Masochism or vicarious living?

Is it natural for a person to spend a 3+ hours getting annoyed, cursing, occasionally throwing object at t the floor, punctuating by expressions of joy but mainly those of frustration, but still looking forward to repeating the whole experience the next week? The answer depends on your culture.

To explain, as an expat, I relish watching my American sports, specifically baseball and football (the one with the larger athletes).  So, I reserve Sunday night at 8:00, Israeli time for the 1:00 pm east coast games, for watching sports.  I prepare properly, i.e., do not schedule any work, read the pre-game analysis, make sure there is a bottle of beer and some pistachios in the house and finish my daily telephone duty (calls to parents and daughter) beforehand.  Then, I go into my office, put my feet up, invite the cat to take a long nap on me, which he almost always welcomes, and begin the evening in the most cheerful of moods. My wife has learned to leave me alone for two reasons: I am “away” mentally; and she does not handle my emotional merry-go-round very well, whether voiced or not. Since I am a fan on the Pittsburgh Pirates in baseball and Cincinnati Bengals in football, not exactly elite teams in their sport, they are rather prone to playing poorly at times.

This is where culture comes in.  When I return to reality around 11:00 pm, generally disgusted with what I have seen, my wife looks at me and wonders why I insist on going through this seemingly unpleasant drama every week. It is clear to her to them that my behavior is irrational and possibly connected to some stupid American ingrained behavior. Granted, I have not conducted a study of attitudes among Israeli women to sport but I strongly suspect that this bafflement is the general rule among Israeli females. By contrast, if I had married an American woman, the odds are that not only would she understand my vicarious living, she might join me. To be perfectly clear, I am glad that I married an Israeli woman but still culturally mixed marriages bring out cultural differences, small and big.  In this case, my wife has no problem racking it up to background, not insanity.

So, I will continue to enjoy my Sunday nights, granted in an irrational manner, while my wife will knit away and try not to hear my mumbled curses. As we agree to disagree, the answer to the question whether it is natural or not is completely irrelevant.

Special oops

Sports are complex, leading to a constant series of errors. In fact, success in many sports is the exception.  For example, in baseball, a good hitter makes a hit only 30% of the time, meaning that most of the time the batter fails.  Of course, the reason for a given lack of success is often hard to identify since the interaction of a large number of players creates a complex interplay of forces. In the above example, the hitter can fail to get to first base because of good pitches, poor swing, heavy shifting of the defense, a great play by an opposing player and sheer bad luck, to name just a few.  Occasionally, a player makes a mistake that he can only look at himself and wonder how he did such a thing.  The fans, even the most sympathetic ones, often react to such mishaps in the most direct way – boos.  The less understanding ones want the head of the offending player.

Continuing with our first example, American baseball, players are faced with numerous situations where they are face to face with the ball, all by themselves. A loss of concentration can lead to the ball rolling between their legs, leaving the poor player looking really stupid.  Sometimes, a player forgets to touch all four bags after he hits the ball out of the park, nullifying the hit. A very rare example of being spacey is thinking there are two outs when there isn’t or vice versa. That will lead to a lot of kidding and even a fine on some teams.

Basketball is fast paced, team game, which leads to many mistakes of circumstances. However, there are some moments of individual ridiculousness.  The most common example is the player standing by the net with no opposing player around him and slamming the ball on the ring instead of the net. The only that goes higher than the ball is the blood pressure of the player.  Ball handling skills are taken for granted, especially for guards.  Yet, from time to time, the ball handler forgets that he has already dribbled but does it again in full view of the referees, who have no choice but to call double dribble. On a more ridiculous level, last minute confusion sometimes leads the player holding the ball outside the court to pass it quite accurately to a player of the other team.  Try and explain that to the coach and fans.

American football combines speed, violence and complexity, also leading to a large number of mistakes and penalties. Most can be explained by the interaction of the large number of players but some cannot. An example is the player called for lining up behind the line of scrimmage when the rules require that the offense have at least seven players on the line of scrimmage. As the commentators so sarcastically note, it is not hard to look left and right to see where you are located. Another infrequent error is the poor pass between the center and quarterback, leading to a fumble.  The two players practice this transfer tens of thousands of times. It should be automatic, right?  On the defensive side, cornerbacks and safeties are supposedly taught to look for the ball.  Unfortunately, under the pressure of the situation, a few forget to do so and get in the head with a flying football.  If they didn’t have a helmet, they would have a red welt on the back of their head.  Instead, they are merely very red-faced.

My discussion is limited is American sports with which I am most familiar.  I would happily love to hear about unforgivable errors in other sports.  For example, in European football, aside from a self-goal, are there other WTF moments?

September Dreaming

As the first of September approaches, young and old cannot feel neutral about the new moon.  The actual events of the month differ from place to place but it cannot be denied that change is acoming, to paraphrase Bob Dylan.

In the United States, Labor Day marks the official end of the summer.  After this holiday, salvation or hell is coming, depending on which side of the parent-child duo you are, as students of all ages go back to school.  It also means the approaching end of the summer heat, to be replaced by the cool but pleasant weather of the fall.  Hikers and garden owners will soon get to experience the changing of colors of the leaves and their covering on the ground, albeit with different reactions, at least in the Northeast and Northwest.  Another result of the change of weather is the opportunity to wear the beloved sweater that has been buried, undesired, in the closet for many months.  For those who bought new boots on sale at the end of the last season, it is now time to show them off.  In the Pacific Northwest at least, the hunters and fishermen start planning their “campaigns”.  Most of this is in the future, but anticipation is biggest part of pleasure. In terms of spectator sports, (American) football fans fully wake up from their hibernation, with everybody allowed, for the moment, the illusion that his or her team really can win the Super Bowl.  By contrast, baseball fans go to completely meaningful or meaningless games, depending on the standings.

