“What do you mean he doesn’t play ball?” Father was aghast at my answer when he asked whether the boy, who had asked me to prom, in some forgotten era, was a “baller.”
“Just that Dad; he doesn’t play ball!”
“Why, what’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing, he doesn’t play ball—that’s all. He swims.”
“What?” He was scandalized. “That’s not a sport! Fish swim. Swimming is not a sport. A sport is when you train your body to handle a foreign object, like a ball, be one with it and then make miracles. No; you can’t go to prom with him.” And that was that.
My father grew up with five brothers, all balers, all competitive. He carried this ball-playing tradition over to our family so I grew up in a home were men played all sorts of ballgames: basketball, football, baseball, tennis, golf—anything that involved various sizes of round, bouncy objects, a lot of running, and some hitting with the aid of elongated implements. Jerseys littered the house; they were everywhere, along with jock straps, sneakers, and soiled socks—phew! Balls rolled about the floor, under the furniture, teetered on the stairs, sat like land mines on the sofa, bulged under the blankets, and dangled from the mouths of our dogs.
During my teenage years the only boys who ever made it inside our house to call on my sister and me were—you guessed it—ball players. Why? Because that was the password into the cave of wonders; it meant that they had something in common with the men of the house whom they were certain to bump into: Dad and brothers, and that they would at least have something to talk about. Dates were never dinner and a movie; they were always box seats to basketball games and football matches, with our date playing on court or afield. That meant my sister and me were mostly left alone to watch them play, quarantined from all contact—bodily and otherwise. My dad was beyond thrilled; we were always allowed. And all was well.
So then I grew up believing that men who don’t play ball, don’t, because they don’t have any (pun definitely intended). But no longer; I married a man who doesn’t play ball—big surprise! God does have a sense of humor.
Inevitably, the universal debate on “jock or nerd; brain or brawn” descended upon my own family and ever since the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs phenomena hit our consciousness, the issue has become moot and academic. My son plays ball and loves it but ask him, “Jock or nerd?” and his reply, without a moment’s hesitation is always, “Nerd!” Ask him, “Why?” “Because I want to be as rich as Bill Gates,” is what you get back.
Sorry, Dad, but nerds do rule! They sit on the board of Fortune 500 companies; they have the superpowers’ economies on puppet strings; they have the world’s stock exchange indexes a centimeter away from the tip of their fingers—in flashing red call buttons; they deploy fleets and armies with a single command; they pound their keyboards relentlessly until they perfect another revolutionary computer program; they hunch over drafting tables sketching the next wonder of the world; they sequester themselves in cabins in some remote wilderness penning the world’s next epic. These leaders, artists, scientists, captains of industry, statesmen of the highest order, professionals all at the pinnacle of their fields, possess a different kind of brawn, that which settles the difference between life and death, progress and obliteration, art and trash, success and failure. And they endure because they are driven by passion; what has been called by developmental psychologists as “the rage to master.”
In high school when unpopularity is a death sentence, everyone worships at the altar of the jocks—the well-built, testosterone-filled, fearless athletes on whose success an entire institution’s glory is cradled. But their celebrity status and all the trappings it comes with don’t translate to the outside world.
Nerds, on the other hand, bother little with social acceptance; life, for them, is doing what they love. They invest all their time and effort in overcoming hurdles that stand between them and what they are passionate about. They evolve into problem solvers, never walking away from pressure, frustration, or failure. They make wonderful fathers and patient partners, which make up half the recipe for lasting relationships.
In a society that puts a premium on entertainment value, they command big bucks. What nerds make in a fiscal year, jocks pocket in a few days but given their short shelf life, their net worth evens out with the nerds’ at final tally. Some of the greatest: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio, Pele, Bjorn Borg, Joe Montana, Jack Nicklaus, and Wayne Gretzky were invincible during their time and in that window of several years they etched their names in history. Sure they made excellent money with winners’ purses and mega-buck endorsement deals but the most that they can look forward to after retiring—sooner or later when the body gives out, a tragic eventuality in any jock’s career—is a job in the entertainment industry, whether in sports casting or show business with the corresponding, drastic, pay cut. Nerds, on the other hand, endure in their office swivel chairs, silver-haired and arthritic, still crafting out masterpieces, churning out numbers and policies and cash—lots of it!
