Coping with Sports Illiteracy: It’s Not a Day at the Beach
By Joel Gunz
Originally appeared in The Anvil
True story. I didn’t learn until last year that, unlike the Rose Bowl, the Super Bowl takes place in different stadiums around the country. I also don’t know how to keep a bowling score, and whenever I see the Trail Blazers on TV I still look for Bill Walton’s copper afro.
I’m sports illiterate, and it’s an inherited disorder.
When I was about 10 years old, my stepfather, Carroll, took me to my first—and last—baseball game. It was the Portland Beavers, a minor league team whose members I had never heard of, and whose win-loss record hovered around .500. We climbed the stadium stairs, while Carroll carefully compared the seat assignments on our tickets to the numbers stenciled on the backs of the bleachers. Finding our place near the top row, we sat down. As it happened, we got the entire section to ourselves, because the rest of the crowd had moved lower to take seats whose owners hadn’t shown up for the game. From our seats the players looked like bugs.
I pestered him to move lower like everyone else, but that just wasn’t his way. Maybe it was due to all those years of doing exactly what he was told day after day at the post office, but he was apparently incapable of sitting in any seat other than the one to which the lottery of scrip had assigned him.
We remained, detached as Olympic gods, watching the game from halfway between land and sky.
Maybe that’s why, like all parents who resolve to give their children a better life than they themselves had, I have never taken my seventh-grade son to a baseball game. Our family has other traditions. Instead of season tickets to the Beavers, we go to the beach. The two pastimes are not as different as you might think.
Baseball fans like to envision games like those portrayed in Kevin Costner movies and Pepsi commercials: it’s late afternoon or early evening and the sun is bending toward the horizon. The bright green and mocha colors of freshly mowed lawn and carefully raked soil are especially rich. Photographers call this the Divine Hour. In this setting, fans might ruminate on the subtle mathematics of wind speed, velocity, trajectory and chaos theory.
These aficionados may insist that there is no better way to spend a spring, summer or fall afternoon than at the baseball field, awash in the constant white noise of the spectators. The poets among them say that if you close your eyes and listen, you just might hear the voices of all the people you’ve ever known.
Sure.
Well, I’m a kind of poet, too. Not unlike baseball fans, I can spend an afternoon contemplating mathematics, mine just concentrate on the formulas that guide oceans of saltwater to a preordained tide line, obedient as an Australian Shepherd. Sitting on a rock watching the tide roll in and the sun sink into the ocean, I can imagine that I’m Descartes, conceiving of the universe as an exquisitely chaotic clockwork. I can listen to its white noise, a sonic wash so complete that if you close your eyes you can pick out every sound you’ve heard in your life.
A few years before he retired, Carroll—who once received a Medal of Service award because he hadn’t missed a day of work in something like 25 years—called in sick, though he was healthy as a race horse. I wouldn’t have been more shocked if he had decided to sport a green Mohawk. I awoke to the aroma of Mom sautéing bacon, onions, corn, clams and halibut. That morning, he’d decided that we should spend a day at the beach.
After dressing, I helped load the car with blankets and extra coats. As Mom simmered the mixture in fresh milk and clam juice, Carroll loaded the cooler with ice, beer, pop and snacks. An hour’s drive later, the midday sun was dazzling as we sat in the sand and ate our seafood chowder, occasionally picking grains of sand off our tongues.
Afterward, we gathered driftwood for a fire. The smell of smoke and burning kelp mixed with the salt air and further helpings of Mom’s thin-but-flavorful stew. My stepfather got this spectator sport just right. Front row seats, even.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing my son a disservice by not taking him to baseball games and car shows, by not owning a TV or Playstation. Like my stepfather, who isolated us in the nosebleed section of PGE Park, I’ve cloistered Max away from experiences common to most other children in America, all because my philosophy to avoid mainstream entertainment is as strict, perhaps, as Carroll’s own conservative work ethic.
Because of that, the social Esperanto required to easily get a date for the prom—or, when gets older, I fear, to make chit-chat with customers on a salesroom floor—is about as foreign to Max as Sanskrit. Instead, I buy him books. We watch movies with subtitles. He’s more familiar with the Saturday morning lineup on NPR than he is with the Cartoon Channel.
Still, when Max visits his friends he watches “Spongebob Squarepants.” The difference is, he’s watching it by choice—not reflex. So I console myself with the notion that, in spite of my best efforts, he’s going to be just fine.
And we take trips to the coast, where we observe the beauty of a wave folding over itself with the grace of a baseball pitcher’s wrist, pounding the sand with a noise as true and as satisfying as the crack of seasoned hickory against a hardened leather ball.
