Two were about sports, and one was about life, liberty, and literature.
The only thing missing--hot coffee as I read them. If it were at home, or even in my office, I would certainly have been on caffeine as I read them. But, there I was in the university library, reading the paper the old-fashioned way, occasionally even folding the paper down.
The best of them all was about the reporter watching with Yogi Berra the baseball movie, Moneyball. Who doesn't like Yogi Berra, right? Jason Gay has written a wonderful piece. In that, Gay notes:
Berra didn't earn a ton of money playing baseball. The game was different then. When Yogi was a 17-year-old prospect from St. Louis, he signed with the New York Yankees for $90 a month. When he returned from World War II, his first major league contract paid him $5,000 a year. Berra worked at Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the winter. He never made more than $65,000 in a season. He never had more than a one-year deal.
But no one squeezed more out of baseball—and gave more back —than Yogi. He played 18 seasons with the Yankees, appearing in 14 World Series, winning ten of them. A catcher, he was a 15-time All-Star, a three-time MVP.
"I was very lucky," Berra says softly.
If only we had more Yogi Berras and his charm and intelligence not only in sports, but in all aspects of life!
The other engaging sports story is as depressing as the Berra essay was uplifting. It is about the exploding child abuse news out of Penn State. What an unfortunate irony that the place is Happy Valley!
In contrast to Gay's final comment about Yogi Berra, "Look at the numbers. Look at the life. Yogi Berra is priceless" the equally old and accomplished Joe Paterno seems to be fading fast towards an ugly exit from Penn State:
Paterno has been at Penn State, as an assistant and the head coach, for 62 years, a record. Graham B. Spanier, the university president, was a faculty member and an administrator there from 1973 to 1982 and returned to lead the university in 1995; Curley graduated from Penn State in 1976 and has been the athletic director since 1993; and Schultz graduated from Penn State in 1971 and has worked there ever since. Ultimately, they all serve the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year.
The question is, if Paterno heard some ugly stuff about Sandusky in 2002, it is now 2011, and he seems to have not done anything about it since. Maybe he didn’t invite the guy to his house anymore. That I don’t know. But as far as alerting people to the possible predator tendencies of his former assistant, Paterno seems to have been silent. He had a game to coach. He had players to recruit.
...
This seems to be a common malady for big-time coaches. They get so puffed up with trying to go undefeated that they lose sight of reality. Just to run this kind of program demands moral blinkers.
Yes, serving "the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year" necessitates moral blinders of various sorts. How awful!
At Penn State, it was even worse than prostituting education for the sake of a football powerhouse. The entire old-boy system in that university managed to overlook the possibility that children’s lives were being ruined, within the dangerous cocoon of King Football. We need to look beyond the alleged abuses. We need to look at the system that encouraged people to look the other way.
Really, we need to do something about big-time college sports.
As I often remark in the introductory class that I teach, the market worries not about morals. Given that we the people are the market, all of us serving this monster that rises up twelve Saturdays are also at fault for having encouraged college sports to become this godawful.
In a wonderful essay about liberty and literature, Mario Vargas Llosa talks up free market and liberty, even while noting that:
There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.
Llosa concludes:
The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.
Indeed. This is no different from my position as a Libertarian Democrat. More than me, my parents remember all too well my teenage years as a Communist sympathizer before I, and as Llosa writes "abandoned the Marxist myths that took in so many of my generation."
So, there, three wonderful essays. Read them. Share them.
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