Love and Sports

Until then I had shamefully hidden my sports fanaticism (especially of that long, involved season of baseball) from girlfriends. Then, only months after meeting Catherine, forces outside of my control had rendered my hardball adultery obsolete. For the next several weeks I didn't have to consult my daily box scores; I was free to love.

Strange as it might sound, the strike couldn't have come at a better time. Catherine and I had met in early May. Later that month, she left the California college town we lived in to travel Europe with a friend for three months. We had decided she would move in with me when she flew back from Budapest.

I hadn't considered the timing: she would be returning in the middle of a pennant race. My hometown team, the Baltimore Orioles, would need my full attention. Then, like magic, the strike settled everything.

Growing up, the girls I liked didn't like sports. Worse than that, they didn't care either way. They were too bohemian for sports. They smoked cigarettes and went to the one art house movie theater in Baltimore nearly every weekend. They were mysterious and a little bit bad. The girls I liked didn't know from batting percentages. For these young, burgeoning actresses, to miss the cutoff man was to avoid a traffic accident; a pick-and-roll was something you did when no one was looking. They liked sullen boys who were members of antinuclear student groups and lead singers, not louche preps twiddling lacrosse sticks. Not jocks.

But I had played sports since I was old enough to chew gum. My older brother played Little League baseball, so I did too. Then he quit and I kept playing. I watched Cal Ripken Jr. and Eddie Murray and Al Bumbry and tried to imitate them, bending my glove against my side, waiting happily at shortstop. When I entered a high school too small for a baseball team, I turned my attention to basketball. I was slow and white, but so was Larry Bird. For one game, though I wasn't injured, I taped the same fingers as Bernard King. I felt as I imagine Jews once felt trying to date non-Jews. I felt like I had to pass. (The fact that I am a Jew whose most serious girlfriends have been blonde and very un-Jewish is another story entirely.)

After basketball games I was lighting cigs while still walking to the car across the school parking lot. I read Fitzgerald and Salinger and wrote in a journal. It wasn't a put-on; I cared about these things too. I cultivated a genuine taste for obscure rock bands and began attending Students Against Nuclear Energy meetings. I tucked the sports section into arts and culture for a quick peek before heading out to the PETA rally. I watched college basketball on a tiny, black-and-white tv in the basement, instead of the larger, too-prominent, color model in the living room.

Much of my sports shame was the product of a simple adolescent equation: sports equaled uncool. But it didn't get easier in college. How do you tell the girl in your Italian Neo-Realism class, the one who looks so much like Diana Rigg you almost fall out of your chair, that, yes, you really dig Pasolini and Antonioni and Fellini too, and, oh, by the way, you're pretty sure Boddicker should get the Cy Young? No, sports remained an anathema in the college bohemian dating universe. When, I wondered, would I meet a smart, interesting woman who also liked sports? Okay, who tolerated them.

Then along came Catherine. We fell hard for each other and I was devastated when she left for the summer. When she returned, moved in and we made a life together, I began to feel more comfortable than I had with any previous girlfriend. I even wore my O's cap around her. She seemed surprised at first, but stayed with me. I guessed that it wasn't unlike if I had one day come across her removing color contacts. She wouldn't have been exactly as I thought, but she would be pretty close.

Two years after we began seeing each other, Catherine and I went to Baltimore for a family visit. My aunt, uncle, cousins and grandmother were crazy for her. I showed her the city: the Club Charles, Fell's Point, rowhouses, crabs. Then I suggested she might get a kick out of seeing the newish ballpark. Sure, she said, she'd bring a book. That night Catherine and I waited through a two-hour rain delay. Under normal conditions the game may have been called, but the Orioles' Eddie Murray had 499 home runs at the time and the umps wanted to give him a shot at 500. The wind blew rainwater into the covered areas. Still, the game was not called. I told Catherine we could leave, that this rain was ridiculous. She wouldn't have any of it. What if we left and Eddie hit number 500? No. Absolutely not.

Finally, the game resumed, and just before midnight Murray drove a pitch from Detroit's Felipe Lira over the wall in right. He had his milestone.

As for me, in October Catherine and I will celebrate our first wedding anniversary.