John Miller, player/coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is back chronicling his team’s 2009 season in his weekly column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com.
The only sports event besides baseball that’s gotten me up at four in the morning this year is women’s tennis. The story of Kim Clijsters, the plucky Belgian who won the U.S. Open this month after taking two years off to start a family, is an irresistible breath of fresh air.
We give talented young athletes the world, and then watch as they arm themselves with impenetrable pride and become monsters cut off from the rest of us. Who can blame a 20-year-old millionaire for looking down at fans and sportswriters, for turning away from the conversation outside the arena?
There’s something about this champion from the Low Countries that’s different from the others. She is a human being first, and an athletic champion second. It comes across in her attitude during matches, where failure no longer triggers freakish emotions, in her steady interviews afterwards, and in her self-orchestrated schedule where life now comes before tennis. She is a grownup.
In 1998, I attended a crab feast at the Ripkens in Aberdeen, Maryland. These were the seniors, Cal, Sr., and Vi. He had just retired from 40 years of playing and coaching, mostly in the minor leagues. She was an old-school Maryland mom and grandmom. Their sons were major leaguers. One of them was a Hall-of-Famer.
My teammate Jaime Cevallos had worked summer camp with Cal, Sr., at my college, Mount St. Mary’s. He had invited camp staffers to the party and told them to bring a couple of friends.
Billy Ripken greeted us at the door and showed us to the backyard. There was a tent with coolers of beer and several tables stacked high with dark red crabs. There were about 40 people there. No major leaguers, since it was September.
Cal, Sr., chain-smoked and talked about Sosa and McGwire. (The next week, his lung cancer diagnosis would make national news, and he would die the following year.) His wife made sure we had enough crabs. She was very nice. Inside, the living room wall wore a hodge-podge of hardware that included insignificant soccer and baseball trophies, as well as the 1983 AL MVP plaque.
The general conversation ran from kids’s soccer to baseball to horseshoes. Pitching horseshoes is a favored sport in Maryland. It’s usually a couple of iron rods set 60 feet apart. Teams take turns trying to “pitch”, or throw underhand, the shoe around the rod.
The Ripkens had custom-designed manicured horseshoe pits, with wooden platforms set up to pitch from next to the sandy areas.
Anyway, my point is that here also was a pocket of unpretentiousness in the superstar constellation. Baseball was the Ripkens’ profession and love, but I got the sense at the party that it need not always define them. If you ask me, the game is even richer that way.
Tell me stories of sports made more human at oldworldpastime@gmail.com