Under Lights & Open Air
A sports story within a wishful world of imaginary purity & writing tips
If anyone can tell a sports story, it ought to be me. I have no idea what else I would have done the first twenty years of my life. I earned nine letters in athletic competition during junior high, getting the rare C-Hawk award. I was one of the fastest kids in the city at the 50-yard dash during grade school and attained legendary status on the recess football field. Earned six more letters in high school as well as summer baseball leaques. Have played nearly an infinite amount of basketball, softball, racketball, baseball you name it. Offered a couple track scholarships, but said no. I have been on rowing teams, fly fish, played frisbee golf, regular golf, hacky sack, kayak, hike/backwoods camping, skateboarding, squash, rollerblading, some road race running, x-skiing, mountain & road biking, etc. To this day I find myself calmly reading over the sports section in newspapers and online. When I was very little, the sports section of the paper was colored peach, which I liked (I also wondered why). I like to believe sports is one of the few things left we don’t know the results of ahead of time (minus the possible influence of sports betting) when it comes to humanity.
[Writing tip: being too close to a topic can stop your ability to write on it. Too much knowing gets in the way. You write, rewrite, rewrite your rewrite, somehow still knowing you aren’t there yet. It feels as if, literally, being limited to the mere range of human ideas is too shallow for what you know. Something pre-historic would be a better direction. I once wrote about forgotten words ten years ago. I will try to do this again sometime.]
Alas, why the writing tip above? I am sports-less when it comes to telling a sports story. I don’t have any walk-off three-pointers, last-second catches, or buzzer-beating heroics. Although, when I was really young, I used to hold imaginary World Series games in my head, tossing baseballs against the back of our garage, at an area of cement with a square strike zone I drew. I put a lot of dents and holes in the siding. I had to repair the wood and buy new glass a few times to be sure. I eventually got a pitch-back net thing, a screen which proved less damaging and more interesting. Regardless of what I was throwing against, let it be known I was the best pitcher in the world during those moments in my small Midwestern backyard in north Iowa City, Iowa, in the 1970s—no-hitter after no-hitter. I was the only one who could hear the applause.1
I think I was like a lot of kids during summer vacation, imagining myself amidst the bigger world in some way, in my case, pretending to be ten players at once in game seven of the World Series between the A’s and the Reds; the Dodgers and the Yankees. Or I would act out the All-Star game, pretending I was Luis Tiant, Tom Seaver, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Joaquin Andujar, Don Sutton, or Rollie Fingers, mimic wind-ups and arm angles to emulate them. I could strike out Rod Carew every time. Jim Rice had nothing on me. Willie Stargell, ha, I used a curveball. My sidearm spin, an invention all my own, took out Reggie Jackson.
These days, sports for me mostly involve fly fishing or biking. But what I’m thinking about now is baseball. Pull this image into your vision. It’s the once upon a time Northern League, faraway in North Dakota somewhere, let’s say it’s the Big Skies vs. the Horizons. The national anthem is just over, and there is a player standing on the field, a bat over his shoulder, looking out into the evening sky from the on-deck circle. Waiting. The stadium is bright, so bright, an astral beam of white light, and beneath all the light is the green, ever-so-green field, crisp white chalk lines, dirt raked as though a zen garden. The players are all dressed in clean white uniforms, and the field and the realm of space illuminated under the light is comparable to a vast and holy church. When the players are warming up they talk with the umpires, batboys smug and efficient. The baseball snaps around easily, accurately, and effortlessly. The pitcher is popping the ball into the catcher’s mitt with the precision of a surgeon. Suddenly, “Play Ball!” goes out, and the stadium hushes for a moment. The ritual is about to begin. People settle in, eager to observe.2