February 04, 2007

SUPER BOWL SUNDAY: LET BASEBALL BEGIN

        Super Bowl Sunday is here, and with it come the Marxist sociologists masquerading as sports writers. All this ink spilled over the skin color of the coaches, as if Jackie Robinson was just now breaking the color barrier. (By the way, when invoking Robinson, someone should remind these locker room Lenins that he was, horror of horrors, a strong Republican) and over the medical consequences of playing football. Is anyone shocked at the fact that concussions occur frequently when big strong men collide, and those collisions have health consequences? That's why most of us seek to avoid them and fork out big bucks to those who seek them out. But the delicate creatures who now cover sports are most interested in flattering themselves for noticing the phenomenon. They write as though they were deep thinkers, empathically concerned about improving the world so the unenlightened who play games don't hurt themselves and aren't exploited by greedy capitalists.

        Sam Johnson conveyed something essential about aging when he wrote:

"Condemn'd to hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away..."

        One of life's social comforts used to be reading the sports pages. Horsefeathers is old enough to remember when reading about a ball game in the next day's papers was eagerly anticipated. This was in the days when radio broadcasts of baseball often consisted of the sound of a teletype machine in the background followed by a 'recreation' of the events taking place far from the studio: "Here's Stan (The Man) Musial at the plate. The pitcher winds and throws a fastball high and tight. Musial uncoils from his question mark stance and lines one to the warning track. The right fielder leaps and can't reach it as it caroms off the wall in Sportsman's Park. Musial lopes into second with his league leading 60th double." Such descriptions were based on a teletyped message: "Musial, 2B, RF." Writing was vivid, evocative and at times almost poetic. There are lines written by Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith and Roger Angell that stay in the mind all these years later. "You're Yogi Berra who wanted to be like all the other guys. Now all the other guys want to be like you."(Cannon), etc.
        Still the games survive, at least until Sharia law prevails. Thankfully baseball begins in 2 weeks and on Super Bowl Sunday Horsefeathers will be staring at the tube--although we share Rogers Hornsby's sentiment that there is only one true American game, baseball. Maybe if television existed back in the 1920's Hornsby would have given a slightly different answer to a questioner, "What do I do in the off-season? I stare out the window and wait until spring."