The Immaculate Inning
 

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There is little doubt that few noticed this rarity in baseball that took place August 26th — An Immaculate Inning pitched by the Boston Red Sox's Chris Sale.

Though I doubt it will resonate with many here, it is truly a beautiful thing to watch unfold. For me, baseball has the capacity to be a complete metaphor for life.

I remember when I first joined the Eratosphere poet John Whitworth would at times reference his love for cricket. It always gave me a sense of reassurance that a poet as talented as he could also become engrossed in a game. Poets can be sports fans, too.

Does anyone have a particular sport, sports term (like “Immaculate Inning”), sports event, story, movie, artwork or literature on the subject of sports that confirms for them that sports can at times elevate itself to being art?

If you care/dare to watch the Immaculate Inning pitch by pitch, here it is. No? I didn't think so : )

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I watched that game too, Jim, and yes, I've been a die-hard Sox fan for ages. Watching Chris Sale pitch is baseball bliss, I think. Of course pitching like him is an art, if art has anything to do with well-timed legerdemain and telling the truth with beautiful lies.

You must know this poem by Robert Francis, another Massachusetts poet who loved baseball:

Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

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No, I don’t think I have read that before, or just don’t remember it. But that seems unlikely since it is a perfect pitch of a poem. Thanks for that.

I love John Updike’s writings on baseball. There was one about Ted Williams’ last at bat and then there was another one published in the Boston Globe on opening day. I’ll try to get my hands on that one and post it here because as I recall, it expressed perfectly (for me) why baseball is the game that explains so much about life. Updike called Fenway, "a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities."

Great to know you are a Red Sox fan! I grew up in New Jersey equidistant from NYC and Philadelphia and was a rabid Phillies fan. My father was a life-long die-hard Yankee fan. I cried coming home on the school bus as I listened on my transistor radio to the Phillies losing their final game of the season, squandering a 10 game lead to lose the pennant. I was devastated.

When I finally ended up in Boston I immediately fell in love with the Red Sox. I fell in love with my wife partly because she was a Red Sox fan and took me to my first Red Sox game at Fenway Park. Fenway is a great place to be on game day, though I hardly ever go these days. Ticket prices are through the roof.

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I don't have a sporting affinity, but my Dad does, and (for what it's worth) felt inspired enough about a folksong about Sir Stanley Matthews in the 1960's that I think is still kicking around somewhere on the web.

He's a cricketing man at heart, though. I am a heathen, who likes cricket for the teas and long-time-drawn-outness of it all. The murmurs of it.

I love the idea of an 'immaculate inning' and I will go and look as soon as I can (although I will not understand it). I wonder if each sport has its own vernacular, and where they cross and where they differ.

Sarah-Jane

And might as well put Francis's other baseball poem out there:

The Base Stealer
by Robert Francis

Poised between going on and back, pulled
Both ways taut like a tightrope-walker,
Fingertips pointing the opposites,
Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped ball
Or a kid skipping rope, come on, come on,
Running a scattering of steps sidewise,
How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases,
Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird,
He's only flirting, crowd him, crowd him,
Delicate, delicate, delicate, delicate - now!

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A stolen base is a thing of beauty.

Sarah-Jane, yes, baseball (and all sports) has its own vernacular. I think baseball language is poetry.

Here is what might be considered found poetry, though no one actually said it or wrote it down. It is my own accounting of the Immaculate Inning described in baseball vernacular.


The Immaculate Inning
(On the occasion of Boston Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale’s historic third Immaculate Inning pitched, August 26, 2021)


From his high place he eyes the plate.
He leans in, shaking off, then taking the sign
delivering untouchables numbering nine:

Fastball, inside, swinging strike one.
Curveball, catching the inside corner, looking strike two.
Fastball, upstairs, swinging strike three.

Fastball, outside corner low, swinging strike one.
Curveball, off the plate low outside, fouled off strike two.
High heat, at the shoulders, swinging strike three.

Slider drops in, down the middle, looking strike one.
Fastball, inside corner, swinging strike two.
Slider, the bottom falls out of it, check-swing strike three.

The Immaculate Inning.
Something to see.
Selection. Control. Velocity.




