TheBanyanTree: Strike Three

[Margaret R. Kramer]

My older grandson (he is eight years old)  is smart as a whip, but does he
care about curling up in a chair and reading the latest Harry Potter book?
No, he gets up in the middle of the night and watches ESPN’s Sports Center!

He’s obsessed with sports.

He grabs the newspaper and checks the stats.  And the schedules.  And reads
the articles.

When we went to a Timberwolves (professional basketball) game last winter,
we ended up sitting by one his fellow classmates.  Those two boys sounded
like Sports Centers anchors discussing players and stats and why the
Timberwolves suck.

It doesn’t matter what sport.  He likes baseball, football, basketball,
hockey, golf, and even soccer.  He knows what’s going on in all sports.  He’
s a sports expert.  He’s eight years old.

His dream is to get a video clip of one of his sports activities on Sports
Center.

How whacked is that?

Besides being smart, he’s a good athlete, too.  He’s tall and lean and well
coordinated.  He’s the kid who figured out how to unhook himself from his
car seat before he was a year old.  He was on a computer at eight months
old.  He was in second grade this past year and reads and does math at a
fifth grade level.  But instead of trying to unify the forces of nature, he
spends his time working on his swing and fielding.  And dreaming of Sports
Center.

But I’m wondering if I’m going to have to censure Sports Center.  Atlanta
quarterback Michael Vick torturing and killing dogs?  And that other pro
football player who more than likely will go to prison for his involvement
in a fight.  Barry Bonds a possible steroid user?  And other ballplayers,
too?  What happened to playing the game fair and square?

Locally, a U of M football player was arrested and charged with performing
sex on a woman who was only 18 and had a blood alcohol count of .30 (legal
driving limit is .08)!  She had passed out and was unresponsive while he was
having sex with her which was also recorded on his buddy’s cell phone.
Sounds like a good time to me.  According to his attorney, he’s not guilty,
because he didn’t physically hurt her.  Where is the line?

On a micro local scene, a father was arrested for making terrorist threats
towards his son’s baseball coach for not giving his son enough playing time.
What happened to it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the
game?

Finally, on my grandson’s team, there are boys who break out in the most
mournful sobs anyone has ever heard when they miss fielding a ball or strike
out (although no one ever really strikes out – everyone gets eight pitches
and then walks if they don’t hit the ball).  I thought I saw everything
while my son played sports from grade school through college, but I never
saw the intense crying that I have at these games with first and second
graders.  The girls never cry, only the boys.  Didn’t anyone ever tell them
that there’s no crying in baseball?

I have given up on sports and no longer watch Sports Center.  I watch the
Twins play baseball on TV and that’s it.

Since Michael Jordan retired (the first time) professional basketball is a
big bore to me.

I honestly and truly believe professional football is fixed.  I have no
evidence . . . but you can’t tell me with the billions of dollars bet on
these games that someone or some group of people doesn’t try to control the
outcomes.

Plus, football is boring, too.  They run a play that lasts a couple of
seconds.  Then they stand and around for a couple of minutes talking about
the next play.  They run another two second play.  Then there’s five minutes
of commercials.  I think I read in Sports Illustrated a few years ago that a
typical football game has only five minutes of actual action, when they’re
actually playing the game.  That’s a small amount of time for a game that
usually takes three hours.  No wonder the rest of the world LOVES soccer.
That game moves.

I bought my grandsons The Dangerous Book for Boys, which such a cool book
with stories, science, how to tie knots, how to build a tree house, and lots
of other wonderful things.  I keep it on my coffee table, enticing them to
read it and try some of the activities.  I want them to use their minds, to
be creative, to read and then do.

And, I do my grandmother bit on the sports level, too.  We’ll walk, well, I’
ll walk and they ride their bikes, the half block from my house to the
baseball field.  Even when it’s 90+ degrees.  We’ll carry our gloves, balls,
and bats.  And I’ll pitch to them.  They hit.  They field.  We kick up some
dust.  And there’s no Sports Center cameras to record the highlights.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net
margaret.kramer at polarispublications.com

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
~Wallace Stevens