Jock Itch #1

Portions of a memoir about why I don't care about sports

This is an actual photo of me en route to a junior high football game, taken by my mom.

The Summer Olympics open this week in Paris, so this post seems as timely as anything else. Some years ago, I thought I’d finally unlocked the key to writing a memoir. I didn’t come from a background of buried trauma. I wasn’t victimized that much, other than an occasionally sadistic older brother. Nobody in my family was murdered, or addicted to drugs, or served any hard time in prison. Nobody was molested by a priest, or lost millions in a business scam. Nobody led any sort of revolution. Nobody got sucked into the celebrity fast lane, and peaked too early and jumped out a window. If you’re going to spill your guts in a book, you’d better give it some zest. And my childhood was pretty zest-less. I was just another white kid from a flyover state, whose parents were still married.

But at some point I realized that as an adult, the one thing that seemed to stand out, that set me apart from so many others, was that I just didn’t care about sports. It’s a massive waste of time and mental energy. It doesn’t give back. I don’t learn anything new. At least that’s how it seemed to me. And in the sports-crazed world we live in, that can be kind of isolating.

I eagerly dug into this project, researching my past, interviewing people, traveling to other countries to try and understand just what in the fuck is my problem. Do I have a problem? Am I onto something new here? How novel! Nobody’s done this before! I performed some of the material at readings, and it seemed to go over well enough, so I lashed together a manuscript and applied to a prestigious writers workshop. I was accepted, and attended, and went through the process, and it was one of the most humiliating experiences I’ve ever endured. Apparently this memoir concept was, as the saying goes, sans literary merit. Too much humor. Nobody cares. Nothing’s at stake. Where’s the narrative? Etc etc. So I tossed the project into a box and sank into a deep funk. Apparently I wasn’t a real writer. I’d made a living at it for years, and ran a literary festival for nearly two decades, but the self-doubt was overwhelming. Was I just an interloping shit-bag? Did I even belong in the literary club? Was there no room for fun? Were all of the people who enjoyed those live readings just…poorly educated? I still think there’s some cool material here, so I’m sharing portions of it on the ‘Stack. Please add your comments if it inspires anything in you.

We watched the final strikeout, delivered by a Giants pitcher nicknamed “The Beard,” and immediately San Francisco’s Mission District turned into a war zone of shouting, car horns, fireworks, and overhead helicopters. It seemed like Afghanistan, or Iraq, or wherever the U.S. was bombing in November 2010. The Giants baseball team had just won the World Series, for the first time since…whenever. My partner Christie and I went out for a walk, because if you can hear choppers, you want to see what the hell’s going on. Police motorcycles with sirens had blocked off the streets, flashing the blues and reds. A mattress fire raged in the intersection. Figures jumped up and down on top of deserted Muni buses. Kids darted around on skateboards, hooting and huffing weed. An amorphous mob of orange and black, vibrating with adrenalin, hugging and shouting, like they’d just toppled the regime.

We ducked into a sausage-and-beer bar, and stood on the patio to watch this growing Planet of the Apes spectacle. People kept running up to the patio and screaming “GIANTS!!” Most of the people screamed back, except for me. I just stood there, sort of nodding and smiling. I wasn’t going to fake it. I didn’t really care either way. Yes, I know your team won. That’s fantastic. I didn’t have anything to do with the outcome, and neither did you. It always baffles me that whenever a city wins a championship, the first inclination is to DESTROY! Swarm the field, smash windows, light things on fire, because WE WON!!

An elderly woman trotted up, wearing an alarming amount of orange/black Giants gear, down to her earrings. She was in her ’70s, her dentures bared, eyes gleaming the stare of the deranged. One by one she high-fived people down the patio, until she got to me.

I have always refused to high-five. Especially if it comes accompanied by some guy, yelling in your face: “Up top!” It pisses people off, but I just can’t do it. I’m not going to get all wrapped up in your stupid little jock ritual. We’re not at center court just before the final game of the NBA championship. We’re not scientists at Mission Control, shouting because we’ve just landed a man on the moon. It’s devolved to now include the moment you just found your stapler: “It was in my drawer the whole time! Up top!”

