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.