I had a thing to do Wednesday night, so I didn't see the Razorback baseball game.
But as soon as I got to my car, I snapped on the radio and found a sports talk channel, just in time to hear a caller from New Jersey or some other place where a single vowel can start out as a long "o" and end up as an "ah" explain how Arkansas blew the game on a Little League play.
"You go-ah-tah catch that ball," he said of the pop foul that fell betwixt the second baseman and the right fielder while the first baseman looked on. "None of dose guys ah go-ah-nah sleep tonight."
They might not have.
As I write this, there are a couple of hours to go before the first pitch in Thursday's deciding game. At this moment I don't know if Arkansas came back to win its first College World Series or not. It didn't. I wish it had, because I'd rather that non-play be remembered as a non-determinate close call rather than the heartbreaking fluke that broke a good team's spirit and cost it the championship. But you don't always get what you want. That's one of the things sports teaches us.
Actually, the best thing about sports may well be the trauma it induces in players and spectators. For the beauty of sports is that it allows us to invest so much in something that ultimately matters not at all. It is a way of feeling fully engaged and alert to the world while limiting risk. Your team loses the championship game and it feels as though the world has ended. But the world hasn't ended. The counters have just been reset.
I can remember with photographic precision a few of my on-field failures. Here's a special one: One out, bases loaded, a soft fly ball to short left field. I drift out from shortstop and am under it when I hear the third base coach tell the runner to tag--"you can run on that arm." Determined to show him different, I stiffen the slightest bit, the ball hits and bounces off the heel of my glove, falls through a long moment to my spikes, then kicks crazily away into foul territory. Suddenly the world speeds up and runners rush around the bases as the crowd roars, laughter mixed in among the cheers.
I am 16 years old and feel like crying.
I don't remember whether we won or lost. I don't remember whether the game was an "important" game or not.
No one else does either. And, for most of us, that's the beauty of sport.
For most of us, dropping a pop-up is embarrassing only in the moment. And maybe it's instructive, maybe it teaches you a small lesson about humility, or about how it is wrong to take anything for granted. But it shouldn't warp you, it shouldn't inflict a serious wound. (Though on a big enough stage it can: see Buckner, Bill; Bartman, Steve; and Moore, Donnie.)
If anything, it should inure you to inevitable reversals of fortune that regularly occur. Sports teaches us about our limitations, and about the limits of our agency. Sometimes we make errors, sometimes we are outclassed by our competition. Almost all of us eventually learn that no matter how hard we train or how much we desire, there's a level at which we simply cannot compete.
And unless there is something wrong with you, the Razorbacks--or the Cubs or the Pittsburgh Steelers or any of the tribes to which you might attach yourself--do not really break your heart. They might disappoint you, they might frustrate you, they might impel you to act in silly ways. Some people may use them as an excuse to behave badly, but most of us understand that whatever an assembled group of mercenaries accomplishes or does not accomplish on the field has nothing to do with us.
I'm not saying the pain--or the elation--isn't real. It is. That's what's magic and fun about sports. We can identify with the athletes, with the team, we can buy into a rich tradition of superstition and cultural practice. We can divide ourselves into little tribes and play at conquest while remaining completely safe.
It is not silly to occupy ourselves with sports. We need diversion and maybe even petty obsessions, we need to lose ourselves in intricate and detailed endeavors that ultimately do no more than keep us sane. Sports may not have any real moral lessons to impart, but at least it keeps us busy. Sports gives us an artificial world to attend to, something to watch besides the news, something to talk about other than the ongoing unpleasantness.
Part of me regrets I lost my capacity for unabashed fandom a couple of decades ago. Maybe it's an occupational hazard; my first job in this business was as a sports writer, and one of the seminal books of my boyhood was Jerome Holtzman's No Cheering in the Press Box, which profiled book sportswriters who worked between the two world wars in a kind of Golden Age when newspapers were still the main delivery device for sports drama. I transferred my allegiance from particular teams and players to the overarching narrative. Winning and losing really didn't matter so much as how the games were played. I still root for good games and good stories over laundry.
Only in sports are the lines between winning and losing so well demarcated; in real life no victory can be completely unequivocal, and most losses have some recompense. You have to catch the ball.
But sometimes you don't.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 07/01/2018