Tag: Baseball

Unrequited Love

I have been a Cub fan for my entire life, a disorder I blame on my grandmother. When she first came to the US from Scotland in 1922, she stayed with relatives on the North Side of Chicago, 5 blocks from Wrigley Field. She didn’t really understand the game right away, but she listened on the radio and went to the park often enough to become a big fan. Living up to the stereotype of the tight-fisted Scot, she attended only on Fridays, which were known as “Ladies Days” back then, and admission was free for females. My dad inherited the Cubs as his team of choice from her and passed it on to his children. His ashes now rest in Wrigley, having been deposited there in two separate installments by my brothers, Dan and Mark.

My love affair with the team began when I was eight years old; 1962 is the first season I recall with any clarity. The Cubs had two-time MVP Ernie Banks, along with future Hall-of-Famers Billy Williams and Ron Santo. They still managed to lose 103 games in a 162-game season, finishing ahead of only one team: the worst team in history, the expansion New York Mets. That entire decade, they struggled to win games while the cross-town White Sox were often in the midst of the American League pennant race. I lived on the South Side, surrounded by Sox fans, but I didn’t care. The Sox had strong pitching and weak hitting, so they often won games 1-0 or 2-1. “Sure the Cubs lose a lot, I would explain to friends, but they lose 9-8 or 11-9—those games are fun.” My dad, who was used to disappointment while cheering for the Cubs, would tease me about my optimistic view of the team. I would come home after playing ball all day and ask, “What did the Cubs do?” He would answer, “Cubs won!” I would celebrate accordingly, then he would add, “Cardinals Eight.”

Then came 1969, the year it all came together for the Cubs—until it didn’t. They had a team full of All-Stars, and a great pitching staff led by another Hall of Famer, Fergie Jenkins. They dominated the league all summer and had a big lead in late August. It looked like the year they would finally win it all. Then they collapsed in September and finished eight games behind the Miracle Mets, who shocked the sports world by winning the pennant and the World Series. I always date the end of my childhood and the beginning of facing the realities of the world to that summer. They broke my heart many times after that year, which is why I chose “Unrequited Love” as the title for this entry.

In my 20s, I especially loved sitting in the bleachers at Wrigley Field. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, I went to a couple of games a year, but the bleachers offered a different experience from the rest of the park. Tickets were still just $1.50, and you could walk up to the gate at game time and get a seat. Because it was so cheap to sit out there, you could see the entire spectrum of American society at the game. Lots of strange people and behavior. You might smell pot, hear arguments that turned physical, and see drunks stumbling around, but you could also see a father patiently explaining the game to his daughter at her first ballgame. The “bleacher bums,” as they were called, often had a pool going for the daily attendance total. Someone passed a baggie around that contained a little notebook and loose change. You would put a quarter in, list your name, seat number, and your guess for how many people were in the ball park that day. When the attendance was announced in the seventh inning, they would give the bag full of quarters to the person who was closest to the actual figure. It was all done on the honor system. Ronnie, the “Woo, woo!” guy was always out there. He was famous for yelling a high-pitched “Woo!” for no apparent reason, often in conjunction with a player’s name, such as “Sandberg, woo! Cey, woo! Bowa, woo!”

After the game, my brother Dan and I would often visit the Wrigleyville bars or another favorite haunt of ours, Ollie’s on Clark Street. One time, we were heading home when we were stopped by one of Chicago’s finest. He stared at Dan’s license and said, “You’re from Oak Lawn? You’re a long way from home, fellas.” Dan explained, “We were at the Cub game.” The cop looked confused and said, “Son, that game’s been over for twelve hours.”

If I had to pick a single game that best captured my unrequited love affair with the Cubs, it was one that occurred 43 years ago today, on May 17, 1979. This game has been on my mind because my dentist, David Page, recommended a book about that particular game during my last dental visit. It’s hard to argue with a man who has his hands and sharp objects in your mouth at the time, so I bought the book and read it. The book is called Ten Innings at Wrigley Field,  by Kevin Cook, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves baseball. It chronicles the entire incredible game, inning by inning, as well as discussing what happened to the teams and players before and after that momentous game.

