Tuesday, August 17, 2004
(4:17 AM) | Adam R:
A Much Needed Diversion (Sports, dude! Sports!)
The Times Cinema in Milwaukee, WI features a "Friday Night Freakshow." They present cult classics every Friday at midnight, and sometimes bands play before the movie starts. When Monica and I went to see Dazed and Confused, a funky drums-and-organ duo broke in the moviegoers. I can't remember anything about them except their anthemic closer which (more or less) brought the house down; the music cut at the refrain and everyone yelled, "Sports, dude! Sports!" Once again, athletics unified the masses.From a recent interview with Our Esteemed Editor:
What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Watching sporting events.It's not that I disagree with him, I'm just saying that on Saturday, while I was on my first-ever "Float" (which involved a bunch of us drunkenly drifting down the Maramek River in central Missouri), a major highlight was chatting up the the locals. I antagonized them a little, asking if they preferred the Cubs or the Brewers in the World Series this year. It's a funny gag, considering Their Cardinals are cruising at .655 while My Milwaukee Brewers have dropped discouragingly below .500. Everyone I asked gave me friendly but bewildered looks before saying, "Um, St. Louis, man."
So. Who do you like, Paul Welenck? Maybe, since we're unable to see eye-to-eye on social standards like kindness, we could find some common ground on the playing field. Maybe a light tête-à-tête about the Olympics will pave the way to mutual respect?
Those Romanians really flubbed the Men's Gymnastics last night, huh?
Life is pretty good for me here in middle America. At least it won't get much better, even if the Brewers were to crawl out of last place. In fact, the predominance of professional sports in our culture precludes arguably greater programs from getting the funding and audience they need. The US may be last in education, but you gotta admit we're doing all right in Athens. I realize how skewed this is, and yet it doesn't keep me from observing that dudes who can coherently rank Terry Bradshaw's feats over Roger Staubach's, say, or who know the top 10 finishers in last year's Indy 500, or who understand the handicapping system on the PGA tour, dudes that know this stuff are nerds. And that is cool, because what separates them from the fantasy players who finally earned Druid Level 9? Not much (which is evident from a Vikings game, where its common to see fans dressed to plunder).
I also like the bookish people who know the value of some good sports talk. Take Michael Bérubé's recent hockey/politics post, for instance. His argument that Kerry should force Bush to account for his negative campaigning is based on his own history with hockey. It's clear that he thinks that Kerry will understand this strategy because Kerry is also a hockey player. I like that in the comments section to this post Bérubé's readers have spent as much energy considering the rink analogy as the political theory it represents.
Every good socialist, as well as every Uncle Tupelo fan, ought to count himself at least a theoretical aficion of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Look at the crowds at their stadium: real, red blooded, down-and-out Americans. Arguably, the Steelers are named more appropriately than any other team in the NFL; Pittsburgh is a largely blue collar town. For some reason, people tie up their well-being with the performance of their home team. They really care how "their boys" do, because for some reason their identity is mixed up with the kabillions of dollars that goes into sports in this country.
I dunno. It's been this way for five of six years. Ever since the beginning of time. There must be something to it. I just want to know what it is. There's a sociology of this stuff, dating from the late 1980s; it's amazing that it is such a young branch of that science. Until recently, no one wondered why brainy old Russ, who's here visiting me from China, is wearing a Chicago Cubs hat? And why I, a Brewers guy, did say to him earlier, "I can't believe I'm hanging out with you on game day while you wearing that hat."
And which came first, baseball or baseball caps? Because as I scan the East Library, dozens of people are wearing them. The old man in the corner supports the UW-Milwaukee Panthers. The guy reading Richard North Patterson likes "G," but I don't know which one. The hipster on the 15-minute computers is a little behind the times wearing his John Deere mesh hat, but he did pin some buttons to it. I doubt the woman perusing videos really drives a Harley-Davidson, but she keeps their logo on her head. And there's one other dude, with a dirty shirt and jeans, who has gray hair straggling out from behind his (of course) Packers cap.
All this says to me that, for as much as he wrote about the human condition, Dostoyevsky didn't know shit.
