Just Because

It's foolish, and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. And the amused superiority and icy scorn 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, is a capacity or an emotion that's almost gone out of our lives.

In case you didn't know it, Roger Angell is the greatest baseball writer I've ever come across. He writes, by and large, for The New Yorker; many of his columns have been collected and published in paperback though some (Season Ticket, Late Innings) sadly appear to be out of print.

This quote (along with the above) is from Angell's piece Agincourt and After on the 1975 World Series ( which you can find in Five Seasons). It never fails to give me goosebumps.

I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them -- in Brookline, Mass., and Broolin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damriscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont, in Waland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all five Manchesters; and in Ramond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives) and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway -- jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I supposed, and on the back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night) and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy -- alight with it.