Snow is slowly and steadily falling.
I woke this morning to find a thin blanket on the ground.
The Cubs home opener is scheduled to be played this afternoon. I wonder if it will be. The start has already been moved back an hour.
I woke this morning to find a thin blanket on the ground.
The Cubs home opener is scheduled to be played this afternoon. I wonder if it will be. The start has already been moved back an hour.
The temperature is 34ºF/1ºC.
The boys of summer it is not.
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We watched the excellent film, CONCUSSION, this weekend. It is a rare movie that is going to change my behavior.
As regular readers know my favorite sport is what Americans call soccer and most of the world football. While that has been true a long time and I am very much looking forward to the coming World Cup, when I was a boy American football was my favorite sport. In recent years, going back at least a decade, football has fallen in my esteem for four reasons.
Some, by no means all, football players are thugs.
I find the strutting, look-at-me antics after almost every play childish and distasteful.
I dislike all the peripheral crap used to try to sell the game to the greatest possible audience. I don’t care about the human interest stories. I don’t watch the Super Bowl halftime show. I don’t listen to pre or post game shows. And I most assuredly do not listen to talk radio. I am one of the tiny minority who are only interested in the thing itself, whether that is football or sailing or music.
A fourth reason is not that the game can lead to brain damage as clearly shown in CONCUSSION, but that when the evidence first became known, the NFL acted exactly as did tobacco companies when scientific proof established that smoking causes lung cancer.
I admire skill, grace, discipline, determination, willingness to play through pain. I accept that society needs warriors. I even understand that a young man might reasonably risk his physical and mental health for a short life of glory and wealth, rather than a longer one devoid of each. (I wrote decades ago: “intensity not duration” and am oddly surprised that somehow I have had both.) Now young men can make an informed choice.
Until very recently football players were innocent victims, as were those who smoked cigarettes until about 1960. Now they can decide whether they want to be willing victims.
As I have liked football less, I have come to enjoy baseball and college basketball, including women’s, more. I don’t know how much football I will watch this fall, but I expect it will be less.
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Mentioning the coming soccer World Cup caused me to recall that I saw some of the previous World Cup at Waikiki Yacht Cub in Honolulu. That was four years ago.
I spent an extra year in New Zealand because of my torn left shoulder and because I love being in New Zealand. I am spending most of this year in Hilton Head because we bought a condominium there and I like it there.
Perhaps I can be excused for not rushing what is likely my farewell world tour.