But this old woman was so happy, and perhaps rightly so. Maybe she had grown up in San Francisco her entire life, and had followed the Giants through decades of disappointment. Maybe winning a World Series title was her wildest dream, ever since she developed a schoolgirl crush over 1962 relief pitcher Benito Cucamonga. Who really knows? 

We stared at each other, long enough for her to suspect that I might be some sort of smart-ass prick. I finally returned her outstretched palm, and she moved on. She got me. This still drives me nuts. What kind of person wouldn’t high-five an old lady?

*   *   *

I asked a good number of people about why they like sports. The answers were less interesting than I’d hoped:

1. I always have.

2. My dad was a huge fan.

3. I played sports.

4. It’s my team!

5. I love the stories of the players.

6. You gotta love the fans!

7. It’s an ancient spirit of athletic competition, going back to the Greeks and the Romans. A crowd loves to watch an impressive feat of strength or skill.

8. It’s fun to go to the stadium.

*   *   *

If people were curious about my own lack of interest, I had my little rant already prepared. Honed and refined over the years:

In modern culture, sports are inescapable. Every airport has a sports gear store, and a restaurant named after a jock or a coach. You can’t walk into any bar in America without the insistent screens begging for attention. You can’t scroll through cable channels without landing on a shot of former jocks turned broadcasters, wearing monstrous-sized tailored suits, shouting in front of a desk filled with children’s toys, supported by endless flag-waving commercials for bad beer and unnecessarily large trucks. The same story plays out over and over with the same quotes. Champions and underdogs. The spirit of competition. We came to play. We always give 110%. I just want to thank Jesus. 

Sports are for people who never escaped high school, perpetual adolescents squeezing into jerseys based on their zip code, decorating their offices with bobble-head dolls and signed balls, and bad-mouthing another city just because it happens to be located across the river. I don’t need to support a system that allows for concussions and wife-beating and gang rapes and parking lot stabbings. I don’t want to participate in a world that anoints young jocks as heroes, rewards them with ridiculous salaries, only to discard them like worn-out pets, wobbling down hallways of retirement homes, unable to even pronounce their names, all because of some trophy 40 years ago.

So that was the rant. So very, very clever. What a shock, that nobody was interested in continuing the conversation.

*   *   *

Me: Do you follow sports?

Well-Known American Writer: Oh my god, it’s hopeless. (Holds up smartphone). You too?

Me: Not really, no.

A Friend: Do you have the ESPN app?

Me: No.

Friend: It’s 20 bucks, but it’s really worth it.

Person at a party: Do you golf?

Me: Oh, god no.

(Person walks away.)

*   *   *

Some sports fans remember fond memories of childhood competition and triumphant victories. I have a single memory from playing Little League. It was the summer between fifth and sixth grade. I usually worked on our cattle ranch, but for some reason I was allowed to pursue my baseball dreams, for a team sponsored by Regan’s Plumbing & Heating. It was a typical Montana summer day, cloudless and hellishly hot. Mosquitos swarmed over from the nearby Tongue River. I was stuck in the outfield, swatting at the bugs with another kid named Jay. That’s where you put the kids who are terrible players, where they can cause the least amount of damage to the team. Oh man, were we funny. We traded jokes back and forth, cracking each other up and doubling over at our own amazing sense of humor. It was turning out to be a perfect afternoon. Suddenly everyone was screaming at us: “C’mon, Boulware!” We looked around and realized the baseball had landed in between us. Just sitting there on the grass. The other players—I guess you’d call them teammates—were furious. I grabbed the ball and threw it wildly in the general direction of the noise. That was the last time I touched a baseball.

This distinguished legacy continued in junior high football, where I hugged the bench and kept my uniform sparkling clean. One afternoon, for some unknown reason, perhaps the score was so lopsided it didn’t matter, the coach put me in at defensive cornerback. On the very next play, the team ran a play to my side of the field. I lumbered along, trying to follow the action, and watched as they outran me and scored a touchdown before I even knew what had happened. Again I heard it. “C’mon, Boulware, Jesus!” The coach yanked me out, and I returned to my good friend, the bench, for the remainder of junior high.

