The Ticket Out by Michael Sokolove

Author:Michael Sokolove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

CHAPTER SIX

Leaving L.A.

Perhaps I was overly receptive to sports-as-life messages, but I never doubted my coaches when they said we were engaged in something beyond just playing ball. Hitting the cutoff man on a throw from the outfield wasn’t only about preventing a runner from taking an extra base—it was a detail, and paying attention to detail was one of those important things in life. Running out a ground ball, even when it was clear you were going to be out, was another test of character. You owed it to yourself, owed it to your teammates, probably owed it to the Lord himself, although our coaches couldn’t say that in public school.

Everything we were asked to do—hustle at all times; practice our foul shots; knock the hell out of anything that moved on the football field—earned us currency to spend later in life. We were learning self-discipline and self-respect. Learning to work. And putting it all in the bank as a deposit on becoming future leaders and winners.

Only later did I come across some strong dissenting voices to all of this—suggestions in literature and popular culture that the more a young man bathes himself in sports, and particularly the more success and acclaim he achieves, the more handicapped he may become.

John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom cannot parley his small-town basketball fame into an existence that feels anything but empty. The former college track star in John Cheever’s “O Youth and Beauty” makes a habit of getting drunk at parties and hurdling the furniture in suburban living rooms. The actor Dennis Quaid, playing a former football star in Everybody’s All-American (based on a novel by Frank Deford), ends up back home with a failed sports bar, a failing marriage, and nothing to offer but old stories. “I’ve told those stories so many times,” he says to his wife, “that I’ve almost forgot it was me who had those things happen to him. It seems like somebody else.” Bruce Springsteen sings of a baseball pitcher who could “throw that speedball by you” but passes his time in a roadside bar, recounting his “glory days.”

This is the athlete not as a winner in life, but as something different, an opposing archetype: the washed-out sports hero, boozed up and adrift, stuck with the sad realization that he reached his apex at about the age of eighteen. (Rabbit’s wife would conclude that even before their marriage, which took place just after high school, he was “already drifting downhill.”)

In literature and film, these characters are without exception white men. Yet the pull of sports, the all-encompassing urgency of it, is strongest in the black community. There, sports exists more in the present.

The myth is that sports somehow fills in the empty spaces. If a boy is missing a father, he finds a surrogate one in sports. If he lacks direction, discipline, or a reason to show up at school, sports gives him all that.

In the black community, sports is less about character building for the distant future and more about a path to direct, tangible reward.

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