On Supporting A Sports Team...

"It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift."

~Roger Angell

Charge!

I have been reading Rowland Bowen's Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development Throughout the World and I recently came across a rather curious rule. Firstly, you must know that in cricket, one of the ways to be given out is to be caught (IE/ You hit the ball, a fielder catches it). So, the rule: If a player was in danger of being out caught he could charge down his opponent trying to catch the ball. A 1744 version of the laws upheld this right, though the bat and arms were not allowed to be used. (In 1624 a player, Jasper Vinall, was accidentally killed by another player, Edward Tye, with his bat, while Vinall was attempting to take a catch) This right was taken away in 1787, however as the game had spread around the world, local variants of the game still allowed it later than that. And so it was that an 1846 series between Canada and the USA was suspended because a Canadian batsman charged down an opponent...he believed it was within his rights to do so. As an aside, Canada first played the USA in an 1844 match which is widely believed to be the first international sporting contest. A further aside...in 1867 Cricket was declared Canada's national sport by John A. MacDonald. I'm not suggesting that the charging down rule be reintroduced, as entertaining as it could potentially be, I just found it interesting. That's all. You can go now.