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Here's a villanelle I wrote about the time I moved from New York (home of Murderer's Row and the perennial world champion New York Yankees and their unassuming fans) to Boston in the early 80's, and had great fun with at poetry readings in the Boston-Newburyport corridor - it was my closer, and the New England poets would pelt me with tea bags and beer cans (were you there, Jim?), while police grudgingly protected me and led me from the reading. My home team, the Powow River Poets, disowned me. All this ended, unfortunately, in October, 1984, when the world turned upside down.


October Speaks
...(A poem for the city of Boston. And environs.)

It is ordained that things will fall apart.
Do not delude yourself – remember that
when summer ends I get to break your heart

with dark and practiced skill that makes an art
of pain, turns every champagne bubble flat.
It is ordained that things shall fall apart

again. You have no charts that can outsmart
a lack of will; no joyful entrechat
when summer ends. The bullpen breaks your heart,

the pitchers drink, the fleet no longer dart
from base to base; with every splintered bat
it is ordained that things will fall apart.

And yet you dance and hope for hope to start
each year, and dreams become your habitat,
till summer’s final ball shall break your heart;

the beer cans, bouncing, clatter from the cart,
the fat relievers shame the Theocrat:
it is ordained that things will fall apart.
When summer ends I get to break your heart.

Psssst. There's going to be an Immaculate Outing at any moment. "No posting of own poems". Innit.

Which is a pity because they're rather lovely.

Jim,

Would you mind having this moved to Drills and Amusements? Would that work, Ann?

My son's best friend in high school was a star football player who went on to Clemson and is now making millions a year on the defensive line in the NFL. The sad thing was the kid loved baseball so much more than football and so much wanted to try to pursue a baseball career. But he was 6'6'', weighed 335 lbs, and was fast as lightning off the point. He had no other choice but to pursue football. His predicament sums up what I think happened to the U.S. overall when football replaced baseball as the most popular sport. Poetry on the field was replaced by two giant corporations running into each other. It was as sad for everyone as it was for David Reader.

Ahem, I think you mean 2004, when, you know, the Red Sox came back from a 3-game playoff deficit against the Yankees and went on to win it all. Oh that was cathartic for us long-suffering Sox fans.

When it comes to poetry and baseball pitchers, Jim, another game and pitcher comes to mind for me: Pedro Martinez striking out 17 Yankees in September 1999. I watched that game in a bar in Boston, and it was pure poetry.

Oh God, yes - 2004! I guess I was subconciously trying to forget it all.

Echoing others, can we move this to Drills and Amusements?

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Oh, man, Michael. That may be the best poem on the subject of baseball I've ever read. I'm a transplant to Boston, like you, (I grew up in central Jersey in a house divided between the Philadelphia Phillies and the NY Yankees) so I will never be the true authentic Red Sox fan like the ones that pelted you with cans and tomatoes (were the tomatoes in the cans? Ouch! That hurts!) It's not baseball; it's the poetry of baseball that steals me every time. Your poem does that.

Andrew: Ahem, I think you mean 2004, when, you know, the Red Sox came back from a 3-game playoff deficit against the Yankees and went on to win it all. Oh that was cathartic for us long-suffering Sox fans.

That 2004 series comeback against the Bronx Bombers for the 2004 AL championship was so electrifyingly cathartic that the ensuing World Series was almost like being in a state of shock as we watched the Sox make quick work of I-forget-who and win the World Series, breaking forever the curse of the Bambino. Our hearts were broken countless times during that fateful championship series, and each time divine intervention was there to resuscitate the Red Sox and push them back to play another game.

I remember at one point in the 1990's being so distraught by the Red Sox's failure to win the World Series that I wrote a letter to John Henry, team owner, begging him to build a new stadium on the waterfront. My theory, along with many others, was that Fenway Park was haunted and needed to be burned to the ground.

But, as Ann says, we're playing a game of pick-up on private property and we've got to go now. I'll ask to have this moved to D&A as Ralph suggests. That way we can have our pick-up game all day until dark and no one will chase us home.

I have this ballad I wrote about the summer my son played travel baseball...



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Cross-posted with Michael — Yes, I'll ask to have it moved. But if you start in with any Yankee-Panky be prepared for more tomatoes. Ha!