It was one of those magical days at Wrigley, a warm spring day with temperatures in the high 70s and the wind blowing off of the lake, directly out over the left-field fence. The blustery wind was a steady 17 mph, with gusts up to 30. It was the kind of day that made hitters lick their chops, pitchers close their eyes and duck after every throw, and outfielders pray that they could corral flyballs in the swirling winds without getting hurt. I was working in a Chicago factory when the game started at about 1:30 that afternoon. I listened to the games on the radio each day, which helped break up the mindless monotony of my job.

I quickly grew disgusted about the game, as the Phillies exploded for 7 runs in the top half of the first inning. I wandered away from the radio to work in another area of the storeroom. My friend, Brian, was working with me. A short time later, he called me over and said, “Don’t give up yet, Jack; the Cubs just scored 6 in the bottom of the first.” That inning set the tone for the rest of the game. After a scoreless 2nd, Philadelphia tacked on 8 more runs in the 3rd, then 2 more in the top of the 4th, making the score 17-6. An inning later, they had a 12-run lead, 21-9. The wind was howling off of Lake Michigan, blowing routine fly balls out of the park and turning every pop-up into an adventure. On a day like that, however, a team is never out of the game, and the Cubs started to claw their way back into it with a 7-run fifth. I’d venture to say that precious little work got done that afternoon in my factory, as a large crowd gathered around my radio listening to the non-stop action.

At 4:30, quitting time came, the game was already three hours long, and it was far from over. My dad worked at the same factory, and he invited us over to his house to watch the end of the game. A caravan of cars raced to his house, about five miles away, running stop signs along the way. My brother Dan was in the parade, along with Brian, and several other friends. By the time we reached my dad’s house, it was the 8th inning, and we barely had time to pop open a beer before the Cubs had tied it, 22-22. In a tension-filled 9th inning, both teams threatened, but failed to score. This game was too good to be contained in just 9 innings.

(Here comes the unrequited love affair part.) After making that spectacular comeback, the Cubs, as they always do, broke my heart. Hall-of-Famer Bruce Sutter, pitching for the Cubs, gave up a game-winning homerun to Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt in the 10th inning and they lost 23-22. There were 11 home runs in the game, 2 by Schmidt, and fifty hits. Dave Kingman hit 3 homers for the Cubs, one of which left the ball park, cleared Waveland Avenue, and landed in the yard of the 4th house down a perpendicular street. He also drove in 6 runs, which was the 2nd highest total for the Cubs that day (Bill Buckner drove in 7). A Chicago reporter who was at the game wrote, “It was historical; it was hysterical.” During the winter in those days, WGN, the station that broadcast the Cubs games, always showed the best game of the previous season in its entirety. In January 1980, they showed this game. It always seemed fitting to me that the best game of 1979 was one which the Cubs lost.

Shortly after that extravaganza, I wrote a song that tried to capture the flavor of the bleachers as well as the craziness of that particular game. It’s called Bleacher Bum.

1. You call yourself a traveler; you say you’ve been around;

You’ve seen the mighty pyramids, and dined in London Town;

You thought Hong Kong was something, but the truth must be revealed:

My friend, you ain’t seen nothing ‘till you’ve been to Wrigley Field.

2. There’s fights and drinking all around, the language is obscene;

The violence and hatred is the worst I’ve ever seen.

It’s not a Friday night in Texas, at the Busted Head Saloon,

Just a picnic in the bleachers on a Sunday afternoon.

Chorus:

If you don’t like the way I look, don’t tell me what you see;

I’m just a burned out bleacher bum, and that’s all I’ll ever be.

So tell me I’m obnoxious—I’ll just say I’m having fun,

‘Cause when I’m in the bleachers, Lord, I’m proud to be a bum.

3. Someone’s sipping whiskey, someone else is smoking dope;

When cheering for Chicago, you should never lose all hope.

It’s seventeen to seven, but we’ll win without a doubt,

‘Cause it’s just the second inning, and the wind is blowing out.

(Chorus)

4. Left fielders from opposing teams have bad dreams every night;

The Surgeon General warns it may be hazardous in right.

The things we call George Foster would turn Cincinnati red;

When he goes back for fly balls, we throw beer down on his head.

(Chorus)

5. Last night I dreamed of Heaven, of Matthew, Mark, and Paul;

There weren’t no clouds or pearly gates, just ivy covered walls.

I didn’t see no angels, or no harp-playing band;

Just forty-thousand Cub fans with a beer in either hand.

