I had a good laugh on Friday morning when NPR announced that Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics had been rejected. In round one of the voting, no less. The whining began instantly. How could this have happened? How could this be? Rio is so overrun with crime and poverty and how oh how could they have chosen Rio over us? Chicago, according to many, was the clear front runner. Even the bookies favored it just before the vote in Copenhagen. I laughed some more. By noon – Pacific time – the voices on the radio were already connecting the dots between Obama’s handling of healthcare to Obama’s handling of the Olympic bid. He talks a good game but he’s clearly not a closer.
Part of my amusement on Friday was the residual rage I still harbor from a realization I had before I was old enough to vote. I give my father an A for the tact with which he explained something to his flaming gay son that still burns my ass: sports teams play by different rules. In high school, the glugs who artlessly lumbered around on the field on Friday nights were forgiven if they skipped biology class, if they got caught drinking at parties, if they got into fistfights every now and again. I knew a fine young man who was obsessed with Tennessee Williams and William Shakespeare. When he took the stage magic happened. He got straight A’s in Latin class but ended up in summer school – that was polite speak for detention in the early 1980s – because he’d been late for gym class too many times. Rules are rules, we were told. Here was the main rule: He wasn’t a jock and therefore not a darling of the Booster Club – that was the group of parents who believed they were still in high school. “Sports makes money,” my father told me. “If the team wins a big game, the rich people write checks to the alumni club. But creative writing, well, you know …”
Certainly, I remember thinking, my father was wrong. But in college most people I knew scraped together student loans and worked part-time jobs and ate questionable diets for four years (it was the Reagan era) and then spent the next two decades paying it all back. Not the football team. They had nice workout facilities, their books were paid for, their meals covered. In Madison, Wisconsin, members of the football team beat some guy within inches of his life and kept right on playing. As I recall, the guy they beat up was unable to identify his attackers because he was in a coma. Go Badgers! In Portland, this year, one of the players repeatedly punched people on the field, but he’ll probably be back in uniform by next month, having learned, according to the coach, from “his teachable moment.” Go Vikings!
I’m 43 now and I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the religious fervor of sports. It’s that powerful, and then some. The local and world economy is collapsing, people are starving, we’re poisoning ourselves more rapidly than ever before. There are no jobs and the schools, as always, are broke. But when it comes to sports, we’ve got cash to burn. If there’s a combination of laughing and shuddering, it’s my reaction to seeing the working stiffs interviewed on the local news, where they explain they’ll gladly pay more for tickets to the Portland Trailblazers’ games if there’s a chance the team is going to make it into the playoffs. We worship basketball in Portland. Go Blazers!
If all the mythology were scraped away, my calculations tell me that a rational society would stage a worldwide riot after watching just five minutes of the extravagance that took place in Copenhagen last week. Fortunately we’re not a rational society, because there were no major uproars over the fact that, even though Chicago is in a dismal state of financial affairs, $74 million was essentially flushed down the toilet.
I’m no better than anyone else, I suppose. Rather than agitate all the time, I do allow myself to savor one part of the Olympics: the opening ceremonies. In 2004, the multi-million dollar drag show in Athens was truly spectacular. I remember it well. My sister and two of my nieces were in town because my brother and his wife had just welcomed their son. We hadn’t had any new babies in the family for years so a trip to Portland was in order. One night, most of the family went down the street to a sushi bar. My sister-in-law stayed in the bedroom with my nephew and tried to get some sleep. One of my nieces and I sat on the couch and watched the parade of athletes with the volume way down. My niece was just learning to appreciate the allure of fine-tuned male flesh, so we sat on the couch, trying to predict which wonder jock would appeal to the other. The teams filed in in alphabetical order, and we had each other’s tendencies figured out by the time France entered the stadium: she liked the blonde, Nordic types, me, the Mediterraneans. It was a wonderful show, and it left me a very fond memory. Which is great, because even though my niece is now halfway through college and my nephew started kindergarten last month, the fine people of Athens are still paying down the debt their country incurred that evening. And for that I thank them.
Part of my amusement on Friday was the residual rage I still harbor from a realization I had before I was old enough to vote. I give my father an A for the tact with which he explained something to his flaming gay son that still burns my ass: sports teams play by different rules. In high school, the glugs who artlessly lumbered around on the field on Friday nights were forgiven if they skipped biology class, if they got caught drinking at parties, if they got into fistfights every now and again. I knew a fine young man who was obsessed with Tennessee Williams and William Shakespeare. When he took the stage magic happened. He got straight A’s in Latin class but ended up in summer school – that was polite speak for detention in the early 1980s – because he’d been late for gym class too many times. Rules are rules, we were told. Here was the main rule: He wasn’t a jock and therefore not a darling of the Booster Club – that was the group of parents who believed they were still in high school. “Sports makes money,” my father told me. “If the team wins a big game, the rich people write checks to the alumni club. But creative writing, well, you know …”
Certainly, I remember thinking, my father was wrong. But in college most people I knew scraped together student loans and worked part-time jobs and ate questionable diets for four years (it was the Reagan era) and then spent the next two decades paying it all back. Not the football team. They had nice workout facilities, their books were paid for, their meals covered. In Madison, Wisconsin, members of the football team beat some guy within inches of his life and kept right on playing. As I recall, the guy they beat up was unable to identify his attackers because he was in a coma. Go Badgers! In Portland, this year, one of the players repeatedly punched people on the field, but he’ll probably be back in uniform by next month, having learned, according to the coach, from “his teachable moment.” Go Vikings!
I’m 43 now and I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the religious fervor of sports. It’s that powerful, and then some. The local and world economy is collapsing, people are starving, we’re poisoning ourselves more rapidly than ever before. There are no jobs and the schools, as always, are broke. But when it comes to sports, we’ve got cash to burn. If there’s a combination of laughing and shuddering, it’s my reaction to seeing the working stiffs interviewed on the local news, where they explain they’ll gladly pay more for tickets to the Portland Trailblazers’ games if there’s a chance the team is going to make it into the playoffs. We worship basketball in Portland. Go Blazers!
If all the mythology were scraped away, my calculations tell me that a rational society would stage a worldwide riot after watching just five minutes of the extravagance that took place in Copenhagen last week. Fortunately we’re not a rational society, because there were no major uproars over the fact that, even though Chicago is in a dismal state of financial affairs, $74 million was essentially flushed down the toilet.
I’m no better than anyone else, I suppose. Rather than agitate all the time, I do allow myself to savor one part of the Olympics: the opening ceremonies. In 2004, the multi-million dollar drag show in Athens was truly spectacular. I remember it well. My sister and two of my nieces were in town because my brother and his wife had just welcomed their son. We hadn’t had any new babies in the family for years so a trip to Portland was in order. One night, most of the family went down the street to a sushi bar. My sister-in-law stayed in the bedroom with my nephew and tried to get some sleep. One of my nieces and I sat on the couch and watched the parade of athletes with the volume way down. My niece was just learning to appreciate the allure of fine-tuned male flesh, so we sat on the couch, trying to predict which wonder jock would appeal to the other. The teams filed in in alphabetical order, and we had each other’s tendencies figured out by the time France entered the stadium: she liked the blonde, Nordic types, me, the Mediterraneans. It was a wonderful show, and it left me a very fond memory. Which is great, because even though my niece is now halfway through college and my nephew started kindergarten last month, the fine people of Athens are still paying down the debt their country incurred that evening. And for that I thank them.