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Here you go, guys... Moved to D & A.

Enjoy your games! :)

Jayne

I've seen both of those Robert Francis poems. I have a little book I found a couple of years ago in a little sidewalk book exchange box. It's called Sports Poems. Here's one from the book:

Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers
BY JOHN UPDIKE

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...dium-bleachers

This is the first poem I ever had accepted for publication - 2003 - and it's also possibly the least deserving (a lot of competition there), and one of the longest. But it appeared in a baseball magazine - the long defunct Elysian Fields - and the editors were baseball guys, not poetry guys. As evidence, look at how it was presented - they screwed up every line break.

The form is an octina, which is a creature I sort of invented. Think of a sestina on steroids.


An Octina for Wally Pipp

This starts with New York Yankee Wally Pipp,
who loved each moment of each baseball game –
the grass and sweat, tobacco juice, the pitch,
the spirits that meant Wally came to play
wherever fist hit glove and ball met bat.
Broad-shouldered, tall, his voice a manly bass,
he wooed true fans from Beantown to St. Lou’,
and thrilled to hear the crowd’s ecstatic bawl

exploding as the umpire called, “PLAY BALL!”
But then a migraine’s grip felled Wally Pipp.
The coach just said, No need for you to stew.
That big young college kid can start a game
or two. We’ll test the rookie at first base;
see how he does against a big league pitch.
The fact is that he ain’t no acrobat,
and talks just like he’s in some Broadway play –

maybe not the guy you want to play
when the pennant hangs on every ball
but, hey, they say he swings a nasty bat.
The kid dug in—he outweighed Wally Pipp –
bestrode the plate, admired a chest-high pitch,
then rocked his hips, uncocked thick wrists – HALLOO! –
a rocket ship roared wide of second base,
and skied to play a slap-bang crashing game

of tag with empty bleacher seats. The game
became the kid’s – he handled every play
at first as if he’d always owned the base,
each swing just tore the cover off the ball,
and fans began to scream his name, Big Lou!!
He had the legs, ran bases like a big-assed bat
from second basemen’s hell, crushed every pitch—
a horsehide whip, a battleship, a pip!

And that was all she wrote for Wally Pipp,
who didn’t start another Yankee game.
He shared the bench with washed-up vets whose pitch
to him each day—that kid needs dirty play;
piss in his shoes and hat, chop up his bat
for firewood—was the bitter rant of base
old men who’d plot a rookie’s Waterloo:
we’ll take him out and get him drunk and ball

some five buck whore—for five bucks more she’ll bawl
to all that it was rape—but Wally Pipp
already knew that greatness lived in Lou,
and wouldn’t play that sick old-timer’s game.
He praised the man who took away his base
and led the cheers for him to slug each pitch;
while tycoons, heartless as a cork-plugged bat,
had Wally quickly sold away, to play

for Cinci’ – small-town Cinci’ – where the play-
by-play announcers peddle hay, and ball-
field summer heat can scorch a wooden bat,
and that became the end of Wally Pipp.
He left to run a bar and grill; would pitch
in nights, and lift a few and talk of Lou –
how sure it was that he would make the Base-
ball Hall of Fame, an All-Star of the game,

the Iron Horse, who never missed a game
in fourteen years. But rotten calls can play
with life, and Wally found he was off base.
He’d thought for sure that they would name a ball
park after Lou, not a disease – but Lou
fell ill. God’s scorecard marked his last at bat.
When millions mourned him on the final pitch,
the saddest man of all was Wally Pipp.

At every New York game the ghost of Lou
is said to grab a bat and try to play;
smash back a pitch, bring home the men on base,
for baseball fellowship – and Wally Pipp.

Amazing, Mike, or awesome. I can’t make up my mind. Astonishing might do. Ineffable. The Toast of Home Plate, surely. You know I’m a tiddlywinks man, myself, or volleyball. Volleyball. I must write another poem about volleyball. Is there a volleyball fan in the house? Anyway, it’s great to see you posting. So much baby talk on the boards these days. Best to you, Mr Calabash, whatever you do.

Allen, with those two Ls and the E.

This is not a poem but a song, and it is not about an inning but about the end of an innings, but I think it is exquisite. (And you should hear it sung, by Roy Harper.)

