“What, did you grow up in a barn?” More teasing than mean, these were among the last words I heard from my grandfather, a former high school football coach, athletic director at Rockland County Community College, and combat veteran of the Pacific theater.
He was visiting from the Florida Panhandle maybe two dozen years ago, and the offense was my failure to remove my beat-up old baseball cap as we sat down to eat at the Fairway restaurant at Poxabogue.
It was one of those welcome rebukes. John Updike wrote about this phenomenon once, after he’d entered a certain social gathering only to see an older woman, a pillar of the Massachusetts set he traveled in, you might say, turn away from him for the terrible thing he’d done in leaving his wife, as he walked around with his needs exposed like a turtle without its shell.
Or words to that effect. The point is, in the greasiest greasy spoon, sporting the greasiest bad hair, I never ate with a hat on my head again.
Sometimes standards make sense. Society seems to be slowly coming to regret the free-for-all, the anything goes mentality that says whatever, man, porn is digitally ubiquitous and there’s nothing we can do about it, no matter how young the viewer. Go ahead, puff away on all the weed of indeterminate strength you want, youth of America, brain cells and sperm counts be damned.
And really, must sports fandom be subsumed by relentlessly hawked gambling? The N.F.L. is certainly all in, working the Vegas boys’ point spreads into every pregame show. Yet it cheapens the thing, no?
As for baseball, when I was at a Mets game last summer, some young guys behind me were following the action as closely as humanly possible, tracking strikes versus balls, pitch by pitch. Great, I thought, me too! America’s pastime!
Then I turned to see that the source of the interest was their wagering on the outcome of every single delivery, mound to catcher, in real time on their iPhones.
The Athletic, the sports news site The New York Times onboarded wholesale after canning its own sports section, and which accepts online sportsbook advertising, ran a refreshingly frank piece last week allowing major leaguers to anonymously opine on the state of the game — and of its fans — in the world we’ve made.
“People suck, dude,” was the lead quote. Death threats, taunting, online harassment — 78 percent said legalized betting had made fan interactions worse. “You owe me $9,000 because you blew the game,” came a Venmo request, “or I’m going to find your family.”
What am I missing here — was there something wrong with simply promoting fantasy leagues and keeping a lid on the rest?
“It’s the worst thing that’s happened to the game since I’ve been up here,” according to one veteran. “And unfortunately,” another player said, “they’re not going to change it because there’s too much money in it.”
Color me naive. Or old-fashioned.