(Chorus)

In 2016, of course, the Cubs ended their century of futility. My stepson, Ben Morgan, had season tickets for the Cubs that year—yes, that’s right; he lives in River Falls, not Chicago, but he had season tickets—and he invited me to join him for one of the games. Thanks to him, I was able to see the Cubs in the World Series. Fittingly, given my history with the team, they lost that game. But then, miraculously, they came back to win the last three games and the world championship. My world view was turned upside down for a while, but the Cubs have since returned to mediocrity. For one brief and shining moment, however, my love for the Cubs was reciprocated.

A Gem of a Diamond

A few years ago, my wife and I were exploring potential retirement locations. Admittedly, River Falls had the upper hand in this competition, because our grandchildren were here. Another factor that eventually tipped our decision toward River Falls, though, was the presence of a wonderful little baseball field in Hoffman Park. Officially called First National Bank of River Falls Field, the park has a small, but major-league quality, covered grandstand behind home-plate holding 305 seats, with room for many more down the foul lines. Admission and parking were free, food was reasonably priced, and the beers from the “Leinie Lodge” were only three bucks. We love baseball, and this park seemed like Nirvana to us.

The ballpark is in a beautiful setting, surrounded by the sort of rolling green hills and ridges that mark this part of the state, but the story about how it came to be is even better. A local teacher, Josh Eidem, and some friends who played on the local amateur team, the Fighting Fish, decided that the team needed a home park they could call their own. They went to the city council and made a remarkable proposal: if the city would provide the land, they would raise the money and build the ballpark. It was all more complicated than this, but the city made some land in Hoffman Park available, and Eidem and his friends raised the money. They broke ground in 2013, on an unseasonably cold day. As Eidem tells it, there was no dirt flying that day; “it was so cold and snowy that we didn’t even stick a shovel in the ground. We just took a picture and got back in the cars.” The point of all this is that it was a community effort from the start. They solicited donations and sponsorships, held fund raisers at local businesses, and did most of the labor themselves, with the help of numerous willing townspeople. The outfield fence was covered with advertising signs for local businesses that had helped finance the endeavor. Everything was conducted on a voluntary basis. They erected the light stanchions earlier than scheduled, because that enabled them to work well into the night. The stadium seats came from Camden Yards ballpark in Baltimore, but there is more leg room than you’ll find in any MLB ballpark. Last year, courtesy of a grant from Major League Baseball, a state-of-the-art, artificial-turf field was installed, making this a first-class stadium all around. In addition to the Fighting Fish, the River Falls HS team, the American Legion team, and an over-35 amateur team, the Groupers, also call FNBRF Field home.

The Fighting Fish themselves came into existence in a similar, ad hoc manner. In 2007, some players from River Falls banded together and formed a team. They discussed several potential team names before outfielder Clint Kempt shrugged and suggested they go with the “Fighting Fish,” because, “We probably won’t come up with anything better.” They slowly built their following with such promotions as hamster races, “Ugly Pants” golf tournaments, and monthly meat raffles at Johnnie’s Bar, before erecting their current home stadium in 2014. Aspiring players can sign up on the team website (Fishbaseball.org), and, should there be enough demand, tryouts will be held. Requirements are essentially that you must have graduated from high school and love to play baseball. The residency rule is surprisingly specific: you must live within thirty miles of home plate. Most players hail from River Falls or nearby towns in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and many have college experience playing at the Division II or III levels. This is true amateur baseball, as none of the players receive remuneration for their efforts; there are no formal practices, and most of the team members have full-time jobs. Some remarkable talent is occasionally discovered among the Fish, however. Arizona once sent scouts to look at a player named Marty Herum. He went 4 for 5 with two triples that day and was immediately signed by the Diamondbacks. More impressively, current Milwaukee Brewer’s star set-up man, J.P. Feyereisen, played with the Fish for parts of three summers before being signed by Cleveland. The Fish compete in the St. Croix Valley Baseball League as part of the Wisconsin Baseball Association, consisting of about sixty similar teams from around the state. Last year, River Falls carried home the championship trophy for the second time in their brief existence. General Manager Grant Miller hoped to keep the championship team together, so he pulled out the checkbook and re-signed each player for the highest possible salary. (In this, an amateur league, the highest possible was zero)

