Song of the Sporting Man

A friend of ours voiced a thought recently that has often struck us. To wit, “It’s a young man’s game,” which is why we play golf and doubles tennis rather than touch football anymore.

We envy men with theme songs to serenade them through this vale of tears: The Nazarene Jeter and strains of New York, New York; the saintly Brees aboard the City of New Orleans; the maple-leafed Crosby and O Canada, King James and the Cuyahoga (burn on big river).

Song and the sporting man are linked in a way that is poetry in motion (yep, it was Johnny Tillotson, he of telethon fame).

Though motion eludes the sporting man approaching his dotage, every now and then he ignores the doubtful knee and the looming obligation of completing the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle to aspire to the artistry of Tim Lincecum’s delivery or Ichiro Suzuki’s swing.

“C’mon, man,” get the legs moving, give it a try. There is nothing more dispiriting to us than the young man or woman who slothfully gives up and yields to the blandishment of the easy way out. Granted, talents are parceled out unequally and what few we may have decay with age, but that iron-clad fact of nature can’t keep us from seeking glory.

We will never find it at the plate, or under center, or in the crease, or behind the three-point line, but isn’t there a chant that we hear in our heads that keeps us shaving every morning and attending girls’ softball games.

Ours is: “G-o-o-d-e-y-e. Good Eye, Good Eye, Good Eye!”