Also in junior high, before each wrestling match, I stood on the mat in my little uniform, and as the Star Spangled Banner played, my eyes would scan the gymnasium, hoping to not see my parents. My dad never bothered to show, but if I did spot my mom in the stands, a stoic bundle of nerves, my stomach would twist, and I’d always end up losing. Nobody yelled “C’mon Boulware.” It wasn’t necessary. Years later, I would remember this and think, “God, how fucked up is that?” I asked my older brother, who was also an unsuccessful wrestler, if this was an unhealthy reaction, and he brightened up: “Oh, me too.”

*   *   *

If you’re a guy in America, the expectation is that you’re a red-blooded sports fiend. I’ve wondered why I shouldn’t just play along. So I don’t yell for my team, drive a big truck, or have a chainsaw in the garage—I’ve got a Weber grill, man. Am I supposed to be exercising my brain solely to retain and spew sports statistics? I’ve been at parties where fans face off, going at each other in a trivia smackdown, pretending it’s all in fun but secretly trying to one-up the other. This usually ends with a high-five over the name of a player (“MANNY BOMO! YEAH!!”). Fascinating. I need a refill.

I’ve certainly pretended to be interested in sports. For many years I supported myself as a freelance writer by pitching sports ideas and faking the passion. Basketball, football, boxing, surfing, sportfishing, rodeo, championship poker, bungee jumping. Golf. I sold at least four feature stories about golf, and I fucking hate golf. But rent was due. It wasn’t rocket science. Ask questions, attempt to understand the appeal, and hopefully discover something new or unique. Even if you think it’s all nonsense.

It’s now culminated to a point of crisis. I need to understand why I feel this way. My first instinct is that the answer might lie in books. History, criticism, scholarship, analysis. Deep knowledge! But the generally accepted histories of how American baseball, basketball and football first developed, it doesn’t really hold my interest. This is all pretty goddamn obvious. I do learn that baseball and football are considered classic American institutions, yet both attribute their origins squarely to English sports. And basketball, supposedly also invented here in the U.S., comes to us from James Naismith, who was a Canadian. So we can assume America is not only a melting pot of cultures and interests, we’re also blatant thieves. That’s no big surprise. But where does all of this come from? I plunder Bay Area bookstores and comb the online corners, hoping to glean some background on how sports might have originated, and why they continue to hold our interest. Here are a few favorites: 

Sport: A Cultural History, by Richard D. Mandell, 1984. The book arrives with a thud, as the preface admits, “The narrative is based almost entirely on previously existing scholarship, much of it in German.” Great, thanks for the warning. Chapters quickly breeze through the prehistoric hunting skills, and the Greeks and the Romans and all of Europe, until the reader hits the brakes at the year 1864, when Richie Mandell attributes the origins of geeky sports statistics to a track and field competition at Oxford, when performances were first recorded, thus turning on the spigot of trivia for centuries to come.

In an astonishing editorial choice, Richie leapfrogs over the entire history of English soccer, the world’s most popular sport, within two pages. Thankfully, we learn that in the late 19th century, a package of player trading cards was first bundled with a pack of cigarettes, suggesting the earliest sports collectors were either adults, or children who liked to smoke. 

The cracks in Richie’s efforts widen in his closing bibliographical essays, where he freely admits that any research in Mayan, Aztec, or Chinese sports is simply suspect. “There may exist solid literature that has remained obscure to me because of language problems.” The message is clear: don’t hire translators. Just stop and call it a day.

Richard D. Mandell finally exasperates the reader’s patience by listing in his recommended source material, several works written by none other than Richard D. Mandell. After noting his own book The Nazi Olympics, he coyly adds, “There has been an American paperback and Norwegian, Hebrew, German, and Japanese translations.” Richie’s final chapter, “Joyous Sport, Beautiful Sport,” ends with majestic flair: “We can be sure that sport will evolve constructively and will gather ever greater mythic force.”