Last year, Covid fears prevented us from attending games, so, last Saturday, we were finally able to see the Fighting Fish in action against the Bay City Bombers. Kathleen and I do not yet own any Fighting Fish gear, but we felt right at home wearing the Orange and Blue of our beloved Florida Gators. That was because the colors and the “F” logo of the Fish are remarkably similar to those of the Gators. In addition to the usual volunteer staff in the Leinie Lodge (Leinenkugel is a local beer brewed in Chippewa Falls), the Kilkarney Hills Golf Club sent Chef Jen to sell gourmet sandwiches from a tent. While I sat directly behind home plate before the game, eating an amazing Italian prime rib sandwich and sipping a $3 Leinie’s beer, I scanned the thirty or so local businesses and sponsors represented on the outfield fence, counting twelve that I had personally patronized. Thus, every game continues to be a community effort. The fact that this is a shoestring operation was driven home when they passed the hat to pay the umpires and cover other expenses. Also, every time a ball left the playing field, the public address announcer would gently remind the spectators to return the ball so that the game could continue. By my estimate, there were four-to-five hundred people in attendance, all in a festive mood and enjoying the game.

The game itself demonstrated a surprising level of skill. Starting Fish pitcher, Matt Doornink, bears a striking  resemblance to Babe Ruth in the twilight of his career, but he can still bring it. Doornink tossed five shutout innings and struck out six. Third-baseman Andy Metcalf is the only team member currently attending the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, because that school ended its baseball program in 2002. More’s the pity, because the kid can rake. For the second consecutive game, Metcalf hit a homer and drove in four runs. The highlight for me, an aging baseball wannabe, came when leftfielder Josh Eidem drove in a run. Yes, that’s the same Josh Eidem who has played every season with the Fish and contributed so much to the construction of the ballpark. It was inspiring to watch a forty-year-old who can still catch up to a rising fastball.

The entire evening left me with a warm feeling toward the small town that I have adopted as my home. At a time when the state, the nation, and the world are torn by differences and division, I now have a place to go where everyone smiles, cheers, and pulls in the same direction. Also, when spoiled Major Leaguers pull down $20 million and more each year, it’s comforting to watch these guys play baseball for the sheer love of the game. Even the “Fish Magazine,” available for free at every game, is a humorous, tongue-in-cheek parody of an MLB program. This team plays to win, but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Above all, having fun seems to be the main objective.

By the sixth inning, the Fighting Fish had a comfortable 5-0 lead, and it had become too cold for our ill-advised outfits, so my wife and I headed for home. During the winter, we can actually see the field from our condo, high on a ridge overlooking the park. That night, however, the spring leaves had begun to obscure our view. As I looked out of my open window, I could still make out the stadium lights through the trees, and I could hear the strains of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” wafting into my home. I squinted through the foliage in an attempt to follow the action, and I swear I could see Shoeless Joe Jackson and Moonlight Graham working their way through some cornstalks in the outfield, hoping to join the game.

Fathers and Baseball

These are the greatest of possible words, “pitchers and catchers report.”

Everyone has their own way of determining the end of the long winter. For some, the first sighting of the red-breasted robin serves as a harbinger of spring. Some rely on a Pennsylvania-based hedgehog and the likelihood of the overgrown rodent seeing his own shadow. Others, antagonistic to the idea of a farcical hibernal ritual to determine seasonal transition, use scientific data such as rising temperatures as a guide. For me, the onset of spring begins with the words, “pitchers and catchers report to spring training camp.”

The line of iambic pentameter at the top of this page is actually mine, but I’m paraphrasing the 1910 poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, written about the early Chicago Cubs’ double-play combination, “Tinker, to Evers, to Chance.” I’m celebrating the fact that on Wednesday, February 17, spring training for the major leagues officially began. Every February, even as a little kid, I would look forward to reading those words in the newspapers. For me, the phrase “pitchers and catchers report” indicated winter was drawing to a close, baseball had begun, and spring was on its way. It’s difficult to think about spring during this week of record cold, snow, and ice, but, for me, those words always conjure up images of baseball—and my dad.

My dad also loved baseball, and he encouraged my ill-fated affection for the Chicago Cubs from an early age. Later, in my more rebellious years, it was like the Daniel Stern character in the film City Slickers said, “Back when my dad and I couldn’t communicate about anything at all, we could still talk about baseball.” In my mind, baseball and memories about my father will always be inextricably intertwined.

