Boston Is Back!



Boston Bruins, 1972 Stanley Cup Champions,
when I was 10 and hockey mattered

 The Boston Bruins have won the Stanley Cup, the first time since 1972. This is their sixth Cup victory, the other five being 1929, 1939, 1941, and 1970.

I was sympathetic toward the Canucks, on account of my Canadian background. But I have never been able to adjust to those expansion teams, so I always view them as somewhat illegitimate. Call me conservative. For you youngsters, the original six teams were Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and New York (Rangers). It's been too long, but now Boston is back. So where's Toronto? (Just kidding.)

The Boston Herald tells us, "The home team had won the first six games of this series, making Boston's victory on the road in Game 7 at Rogers Arena even more impressive. It marked the first time in NHL history that a road team clinched a title in a terminal game by shutout."

A final note: it is sad that Boston Garden has been superseded by TD Garden, i.e., "Toronto Dominion" Garden. Does that seem right to you?

Yankees Game

Yup, that's me at Yankee Stadium for the Yankees-White Sox game. And that's home plate right there. Chicago won, 3-2. The game ended with an exciting play by the Chicago outfielder, but his amazing catch went unrecognized by the New York crowd.

High honors to anyone who can identify the man in the suit in the lower right hand corner of the picture. He is a former Yankees player who was wearing a large, diamond-encrusted World Series ring. Seemed like a nice guy.

Why America Needs Baseball

I think it was Ronald Reagan who once complained that there are not more happy, edifying stories in the news. Of course, generally, those stories don't attract readers. Murders, corruption, and earthquakes do.

But this is one the Gipper would have liked. Trust baseball to provide it. I thank my friend Warren Smith at World magazine for having the spiritual discernment to see it and write it.

Even if you don’t follow baseball, you may have heard the story.

On Wednesday, Detroit Tigers journeyman pitcher Armando Galarraga—whose 21-18 career record is hardly spectacular—was one out away from that rarest of baseball achievements: the so-called “perfect game.” Twenty-seven batters up and 27 down. It has been done only 20 times in major league baseball history.

Galarraga had retired 26 batters when the Cleveland Indians’ Jason Donald stepped into the batter’s box. Donald then sliced a grounder to the right side of the infield, forcing first baseman Miguel Cabrera to field the ball. Cabrera threw the ball to Galarraga, who ran over to cover first. Everyone in the ballpark knew Donald was out by a half step.

Everyone except umpire Jim Joyce. Joyce called Donald safe. The blown call ended Galarraga’s bid for major league baseball’s 21st perfect game.

What follows is a story of what Smith calls "character and grace." Right there on national display. "[T]he story of Galarraga and Joyce will, I predict, be told as long as the game is played, perhaps even as long as we imperfect human beings strive for and occasionally achieve moments of transcendence. And that’s why I love baseball."

Read Warren Cole Smith's story at WORLDmag.com, "Baseball's Transcendent Moment."

Patriotism and Sports Pride

It was a strange providence that the Lord timed my oath of citizenship to coincide with the Vancouver Winter Olympics and, at the end of that, the great hockey showdown between my new country and the old country. It stirred up some surprising sentiments.

What was also suprising was that my Yankee wife "supported" the Canadian team for the gold medal, even though she is fiercely patriotic. She caught some jesting grief for this from a friend or two. The next day, a student confronted me over where my heart lay in the contest with Canada, making it clear to me before I answered that this was the litmus test for the sincerity of my solemn affirmations at the naturalization ceremony. So the two of us gave some thought to the relationship between patriotism and internation sports competition.

Here is part of my WORLDmag.com essay that came of it:

I have suffered a few aspersions because, though I am now an American citizen, I nonetheless felt an affinity for the Canadian Olympic hockey team, and even thought it was right that they should win the gold medal. Someone went so far as to suggest that the direction of my allegiance in this contest was the test of my fidelity to the oath of citizenship I took. But patriotism, the healthy love of one’s country, has nothing to do with international sports.

...[I]f a patriot is one who loves his country and seeks what is best for her, then he may withhold his cheers for an unworthy national team, and even direct his cheers elsewhere if he thinks his country’s victory in that case would be bad for the national character. So why turn against the U.S. hockey team?

...An Olympic gold for the United States in hockey would have encouraged a belief in manifest destiny that does not bring out the best in this exceptional people to whom, on firmly held principle, I have chosen to join myself.

Read the whole provocative thing: "Patriotism is not Boosterism."

Hockey and Natural Law

Canada beat Russia 7-3 in Olympic hockey. The natural order is affirmed. After beating Slovakia (should that be too difficult?), they will go on to play (it is safe to assume) the USA for the gold medals.

We Americans seem to master everything we touch (sadly, that doesn't include me). But Americans, as far as I can tell, have little interest in hockey. We have three big sports: baseball, basketball, and football. Around here, I don't see any excitement for the New York Rangers. Yet there we are in Vancouver at the top of the game, besting and rivaling those who give it all their national attention. Granted, many on the team play in the NHL. (That's the commercialization of the Olympics. I was inevitable.) But how do we get so many Americans who are good enough for NHL competition, unless they are Canadians who have adopted American citizenship?

Canadians do nothing but play hockey and wonder why Americans aren't socialists. They lose at politics, but they should win at hockey.

