Arena: Etruscan for Sandlot

[from 11/10/09]

Recently while I ate dinner at a community meal, the community TV was on, tuned in to some sort of friendly community game. It was a game of hit-the-ball, and boy, were those people ever bad at it. As I watched in between bites of my corndogs and tatertots, I saw one guy after another try to hit a ball with a stick and out of at least a dozen times only succeed four. They obviously had worked very hard at preparing for this. They even had uniforms with their names written on them, and they furrowed their brows very hard when the ball came their way, but they could only manage to hit it one time in three.

Admittedly the man throwing the ball all the time did a horrible job too, scarcely ever getting it anywhere where you could hit it without letting go of the stick with one hand and reaching for it, something that never occurred to the men holding the sticks.

Later I found out the last of the hits won a game for the "Yankees". So I thought it was some sort of activity in celebration of the Civil War, until I learned the other team named themselves after female horses!

Anyway, that, and some remarks by some friends to me concerning my observations of that, got me thinking about the value of sports vis-à-vis character development. We're always told that the reason we should support sports in schools and in the civic "arena" (ironically, Etruscan for "sandlot") is to build sportsmanship and create self-esteem among our growing, maturing, civic brats, and the civic grown-ups our civic brats grow up to be.

In my day, we didn't have sports in school. We had gym classes in schools. We had sports in the streets. If we wanted to play a game of hit-the-ball we got our own stick, stole some dweeb's ball, took over a dead-end street, and picked sides. We didn't need anybody's support, and we had all the self-esteem we had any use for, and we STILL have it. And if you don't believe me, you can kiss me smack between my big pink cheeks.

The really great thing about it was, if we didn't want to play hit-the-ball, we didn't have to. We could choose what we wanted to play, because WE had freedom. It wasn't, "Everybody get in the van, you're all going to your Little League game whether you like it or not." We could play Hide-and-seek. We could play Toss-the-dweeb. We could choose not to play at all, preferring to spend that time in a sanctuary of worship of the religion of our choice, or pretending to kill foreigners with play guns.

So right now, I'm calling for the separation of Sports and State. I don't care how good sports is for the soul, it's still just like any other religion except more people care about it, and so the "churches" are almost always packed. That alone should be a cue to everybody that we don't need State establishment of teams, they can establish themselves just fine.

As for me, I think if the State subsidizes the sports industry, they should also support the pornographic film industry, which I believe does far more good than sports does. Think about it. Which entertains fat boozers better, a game of football, where you can see men in tight pants bend over every two minutes and pat each others butts? Or porn videos? It's not even close. Also, our youth, who could get varsity credit to be in the videos, would be getting some real workouts. That's good aerobic exercise, without significant risk of head trauma or spinal injury. And it builds character, too, like any other job well-done.

Clearly, our extensive subsidies of sports have not made Americans any more sportsmanlike than ever. They haven't prevented road rage, or the unsporting belief that warfare should only happen in the countries we make wars happen, never here.