As far back as I can remember, I was a Cub fan. The first season I clearly recall was 1962, the year in which a 21-year-old Cub player, Kennie Hubbs, won the Rookie of the Year award. I related to Hubbs, because I, too, was a “good-field-no-hit,” middle-infielder. In fact, I hit a robust .163 for my Little League team that season. On those rare occasions when I managed to get on base, however, I was fast enough to steal my way around to third. My manager, knowing that my only realistic chance of reaching base was if I walked, would send me to the plate with the encouraging words, “Henderson, if you take that bat off your shoulder, I’ll break your arm.” The era of promoting self-esteem in children had not yet arrived in Chicago.

Nor had it affected Southern Illinois, if Kathleen’s father was any indication. When we began dating in the 1980s, we were watching her daughter Kristin’s team play a game in Carbondale. These were tiny little kids playing at a level that was not much above T-ball. If a miracle occurred, and a girl managed to hit the ball, the fielders had no idea what to do with it when they picked it up. Also sitting with us was her dad, Raymond McCormick, a former Marine who had fought at Iwo Jima. He had played baseball for years and managed championship American Legion teams. He knew the game well, and, where fundamentals were concerned, he apparently cut no slack for his grand-daughter or other ten-year-old girls. In this particular game, with a runner on first, a girl hit the ball to Kristin at shortstop. She scooped up the ball, and, wonder of wonders, threw to first in time to get the runner hustling down the line. The stands erupted in cheers, those parents never before having seen a play executed correctly. In the midst of this wild celebration, however, Raymond shook his head in disapproval and pointed toward the infield. “The play was at second,” he told me gravely, as if those girls were certain to turn the double-play had they simply thrown to the correct base. I just nodded in response.

My father was from that same generation as Raymond. They weren’t big on praising children, being more concerned that their kids would “get a big head” than boosting self-esteem. That is not to say that my dad wouldn’t stand up for us when we had been wronged. One 4th of July Little League game stands out in my mind. It was a hot day, and the game had dragged on for hours. It was a typical kids game in many respects. Our pitcher had a no-hitter going, although he had walked about 14 batters. Meanwhile, my team had racked up twenty or so runs, largely through a combination of errors and walks. Late in that 20-to-nothing game, my manager scanned the bench to see who he could send in to hit at that crucial moment. He pointed at me and told me to grab a bat. As I eagerly headed to the plate, he yelled, “Henderson! If you . . .”

I rolled my eyes and said, “I know: if I take the bat off my shoulder you’ll break my arm.” I stepped into the box and banged the bat against my tennis shoes as I had seen Ernie Banks do many times. My family was in the stands that day, so, despite the admonition from my manager, I was determined to swing if the pitch was anywhere near the plate. The first pitch bounced in the dirt, two feet in front of the plate. I held off. “Strike!” the umpire barked. I was confused, but I dug in again. The second pitch almost hit me in the hip, but I deftly avoided the ball with a maneuver that would have made a Spanish matador proud. “Strike two!” I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I understood the cardinal rule of baseball that says you should never argue with the ump about balls and strikes. Behind in the count, and feeling a bit like Casey from the famous poem, I grew more determined than ever. The third pitch came in, well over my head, and I coolly let it sail by. “Strike three!” the umpire called, with a little more enthusiasm than I thought the situation merited. I trudged back to the bench with tears streaming down my face. I wasn’t upset about striking out—that had happened a lot; it was because of the injustice of being called out on three pitches that were clearly out of the strike zone.

I was embarrassed about my performance as I headed back to the car to meet my family. That’s when I saw my dad. He had the umpire pinned against the cinderblock wall behind the dugout. My dad was a big guy with a long history of barroom brawls, so the umpire, with fear in his eyes, was listening attentively to what he had to say. Despite his aura of menace, my dad spoke calmly and distinctly. He said, essentially, “Sir, I understand that it was exceedingly warm behind the plate, it was a one-sided game, and you would like very much to get home to your family. But these lads are trying to learn which pitches are strikes and which are balls, and your calling every pitch a strike, regardless of its proximity to the strike zone, could prove deleterious to a young man’s fledgling batting eye.” My memory might be somewhat faulty, so his words were probably put more crudely, and perhaps punctuated by profanity and other colorful terms, but he got his point across. The umpire, apologized profusely before sprinting to his car when my dad released him.

