Click2Flicks - FOR LOVE of the GAME - Chapter 5

<body link="0000ff" alink="ff0000" vlink="000000" bgcolor=000033> <table width="100%" bgcolor=000033> <tr> <td align=center valign=top> <table width=90% bgcolor=ffffff> <tr> <td align=center valign=top> <tr> <td> <div align=center><p><b><font face="arial, helvetica" size=5 color=000000><b>BASEBALL</p> <p><font size="4">CHAPTER 5 - FOR LOVE of the GAME</b></font></p> </div>  <center> <table width="90%"> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top"> <div align="justify"> <p><font face="arial, helvetica" color="000000" size="3"><a target="_blank" href="images/MarkTwain.jpg"><b>Mark Twain</b></a> observed that baseball matched the character of nineteenth-century America. It was, he said:</p> <blockquote><font face="Times New Roman"><b><i>the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging , tearing, booming nineteenth century.</i></b> (Quoted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0809016362/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-3372875-2276827#reader-link" target="_blank"><b><i>Autumn Glory: Baseball’s First World Series</i></b></a>, by Louis P. Masur, page 192.)</font></blockquote> <p align="justify"><font face="arial, helvetica"><a target="_blank" href="images/Walt_Whitman_whitman_in.1887_photo_by.george.c.cox.jpg"><b>Walt Whitman</b></a>, the poet, went further, declaring that baseball was as important to Americans as their Constitution. He affectionately called it</p> <blockquote><font face="Times New Roman"><b><i>America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere - belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life. It is the place where memory gathers.</i></b> (Quoted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0809016362/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-3372875-2276827#reader-link" target="_blank"><b><i>Autumn Glory: Baseball’s First World Series</i></b></a>, by Louis P. Masur, page 192.)</font></blockquote> <p align="justify"><font face="arial, helvetica">By 1925, <a href="http://www.awesomestories.com/movies/the_hours/the_hours_ch2.htm" target="_blank"><b>Virginia Woolf</b></a> - the British novelist who was touring the United States that year - agreed with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1570035318/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-3372875-2276827#reader-link" target="_blank"><b>the conclusion</b></a> of <a href="http://www.newberry.org/programs/images/lardner.jpg" target="_blank"><b>Ring Lardner</b></a> (a <a href="http://www.depauw.edu/library/archives/ijhof/inductees/lardnerr.htm" target="_blank"><b>then-famous writer</b></a>) that “in America there is baseball instead of society.” In a country which was vast, young and lacking centuries of unifying traditions - unlike her own - Woolf saw baseball as an American common denominator. Unifying people, <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=u9lbduSl48MC&pg=PA162&lpg=PA162&dq=virginia+woolf+vast+continent+isolates+no+tradition+controls&source=web&ots=DjYGFObilo&sig=NzI_xjdodDI6r_mNNYdswC3JkKg" target="_blank"><b>the game was</b></a></p> <blockquote><font face="Times New Roman"><b><i>a centre, a meeting place for the divers activities of a people whom a continent isolates, [and] whom no tradition controls.</i></b> (Quoted in <i>The Norton Book of Sports</i>, edited by George Plimpton, page 162.)</font></blockquote> <p align="justify"><font face="arial, helvetica">From reading <a target="_blank" href="images/mencken.jpg"><b>H.L. Mencken’s</b></a> <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0394400755/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-3372875-2276827#reader-link" target="_blank"><b>American Language</b></a></i>, published <a href="http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/mencken.htm" target="_blank"><b>in 1919</b></a> (and subsequently updated), Woolf also knew that phrases like “play ball,” “strike out” and “shut out” were already part of America’s vocabulary. Admiring how Americans reacted to the sport that was “indigenous to the soil,” Woolf observed:</p> <blockquote><font face="Times New Roman"><b><i>Americans are doing what the Elizabethans did - they are coining new words.</b></i> (Quoted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521585724/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-3372875-2276827#reader-link" target="_blank"><b>Walt Whitman’s Native Representations</b></a>, by Ed Folsom, page 28.)</font></blockquote> <p align="justify"><font face="arial, helvetica">Let’s take a look at the game - and how it was played - in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.</p> </div> <p align="center"><font size="2"><a href="baseball_cards_ch4.htm">GO TO LAST CHAPTER</a>   <a href="baseball_cards_ch1.htm">BACK TO FIRST CHAPTER</a>   <a href="baseball_cards_ch6.htm">GO TO NEXT CHAPTER</a></p><br> </td> </tr> </table>  </td>  <td align="center" valign="top"> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.awesomestories.com/includes/ad_format.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script> </td>  </tr> </table>  </td> </tr> </table> </body>