But there are certain under-the-counter pleasures in sports which afford far greater happiness than then those we can quantify. In my case, as in my father’s, and millions of other sports fans I know, it is the full-contact ballgame. Yes—that male supremacist pastime, that gross, gladiatorial, at turns violent and brilliant bastion of athletic prowess. Like such disreputable entities as poker nights, stag parties, prize fighting and fraternity beer bashes, ballgames are a token of maleness at its most retrograde and obtuse.
There is something gripping, something poetic in any ballgame between two capable teams. In soccer, this beauty is immediately apparent, with its simple rules and elegant, sweeping movements; or baseball, with its dramatic duel between pitcher and batter, the hand-eye coordination of the players, and the Zen of hitting; and finally, the catlike grace and liquid moves of basketball players coupled with incredible speed.
Jocks are beautiful! But even with all that, great athleticism is not enough. What sets off all these skills is the way they are confined to tiny, discreet segments of time: that clock-beating three-pointer; the cross header from a corner kick; or the homer at the bottom of the ninth with all bases full. Each play in any intense ball game, where the odds are tied and skill levels between opposing teams are closely matched, is a mini-opera in which a drama of precision, savagery, and grace is enacted in just four or five seconds. At the pass of a ball, a menagerie of animals is released from its cage. Agility, speed, quick reflexes, coordination, courage and a little bit of luck all come into play.
In some obscure but undeniable way, all sports offer miniature and clear-cut imitations of reality, little universes in which someone actually wins and actually loses. That’s why they are pleasurable. All athletic performance is unpredictable; this is what makes it exciting. Most often, it is the team with a slightly maniacal edge, whose players possess the impulse to die for the ball, to sacrifice the body play after play, that bests the rest.
Not all players have this. In fact, they are increasingly harder to find. In a team of ball players there are always varied characters arrestingly different from each other. There are those who trot, preen and grandstand for the spectators—the level of their game becoming only as good as the encouragement they get of which Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, the youngest player at 19 during the last Football World Cup, is the perfect example. He was more of a cheerleader than a striker then, playing to the crowd’s capriciousness rather than for his team’s objective. There are those charmingly self-effacing super jocks, highly-skilled and with a steeled determination, in a league by themselves, much like tennis great, Roger Federer, who plays each game as though his life depended on it. There are those who perform like robots with magnetic hands, which have the ability to catch and return anything thrown their way. Here, Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets, one of the greatest players of his generation and one of the greatest play makers and point guards in NBA history, readily comes to mind. And still those clueless, errant rookies who look to their coach and teammates for every single move and Yao Ming, during his NBA debut game in 2002 as a rookie for the Houston Rockets, was exactly that. There are those with flawless physiques and the face to match, so darn easy on the eyes and ready to melt any woman’s heart—David Beckham of L.A. Galaxy and Alex Rodriguez, third baseman of the New York Yankees, are fixtures in every woman’s fantasy. There are the sympathy addicts who manage to fall at crucial moments and hold the crowd in suspense at whether they can get up scot-free. They normally do, but lie still to relish those extra couple-of-seconds when they have the entire arena’s bated breath riding on their next move.
And then there will always be that golden moment when a lone figure suddenly emerges from a swarming mass of bodies in the sports arena and breaks into the open dodging obstacles, cheating his foes as if he were cheating death, running for his life to make that glorious point. Fine; it’s a small pleasure, but that’s all it takes.
Sure, there are a few remarkably gifted renaissance men who possess brilliant, scholarly minds along with incredibly coordinated, athletic bodies, but they are the exception to us, mortals, who have to settle for one or the other.
