It is September that carries with it the final judgment for many baseball teams, and at times it is one particular play that decides a team’s destiny. “April is the cruellest month,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first lines of The Waste Land, but for baseball fans it is the month of September that marks [...]
Recently I went to see a baseball game. The New York Yankees were playing the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium. Usually I am perfectly content to watch sports on TV in the comforts of home and avoid the contingencies of weather and traffic, and the costs of parking, tickets and concessions. I am also sensitive [...]
The Game Like any sports culture, American football arrives at its season with its own mythos. The difference is, here in the States, no other sporting event captures and communicates so well the id of the American psyche: good guys vs. bad guys, victory or defeat, and violence, violence, violence. But I am more than [...]
Tensions tighten and raucous roars of excitement permeate America as football fans eagerly await this year’s Super Bowl. Fans have watched the playoffs intrigued as games unfold, awaiting the final score to see which team will advance to the final game. Some scorn the passion and obsession people have with a “trivial” game. And in [...]
President Obama has been taking a good deal of flak, lately, for all the time he is spending on the golf course. He famously “took a break” from his latest vacation to address the horrors of the beheading of an American journalist by an Islamic extremist group, and to say a few words about the [...]
Baseball is more than just a sport. Its designation as a “pastime” hints at its essential conservatism as an activity borne of a vanished agrarian civilization in which leisure was valued and in which time was to be filled with imaginative human creativity. The beginning of the baseball season is a natural time to reflect [...]
I’m from Seattle (the area if you want to be picky). Now I know that everyone likes to brag about their city being a sports town, but Seattle takes the cake. How else do the Mariners continue to have fans? Why is soccer actually popular here? And why the heck won’t the NBA move back!? [...]
I admit it. I am not an athlete. I am ham fisted and physically illiterate. In school I was always one of the last chosen for a game of pick up football, and if a teammate was kind enough to throw me a pass I was likely to fumble the ball or run the wrong [...]
I came across this the other day, from the Washington Times: Kids flee football in light of NFL violence, Pop Warner participation plummeting. The author is Nathan Fenno, and I hasten to say that I am the last man in the world to wish to kill the messenger. His article is on the whole fair, although [...]
Baseball is republican; baseball is deliberate; baseball is particularly American. May Little League baseball endure as long as the Republic it supports. Tonight one of the most important episodes in the life of the Gregg family came to an end. With Nolan (12) throwing a newly developed knuckle ball toward home plate, thirteen years of [...]
The Smart Take from the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril by Pete Carril Bad shooters are always open.–Pete Carril Dr. Pete Carril is a bit of a snob. I emphasize the “Dr.” because last year Princeton, the school at which he coached basketball for twenty-nine years, awarded him the honorary degree, Doctor of Humanities. I [...]
Knute Rockne “College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.” — H.L. Mencken, 1922 We will confound [...]
Hosting the 2012 London Olympics is estimated to cost UK 14 billion (US 21.9 billion), up from the initial 2005 bid estimate of UK 2.37 billion (US 3.7 billion). This comes when the UK government budget is still growing, albeit more slowly, and the state fires soldiers and slows local garbage collection while protecting its [...]
Anyone harboring concerns over the state of British culture should have had their fears laid to rest by the London Olympics’ opening ceremonies. British culture is well and truly dead. From the “signing” choir that could hardly sing, to the parade of “notable” left-wing figures carrying the flag around the stadium, the mish-mash of bad [...]