Adrian Peterson fumbles
Sports Saturday
This will be my final “Sports Saturday” (although it will be far from the last time I write about sports and literature). I’m working on a book which I’m tentatively calling How Beowulf Can Save America and need to open up some extra writing time.
The good news is that, when I do write about sports, it will often be closer to the time the sports event actually occurs. But I give up the Saturday feature with sadness–in pushing myself to find connections between literature and sports every weekend, I have found more applications than I ever would have imagined.
For this last post, I am sharing a poem by my father about the dream of sports as it contrasts with its often bloated reality. We love it when athletes defy gravity and the other natural laws that humans are subject to. At their best, sports are poetry in motion. But they come crashing to earth when we commercialize them and otherwise forget their fun and magic. This poem aims to restore perspective.
As we enter the football season, which begins this weekend for college and next weekend for the professionals, may we hold on to this perspective:
Weekend Athletics, with Bears and Elephants
By Scott Bates
Here comes the weekend with its acromegalic afternoons
Inhabited by bears, in caverns crouched, ingesting great reservoirs of Bear Beer,
Transfixed by the batted blocked clubbed kicked and clobbered ball
Until it transcend the sun in great technicolor spasms of Knute Rockne’s blasted face.
I dream of silken nets moving swiftly by moonlight
To catch the diamond racket and send it spinning through touseled, perfumed hair,
Of golf greens winding through shadows to trap and envelope putters,
And bars no longer parallel handspringing down a spiral stair.
A swimmer in slow motion spans parking lots of twisting lovers,
A mountain child rolls down rooftop after rooftop of April meadows,
A birdwatcher circles silently over bargain basements and arterial highways,
And skaters on intricate canals step off toward the sea.
O somewhere, a football heroine is bringing the ball out of the end zone
She is on horseback and clutches the pigskin to her breast.
No one is in the stands. To the warm center of the field she comes,
She rides smiling into a welcoming huddle of celebrating elephants.
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