Skip to main content

The Way we Play

Kevin Love plays basketball for the Timberwolves.  He is incredibly good, often scoring more than 30 points, sweeping up 20 or more rebounds, while making his teammates look good.

He is 6'11' tall, and has slimmed down to 260 pounds.  You don't have to be a giant to play basketball, but you had better be able to play with giants.

Linemen in football often weigh nearly 400 pounds, and now that there are pass receivers nearly Kevin Love's size, the day of smaller defensive backs is in danger.  Hockey used to be about skating.  Now it is about giants skating, and fighting.  Even baseball has discovered that big and strong and fast is better than smaller and strong and fast.

I am having lunch at the bar of a local restaurant.  The coaster under my Irish Red reads, "Hi, I'm Kevin.  I'll be your coaster this evening."

It is a big coaster.

And I ordered a small salad.

When John Wooden was coaching all those magnificent teams at UCLA, he said the basket should be raised from 10' to 12'.  He was no fan of sticking your arm down into the hoop.

We are very near to making sports--nearly all sports--into concussion contests for really big people.  Even tennis players are getting bigger, and stronger.  If they find a way to allow high-sticking at the net, it will become a nearly-perfect sport.

Even boxing, which celebrates brain concussions, has become too tame for the enthusiasts of violence.  Extreme  fighting adds cages, kicking, and stomping.  If we did that to roosters or dogs, we would be put in jail.

Something brutal is happening to us.  It shows in the way we play.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more