For those who do not know cricket, I would say that it is the perfect cricketer's obituary.

When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease

When the day is done, and the ball has spun, in the umpire's pocket away
And all remains, in the groundsman's pains for the rest of time and a day
There'll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin
On a dusty pitch, with two pounds six of willow wood in the sun

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, you never know whether he's gone
If sometimes you're catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on
And it could be Geoff, and it could be John, with a new ball sting in his tail
And it could be me, and it could be thee, and it could be the sting in the ale
Sting in the ale.

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, well you never know whether he's gone
If sometimes you're catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on
And it could be Geoff and it could be John, with a new ball sting in his tail
And it could be me and it could be thee, and it could be the sting in the ale
The sting in the ale.

When the moment comes and the gathering stands and the clock turns back to reflect
On the years of grace as those footsteps trace for the last time out of the act
Well this way of life's recollection, the hallowed strip in the haze
The fabled men and the noonday sun are much more than just yarns of their days.

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, well you never know whether he's gone
If sometimes you're catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on
And it could be Geoff and it could be John with a new ball sting in his tail
And it could be me and it could be thee and it could be the sting in the ale
The sting in the ale.

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, well you never know whether he's gone
If sometimes you're catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on
And it could be me and it could be thee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy-WU7RPxEw

Michael, that is a really splendid poem. You made me love baseball a little.

Cheers,
John

I played as little baseball as possible, a victim of grounders whacking me in the chin or Roman nose—could never get the timing right. Here are a few games I played well and without injury. But wondered why I did it.

Ballers

O A Small Ball

Why do people chase a ball
and whack it with repeated blows?
It‘s a dimpled sphere that’s small,
so why do people chase a ball
that slices, hooks, falls to a crawl
toward empty holes where nothing grows?
Why do people chase a ball
and whack it with repeated blows?

OO A Hard Ball

Why roll a polyester ball
that’s aimed to clobber upright pins?
It’s hard and meant to make them fall.
Why roll a polyester ball,
scattering pins, or none at all—
bowled off a lane, the gutter wins.
Why roll a polyester ball
that’s aimed to clobber upright pins?

OOO A Bounced Ball

Why beat a ball on hardwood floors
in drives against defensive players,
a sphere that rouses grandstand roars?
Why pound a ball? On hardwood floors
when dribbled, passed, and shot it soars,
slam dunked through netted hoops by ballers.
Why beat a ball on hardwood floors
in drives against defensive players?

OOOO Why Are There Ballers?

We’re avatars of Sisyphus?
Major Mars still marches us?

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Andrew: "When it comes to poetry and baseball pitchers, Jim, another game and pitcher comes to mind for me: Pedro Martinez striking out 17 Yankees in September 1999. I watched that game in a bar in Boston, and it was pure poetry."


Pedro's entire career is pure poetry, IMO. I wish I could remember what game it was where I was sitting in a sports bar in Raleigh NC watching Pedro dismantle the opposition batter by batter. The patrons were going wild. They loved him. They weren't Red Sox fans per se, they simply loved to watch Pedro pitch. I never felt more proud to be a Red Sox fan then that night in Raleigh. Pedro was a Rembrandt.

But there is also the darker side of life that baseball does justice providing a metaphor to: war, conflict, mistrust, bad intent, violence, etc. in the form of brawls. In particular, the Yankee / Red Sox brawl that saw a young Pedro throw the old Zim Don Zimmer to the ground. That whole brouhaha (as it unfolded from pitch to pitch, inning to inning) is pure poetry. Here it is.

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Just to change the subect a bit, here's one on football which was originally in my first book, Life in the Second Circle. I never had no formal poetry education, so - like most of my poems - this one flows very directly from my own life. Boston area residents - and I assume many others - will recognize the Doug Flutie/Gerard Phelan references. I actually met Phelan on business, and wrote a first draft of the poem the following week and then sat on it for years. He was very much as described, and the last line is a direct quote.


The Man Who Caught the Pass

This is the time of year, year after year,
in the rooms of this winter-dismal city,
when Billy Crowther, slim as a young God,
vanishes himself again and again
into an alien stadium’s twilight, sees
that football arching, arching towards him
and somehow, falling backwards, reaches out
towards blackness, finds and grabs a golden ring,
and ends up on his ass, possessing now
a ball, a game, a life.