In Israel, September, the Hebrew months of Alul and Tishrei, it is also a time of change.  Like in the United States, children from nursery school to high school start the school year.  However, most curiously, this is only a dress rehearsal for the school year since once the “holidays” hit, i.e. Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, they get another extended vacation.  Because the Jewish calendar is lunar, the actual Gregorian date, but not the Hebrew day, of the holidays wanders a bit, with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, occurring somewhere between early to late September.  This is quite meaningful for university students since university studies, logically in my mind, begin after Sukkot, meaning sometime between the end of September to close to the end of October.  This year for example, it begins on October 26 at the college where I work.  In terms of the weather, September brings with it the infamous “hamsin”, 50 in Arabic, referring to those horrible hot eastern desert winds that take your breath away.  By law or tradition, on Yom Kippur, a day of avoiding intake of food and beverages, it must be hot and miserable to add to the suffering. Those of faith would say this suffering brings you closer to God.  Curiously, it is also tradition, clearly not as dependable, that it must rain on Sukkot.  I regret to say that the last year’s Sukkot shower only succeeded in getting everything wet but failed to secure a good rainfall for the winter.  Religious people invest in mitzvot, good deeds, like taxpayers invest in December, since their fate for the upcoming year is in the balance until Yom Kippur.  By contrast, non-religious people merely worry about surviving the numerous family feasts and the cost of keeping the children busy during Sukkot. In regards to getting out those winter clothes, there are at least two months to wait.  As Tom Jones might say, change is the air.

So, September is the transition month from summer to fall.  If you have any local September traditions, I would love to hear about them.

Sports Overdosing

Sports are part of any culture.  Organized athletics have represented an important vicarious experience in most countries, affecting their very rhythm of life.  Whether it is Olympic games in ancient Greece, hippodrome activities in the Roman world, or the ups and down of the modern football season in Europe, people feel the seasons through the existence or absence of sport.

In the United States, due to the prolonged sports seasons, an extreme situation has occurred.  At this moment, in early October, all four of the major team sports are active, specifically baseball (postseason), American football, basketball (preseason), and hockey.  On any given night now, the fan can watch a live game from morning to night or, even worse, have to make a difficult choice on which sports to watch.  For example, last Sunday, I had to choose whether to watch my Pirates (baseball) or Bengals (football). 

This is like going to the store to buy fruit and finding fresh oranges, peaches, apricots, grapes, and cherries.  Once upon a time, every season had its fruit and vegetables, for example potatoes and oranges in the winter and lettuce and strawberries in the summer.  Today, in American stores, the only marker of the season is the price – a bit higher in the offseason.

Likewise, every season had its team sport – baseball in the summer, college football in the fall, and basketball and hockey in the winter.  Today, those poor athletes seem to barely get three months off while we fans are constantly in a state of overexcitement.

So, if you are in a country that does not import fruit and vegetables from the other hemisphere and has one or two major sports played at different times, consider yourself lucky.  You feel the ebbs and flows of the passing of the year, rejoicing with every seasonal rediscovery instead of being constantly bombarded with excitement and becoming, paradoxically, blasé from overexposure to good things.  

Sporty Shibboleths

An example of a Hebrew root in English, a shibboleth is a word that only natives can say properly and thus identify themselves as friend and not an enemy.  Examples of shibboleths include the pronunciations of the words coax and Williamette (river).  Electrical people say co-ax, not coax while Oregonians say wil-lam-it, with accent on the second syllable.  On a practical note, during the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers asked questions about baseball to discover which of the MP’s were actually dressed up German soldiers.  For these Germans, a simple question about who played center field for the Yankees proved that they were imposters, just as in the biblical story of saying the word shibboleth.

In fact, the understanding and appreciation of a certain sport is a cultural portal never passed by many immigrants even after decades of residence in a country.  These sports include baseball in America and Japan primarily, cricket in England and its colonies, petanque in France, sumo wrestling in Japan, and biathlon in the Scandinavian countries, to name a few.

Not all sports are so localized.  Football, soccer in America, has taken root everywhere.  It is hard to find a country that does not have a national football team, however incompetent.  American football shares enough with its distant cousins, rugby and Aussie football, to be understood by a wide variety of people.  Also, its basic attraction, crude violence, is universally appreciated.  The relatively simple rules of basketball as well as its ability to be played by people of all ages have made that sport a successful import to most countries. 

The telling sign of a sport-culture shibboleth is the demographics of its avid spectators.  Looking over a crowd of 50,000 people at a U.S. baseball game or U.K. cricket match, it would be safe to assume that vast majority of the people grew up in that country or another country where the game was played.  The number of late converts is probably extremely limited.  They have better things to do with their time, which means that they are simply not completely native.  That is the magic of a shibboleth.

Baseball and the English Language

Every language is shaped by the experience of its speakers.  The sea and (European) football have shaped England.  Ranching and its wilderness experience have shaped Australia.  One of the strongest influences on modern American language is sport.  While American football and basketball attract more fans per game, American baseball attracts more people per season and strongly impacts the language.

If life throws you a curveball, you have an unpleasant surprise.  A person who is called a minor leaguer does not get much respect.  If you strike you, you had no success.  Speaking of scoring, teenagers used to refer to a date’s progress by how far the boy got, i.e. a kiss was first base while the mythical homerun was generally a lie at that age.   A ballpark figure is an approximate number while a bleacher bum is an uneducated, boorish individual who is always criticizing.  If your batting average is poor, you are not successful most of the time.  A person who tries hard until the bitter (or maybe happy) end knows that It isn’t over until the fat lady sings.  A screwball is a completely strange person.   The world series is where the best play each other

So, whether you like watching baseball or not, baseball is a part of America’s language.