There was one other instance in which my father intervened on our behalf in a baseball-related situation. My house in Chicago was on a barely paved street directly across from a cemetery. In the wide gap between the cemetery fence and the street was a double set of railroad tracks and a narrow strip of grass perhaps fifty feet wide that led to a small embankment on which the tracks sat. That strip of grass stretched for the entire block and served as the neighborhood playground for football, baseball, and hockey, as well as for games of “Cowboys and Indians” or “Army.” One spring, we noticed that our next-door neighbors, the Boggio family, was occupied for an entire morning, doing something to the grass across the street from their house. When they finished their task, we discovered to our horror that they had planted a flower garden smack in the middle of our multi-purpose field. They had set up neat lines of brightly colored flowers accented by a dozen or so bushes that would eventually grow into a solid hedge surrounding the garden on three sides. The problem, of course, was that it was directly behind second base of our baseball diamond. We didn’t know what to do, so we waited anxiously for my dad to get home from work. In those days, we had five kids (two more would come later), and dad had to work two jobs to feed us all. Several times a week, he returned from his factory job about 4:30, showered, shaved, and changed clothes before heading out for another eight hours of tending bar. The only opportunity we had to talk to him was the five minutes while he was shaving. My brother Dan and I saw our opening and briefed him on the critical situation:

“Dad! Mr. Boggio built a garden in our baseball field!”

“I saw it.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But, we’ll have to walk a mile to the park just to play baseball.”

He stopped shaving, turned to us, and said, in a voice that indicated the conversation was over, “Don’t worry about it.” We walked away dejected, feeling as if he had let us down.

The next day, a Saturday, we woke up to an amazing sight. Overnight, something had happened to Mr. Boggio’s garden. It looked as if King Kong had ravaged the area, leaving flowers and hedges uprooted and scattered in all directions; some greenery was even stuck high in the barbed wire atop the cemetery fence. There was nothing left of the garden but an area of black dirt where plants had once grown. Before we could ask our parents what had happened, we heard a knock on the front door. My dad answered it, and we could hear Mr. Boggio’s voice, but we couldn’t make out the words. My dad, in a voice oozing with Eddie Haskell-like sincerity, replied, “Gee, I don’t know anything about your garden.” Mr. Boggio spoke again, and my dad said, in a much louder voice, “I told you I don’t know anything!” and slammed the door. He calmly walked past us, sat down and returned to his coffee and morning newspaper. As Dan and I added two and two together, we could hear my dad chuckling behind the newspaper he held up in front of his face.

He never told us what happened, but we assumed that he returned from the bar about two in the morning, after having imbibed several cocktails in the course of the evening, saw the flowers shining in the streetlights, and took care of the problem with great energy and no small amount of flair. We aren’t certain of this, but, knowing my dad the way we do, it seems the most likely scenario. Regardless of the true story, we had our field back, and the garden never re-appeared.

When my dad was too young to really remember, the Cubs won the National League pennant every three years, in 1929, 1932, 1935, and 1938, losing in the World Series each time. Then, when he was 17 and stationed on Guam with the Navy in 1945, they won again, so he missed the World Series (which they lost). He told us that he wrote his brother, “Oh well; I’ll catch them the next time they’re in the Series.” Of course, that “next time” never occurred in his lifetime. He died seven years before the glorious World Series of 2016 when the Cubs finally won it all for the first time since 1908. I thought about him a lot that season.

In fact, that year, I probably started thinking about him in February, when I heard the words, “pitchers and catchers report.”

Field of Dreams

As the Covid-19 crisis drags on, and our president continues to refuse to acknowledge that it is even a problem, boredom is a constant fellow traveler for many of us. We take our antidotes and diversions wherever we can find them, and, for us, it has often been sports.

For the past week, daughter Kristin and her husband, Kevin, visited with us in River Falls, and we had a great time with them, albeit confined to the house most of the time. Monday, on Ben’s day off from the clinic, the four of us went golfing, while Kathleen stayed with the two grand-kids and the three dogs. As Abigail later explained it, Nana Henderson was on “poop and barf patrol” following the dogs around Ben and Amber’s house and cleaning up after them. So, while she took one for the team, we had a great time golfing.

