Reviving the Spirit of the Game

Sports, at their best, are healing experiences. I have a friend, Ron Jones, who plays basketball with handicapped children and adults. I have another friend who plays ice hockey with a group of teenagers from the hood. They can tell you all about the healing power of one really good game.

Now, we compare and contrast:

The World Series. Where really good games are what it's all about. What do you think is the ratio of players to spectators?

No, I'm really asking. What do you think? You have two teams, and umpires and coaches and that's about it. Thirty players. And maybe thirty million spectators.

There it is, right in front of your commercial-weary eyes - baseball, at its best, in all its glory - and your shot at being a player is about a million to one.

Our most popular national sports, the team sports, the ones that get the big bucks, are the ones that most of us are not good enough to play.

Even in the little leagues, parents dream of their kids getting to play the big one. When their chances are, out of a million, at best, one.

It's just not a very healthy way to play baseball. For kids. For parents. For society. It's just not healthy for mind or body or character or experience of self.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not badmouthing baseball. Or football. Or even table tennis. Sports can be each profound and challenging invitations to health, to awareness and responsiveness, community and synergy. They can become life-changingly vivid encounters with self and other with the always astounding experience of collective competence. It's hard to remember that, especially in the beckoning presence of multi-million-dollar players basking in the glare of trophies and camera lights. It's hard to remember that there's something about the sports themselves that makes them deep and healing enough to be worth playing. For free. Without spectators or national standings or parental guidance.

One good way to remind yourself of how healthy you can get in a good game of baseball is by playing it in a street somewhere, with a stick for a bat and a rolled-up bunch of socks for a ball.

OK, I'm exaggerating. Not a bunch of socks. A tennis ball maybe. But in the street. You, six ten-year-olds, your grandfather and your five-year-old sister. You're playing baseball. You're playing to win. You're keeping score. But the game itself doesn't count. And it certainly doesn't count more than any of the players. It's all too unprofessional. The place is unprofessional. The players unprofessional. The equipment, definitely unprofessional. And yet you're having the time of your lives, having the very kind of fun that lies at the very heart of baseball.

I call this Junkyard Baseball. I call it that because I wrote a book called Junkyard Sports, so I have to.

I wrote about six of the major team sports, and shows readers things like how, with maybe a couple push brooms and a small collection of singleton socks and panty hose, they can take sports back, they can play baseball or basketball or football or volleyball or soccer or hockey, and can play their way to acts of heroic health: physical health, emotional health, community health.

The idea of junkyard sports is to make sports accessible again, their healing power available to everyone, together. The vision is of Olympians and special Olympians playing together, all in the same game on the same side. Of grandparents, parents, children, playing sports together, on the remarkably level playing field of fun.

Junkyard sports are not without precedent, by any means. They're firmly rooted in the way people really play, when no one's watching, when the only thing people need to prove is how good of a time they can have together. In games we sometime call street games or sandlot or pickup games. Games like stickball and wallball and roofball.

One of the keys to the success of the junkyard idea is that the people who are playing the sport are the same ones who are figuring out how it should get played. So instead of worrying whether they have the " right stuff," they play with whatever stuff they can find. Instead of being anxious about being good enough for the game, they consider the possibility that the game itself might not be good enough.

Which makes me wonder whether this junkyard approach can work for other things, can make healing, health-inducing experiences out of those that have been co-opted by commercial and political interest. Music for example. Junk music that people play whenever they feel like it, with anything at hand – forks, shoes, pot lids, trash cans. Or junk art, made from string and chewing gum and smashed soda cans. Think of it as a kind of deep recycling, where the people and the stuff and we find everywhere around us, and the place we find ourselves playing in, is the very stuff and people and place where we can make manifest the health and freedom we knew, all too briefly, when we were too young to understand why everyone doesn't win.