Watching My Granddaughter's Soccer Game

This past Saturday I spent an hour watching my 7-year-old granddaughter play soccer. I try not to be one of the soccer grandpas, rooting too loudly for a game that's supposed to be fun--providing the little kids with excellent exercise plus the opportunity to learn sportsmanship and ball-handling skills.

It was a good game, and I noticed that my granddaughter played with greater focus and pleasure than she had last year. She looked like a real player, and had a couple of excellent passes, one of which went for a goal.

Only later did I wonder: Could such an event impact my addiction? Was I, at times, getting a high from the play, and not merely enjoying watching my granddaughter having a fine time with teammates on a sunny late summer morning?

Sports watching addiction is subtle. If you quit watching TV, it's there lurking on your desktop or in the newspaper or on radio.

I worried for a while--would the experience make me now want something "better," a quick look at the TV? That bad effect hasn't happened. I did overhear that the NFL season is about to begin. I hadn't thought about it all during the preseason. I was hardly aware that the preseason was even happening. Nor have I clue about the baseball races.

I am, in other words, quite free of the addiction, and that makes me think that I can safely watch my granddaughter's next game.

Sports and Fortune Cookies

No one can accuse me of not trying to avoid sports information via the media.

I stopped listening to the local all-news radio show because they feature sports at least twice an hour.

I avoid looking at the front page of the local paper where sports stories often appear above the fold--especially Barry Bonds stories.

I have trained my eyes to identify breaking sports news on Yahoo! and never clink those links.

Then the other day, I brought home Chinese food--seemed safe enough--and discovered the following inside a Fortune Cookie: "Keep an eye open for an opportunity in the field of sports." (Actually, my wife got the fortune, but she felt compelled to read it to me.)

What am I supposed to do to kick my addiction to this plague: Stop eating?

A Fan's Red Letter Day

My old friend Stephen sent my wife an article that he had written for his local newspaper. The piece describes the joy he feels when--on a given day--the White Sox and Mets win, and the Yankees lose.

My wife says it's a good piece. But I'll never know because I view it as the equivalent of second-hand smoke. Reading about another person's spectator-driven emotions is dangerous.

Baseball in Hiroshima

Last night I watched the HBO documentary about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The movie is worth watching for many important reasons. But one unimportant scene caught my attention in relationship to this blog. One of the survivors is pictured enjoying a professional baseball game, laughing and cheering just the way Americans do when watching Major League Baseball.

I do not know if spectator sports were popular in Japan prior to WWII, but the image of the Japanese ballpark was so similar to what you see in American ballparks, I felt that this form of spectatorship was a "gift" of America to Japan. The Japanese survivor seemed to be having so much fun passively watching extraordinary athletes play the game.

In the context of the movie--about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people--the issue of spectator sport addiction is nothing. But the documentary did remind me that the draw of watching is probably universal.

The Thrill of Playing Catch

When I was a kid, I was always amazed by big league outfielders who almost always caught a fly ball no matter how high it sailed. I never mastered that skill. In truth, I was always a bit afraid when a ball came at me during a softball or hardball game. No one ever taught me how to catch, and I was no natural.

Now, instead of focusing on big leaguers--whose skills still astound me--I'm spending time playing catch with my 7-year-old granddaughter. We started with a basketball, flipping it back and forth, just a few feet separating us. I noticed that she seemed a bit afraid of the ball, and would almost blink as it approached her. But after a while, her confidence grew. We then moved farther apart. Soon, she was routinely catching 10 in a row without dropping one.

Today, we switched to playing catch with a tennis ball. It's more of a challenge, giving the catcher a smaller target. I was surprised and delighted to see that my granddaughter's eye-hand coordination was vastly improved. She caught 20 balls without dropping, and some were off the mark (thanks to my limited throwing skills).

I am having so much more fun playing catch with this young woman--and seeing her rapid progress--than I ever did watching the more adept, really magnificent professionals. Not only that, my own ball-handling skills are finally improving!

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

I'm a worrywart. I don't just worry about ordinary things like finances, health, global warming, and the possibility that a meteor is going to hit West Marin where I live.

I also worry about things that can't possibly happen. For example, when I was a kid one day my mom noticed a light red line running down my leg under the skin. Being color blind, I hadn't even seen in. My mom took me immediately to the doctor who diagnosed the problem as a serious infection. Had we delayed coming to him, I might not be talking to you right now.

I got an antibiotic and that was that. But sometimes I catch myself worrying: "What if my mom hadn't noticed that red thing?"

My wife calls this retroactive worrying, and I worry that it's not a good thing. I know that too much worrying can be harmful to one's health.

Now what's this have to do with Sports Addiction? Everything. When I was watching sports--especially watching a team that I rooted for--I'd worry throughout the game. If it was baseball, I'd worry about whether our clean-up hitter would clean up. I'd worry about whether our closer could close. I'd worry about everything.

I mention this because today, having got maybe halfway through the baseball season without watching an inning, I find myself being less worried. I still worry about my finances and health, of course. But not about players and games that have nothing to do with my life.

The New York Times News Alert: Venus

I just came online and found a NY Times.com News Alert. My blood pressure always rises a bit when I see one of those announcements, which often relate to one catastrophe or another. As I reject the subject line, I saw the word "Venus."

Perhaps because I'm working on a novel about traveling to Mars and hence thinking astromically these days, I imagined I was about to read a story related to space travel. I was close to clicking the link when I noticed that the subject line said: "Venus Williams Defeats..."

A sports story masquerading as news. This is the world we inhabit, where a game is treated with the same importance as war, the economy, education, life and death.