Where have you gone, Sandy Koufax?

There is an appropriate place in life for sports.  In life, that is.  I emphasize life because that is, after all, an all-consuming quest of mine--what is this life all about, and what does my existence mean?  This search for meaning then leads me to question the primacy that society grants to irrelevant aspects like, well, sports.

Today's exhibit:

News of Father’s Death Is Withheld From Royals Starter Edinson Volquez

Re-read that.

A man dies.  The news about his death is held back from his son, only because he is the starting pitcher in a World Series game.

No, it was not the team that put a cone of silence all around.  It was the pitcher's family:

According to the Royals, Roandy Volquez, the pitcher’s wife, told General Manager Dayton Moore what had happened and asked him not to tell her husband until after he had finished pitching the biggest game of his career, his first World Series start. The team then asked the broadcasters on Fox not to announce the news, because Volquez routinely goes into the clubhouse between innings, and the broadcasts of the game are usually on.

Let's see.  The wife and the family told the team not to let the pitcher know that his father had died.  And then the broadcaster was asked to keep the mouth shut as well.  Seriously?  Hello, the father is dead!

But, we live in a world where news is hard to contain, right?

Shortly after that, news reports began to circulate that Volquez’s father had died, and even as Volquez went to the mound unaware of what had happened, many people around him knew.

Many people around him knew that his father was dead.  The son was the last to know.  Seriously?  Hello, the father is dead!

It was not as if the father was a mean guy either; three years ago, the son said this:

“It was good for me because my mom and dad always took care of me,” he said in the article. “I started playing baseball when I was 9 or 10, and they took care of me. It was easy for me.”

Of course, it was the wife, the family, who made the decision not to inform Volquez.  But, I can't help thinking that it is so much a reflection of the contemporary values in society.  Yet another example of our messed up priorities.

This story is such a contrast to one of my favorites from the rich lore of baseball.  Another pitcher, another World Series, and a different call on priorities.  Fifty years ago, Sandy Koufax refused to pitch on the first game of the World Series because it was Yom Kippur.  

Koufax, who wasn't particularly observant, had no clue that his decision would carry so much weight—then or now.
"I believe he was thinking, 'I'm going to pitch the next day. What's the big deal? We have [star pitcher] Don Drysdale starting'," Leavy said in a Q and A with Sports Illustrated in 2002. "And, in a way, that makes it even sweeter. Yom Kippur is a day of sacrifice. .... And here's Koufax, who's doing this reflexively not out of his own great belief, but really more in deference to others. So it was a much greater sacrifice on his part. For a more religious man it might have been a no-brainer. For Koufax, it was the right thing to do."
And in doing the right thing, Koufax inspired a generation of Jewish players that came after him.

That was class.  That was demonstrating what was more important in life.

Perhaps far too many people in this world simply do not care about understanding life and its priorities.  They then spend a great deal of time and money on sports.   How messed up is this approach?  Here is another exhibit:

Five former University of Louisville basketball players and recruits told Outside the Lines that they attended parties at a campus dorm from 2010 to 2014 that included strippers paid for by the team's former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.
One of the former players said he had sex with a dancer after McGee paid her. Each of the players and recruits attended different parties at Billy Minardi Hall, where dancers, many of whom stripped naked, were present. Three of the five players said they attended parties as recruits and also when they played for Louisville.
Said one of the recruits, who ultimately signed to play elsewhere: "I knew they weren't college girls. It was crazy. It was like I was in a strip club."

It is one messed up life that we lead!

Indian-Americans break out

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said his deputy, Neel Kashkari, will be in charge of the bailout passed by Congress, and almost immediately Time magazine dubbed him the “$700 billion man.” However worrisome and complicated the crisis and the bailout, Kashkari’s appointment was personally exciting for one reason: he is Indian-American.

According to reports, the 35-year old Kashkari is the son of Indians who immigrated to the United States from Kashmir. It’s a long way from the scenic Himalayas to the waters of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, where Kashkari was raised.

Kashkari joins an impressive list of Indian-Americans who burst onto the American public sphere in quite a hurry over the past few years. I used to joke that we will know for sure that we have arrived on the U.S. scene when one of us got enmeshed in an embarrassing, high profile controversy. Well, not anymore. It has been simply fascinating to watch Indian-Americans exercising a remarkable level of influence.

It was an Indian-American who led the legal fight that profoundly changed our treatment of Guantanamo detainees. Neal Katyal, who is a law professor at Georgetown University, was barely 36 years old when he won Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld — a Supreme Court ruling that challenged the current administration’s interpretation of executive powers.

Another one almost became a vice presidential nominee. Bobby Jindal, who is the 37-year old governor of Louisiana, was a serious contender for the second spot on the Republican ticket.

Readers of Newsweek may be familiar with Fareed Zakaria, who also hosted a news show on PBS. A friend once described Zakaria as being sexier than Omar Sharif, and with brains on steroids!

Jhumpa Lahiri makes us think about profound issues through her award-winning narratives that are often about Indian-Americans. And director M. Night Shyamalan scares the daylights out of filmgoers with stories that are deceptively simple.

On the other hand, it was absolutely depressing to read that an Indian-American family was one of the first who lost their lives because of the current economic crisis.

Karthik Rajaram was a former employee of PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Sony Pictures in Southern California, but had been unemployed for a few months. He committed suicide, after killing his family — his wife, mother-in-law, and three children aged 19, 12 and 7. It is unfortunate that this Indian-American resorted to guns, reinforcing the notion that guns and violence, too, are as American as the oft-repeated apple pie and mom.

All these are absolute contrasts to the stereotypes that we run into on television and movies, where the typical Indian character is either a motel owner or a physician, both with accents far stranger than mine. After all, even from a statistical perspective, one would expect a lot more than just these two stereotypes when the population of India itself is more than a billion, and when a few million with Indian origins are scattered all over the planet!

Perhaps I am not different from other “ethnic” immigrants in getting pumped up. I clearly remember a fellow student in graduate school who was from Canada.

He was acutely aware of Jewish players in professional baseball, and his interest in this came from his passion for the game and from his Jewish background. To him, Sandy Koufax was not merely the best pitcher ever, but was almost a god. There is no Indian-American equivalent of Koufax. Yet.

There is no denying the fact that Kashkari, Katyal and others are fantastic testimony to the idea of America.

More than in any other country, it is in America that there is a high probability of anybody making it big in whatever they choose. It is that idea, an ideal even with its own blemishes, that continues to draw immigrants from all over the world, from thousands of miles away.

So, I don’t get depressed about the multi-trillion-dollar global economic crisis. After all, an Indian-American is in charge of straightening things out!

Published in the Register Guard, October 21st