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Sports, as the etymology of the word suggests (desporter -- to divert), is a diversion from something. Sports involve us in movement through time and space to an unnecessary goal where someone wins and someone losses. In sports we choose to overcome superfluous obstacles for fun and for deeper reasons we may not realize. Sports only matter because they don't.
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"What we play is life." Louis Armstrong
A few years ago my friends and I were playing in basketball tournaments for men over fifty and we qualified for the Senior Olympics at the University of Pittsburgh. We acquired a sponsor, a local funeral home that made warm-up jerseys for us. Being used to dealing with bodies at rest, these comedians knew we were a bunch of aging hoopsters intent on keeping our bodies in motion for as long as we could. So they had shirts made with that up-beat and adolescent cliche printed on the front, "Basketball is Life." Lest we forgot, and being in the trade of taking bodies at rest to the underworld, on the back they had printed "Leave the Rest to Us: Flynn and Dagnoli Funeral Home."
Most of us found the juxtaposition hilarious (including one funny Irishman who ended up dead at the funeral home), but one teammate found it disturbing, which gave the rest of us additional sardonic laughs. Sex and death and one's ongoing vitality are the stuff of uneasy laughter in the locker rooms of aging men. It's a place for essentials.
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"He was like a great singer with a style all his own, a pacing that was different, a flair for the unusual." Chick Hearn, play-by-play announcer for The Los Angeles Lakers about Pete Maravich
I was reminded of this as I was rereading bits of Bob Dylan's fascinating and poetic memoir, Chronicles: Volume I, and came upon his recounting of hearing of the news of the death of "Pistol" Pete Maravich, the greatest scorer in college basketball history and a magician without par on the court. It was January 5, 1988.
My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to
talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morn-
ing news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich,
the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in
Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I'd seen Maravich
play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New
Orleans Jazz. He was something to see - mop of brown hair,
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