On the DL: Power, Politics, and Sport
For a short time, I recall, it was a point of pride for me to be able to relate how I had once been witness to another person's pain, a man's physical prowess and prospects coming up hard against a padded, but no less cement, wall. I'm talking about May 26, 1995, the night I sat in the concrete crown of Seattle's late and not-so-great King Dome, taking in one of Ken Griffey, Jr.'s first major injuries, a broken left wrist wrought whilst achieving a game-saving--but for Griffey, season  crippling--catch against the outfield wall. Eleven years old at the time, my interest in sports, if dated from that very moment, took on a similar trajectory as that of Griffey's career. With a few remarkable years of baseball left, Griffey's health problems eventually became a regular theme of his game--as a growing disinterest became a regular theme in my relationship to sports.
My disinterest in sports was precipitated by many things, I imagine, but I tend to attribute it to a growing political consciousness and an overall disenchantment with what an absolute sausage party it became as I grew older. By the time I reached junior high, baseball was becoming a perceived source of the anxiety, as it was hardly congruent with that pack of punk rockers I aspired to emulate at school. It also probably says something that of all my Little League memories, my mind invariably tends to turn towards two particular coaches. The first was Coach Mayes, a divorcee in a smelly brown leather jacket, tight jeans, sunglasses and hair growing out of his ears. Ray took the opportunity of an after-practice pep talk to relate the lessons behind the "do-or-die" ethic of the pilots who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki--an ethic he felt our team needed to adopt if we ever wanted to save our sorry selves from the prospect of an immanent losing season (we lost anyway). The other, one Coach Tagget, was a venerable agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Though I doubt there is any real tangible way to measure how much of his day-job spilled over into his coaching of our baseball team, the unsettling series of shouts and obscenities Tagget unleashed whenever we failed to win I canŐt say reflected all that well on the Feds. While Tagget's verbal abuse never did inspire us to win, it did inspire me to resolve that he would be my last Little League coach.
Back then it was just an uncertain inkling that sports didn't sit well with my identity; now I like to think that I can identify some of the dynamics that drove me out of sports. The demand for physical exertion, no pain no gain, so dependent on the male identity--patriarchy, really--is in part what so endeared my coaches to sport; and not only to sport, but also the badges and bombs of the American State.
In this light, Griffey's pain is less something I ought to celebrate being a witness to, and more something to cringe at. To be honest, I wince less once I consider the size of GriffeyŐs paycheck; but there is yet another voice telling me to "Suck it up!" completely. That would be those--the likes of Mayes and Tagget, I imagine--intoning that it's just a game: that I'm reading too much into sport; and that this discussion of sports ought to be kept on the DL--that is, the down-low, not the disabled list. In this arena, however, a particular intellectual heavyweight has my back, German philosopher Theodor Adorno. In this way, I'm back in the game--not to play, but to ponder.
Next page: Tee-Ball, Mr. T, and T. Adorno
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