............................... You can see it
as often as you want these days on YouTube -
twenty years ago, but always just the same
six seconds on the clock, the team down four,
as legendary Sweeney waves the crowd
to silence, sprints imperiously right
to find a quiet patch of turf, then plants –
and hurls – a sixty-seven yard long lightning bolt, a javelin
that Billy Crowther gathers in, becomes
The-Man-Who-Caught-The-Pass-That-Sweeney-Threw,
and that will be his name

..................................... forevermore.
Sweeney won the Heisman that next week.
It was The Play, they said, The Greatest Pass
That Ever Was. He posed and smiled handsomely,
turned pro, and was a superstar for years,
sold breakfast cereal, and pushed his charities.
Billy Crowther signed a lesser contract,
blew out his knee before the second game
and never played again – a cameo,
a Rosencranz, a Guildenstern, whose role
was simply to be there.

.................................. His job was done.
We wonder what it must be like, at twenty two,
to be so well defined, to spend your life
as anti-climax to an accident –
a safety gets confused, a coverage blown –
that’s all it takes. The Man-Who-Caught-The-Pass
is who you are, and almost every day,
unless you find yourself a mountain-top,
someone will bring it up, and you will smile,
and make a gracious joke, so they can think
how nice he is, The-Man

.......................................Who-Caught-The-Pass.
I met him once on business, recently –
a typical Vice President of Sales –
attentive, friendly, poised and capable;
and realized this was exactly what
he would have been if he had dropped the pass.
There was no tragedy to end the play:
he’d never spiraled downhill, never read
the script, was unaware how things should be.
Our business done, I called out as he left.
He paused, and turned his head.
.............................................“Nice catch,” I said.

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Great account Michael of a timeless game — You may want to find a way to avoid the "twenty years ago" time lock on the poem (S2L3) and give it a more timeless feel.

It was a Thanksgiving weekend to remember, for sure. I've been to lots of BC home football games and it is definitely the House that Flutie built.

While we're the subject, Doug Flutie (in his last professional football game I believe) pulled of a rarity with this dropkick for the Patriots. One hadn't happened since 1941.

I've been wanting to share a baseball ballad I wrote but can't find a copy and don't have it completely memorized. Grr.

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Hi folks,

Here's an adequate little poem I wrote about a great American game, Ultimate Frisbee, which I've been playing for lo these thirty-five years. It appeared in my first book of poetry, Allegro. We have a saying in the game which goes like this: When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a Frisbee.

Ultimate


Up and down the field we ran,
throwing things and catching things.
We moved in unison; a man
will do this. All our offerings

we gave to air, that they be caught.
We leapt, we dived. We stuck a hand
out into air, and thus we brought
our team downfield. The things we planned,

we moved to execute, until
the team we faced got in the way.
We bent the world to match our will,
and won our game. That’s why we play.

16.ix.2018

 

Doh!
 

OOOO A Carried Ball

Why run or catch one, get concussed,
against a team that’s tough and strong?
In violent games the pigskin’s tossed—
why catch or run one, get concussed?!
Is snagging rawhide missiles the cost
to score for praise in print and song?
I ran and caught them, get concussed,
outdoing teams both rough and strong.

This did I and concussed got, grades 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. And still love the game, would it do again. Smiling!
Drooling. Played the games I write about (Lettered 4 years and All State).

I have been fascinated by "inning". To see the word without an "s" on the end seems so quintessentially American, more so even than bathroom and suspenders.

It made me miss John Whitworth, sharply and suddenly, and I wished he were here to join in this pleasant conversation. His love of cricket has already been mentioned and I recall that he once asked me, during one of our long email exchanges, whether there would be cricket in Heaven. My reply formed part of a longer poem and went thus:

Oh, will there be cricket in Heaven -
The impact of missile on bat,
The sensation of play
Going on miles away
From the place on the grass where you’re sat?

But of course there’ll be cricket in Heaven
For isn’t it just what God meant;
Making poor flannelled fools
Follow mystical rules
For the promise of tea in a tent?