In 1995 Kendall Blanchard published The Anthropology of Sport, which traces things back to 4,000 B.C., with the discovery of ancient “gaming devices,” and the use of skills vital to the hunt. A handy spreadsheet of pre-history sport indicates that the inhabitants of North America were actually playing games earlier than those in Mesopotamia, which blows a hole in the big theory of the “Fertile Crescent” as being the cradle of civilization. It would seem that North America invented the “fuck work let’s have fun” lifestyle, thank you very much.

Of particular note is Blanchard’s research into sport of indigenous societies, especially the pre-Mayan Ball Game, and the development of the rubber ball. Residents of Mexico’s Yucatan discovered the properties of rubber by accident, figured out how to make it into balls, and created a game played in elaborate courts made of stone. Evidence exists there were decapitations, as well as removal of human hearts, either to honor the gods, or as punishment for losing. But Kendall does mention, with a straight face, there is no evidence “to support the idea of post-game cannibalism.”

The Meaning of Sports by Michael Mandelbaum, was published in 2004, and as its thesis analyzes America’s three-headed monster of baseball, football, and basketball. The origins of each are discussed in punishing detail, which can be quite informative, especially if you’ve never been exposed to any sport and don’t know how to use a computer.

My first disagreement with Mikey Mandelbaum occurs on page five, when he trumpets the inherent drama of team sports. “The outcome of a game, unlike that of a scripted drama, is unknown,” he cries. “Few people watch the same play or motion picture repeatedly because after they have seen it once, they know the ending. The tension is gone.” 

I stop reading here and make a list of movies I’ve seen at least seven times—Sunset Boulevard, The Graduate, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather 1 and 2, Double Indemnity, The Apartment, and even in moments of cable-surfing weakness, The Bourne Identity. I consider emailing the author a long list of Broadway revival plays and musicals. And then I realize—oh, wait. Mikey Mandelbaum is simply pompous.

The hits keep coming. “Joe DiMaggio sits on the shoulders of two bearers—mythology and science.” “The marriage between television and team sports has proven to be a match made in heaven” is a perfect sentence, if the reader were from Mars. As is the notion that “official games of basketball take place indoors and unlike baseball and football are not affected by the weather.” The sheer bravado of Mikey’s voice, the debate-team delivery, the simplistic announcements dripping with profound, unexamined confidence, all suggest a background in American foreign policy. As luck would have it, he is a professor of exactly this subject.

I’m not really sure who is the intended reader of this book. Perhaps the distant stepdad, for Father’s Day? Or newly sworn citizens of the U.S.? But for anyone who even flicks through a few pages, it’s a guarantee that you’ll never want to sit down at a dinner table with Mikey Mandelbaum, unless you enjoy floating in a state of zombified jello boredom. It comes as no surprise that Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times calls this book “Delightful.”

Kudos must be given to Stephen G. Miller, author of Ancient Greek Athletics, for a truly great opening sentence: “Will Antigone bury her dead brothers or leave his corpse as carrion for the crows—will she obey the dictates of her conscience or the orders of the state?” Okay! I’m definitely listening.

This lavishly illustrated coffee-table tome, published in 2004, wastes no time in reminding the reader that athletes of ancient Greece were nude. In fact, nude appears to be the author’s favorite word. It appears so frequently, the reader begins to imagine the elderly Dr. Miller, professor emeritus of classical archaeology at U.C. Berkeley, padding around his dark-wood Craftsman home, stark naked and doing his morning stretches, dusting his statues of discus throwers. But there is reason behind his voyeuristic tone. He reminds us that the Greek word “gymnos” translates to “naked,” and adds, “We now know that the cremaster muscle forces the genitals to contract during exercise so that the danger of injury is less than it might appear.” Indeed, knowledge is power.

Amidst the nudity, Stevie Miller describes the first sports heroes of Greece, including Milo, a strongman and Olympiad wrestler who would tie a cord around his head, and then hold his breath until his bulging veins snapped the cord. Another was Kleomedes, who killed his opponent in a boxing match, then in a fit of grief, pulled down the roof of a school, killing 60 children, and then vanished. It’s not clear why this made him a hero. Unless the children deserved it.

