The Weekly Screed (#883)

“Seashells and balloons”

by David Benjamin

“Those (bleepin‘) balloons are staying up there.”

              — Bill Russell, NBA Finals, Game 7,  5 May 1969

MADISON, Wis. — A dinner with my former boss Patrick inevitably cycles ’round to sports talk. We’re both sports mavens. Our conversation often settles into a comforting cadence, an argot and vernacular that can be — to an unschooled eavesdropper — as opaque as a scene by Ionesco.

Patrick and I met awhile ago in Boston, where we slipped into the verbal shorthand of the aficionado, covering matters of profound triviality that ranged from Le’Veon’s holdout and Rodgers’ knee brace to the unequal MVP race between Mookie and Martinez. Thinking back on the encounter, it strikes me that a few qualities common to every sports maven bond us fiercely together while alienating us from the common run of rational humanity.

For instance, there’s a canon of distinct sports moments — plays, quotes, gestures — that form a sort of litany invoked by every fan who has ever loved the game, whatever the game, while conveying no meaning at all to any sane person outside the clubhouse. When we refer to Mazeroski’s homer, for example, the spark of recognition lights our faces. Even if some of us hadn’t even been born by then, we beam back together to Forbes Field on 13 October 1960. Some of us can even hear the voice of Mel Allen calling the shot that snuffed the Yankees.

Similarly, we all remember our exact whereabouts when Bucky cleared the Monster, when Buckner booted the ball, when Kramer pancaked Pugh, when Laettner stunned Kentucky, when Havlicek stole the ball and Johnny Most went ultrasonic, when Fisk waved the ball fair and when Gibson limped the bases at Chavez Ravine. The Code of the Maven includes terms like The Shot Heard ’Round the World, The Immaculate Reception, The Catch, The Heidi Game, The Phantom Punch, The Brady Rule, The Pesky Pole, The Bayonne Bleeder, The Lambeau Leap.

 

Most of us can name some or all of the Twin Towers, the Big Three, the Four Four Horsemen, the Fab Five, the Seven Blocks of Granite, the Eight Men Out and the rules of 43-Man Squamish. None of us would flunk a quiz that includes the names Duke Kahanamoku, Ludmyila Turishcheva, Carmen Basilio, Wilma Rudolph, Tenley Albright, Sal the Barber and Swift Current Fats. Invoke the fearsome names Bednarik, Butkus, Nitschke and Huff, and we all get goosebumps.

Not one of us can, moreover, can see or read the call, “Jesus saves,” without muttering the proper response: “… but Esposito scores on the rebound!”

For all of us, there are private moments that linger so indelibly in the memory that they change our lives. One of mine was reading the uncensored coverage of the ’69 NBA finals, Game 7, when the sleek, young, supremely talented L.A. Lakers hosted the geriatric Boston Celtics. Lakers’ owner Jack Kent Cooke had filled the Fabulous Forum rafters with balloons, ready to spill onto the court after his thoroughbreds had casually lapped the crippled Celts. Boston’s player-coach, Bill Russell scowled up at the balloons and made a profane, chilling promise to Laker star Jerry West.

 

True to Russell’s word, the balloons never came down. And I became, for ever and all, a Bill Russell disciple. Since then, I’ve stayed true to the Celtics, even through Henry Finkel, Len Bias and Antoine Walker.

Common to all mavens is that they do not view their sports from a cool, objective, panoramic vantage point. They stand devoutly behind a chosen team, learning the game through loyalty, pain and ref-cursng. Patrick, for example, knows all the teams in every league going back decades, but he began this education in Johnstown, with the Steelers, the Pirates and the Panthers at Pitt. In his career, he has hobnobbed with CEOs and senators, Pulitzer winners and Nobel laureates, but you can still see — if you look real close — the steeltown chip on his shoulder and feel, in his handshake, the calluses that will never quite go smooth.

To be a sports maven, it’s best to have humble beginnings, a beer-bottle wallet and the prudence to never interrupt a Namath-vs.-Unitas argument in a sports bar.

 

My gateway sport was baseball and my mentors were Milwaukee Braves. But the Braves forsook me, to Atlanta, of all places, when I was in 11th grade. For awhile after that heartbreak, baseball meant nothing to me, nor did it need to. I had ample consolation from Hornung, Taylor, Willie Wood and Vince Lombardi. But when I moved to Boston, I discovered the most literary team in all of sports, playing in a creaky ballpark that John Updike called “a lyric little bandbox.”

Every spring, they commenced to act out a Greek tragedy, venturing out onto the diamond in hopeless battle against the indomitable Yankees, like Prometheus bound to a rock and shaking his fist at Zeus. Ted Willams had wasted a brilliant career in Boston, pushing a Sisyphean rock up a 37-foot green wall. By and by, he turned left field over to Carl Yastrzemski, the Polish incarnation of Tantalus — forever reaching, never quenched.

 

Here was a baseball team that an underdog prose-poet from the Driftless Area could love. And so, I have.

 

Perhaps the most annoying quirk common to sports mavens is that each of us is a crack “color analyst” (the blithering twit who second-bananas the play-by-play broadcaster). We all channel Diz and PeeWee, we know ten times more than Troy Aikman, and we all concur that Joe Buck is a moron who daily disgraces his old man’s legacy.

 

The analyst bug is a mental defect that must be sown early in life. To become a know-it-all in almost any discipline, like quantum physics or brain surgery, you can start out as late as high school and still get pretty good. But in sports, the competition is abundant, abusive and merciless, If you  haven’t begun spouting, parsing, whinging and predicting by age ten, you’ve pretty much missed the kickoff. The first clue (it comes fast) that your latest casual acquaintance is a sports maven is the way he asks a question: “So whaddya think of that (bleepin‘) stunt Antonio Brown pulled the other day?” 

There, you see? This is not really a question. The guy knows inside-out the (bleepin‘) stunt at issue. He knows exactly, in vast, voluminous detail, what he thinks about it. By asking, he’s squeezing a rhetorical trigger whose purpose is to either intimidate you into agreeing, or to launch 45 minutes of circular argument so loud, tedious and irritating that it tempts the bartender to take a Louisville Slugger to the both of you.

 

Take my wife, Hotlips. Thanks to the Hiroshima Carp, she knew baseball before she met me. Now, after years of indoctrination, she screams during Packer games and roots for the Red Sox. But she’ll never be a maven. You can observe this, as Yogi said, just by watching.

For instance, just the other day: I’ve barely begun a pretty darn definitive disquisition on the critical absence of play-to-play rhythm in Paul Chryst’s over-cautious three-step-dropback aerial game plan for Hornibrook against Michigan, with the fullback chipping and two tight ends…

There. You see? Her eyes are already glazed over.