Worlds Apart

It may come as a surprise to some (certainly not to many of my friends) that my previous entry (an anthropologic observation of American Football) was only marginally tongue-in-cheek.   My understanding of the rules and intent (of scoring points by carrying a ball into a specified zone while adhering to certain constraints enforced by referees) is nothing so ignorant as a plain reading would suggest, yet it was with an equal honesty that I composed the whole piece. 

In short, my understanding of sports is purely academic. 

I comprehend the various games in the same way that I understand driving, drilled with little league teams in the same manner as when I studied and practiced for my driver's license; the rules, whether logical or tyrannical, are necessarily followed, while the processes behind engaging the gears in sequence and depressing the accelerator and/or brake at the proper moment are prerequisite skillsets necessary for conducting the whole affair.  But I have no deeper connection to rules of sports than to traffic laws, no greater thrill of play than in arriving at my destination at the proper time. For me the thrill of a goal scored is hardly more profound than a decent parking job, and certainly less permanent; at least the parking job promises the chance of an easy exit.  And I cannot begin to understand why one would care to watch someone else play ball - or watch someone else drive to the supermarket. 

(Even then my analogy is not perfect; there is a certain thrill that some men find behind the wheel of a vehicle, which I have never experienced nor truly desire.)

So to speak of ball-sports (leaving aside all other sports for the moment) in sterilized terms of people engaged in an activity with no immediately apparent meaning is the most correct expression of my connection to the game(s).   I am told that sports helps to build coordination; this is manifestly unnecessary, given the prevalence of track and field sports, as well as martial arts.  I have been assured that sports is instrumental in developing teamwork and social skills.  This is also suspect, as I developed no such ability during the several seasons I played flag football.  Not that I was warming a bench every game; I played as often as every scrawny kid out there.  The key difference is that I had no idea what was going on, something to do with that ball-that's-not-a-ball someplace behind me in the ruckus.  Nor did it occur to the coaches to explain the fundamentals.  I think they believed that we all innately knew the gist of our roles, never suspecting that I had never watched a game in my short life.  To me it was an excuse to play organized tag in large teams.  Problematically, everyone else seemed to take the ball-and-scoring bit too seriously for my liking, and to enjoy tackling each other for fun.  So when I outgrew flag football for contact, I left and took up karate. Joke's on me.

So I am left wondering what all the fuss is about, since in my experience with ball sports there does not seem to be anything going on besides groups of athletic people pelting about in search of the elusive macguffin.  In the main, there appears to be largely one set of goals in ball sports: to take the thing from point A to point B. Often there will be friends involved. Sometimes total strangers. Some of these friends and strangers are on one's own team. Sometimes these friends are not actually your friends at present, because they are on the other team. Points A and B are goals of some sort, either a zone or a net, of varying sizes but all intended to demarcate the physical space in which points are scored using the ball. Even the balls are unique to their game; basketball, soccer, lacrosse, and Gaelic football all use different balls and different goals, but the aim is the same. American football and rugby shake things up by swapping the ball for an egg (while insisting that it is, indeed, a ball).

Baseball is the wild card in this arrangement. Herein one man, representing Team A, faces the entirety of Team B; Team B's representative offers Team A's representative the ball (aggressively) while Team A's rep returns the ball in such a manner that occupies the whole Team B lineup in reestablishing control over the ball before Team A's rep is able to sprint the distance between four white targets. Unlike basketball, soccer, or American football, where the audience's attention is centered on the ball and those in proximity, in baseball the man courageously sprinting from target to target is as much the focus as the little white ball spinning merrily about somewhere in the field. Team B's responsibility is to bring these two foci back into one place, by causing the ball to arrive at one of the targets before the runner; Team A's rep's responsibility is to avoid this. 

In other words, an involved and very expensive game of tag. 

Then there's cricket, which is about as comprehensible as wack bat.  Nobody knows what those commonwealth folks are up to.  (Somebody divide that by nine, please.)