Golf has been a big part of their visit, because we spent the previous four days watching the PGA Championship from San Francisco. I had devised a somewhat-complicated pool of sorts for the tournament, and everyone got involved including the kids and Ben’s father-in-law, Tom. Thus, we all had a rooting interest, and we watched the tournament every night until 9:00, since it was held on the West Coast. Ten-year-old Abigail was on a team with her brother, but didn’t really get interested until the day after the tournament. At that point, Ben showed her how much money the leading golfers received for playing that weekend. Abigail, who has a decided mercenary side to her, said, “Holy cow! The winner of Survivor had to spend 40 days in the jungle to get one million dollars, and these guys just play golf for 4 days and can win two million!” I believe she will be more interested in golf in the future.

The tournament was, of course, played without fans, which gave it an eerie, silent quality when a player would make a great shot and you expected to hear a roar from the crowd. This is the way virtually all sporting events are being played in this age of Covid-19. It’s hard to believe, though, that a relatively short time ago, all sports were played that way.

Organized sports teams and leagues really began in earnest in the years just after the Civil War. One thing that happened was that, by the late 1800s, people began to worry about becoming too “civilized” from living in an urban environment, with few parks or open spaces, and working at sedentary jobs. By the early 20th Century, this fear of becoming overly citified manifested itself in several ways. People like Teddy Roosevelt advocated a strenuous life in the outdoors, thus helping boost organizations such as the Sierra Club and the new Boy Scouts, and set aside federal land for national parks. Popular books began to encourage people to take up a more active lifestyle. In an example of this, Jack London’s Call of the Wild used dogs as a metaphor for people who needed to return to a more primitive state to reach their full potential. Finally, every major city began to set aside green space for their citizens to enjoy the outdoors and play sports. Another development of the late 1800s was that the Industrial Revolution had progressed to the point that the growing middle-class of businessmen, merchants, and managers had something that, for the first time, people referred to as “leisure time.” Even working-class people, because of the efforts of labor unions, were able to negotiate shorter work weeks. That meant that they had Sundays off, and many worked only half-a-day on Saturdays. People, primarily men at the time, began to fill this new-found free time with sports, games and other recreational activities. Middle-class athletic clubs in every city and town began to organize baseball teams to play against each other or even travel from town to town for competitive games. These two developments led to an explosion in sports for adults to get physical exercise or as an outlet for competitive juices. Those games were usually played in any available open fields, and, like today, with few or no spectators.

Then, as crowds began to gather to watch these contests, entrepreneurs realized that they could build an enclosure around those fields and charge people to observe others playing games. So, ironically, sports that started as a way for city people to get more exercise, quickly evolved into games played in stadiums in which a handful of men played, while thousands more paid good money to sit and watch them. Colleges got into the act as well. Intramural sports such as football began as a way to get students out of the classrooms and onto the playing fields for exercise. Quickly, though, administrators realized that they could make money from these sports and, if your team was good enough, their school could attract national attention and broaden the pool from which they could recruit top students. The top universities even hired “tramp athletes” who would play football for a different college each week, selling their services to the highest bidder.

In my nostalgic mind, then, baseball games, golf tournaments, track meets, and other sports being played in empty stadiums hearkens back to a time when these sports were played for fun and exercise, rather than to make money. I want to say that there is a purity to these games today, but in order to do that, I would have to ignore the fact that sports are a billion-dollar industry, and we wouldn’t see them at all unless someone had figured out a way to make money off of them.

Still, in a surreal world in which we are confined to the house most of the time, watching sports and feeling a connection to something outside our living rooms is a distinct pleasure. Adding to that surreal quality are the cardboard cutouts of fans in the baseball stadiums and artificial, piped-in crowd noises. We purchased the MLB Extra Innings package in order to watch as many games as possible in this truncated season. Kathleen is feeling ripped off because her Cardinals only managed to play five games before an outbreak of Covid sidelined the entire team. But me, . . . hey, the Cubs are six games in front about a third of the way through the short season. They’re off to their best start since 1907. This . . .could . . . be . . . the . . . year!

And the cardboard cutouts go wild.

Spring Has Sprung (Maybe?)

Spring is here, spring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don’t you? Course you do…

                                                            –Tom Lehrer, in Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

River Falls experienced a small dose of spring fever last weekend. When we woke up on Thursday morning, the local temperature was 15 below zero; on Saturday, it rose to nearly 40 degrees; by Sunday afternoon, it topped out at 46—that’s a change of over sixty degrees in a couple of days. Pretty cool.