So what shall it be, staying power or those few intoxicating minutes of pure magic?
“Just that Dad; he doesn’t play ball!”
“Why, what’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing, he doesn’t play ball—that’s all. He swims.”
“What?” He was scandalized. “That’s not a sport! Fish swim. Swimming is not a sport. A sport is when you train your body to handle a foreign object, like a ball, be one with it and then make miracles. No; you can’t go to prom with him.” And that was that.
My father grew up with five brothers, all balers, all competitive. He carried this ball-playing tradition over to our family so I grew up in a home were men played all sorts of ballgames: basketball, football, baseball, tennis, golf—anything that involved various sizes of round, bouncy objects, a lot of running, and some hitting with the aid of elongated implements. Jerseys littered the house; they were everywhere, along with jock straps, sneakers, and soiled socks—phew! Balls rolled about the floor, under the furniture, teetered on the stairs, sat like land mines on the sofa, bulged under the blankets, and dangled from the mouths of our dogs.
During my teenage years the only boys who ever made it inside our house to call on my sister and me were—you guessed it—ball players. Why? Because that was the password into the cave of wonders; it meant that they had something in common with the men of the house whom they were certain to bump into: Dad and brothers, and that they would at least have something to talk about. Dates were never dinner and a movie; they were always box seats to basketball games and football matches, with our date playing on court or afield. That meant my sister and me were mostly left alone to watch them play, quarantined from all contact—bodily and otherwise. My dad was beyond thrilled; we were always allowed. And all was well.
So then I grew up believing that men who don’t play ball, don’t, because they don’t have any (pun definitely intended). But no longer; I married a man who doesn’t play ball—big surprise! God does have a sense of humor.
Inevitably, the universal debate on “jock or nerd; brain or brawn” descended upon my own family and ever since the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs phenomena hit our consciousness, the issue has become moot and academic. My son plays ball and loves it but ask him, “Jock or nerd?” and his reply, without a moment’s hesitation is always, “Nerd!” Ask him, “Why?” “Because I want to be as rich as Bill Gates,” is what you get back.
Sorry, Dad, but nerds do rule! They sit on the board of Fortune 500 companies; they have the superpowers’ economies on puppet strings; they have the world’s stock exchange indexes a centimeter away from the tip of their fingers—in flashing red call buttons; they deploy fleets and armies with a single command; they pound their keyboards relentlessly until they perfect another revolutionary computer program; they hunch over drafting tables sketching the next wonder of the world; they sequester themselves in cabins in some remote wilderness penning the world’s next epic. These leaders, artists, scientists, captains of industry, statesmen of the highest order, professionals all at the pinnacle of their fields, possess a different kind of brawn, that which settles the difference between life and death, progress and obliteration, art and trash, success and failure. And they endure because they are driven by passion; what has been called by developmental psychologists as “the rage to master.”
In high school when unpopularity is a death sentence, everyone worships at the altar of the jocks—the well-built, testosterone-filled, fearless athletes on whose success an entire institution’s glory is cradled. But their celebrity status and all the trappings it comes with don’t translate to the outside world.
Nerds, on the other hand, bother little with social acceptance; life, for them, is doing what they love. They invest all their time and effort in overcoming hurdles that stand between them and what they are passionate about. They evolve into problem solvers, never walking away from pressure, frustration, or failure. They make wonderful fathers and patient partners, which make up half the recipe for lasting relationships.
In a society that puts a premium on entertainment value, they command big bucks. What nerds make in a fiscal year, jocks pocket in a few days but given their short shelf life, their net worth evens out with the nerds’ at final tally. Some of the greatest: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Joe DiMaggio, Pele, Bjorn Borg, Joe Montana, Jack Nicklaus, and Wayne Gretzky were invincible during their time and in that window of several years they etched their names in history. Sure they made excellent money with winners’ purses and mega-buck endorsement deals but the most that they can look forward to after retiring—sooner or later when the body gives out, a tragic eventuality in any jock’s career—is a job in the entertainment industry, whether in sports casting or show business with the corresponding, drastic, pay cut. Nerds, on the other hand, endure in their office swivel chairs, silver-haired and arthritic, still crafting out masterpieces, churning out numbers and policies and cash—lots of it!
