To Sport Right Now
by Dale Rigby
I sympathize with what baseball is trying to do,
but it is almost like they are swatting at locusts.
–Bob Costas on CNN, July 28, 2020
Swish. It’s sixth grade Field Day, and I’ve already won the chess tournament, the South America trivia contest, and finally nipped Cindy Barr, my secret sharer, in the 50-yard dash. And now she’s peeking a smile from over by the hopscotch chalk when I bend my knees and swish my first free throw. “Attaboy” shouts Mr. Snell.
Is to watch Justin ginger locks Turner hit a walk-off intra-squad home run and feel deep despair, a premodern eclipse, as a visible caravan of cars queue in the panoramic Dodger Stadium parking lot cum makeshift testing site.
Swish. Have some faith, Montaigne! This be no pimply-male-captain-of-the-playground narrative. Count on sum comeuppance. Even now I’m not sure why I tainted that triumphal stage. But boy did the boy. This gafted child broadcast to a playground of peers a curious propensity he’d hidden like Portnoy his wanking from all but his pinkie-sworn parents.
Is to remember that the 1918 Red Sox World Series victory over the Cubs ended on September 11, in a season shortened by the national draft board’s “work or fight” order that deemed sport unnecessary labor.
Swish. At the age of my kindergarten naps with Dick and Jane you, the Doogie Howser of the early Renaissance, were already un-schooling in your father’s famous petri dish, gamboling from peasant nursery to Latin mastery, groomed a free and feral spirit from the larval stage.
Is to wonder whether to call this week’s waltz from West Side Story between the Dodgers and the sign-stealing Astros a melee or a brouhaha or a bench-clearing-brawl or a fracas or a donnybrook when it brings to mind jittery juveniles social distancing at a Sadie Hawkins dance.
Swish. And then, alas, at age six, he banished listless you to the College de Guyenne and the fourth grade. That sucked, eh? When even steely Headmasters fear to accost a superior tongue, the fellows don’t exactly welcome one of the fellers. Take me out to the bully-game, eh?
Is to revere Dr. Fauci’s Topp’s card despite that errant opening pitch, while remembering with recrudescent anger that President Woodrow Wilson never uttered one single solitary public word about the 1918 influenza which would, ironically, cause his debilitating stroke.
Swish. And you might have grown to hate reading like your fellow nobles but for the indulgence of a mentor allowing indolent snatches at Ovid’s Metamorphosis; my savior was a Mr. Snell in sixth grade, who just smiled when catching me dawdling with The Natural during his basal math lessons.
Is to kneel for eight minutes and forty-six seconds before the National Anthem.
Swish. You contend that at “dancing, tennis, wrestling, [you] have never been able to acquire any but very slight and ordinary ability; at fencing vaulting, and jumping, none at all,” but your every sentence speaks gymnastics. And you, modest one, were an inveterate horseman.
Is to discover that in 1918 Babe Ruth, presaging The Curse of the Pandimo, went 13 and 7 and hit .300 with eleven home runs.
Swish. Micheau, was your sport colored by the tragic fate of your soldier brother, hit by an innocuous court-tennis ball a bit above his right ear, dying of apoplexy five or six hours later sans contusion or wound?
Is to watch Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old and grasp why the mandatory 1918 draft sent “many ballplayers,” patriots rightly horrified by trench warfare, “scurrying for jobs that were ‘essential,’” according to John N. Barry’s The Great Influenza.
Swish. Montaigne, you had some stones. When the plague zone reached your Tower in August of 1586 you became a homeless wanderer, leading a small caravan from your estate for six miserable months, unable to settle, forgoing your Essays, having to “take to road again as soon as any one of us felt so much as a pain in the tip of his finger.”
Is a childhood daydream listening to velvety Vin Scully — Davis goes back, a WAY back, to the wall — she’s gone! — before awaking to the piped-in nightmare of the ball rending asunder a cardboard cutout in the left field stands.
Swish. In case of contact, the quarantine was forty days and forty nights, while you were “grieved to see the bodies of the dead scattered about the fields at the mercy of the wild beasts, which quickly overran the country.” Healthy folks would “dig their own graves betimes,” whilst “others lay down in them while still alive.”
Is to not whistle past the grave fact that after only eight days of Major League Baseball a full 20 percent of the games are postponed.
Swish. My dear Montaigne, you said you were only made fearful those six months by the onus to “bear with the suffering of others,” because you carried your own “antidotes within me — which are resolution and patience.” Might you help us out a little here? We need an antidote, for our-center-is-not-holding, that’s for sure, but surely you’ve got something less below the Mendoza line, less bromide-like than resolution and patience?
Is to swat at locusts.
Clank!! “Some groovy scene, all-timer school record and all little man…” said the hippie child DJ with a rainbow-dappled microphone from the community radio station….
“Oh that’s not so boss,” I told him, sounding like I’d just caught The Red Balloon, and then I went… 248163264128256512102420484096…droning on…oblivious…doubling digits into the many-too-many millions…like a precocious 1970 poster child for Ritalin.
Is to aver that even in virulent times it feels essential work to confess that my Winnie Cooper, the prettiest and smartest and fastest girl in the whole world, froze into an embarrassed frown at this new nerdy boy crazed with cooties. For to sport right now is to shelter in this place, to allow that, in memory’s cardboard cutouts, I am still that boy and she still that girl.
Dale Rigby, when not coaching nonfiction prose and trying to sell that Montaigne had some stones within the MFA program at Western Kentucky University, may be found on the golf course sporting black and gold headcovers from his beloved Iowa Hawkeyes. Among others, his essays have appeared in Sport LIterate, Fourth Genre, Iowa Review, Writing on the Edge, and Under the Sun.