I miss John. His innings was cruelly curtailed and the team is the poorer for his dismissal.

That's lovely, Ann. I didn't know John, but I appreciated his kindness to me and others (e.g. Daniel Kemper) and of course his sense of humour. The thread 'Autumn John Whitworth' was easily the funniest thing I've ever read here. And I'm pretty sure cricket came up during the discussion.

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Ann, John Whitworth's poem that you posted above is one I saw a few years back — I believe someone referenced it here on the Sphere — and it grabbed hold of my heart in the most gentle way. It made me like cricket, though I don't know much about it.
The revelation that good poets like John Whitworth can also be sports fans buoyed me as I mustered the rationale for posting the Immaculate Inning and the achievement it represents. It's also partly the reason why I thought I'd start this thread and hope for the best in terms of ferreting out poetry on sports.

Michael's "October Speaks" above and David's post of "When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease" along with the Robert Francis poems tap that well of childhood that we only hear faint echoes of after we leave that state of innocence and enter into adulthood, dry-mouthed and thirsting for our childhood sense of destiny and heroes and failures and all the other things sports make into metaphors. They are my own meager mythology, I guess. Just the name "Ted Williams" or Willie Mays" or "Babe Ruth" produce a sense of awe in me.

But not all sports produce the kind of poetic passion of cricket and baseball. Michael's American football poem is good, but I have mixed feelings about the game. It has robbed American of it's favorite pastime, Baseball, and it speaks volumes to where our country is headed, I think.

And there are no good tennis poems, that I'm aware of. Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic, Rapheal Nadal are all pure poetry.

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Jim, there is a rather well-known tennis poem by the Englishman Sir John Betjeman. It is worth a read: https://www.oatridge.co.uk/poems/j/j...-love-song.php

Cheers,
John

And here's a few on basketball, also from my first book. Basketball was my best sport. I believe I got as far as All Schoolyard, Third Team, Honorable Mention when I left Junior High. There's a little bit of me in both poems.


The Rabbi’s Son

Jack Sugar slid away from Jacob Zuckerman
at Shabbos morning services; threw on a blue
and faded sleeveless tee, and grabbed a train downtown.

Inside the Fourth Street cage the black guys knew
that Jack was strong and fast – could make those tough,
quick moves and take it to the hoop and stuff –
but also had a point guard’s street smart sense.
So when he hit the court the whispers flew
about this uptown dude named Sugar, who
blew kisses to the shiksas near the fence,
then spun in mid-air, pumped a jumper, dunked

the winner as the great crowd’s cheers drowned out the hum
of Kaddish, and he shushed them not to interrupt
the closing prayers, final blessing, and “Shalom”.


The Sugar Man

At try-outs, sweet Jack Sugar was the one
with all the moves, who walked his sloping walk
as athletes do, who called himself The Hawk,
the Sugar Man! – who nonchalantly spun
two basketballs on fingers on a run
across the gym, and bowed as we all gawked.
But we were sharp, and mean, and soon the talk
was that he was all show – a greedy gun
who threw up brick on brick, and played no “D”.
Jack had the look and style – smooth as glass –
but couldn’t make a shot and wouldn’t pass:
by next semester he was history.

Oh Sugar Jack, Jack Sugar, here’s my plan.
You have to find a you that sets you free
to do just what you do - make style the key!
Be poet, politician, businessman;
you need a place where you can sky and soar,
and that’s what counts – not baskets made or missed –
but misdirection, magic tricks, and twists;
and how you look is how they keep the score.


Things come around. Years later - in the nineteen-sixties - I was an unstoppable force as a ringer for the Yokohama Country Club (I don't do country clubs, but this was an exception) in the Japan Industrial Basketball League. Games were on weekend mornings, we generally had five or six guys show up, a number of us were reasonably sober; the opposing stands were packed, and they had cheerleaders and uniforms with numbers on them and shit; and we absolutely obliterated teams of accountants and engineers from Hitachi Heavy Industries, Sumitomo Trading, and the like.

Up in the air!
 

