TUPATALK: Sports is intertwined with our culture psyche
I’ve garnered a lot of wisdom — or so I would like to think — from the television.
While watching an older show, I appreciate a spurt of philosophy from a a 1960s drama: “The older they are the younger they wish.”
That opens a stream of thought in me about how sports sometimes makes unusual impacts on the lives of great people.
Several years ago, I had to chuckle at an incident during a televised San Francisco Giants vs. Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game, in Los Angeles.
A Giants’ player crushed a deep fly — only to have a Dodgers outfielder climb the latter to make the home run-robbing catch.
As the Dodgers’ masses went on a verbal frenzy rampage, the park organist played the song “This Nearly Was Mine” (“South Pacific”) to mock the San Francisco hitter.
For those who don’t know, the stunning musical “South Pacific” had been written by Rodgers & Hammerstein.
People in Oklahoma have an unique affinity to this pair of geniuses — they’re title song from the musical “Oklahoma!” has been adopted as Oklahoma’s state song.
I’m certain most people would see no connection between Hammerstein and baseball. As far as I know, and I’m not uneducated on the subject, he didn’t write any musicals about sports or was formally associated with them.
But, as I read in a biography (“Getting to Know Him,” written by Hugh Fordin), Hammerstein as a young boy growing up in New York in the early 1900s became enamored with baseball.
He obtained several baseball cards of the era and memorized the stats of his favorite players and followed them ardently.
When his mom died while he was still young, the author noted that Hammerstein coped with his almost overwhelming grief by walking the streets and reciting in his mind the baseball stats he had stored in his brain.
Several years later, during a marital crisis, his mind again reverted to those baseball stats of his youth, as a way of dealing with the crushing emotions.
Fast forward to 1960 and Hammerstein was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was 65 years old.
There is an anecdote that one afternoon he and Richard Rodgers lunched together so that Hammerstein could give him the news. As the pair, both obviously sad, left the restaurant, a well-meaning acquaintance noticed their down demeanors and told them they should be happy, that they had everything to live for.
During the latter summer, Hammerstein reached the final stretch of illness.
Fordin revealed that as he lie suffering in the those final hours, he once again repeated, out loud, the baseball stats he had memorized 55 years earlier.
When I heard the Dodger Stadium pound out the “South Pacific” tune, I got a bit of goosebumps thinking of the synchronicity of serendipity that his song (to the music composed by Rodgers) would be played at a baseball game.
I don’t know if we sometimes understand how much sports has been engrained in our national culture and has touched and blessed the lives of both the athletic-minded and non-sports-minded alike.
This article originally appeared on Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise: TupaTalk column
