Some things just don't go together. Handel's Messiah and Jingle Bells. Lucky Charms and gravy. Italy and Baseball. But when I was 20 years old I knocked on a door in Florence and met an Italian so in love with baseball he could barely stop talking about it. He had a poster of Roger Clemens. His favorite player of all time was Pete Rose. He was ON A BASEBALL TEAM. This guy even looked like a baseball player. If it hadn't been for the Italian coming out his mouth I'd have thought he was from Cincinnati.
There are things that everyone in the U.S. knows about baseball: the bases are 90 feet apart, Bonds is the home run king*, Rawlings makes the official ball, the Dodgers used to play in Brooklyn, the Cubs are cursed. But NOBODY knows this stuff in Europe. Nobody but that one guy, anyway. Most Europeans I know can't distinguish baseball from cricket. When you ask a European what he knows about baseball he says 'Yankees!' It doesn't even cross his mind that there's 100 years of history out there. Words like 'the Babe,' 'the Negro Leagues,' and 'walk off home run' stir all kinds of emotion and memories in us, but mean nothing to most Europeans.
Not that it's any different here in America. Have you ever seen news coverage of the Tour de France or the Giro d'Italia? You haven't. It gets like 15 seconds on Sports Center right before a commercial break, and then only if Ricco gets caught in the team bus injecting himself with EPO.
What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words 'professional cycling?' Admit it, it's Lance Armstrong right? The history of cycling is full of legendary riders, rivalry, miracles, heroes, and tragedy. Cycling has been around just as long as baseball and all most Americans know about it is the name of one cocky Texan.
Prepare to be educated.
1 comment:
make that one bad a** cocky texan who has done what no other euro trash coke head could do in the history of the sport . . . by the way this is kurt, not jenn, i'm just too lazy to create my own account!
Post a Comment