Here's one on a sport I haven't tried but observe on most clear days near my home:

We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount!
Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more.
Thoreau, “Walking”

The Hang Glider

It is said transcendent souls inform us:
I sometimes think
Mine is like a soaring hang glider’s

Shadow, sauntering across mountains
On sunny days,
Skipping over tree tops, disappearing

Behind a grove or into a deep crevice
And popping up
On a clean-swept shale slope,

Huge, much larger than the glider,
Far less defined,
Almost amoebic as it slinks its way

Across unleveled earth—but then contracts
As the glider
Swiftly sinks toward its safe ground,

The shadow moving ever more slowly,
As if waiting
For its substance to catch up with it.

If that shadow’s anything like a soul,
It’s most active
When a body willfully transcends it,

Most indolent when the body hugs it
Too tight to earth.

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John Isbell: "We have a saying in the game which goes like this: When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a Frisbee."


That is brilliant.
A frisbee's flight when thrown right is as if it is exploring another dimension.

I love throwing a frisbee, especially on a beach, but have never played ultimate frisbee. If I were living on a campus my grades would suffer at the expense of the frisbee.

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Hi Jim, hi Ralph,

Jim: I'm glad you like the quote! Thank you for your insight into it, it's been with me now for many years. Yes, discs will do strange things beyond the scope of spheres, that's just how it is in aerodynamics. I've spent many years, again, working on just that - wasting time, indeed, if time is ever wasted.

Ralph: what a lovely poem! I have a hang glider poem as well. It's about a good friend's death, and I am happy to remember him here. His name was Fabrice:

The Blue Sky Overhead


Fabrice, you child of summer, when you fell
along the rock face, your team was not there
to move you down the field in pass and cut
and catch to score. We’d all left La Défense,

where we had showed our pastime to the French –
we’d left the happy field of play. You climbed
alone that day into the sky. And when
you rode that updraft through the shining air,

what glory! though it took you into rock,
where your art had no purchase and you fell.
And did the Earth embrace you, when you came
wrapped in your glider to its arms? Did you

give up your spirit to the tender hands
of those who watch upon the young? You were
not thirty. I still see your happy face;
the sun of June; the blue sky overhead.

And so, that story ended. But for me,
I choose not to accept this. I prefer
to take the pass. Fabrice is cutting yet
into the endzone here. He’s worth a bet.
 

And in honor of my long-gone cricketing days (left arm round the wicket), here is Michael Green:


THE RIME OF
THE ANCIENT CRICKETER
by
Michael Green
From 'The Book of Coarse Sport' (1965)


An Ancient Cricketer goeth in to bat.

It is an Ancient Cricketer
And he stoppeth one of three.
The others whistle past his ear
Or strike him on the knee.

The pavilion gate is open wide
And he is last man in.
With creaking joints he walketh forth,
Thirty to make to win.

He sendeth a catch to first slip, who droppeth it.

His bat is in his skinny hand,
There are three slips thinks he.
He snicks a ball up to the first,
Eftsoons the catch drops he.

His opponents beat their bosoms.

A chance! A chance! Another chance!
The Cricketer giveth three.
The fielding captain beats his breast
And curseth him roundly.

The field was there, the field was here,
So thick upon the ground;
They crouched and growled, appealed and howled
The Cricketer’s bat around.

Fielders, fielders, everywhere,
About his bat did creep.
Fielders, fielders everywhere,
Nor anyone in the deep.

The Cricketer doth fear he hath a hole in his bat.

God save thee, Ancient Cricketer!
Have mercy on thy soul!
Like many men before thee gone,
Thy bat must have an hole.

Yet still the Cricketer batteth on,
A full half-hour bats he.
He doth not score a single run
Though he trieth mightily.

Although he scoreth no runs, the Cricketer helpeth his side to win.

‘Tis done! ‘Tis done! The game is won
And well and truly fought,
The Cricketer limpeth happily in
Although his score was nought.

He batteth best, who scoreth most,
And hath but little luck.
Yet though the Cricketer made no runs
It was a noble duck.

These are great, John; very much enjoyed :-)

Hmm, sport. Well, I have a rather dreary poem about Arthur Arthritis turning up during a netball match when I was 12; no one wants to read that, I'm sure. The rest is all rather whimsical and anecdotal, lol. But we'll give it some thought.

