I’ve been thinking about being an eighty-two-year-old sports fan.
Major League Baseball’s opening day this year was just a few days ago, and before the first inning in Major League, Minor League, and even Little League stadiums across the country*, speakers blasted out John Fogerty’s wonderful song, Centerfield, which opens with this stanza and chorus:
Well, beat the drum and hold the phone - the sun came out today!
We're born again, there's new grass on the field.
A-roundin' third, and headed for home, it's a brown-eyed handsome man;
Anyone can understand the way I feel.Oh, put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Put me in, Coach - I'm ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be centerfield.
Don’t miss this terrific video - for any lover of baseball, it’s a must-see! It’s like a journey through the history of American baseball, set to John Fogerty’s classic song.
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For any true sports fans, the truth is in the second line of the verse:
We're born again, there's new grass on the field.
Whatever your sport, if you’re a true fan the game that was laid to rest on the final day of the previous season rises like Lazarus on the opening day of every new season, sending you into crazy-making months of cheering and despair that are the lot of every sports fanatic, from which fan is derived.
Why do I care who Shohei Ohtani is or why the curse of the Bambino hung over Boston Red Sox fans for eighty years? The origin of my devotion is that sports, and especially baseball, was one of the few things that connected me as a child to my dad. He bought me an expensive glove when I was five years old, and I used it until it literally fell apart in high school. He took me to Hollywood Stars minor league games at Gilmore Field where one afternoon they introduced Babe Ruth himself (the in-the-flesh Bambino) sitting in an overcoat and a driver’s cap behind home plate less than a year before he died on August 16th, 1948.**
The origin of my devotion is that sports, and especially baseball, was one of the few things that connected me as a child to my dad.
A postcard from Santa Anita (1960s)
Dad also introduced me to horse racing when I was four years old. When I had young children of my own, I took them to nearby Santa Anita racetrack and taught them to read The Racing Form and to handicap bets which I paid for and then let them keep any winnings, such as they were. I’m still stuck on the beauty of the horses and the thrill of the stretch run to the wire, and often watch live TV feeds from Belmont and Saratoga racetracks in New York while eating lunch on Saturdays. I played recreational tennis for thirty-five years, have been to Wimbledon, Roland Garros, and The Billy Jean King Tennis Center in Queens to see three of the four Grand Slam tournaments.*** I’ve been reading the sports pages of local and national newspapers for seventy-five years and know too much useless information about sports I’ve never played: hockey, golf, track and field, swimming, soccer. I somehow skipped polo and cricket.
Like many rabid fans, I’ve never been excellent at any sport. I got three hits my entire senior season on Hollywood High School’s varsity baseball team and was the third best scorer on that fall’s basketball team, though as compensation to my ego I did get elected team captain. In nearly four decades of tennis, I never learned to hit a clean, consistent backhand and since I usually played with friends younger and better than I was, I was thrilled to win occasional sets rather than expecting to win three-set matches.
I watched our older son play baseball and soccer, and now watch our two grandsons play varsity high school soccer and water polo. From the stands, I realize I’ve never been as good at any sport as these three have been at several. As a parent and grandparent, I’ve watched fifty-six years of their games as a rabid fan, evidence that my commitment is not simply to my own participation but to the joy of competition and the satisfaction of watching people I care about excel.
I’ve never been able to develop an emotional distance from winning and losing. I still shove my fist in the air and shout YES! when either of our grandsons scores. I became rudely obnoxious in the fall of 2004 when, after losing the first three games of a seven-game American League final series to the hated Damn Yankees, the Red Sox were behind in the final inning of the fourth game. With two outs, New York had Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher in history, on the mound. In what sports fans know is the occasional miracle, my father’s hometown Red Sox won that game and the next three, then defeated the St Louis Cardinals in four straight games to win their first world championship since 1918. They won again in 2007 and 2013****, each time resurrecting my intolerable glee.
The front page of the Boston Globe “victory edition” on October 28, 2004.
You win some, you lose some, is a truism every sports fan knows deep in our bones. We celebrate the wins, of course, but the joy is quickly dispelled by the next defeat. Somehow the losses linger longer than the wins. Maybe it’s an ethnic thing. Several years ago, my Irish friend Mary sent along these two reminders of our shared cultural conviction, to prepare me when the worst, the unthinkable happens:
I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.
– Senator Daniel Patrick MoynihanThe Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains them through temporary periods of joy.
– W.B. Yeats
For me, such heartbreak goes way back. Our high school basketball team made the 1959 playoffs in the Los Angeles City Championships, and our first-round game was against Jefferson, the team that won the title the previous year. We led the game until the final minute when we fell behind by a single point. With nine seconds left, our best player had a jump shot from the corner to win it; the ball caromed off the rim, Jefferson got the rebound, and the buzzer ended the game. By the time I got to our team huddle on the sideline I was sobbing; then I began to shout, No, No! No way! No way! and stomped around like this for a couple of minutes, my teammates and hundreds of fans of both teams staring at me in silence like I had lost my mind, which in retrospect perhaps I had. I was emotionally naked, completely undone by the unacceptable loss.
The 2024 Super Bowl
Such emotional excess has marked my experience of loss from then until quite recently. In the recent Super Bowl, when our family’s beloved San Francisco 49ers lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in overtime, none of us talked about what a great game it was or how magnificent Patrick Mahomes (the Chiefs’ quarterback) is. None of this well done about both teams. We sat in the communal gloomy silence that such a loss casts over true fans, a sadness that lingered way beyond what any normal person would consider reasonable for an eighty-two-year-old whose team loses a sporting event.
Several days later, my melancholia still lingering, I remembered the closing lines from another baseball lyric, Casey at The Bat, which is so iconic that it sneaks its way into John Fogerty’s Centerfield.
CASEY AT THE BAT, 1888. Illustration by Edward Wilson for the poem.
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and little children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville – great Casey has struck out.– “Casey at the Bat,” Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1888)
The residents of Mudville and I have a lot in common - both the agony of defeat and the sure and certain thrill that, come opening day, we'll be in the stands ready to cheer again.
* And around the world, since this season’s opener between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres was played in Seoul, South Korea.
** Baseball fans, in fact all sports fans (and particularly yours truly), are serious about accurate statistics. This essay will have plenty of ’em, although I’ve tried to mostly confine them to footnotes.
*** Australia is too much of a trek, even to watch Bjorg or Federer, Serena or Steffi Graf.
**** Like I said, fans care about details.
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