The warm weather and sunshine melted snow that had fallen since November. More than that, the sunny warmth seemed to affect the attitudes of everyone in town. I went for a run that took me downtown, but it was so nice, I extended it and walked all through the UWRF campus before returning home. Everywhere I went, I saw people walking, jogging, riding bicycles, hauling out their barbeques, and otherwise enjoying the fresh air. On my long street (Golf View Drive, 1.3 miles long), I saw two young parents on lawn chairs on their driveway, watching their kids play. A few doors down, I saw a little girl, about 5, splashing through the melting snow in a Minnie Mouse outfit that included patent leather shoes, a red and white, polka-dot skirt, and a black, sleeveless shirt. At the time, mind you, it wasn’t as if we were on a beach in Florida—the temperatures were still in the thirties. Compared to the weather we had been having all winter, though, it was positively balmy. Everywhere I looked, I saw faces that reminded me of those people just released from the quarantined cruise ship in Japan: they were relieved to be freed from a lengthy captivity.

To hell with the groundhog, for me the first harbinger of spring has always been hearing the words, “pitchers and catchers report” to spring training. This year was no exception, and spring training is underway in Arizona and Florida. Living in Chicago for many years, there might have been snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures, but as long as baseball was being played somewhere, I knew that spring could not be too far away. I remember being a little kid and throwing a rubber ball against my front porch as soon as the snow started melting. I still smile when I think of my dad inside, swearing every time the ball took an errant bounce and clanged harshly against our aluminum front door.

In more recent years, the unofficial start of spring for me came on the Thursday in March when the NCAA basketball tournament began. March Madness has always been special for us. When Ben was still a little kid, we told him he had his choice of which day he wanted to take off from school: opening day of baseball season or the start of the NCAA Tourney. He invariably chose basketball because, that way, he had sports on TV from morning until midnight.

In Nashville, our NCAA-basketball watching broadened to include friends and family in a local bar. In the days when only one game at a time was broadcast on TV, we could see all four games at the Cross Corner Pub. Kathleen ran a pool at her place of employment, and her friend, Joy, recruited people to enter the pool and join us on Friday afternoon for food, beer, and basketball at the pub. It usually fell during my spring break from school, so I could attend without guilt. Daughter Kristin and her husband Kevin drove up from Huntsville to join us (although they were usually late), and many people from Kathleen’s workplace or mine joined us for lunch or dinner in the course of the day.

The best day of the year for me always fell on that Wednesday before the NCAA games began. At that magical moment in time, the weather had already warmed up in Nashville, and my newly seeded lawn was gloriously thick and green, surrounded by multi-colored tulips and golden daffodils. The Cubs had not yet started their season, so, officially, they were still tied for first place. Finally, my NCAA basketball bracket was pristine, without a single angry, red “X” drawn through one of my picks. All was right with the world. Of course, within a short period of time, my bracket sheet would have more red on it than was seen after the Battle of Gettysburg, the Cubs would disappoint me yet again (except in 2016), and the hot, summer weather would burn my lawn to a brownish yellow. Still, for one day each year, my life crackled with potential.

This year, we have had to alter our long-established traditions following our move to River Falls. Next week we leave for an extended road trip to Illinois, Alabama, and Florida, culminating in a visit to Huntsville to watch the first two days of the tournament with Kristin and Kevin. I’m sure we will enjoy the warm weather, but watching games with them promises to be the highlight of the trip.

We will return north in late March, by which time, winter should be almost behind us. It will officially be spring by that time, and the weather should be warming up, even in Wisconsin. That being said, granddaughter Abigail has repeatedly reminded us that her school had to declare a snow day last year on her birthday, April 11th. I think she now expects it to snow every year on her birthday. I know that snow and cold into April is a realistic possibility up here, and that we are not out of the woods yet in terms of inclement weather. But I’m convinced that every day will be sunny and warm from now on. That optimism stems from a line that always reminds me of spring and baseball. It’s one that Ernest Lawrence Thayer borrowed from Alexander Pope for his famous poem, Casey at the Bat: “The hope which springs eternal within the human breast.”

Of course, that poem also reminds me of the Cubs, because, in the end, Casey strikes out and disappoints once again.