But there are certain under-the-counter pleasures in sports which afford far greater happiness than then those we can quantify. In my case, as in my father’s, and millions of other sports fans I know, it is the full-contact ballgame. Yes—that male supremacist pastime, that gross, gladiatorial, at turns violent and brilliant bastion of athletic prowess. Like such disreputable entities as poker nights, stag parties, prize fighting and fraternity beer bashes, ballgames are a token of maleness at its most retrograde and obtuse.
There is something gripping, something poetic in any ballgame between two capable teams. In soccer, this beauty is immediately apparent, with its simple rules and elegant, sweeping movements; or baseball, with its dramatic duel between pitcher and batter, the hand-eye coordination of the players, and the Zen of hitting; and finally, the catlike grace and liquid moves of basketball players coupled with incredible speed.
Jocks are beautiful! But even with all that, great athleticism is not enough. What sets off all these skills is the way they are confined to tiny, discreet segments of time: that clock-beating three-pointer; the cross header from a corner kick; or the homer at the bottom of the ninth with all bases full. Each play in any intense ball game, where the odds are tied and skill levels between opposing teams are closely matched, is a mini-opera in which a drama of precision, savagery, and grace is enacted in just four or five seconds. At the pass of a ball, a menagerie of animals is released from its cage. Agility, speed, quick reflexes, coordination, courage and a little bit of luck all come into play.
In some obscure but undeniable way, all sports offer miniature and clear-cut imitations of reality, little universes in which someone actually wins and actually loses. That’s why they are pleasurable. All athletic performance is unpredictable; this is what makes it exciting. Most often, it is the team with a slightly maniacal edge, whose players possess the impulse to die for the ball, to sacrifice the body play after play, that bests the rest.
Not all players have this. In fact, they are increasingly harder to find. In a team of ball players there are always varied characters arrestingly different from each other. There are those who trot, preen and grandstand for the spectators—the level of their game becoming only as good as the encouragement they get of which Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal, the youngest player at 19 during the last Football World Cup, is the perfect example. He was more of a cheerleader than a striker then, playing to the crowd’s capriciousness rather than for his team’s objective. There are those charmingly self-effacing super jocks, highly-skilled and with a steeled determination, in a league by themselves, much like tennis great, Roger Federer, who plays each game as though his life depended on it. There are those who perform like robots with magnetic hands, which have the ability to catch and return anything thrown their way. Here, Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets, one of the greatest players of his generation and one of the greatest play makers and point guards in NBA history, readily comes to mind. And still those clueless, errant rookies who look to their coach and teammates for every single move and Yao Ming, during his NBA debut game in 2002 as a rookie for the Houston Rockets, was exactly that. There are those with flawless physiques and the face to match, so darn easy on the eyes and ready to melt any woman’s heart—David Beckham of L.A. Galaxy and Alex Rodriguez, third baseman of the New York Yankees, are fixtures in every woman’s fantasy. There are the sympathy addicts who manage to fall at crucial moments and hold the crowd in suspense at whether they can get up scot-free. They normally do, but lie still to relish those extra couple-of-seconds when they have the entire arena’s bated breath riding on their next move.
And then there will always be that golden moment when a lone figure suddenly emerges from a swarming mass of bodies in the sports arena and breaks into the open dodging obstacles, cheating his foes as if he were cheating death, running for his life to make that glorious point. Fine; it’s a small pleasure, but that’s all it takes.
Sure, there are a few remarkably gifted renaissance men who possess brilliant, scholarly minds along with incredibly coordinated, athletic bodies, but they are the exception to us, mortals, who have to settle for one or the other.
So what shall it be, staying power or those few intoxicating minutes of pure magic?
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