MEMORY LANE
Why I Love Sports — When the coronavirus pandemic put the sports world on hold, we decided to reflect on why we love sports in the first place. We started our series of personal essays March 22, and after 100 days of the sports staff of The Oklahoman, local sports leaders and most importantly, readers sharing their hearts, we bring our celebration of sports to a close with one final word. Thanks. Editor
The field sat at the bottom of a hill next to our house in Joplin. I was in first grade. We spent two years in Missouri, 1966-68, before hurrying back to
Norman. No offense, but Oklahoma was home.
A couple of times over the last half a century, I've pulled off Interstate 44 and driven around Joplin. Funny the things you can
remember. I actually found that split-level house.
But the field was only a vacant lot, and not a full lot at that. The hill was an incline.
Everything seems bigger when you're a kid.
Like the backboard attached to a pole on that small lot. I learned the rudiments of baseball on that semi-sandlot. Which direction to run the bases. The concept of strikes and outs and runs. But that backboard and rim intrigued me most.
The rim was set at 10 feet off the ground, or thereabouts. I could hit it with a
baseball on occasion. But a basketball? No chance. I never got close. I tried and tried. Never sniffed iron.
Maybe that's why they call it a goal. In our introductions to the sport, just getting a basketball 10 feet off the ground is as satisfying as running a marathon or joining the Hole-in-One Club.
I don't think about Joplin much. Too many other adventures, more vibrant, fill what Glen Campbell called the back roads of the rivers of our memory. But I think about Joplin every once in awhile, because that's where sports started for me.
That's where an older kid told me about the World Series champion, some team with the mysticalsounding name of Orioles. Where a barber first said the name “Stan Musial.” Where I was so quickly eaten up with baseball that my dad dropped off at my school a black-and-white, 12-inch portable television so Mrs. McBride's class could watch the CardinalsRed Sox Series of '67.
One hundred days ago, we started a “Why I Love Sports” series. We wrote some ourselves. Local sporting celebrities participated. And readers wrote the majority.
The readers' were my favorite. Especially those that settled on the same theme; the games they played 50, 60, sometimes 70 years ago. The friends whose names are recalled as easily as grandchildren's. The results, never published in a newspaper or broadcast on a radio, posted only in a child's brain, but all these decades later still vivid in those back roads of those rivers.
My boss asked me to close out the “Why I Love Sports” series, which made me think, for the first time, why indeed I love this enterprise that has consumed my life. I'd never thought about it before.
I played sports with a passion until I was 17, and no sooner had I figured out my athletic ability had reached the end of the station, I got the chance to write about sports. That train still runs, after 42 years.
It's like Dean Martin sang, “I don't know why, I love you like I do, I don't know why I just do.” The King of Cool never answered his question. But I answered mine.
Memories. That's why I love sports. Memories. The memories from a half century ago and memories from a half hour ago.
I can talk about the exploits of Mark Rohlmeier and Curtis Gray, Ricky Davidson and Mark Kottka, from sandlots and playgrounds from 50 years ago. But my appetite is just as great when recalling the games I just saw.
Many's the late night with colleagues, driving back from Stillwater or walking to our cars in Norman, when we rehash the game we just had hashed while watching.
And that's the sporting void we've experienced during the coronavirus pandemic. It's not just our entertainment that was put on hold. It was our memories.
For the spectators, no new Thunder games to anguish over. No NCAA Tournament. No baseball. All under the specter of perhaps no football.
The great Red Smith once wrote that people go to the ballpark to have fun, then read the sports page to have fun all over again. That double fun is a virus victim.
For athletes, no new memories, be they in great coliseums or old rec gyms, on pristine fields or in city parks lined with parents in lawn chairs.
But the games slowly are coming back. Both the big-money sports that fill the airwaves and internet streams, and the no-money sports that are no less a part of the American landscape.
My middle granddaughter is 10. Her sisters sing and dance. Sadie likes to play games; she took up softball just this year.
The Storm has played four games. Sadie has slid safely into home, and no runway model ever wore a dress more proudly than Sadie wore those dirt-covered pants back to her dugout. She caught a looping liner the other night; I got more excited than the night Big Country hit the halfcourt shot against Missouri.
I stood in the park the other night and thought how Sadie was making memories, how when the 22nd century approaches decades from now, she might look back warmly, thinking about the summer of 2020, remembering Emma and Jordan and Blakely and those dusty pants.
I'll never get near the 22nd century, but I'll have those memories, too, added to those from other sandlots and other spectacles, supplied by Russell Westbrook and Baker Mayfield and R.W. McQuarters and a thousand more, always gentle on my mind.
Berry Tramel: Berry can be reached at 405-760-8080 or at btramel@oklahoman.com. He can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including FM-98.1. You can also view his personality page at oklahoman.com/berrytramel.