Cheerie,
Fliss & Coo :>)

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Cricket stymies me — as I'm sure baseball does to the English. Never the twain shall meet, I guess, though they are blood relatives.

That tennis poem is horrendous! Thanks, though for trying : ) It just doesn't do justice to the game, I don't think.

Ralph, you are a prolific, irrepressible poet. I wish things would roll out of me more easily.

Still working on cobbling together that baseball ballad I wrote once about my son's summer traveling baseball team. It seems to have gone down a hole. FWIW, here's the only part I remember. "Grogie" (long "o") was the team's manager. Kevin Grogan, if you're listening. He'd handle everything from scheduling to traveling to raking/grooming the field before games. He poured his heart out to make the boys dream.


Ode To Grogie (Long "o")

Out of the cornfields of Milton
A guy named Grogie came
with a wagon full of baseballs and a rake.
He said, "Last night The Babe appeared in my dream
and said, 'Hey Grogie, go build a team'"
so for the summer our sons he did take.

...(refrain)
...Grogie was his name and baseball was his game
...springtime summertime any old time at all
...Double doubleheader, triple triple tripleheader,
...night or day the more the better
...Music to his ears was, "Let's Play Ball!"


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Hi Jim,

Yes to your Betjeman tennis poem review - the man was poet laureate, you know! Not the best poet of the lot, I think. :)
I like the Grogie ode, especially the rake line. The Coleridge parody I think requires a cricket lexicon, which I suspect is larger than a baseball lexicon. More weird names.

Cheers,
John

William Scammell wrote a whole book of tennis poems - The Game. I am hunting for my copy. It has a picture of Suzanne Lenglen on the cover...

Ann: "William Scammell wrote a whole book of tennis poems - The Game. I am hunting for my copy. It has a picture of Suzanne Lenglen on the cover..."


Wow a whole book of them! One's got to stand out... Thanks for the heads up— I'll look around for it. Tennis is a back-and-forth game. It's got a lot of love in it. And grunting. I played it all my life. We called ourselves tennis rats. We'd hang at the courts all day looking for pick up games, scavenging for lost balls, kicking the soda vending machine to get free cokes and sometimes coins, sneaking onto the adjacent golf course to the par three 9th hole where we had become experts at landing the golf ball on the green in one using a tennis racquet and the birdie-ing the hole using the butt of our racquet — trying not to get caught doing it.

.

Forgot all about this one. From my first book again, but on a sport we haven't covered yet.

Muhammad Ali Entered My Dream Just to Say Hello

We talked mostly pussy,
two old guys trading brags and stories
old style, toe-to-toe, center of the ring,
nobody taking a backward step.
BAM! Nothing on under the dress BAP!
POP-POP-POP then her other sister BING!
Folks could hear them yelling my name POW!
and by about the fourth round
I was in trouble, mouth breathing, arm punches,
couldn’t match his speed and moves
You can get them little motor homes to rocking
and all that joy and beauty.

So I switched to boxing,
told him how I saw him win the Golden Gloves,
delicious Cassius Clay from Louisville
seventeen years young
taking apart some gnarly old British semi-pro;
and we talked about Manila and Sonny Banks
and Cleveland Big Cat Williams and Sonny Liston
on his back in Maine
and eventually, of course, about that night in Zaire
with big George Foreman BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
pounding him into the ropes in the eighth round,
Ali absorbing it all
(helped by those loose ropes),
then sliding off to SNAP a jab, and SNAP-SNAP
two more, and WHAP, a right, and WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP-WHAP until
big George Foreman
destroyer of men, pulverizer of Joe Frazier,
choking on spiders,
toppled.

He told me about losing the title to Leon Spinks,
and getting into shape and winning it back,
and the crazy fight in Tokyo with the Japanese wrestler
who kicked the life out of his legs,
and how he came back from that to knock out Larry Holmes,
to win his fourth title, to be The Greatest Ever.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him
that he lost the Holmes fight,
that he was so badly beat up that twice
Holmes begged the referee to stop it
before he killed a man,
and that finally the corner threw in a white towel.
How could I say anything?
It was only a dream and it was his dream now also,
inside my dream of that beautiful seventeen year old boy
dancing in circles in Madison Square Garden
BAP-BAP-BAP-BAP-POW!