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Now that major-league baseball has arrived, and with Father's Day coming next month, we will soon see acres of nostalgic prose about the mystic father-son bonding which occurs with tickets to double-headers and the playing of catch in the gloaming.
Well, I get along pretty well with my dad, and I can recall but one game of catch. His eyes are bad, and a ball was as likely to strike his bifocals as to land in the glove he borrowed for that outing.
As for attending games to strengthen paternal-filial ties, he once took me and my brothers to a night town-league softball game because he had friends playing. I suspect he had inadvertently promised them he'd come to a game, and he kept his word, bored as he was through the evening.
But we did do other things together. For instance, if I stayed out too late on Friday night, then he'd haul me to work at the laundry with him on Saturday morning. I learned a valuable lesson -- don't ever get into a business that requires you to rise at 5:30 a.m. six days a week to fire up a boiler so there will be steam when everybody else gets there at 7 a.m.
I was a hard-core baseball fan. I followed the Mantle and Maris home-run derby devoutly in the summer of 1961, I played constantly with friends when I should have been doing homework, and I desperately envied a cousin in Arvada who had been to an Actual Major-League Game in Chicago.
Baseball even inspired me to journalism. At Evans Junior-Senior High, I wasn't player enough to take the field as a Ram. I was good at numbers, though, and became the official scorekeeper, with the awesome power to decree errors in real North Central League baseball games.
Slide rule at hand, I could produce instant batting averages, and as soon as each game ended, it was my job to call in the results to the Greeley Tribune.
Such reports often get garbled over the phone, which angered the players. I was a wimpy freshman, and they were big guys with bats.
So after one Saturday-morning double-header with the
Fort Collins JV squad, I found a book on sportswriting and
produced a dozen paragraphs about Evans sweeps pair as
Graf pitches no-hitter.
My mom typed it and the box
scores; I pedaled my bike to the Tribune and handed it
in.
Monday afternoon, there was my story with hardly a word
changed. The players were thrilled. I thought: Grown men
get paid to do this? And I'm only 14 and I've figured it
out? That must be the easiest job in the world. Maybe I'll
write for newspapers when I grow up.
Not long thereafter, I got into an argument with my
folks. All you care about is baseball,
they said,
and there's a big world out there for you if you'll pay
some attention to English and math.
They were right. I still like a ball game now and then, but can't we just enjoy baseball for what it is, rather than try to elevate it to some transcendental level?
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