Backing Away From Obama

The American people are taking a Churchillian stance toward President Obama these days. Having failed to catch the Bay State's body-politic language when, standing in for the country as a whole, they pulled away from the Democrats' attempt at a head-to-toe government embrace, Obama is now proposing the government supervision of college football. Stephen Bainbridge, a UCLA law professor, illustrates the popular response to all of this with a well known anecdote about Churchill and Clement Attlee.

One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinal trough in the House of Common's men's washroom. Attlee arrived first. When Churchill arrived, he stood as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, "Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?" Churchill said: "That's right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."

Bainbridge adds: "With the government already running the banks and the auto industry, and trying to take over the health care industry, however, one might have hoped that sports would escape the ravening maw of Leviathan."

Fouad Ajami gives an insightful account of how American has fallen out of love with the man Oprah Winfrey called "the One." Read "The Obama Spell is Broken" (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 1, 2010).

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon. .. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune. ...

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again. ...

Ajami is a poet-professor-columnist. Read the whole article for his account of Obama's hubris, self-delusion, and politically self-destructive embrace of European praise.

Boys Must Be Boys, But a Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do

In "The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life," I question the worth of sports that don't point in any way to a productive life of some sort. "Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so." Here is the video that got me thinking about it.



But these amazing basketball shots are something else entirely. (The song is really good too, but I don't know what it is. Well chosen. Suitable to the spirit of young men.)



I share the joy of these boys. I'm happy for them. And I'm impressed. But they're just boys. When boys become men, they put aside childish things and apply what they've learned as boys to serious adult pursuits.

This Danny MacAskill fellow, for example, is amazingly good on a bicycle, but unless he can find a military application for this skill he needs to stop wasting his life and turn to philosophy or business or something else that's not just goofing around impressively.



We have given far too much praise in the last half century to people who have never grown up, to adults who act like children. What does that say about us?

Grappling With Equality

This is another step in the domestication of the American man, and the de-naturing of us all. Sadly, girls' wrestling is nothing new, and neither is the participation of girls on boys' wrestling teams. But in Minnesota, people are cheering what they call a history making moment because someone has become "the first female to compete at the state high school wrestling tournament" ("Girl Wrestler is Winning Points, Making History," Star Tribune, March 5, 2009).

This caught the attention of Minneapolis pastor, John Piper, at Bethlehem Baptist Church and Desiring God Ministries ("Over My Dead Body, Son"). One of his concerns is broadly cultural, and the other is more narrowly moral, though they are both concerns for men's moral character.

For all those who are concerned about the way men in general treat women in general in our society, he says, "Manly gentleness is not an epidemic in our culture. Rap videos, brutal movies, fatherless homes, and military madness have already made thousands of women the victim of man’s abuse. Now we would make the high school version of feministic nature-denial a partner in this undermining of masculine gentleness."

To fathers who are concerned to raise their sons into masculine maturity, he says, "Give your sons a bigger nobler vision of what it is to be a man. Men don’t fight against women. They fight for women."

Someone offered this comment following the Twin Cities Star Tribune article:

First double standard, where boys are strong than girls post-puberty, the girls are allowed to play on boys' teams in middle school when the girls are bigger. If they get to beat up on the boys in middle school, you can't whine when boys return the favor in high school. Second, in wrestling, this girl has an unfair advantage because she can maintain lower weight classes later in life, thus giving her more experience. Any wrestler worth his or her salt will tell you experience will trump gender anytime. She often ends up wrestling freshman. Not only that, since girls have a lower center of gravity, it's harder to throw her. Third, what about the sexual harassment? Boys are uncomfortable wrestling her and she doesn't care. I wonder how she would feel if a bunch of boys decided to come shower with her. You know, nothing sexual - just a shower. If the coach explains it's just a shower I'm sure she'll be ok with it. God knows the boys can't complain because her right to participate overrides their right not to be harassed.

A Minnesota state senator has introduced a bill to ban girls from boys' wrestling ("Will Wrestling Bill Pin Local Girl?"). Law not only restrains. It also instructs. One way or another, it teaches moral lessons.

As a wrestler myself (you never lose it), I can tell you that I would have to cede any bout in which I was matched against a woman. In general, it is wrong for men to handle women in that way unless the men are wearing badges and the women are resisting arrest. The blindly ideological insistence that boys and girls, men and women wrestle each other in athletic competition abstracts from human sexuality and its significance. This is true in all that a grappler does with his opponant, but it becomes especially clear in a particular pinning maneuver called the "Saturday Night" in which, face to face and chest to chest with your opponent, you hook his arms with your arms and his legs with your legs, and then arch your back, pinning his shoulders to the mat. You get the point.

In Plato's Republic, in the "city in speech" that he constructs to illustrate the requirements of justice in a political community, he has men and women wrestling naked together for the sake of the radical egalitarianism necessary for political unity in the just city (455d-458d). Of course, he understood that this is absurd. His point is that if you press the political relationship to point of trying to perfect it, including the unity and selfless devotion from the citizens that it requires, you end up with absurdity and monstrosity.

In Allan Bloom's interpretive essay that he published with his translation of the dialogue, he says that Book V, with its radical egalitarianism and its communism of women and children, is a comedy. If that is so, our ideologically blinded, egalitarian feminists are pushing our society ever further in this tragically comic direction.