Stevie then introduces us to the Greek concept of arête—a desired quality of being which stressed the concepts of excellence, goodness, valor, nobility, and virtue. Chroniclers of athletics during this period included Aristotle, who wrote: “Those who train their children in athletics to the exclusion of other necessities make their children truly vulgar and available to the state for only one kind of work.” Unfortunately, this book was published by a university press, and so that quote has been read by perhaps 40 people total in the history of mankind. But all of them sighed in agreement.

Another surprising element of arête was the concept of shame. If an athlete in ancient Greece committed a foul in competition, he was flogged in public, and willingly subjected himself to the act. Athletes caught cheating at the Olympic Games found their names inscribed on statues of Zeus, which lined the entrance to the main stadium. Today’s athletes who cheat are severely punished with an asterisk. 

Sport in America: From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession, edited by David K. Wiggins, contains 19 essays from scholars and academics that examine the history of U.S. sports, from the nation’s earliest years on up through the steroid era. My used copy, published in 1995, comes courtesy of a student named Jacqui Hennessey, who has personalized the book on each side with her name, “J HENNESSEY.” Throughout the pages, she alternates between black ballpoint and pink highlighter, and like so many students who enter higher education, she gives up halfway through.

Davey’s most popular essay, at least for Jacqui and her annotations, concerns American slavery. In early plantation life, masters would often allow their slaves to hold Saturday night parties. Next to this description Jacqui writes, “self respect.” This weekly ritual attracted slaves from neighboring farms to gather and celebrate with music and dancing. In the margin Jacqui adds, “ideas coming together by them visiting different slaves.” The dancing was very athletic and expressive, borrowing from African traditions, and sometimes mimicking animals or even the plantation masters. 

One description calls the dancing “…often simply a test of physical prowess and a method of winning praise from one’s peer group.” Jacqui highlights this and also writes, “Test of physical prowess—winning praise from peers.”

Other early competitive activities among slaves including hunting, fishing, boat races, horse races, and friendly wrestling and fighting. It’s noted that participants were not interested in rivalry, domination, or violence. The burden of slavery was obviously quite enough. 

On the other hand, at approximately the same time period, a companion essay describes the backwoods brawling of white people in the south. This unlicensed, unsupervised fighting was so vicious, it was necessary to pass laws making it a felony to put out an eye, cut out the tongue, or cut off the nose. Essay author Elliot J. Gorn does not enjoy describing these violent matches, he truly rejoices in every brutal detail. One passage, about a gouging fight between Savannah politician Robert Watkins and U.S. Senator James Jackson, ends when “the other flew at him, and in an instant turned his eye out of the socket, and while it hung upon his cheek, the fellow was barbarous enough to endeavor to pluck it entirely out.” This sentence has been helpfully underlined by Jacqui.

Another match, between a Kentuckian and a Virginian, resulted in the loss of both eyeballs (the Kentuckian), a nose ripped from the face (the Virginian), and a lower lip torn off with the teeth (the Kentuckian). The author closes the horrific scene with, “The citizens refreshed themselves with whiskey and biscuits.” Yay, white people! We’ve come a long way. Or maybe not.

Jacqui Hennessey’s final stab at required reading, for this unnamed class in an unnamed school, occurs during a chapter on Roone Arledge, head of ABC sports programming in the 1970s and ’80s. During a description of Monday Night Football, she administers a single pen slash underneath the name “Howard Cosell.” And then she disappears from the book.

I imagine her somewhere in the Southwest, perhaps coaching a girls’ field hockey team, married to a 24-Hour Fitness manager named Brad, raising a family of little jocks, and maybe late at night when the kids are in bed, and she’s on the third glass of iced Chardonnay, Jacqui Hennessey rubs her eye and thinks back to the vicious eye-gouging matches of 19^th century Virginia, and mutters to herself, “God, I hated that class.”

To be continued.