Nothing But Iron: A Periscopic View of the Sportswriting Off Season by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. June 6, 2006 This issue is for my tennis friends Smitty and Ralphie Boy, whose unrelenting encouragement forced me to momentarily regain my literary focus. In my sportswriting off-season, the boundaries of which are One Shining Moment and Smitty’s first UW tailgate party, it is easy for weeks to pass without tending to my readers. For this neglect, I beg your forgiveness, which won’t change the sporadicality of my editorials, but I’ll take it anyway. My public silence should not be misjudged as inactivity. I was, for example, engaged in yet another ill-fated business enterprise. I was filling an empty stapler at work and it occurred to me that each day figuratively zillions of staples are discarded along with the tons of once-important documents to which they are attached. Much of that paper is recycled, but I wondered about the staples. Landfill. I set up the Renaissance Staple Study to look at staple reclamation as a business. During the a week-long experiment, I was able to salvage 1042 used staples. It took me an additional forty-six hours, with the use of a microscope and tiny pliers, to straighten, align and glue the staples together in three-inch long strips. The reclaimed staples worked like new, meaning one out of every ten jammed in the stapler and ended up back in the garbage attached only to air molecules. In the end it was simple math that killed the idea; even with cheap labor from an overseas sweatshop the estimated cost of reprocessed staples was $7,204 per box. It didn’t take a genius to foresee the marketing challenges of staple recycling, so I decided instead to develop a cell phone that uses brand new cheap staples to fasten pieces of paper together in between calls, photos and text messages. When I last wrote a column April’s residual snow had melted revealing brown dirt, brown lawn and brown foliage, most of which lay in matted piles at the bases of barren trees and shrubs. Then, as if Mother Nature had Photoshopped the landscape, spring happened. In a few days, brown became green. From green came purple, pink, yellow, white and red. Those of you who do not have spring should try it sometime. It is a remarkable phenomenon. For a time I was even able to appreciate the resurrection of my lawn, which was decimated–I thought beyond repair–by last summer’s drought coupled with my reluctance to waste precious drinking water to save it. I marveled at how quickly, after a few well-timed rain storms, the alopecic lesions regenerated, to the point that my lawn was once again a viable contiguous outdoor carpet. It did not take long, however, before I remembered how much I despise the whole concept of lawn, as one of the dumbest, most wasteful agricultural inventions of all time. Think about it. We buy the largest parcels of land we can afford, plant or tile it with grass, spray it with toxic chemicals to kill the yellow flowers that threaten to overthrow the lawn’s monocultural monopoly. We then water and feed it so it grows faster, only to complain that it grows so fast that must spend valuable writing time cutting it, unless you have teenage boys like I do, in which case you spend valuable writing time coaxing them to cut it while you supervise from your hammock. Grass does have its place, and that place is golf courses, football fields, pastures and public parks. Interestingly park lawns are only 27% grass. The rest consists of dandelions, which grow well without water or fertilizer. I have successfully converted about a fifth of my lawn into useful crops, that I define as either edible or smellable. My agriculturally-inept brother Bruce calls that male gardening, but he’s not the boss of me. This pursuit, more than any other, with the possible exceptions of basketball, tennis and my day job, has kept me from writing for you on a regular basis. In Wisconsin, gardening has a time line that is more or less inviolable. Plant too late and your produce will be claimed by September’s first killing frost long before it reaches your dinner table. Sow too close to winter’s icy grasp and tender seedlings freeze to death. Some plants cannot tolerate cold, others can’t take heat. Every week the gardener, male or otherwise, fights many battles: clay, high or low pH, insects, funguses, viruses, woodchucks, rabbits, poor drainage, too much water or too little water. If he wins enough battles, he is rewarded with food. Surely my ever-widening brother can understand that reward. I will grant you that gardening is not a sport, and it may be of limited value to all but the few readers, who will savor the surplus tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and fresh herbs from my, but it is a worthwhile, not to mention masculine pursuit. Evidence of gardening’s maleness comes from the Spanish, who assign gender to all nouns. It’s el jardín not la jardín. El is masculine. So there, Bruceonando. It would be wrong, even for a basketball fanatic, to neglect the remarkable feats of Wisconsin hockey. National championships are the ultra-precious gem stones of amateur athletics. For both men’s and women’s teams to share that accomplishment is magical. It is not magic that I feel in my heart, but my mind sees how it must flourish in the hearts of those who love sports played on non-stick surfaces. I did find time, after cleaning my desk and downloading new ring tones for my cell phone, to watch two periods of the men’s semifinal. At first I felt the same familiarity that I felt as an anonymous bystander at my wife’s ten-year class reunion, but by the end of the first killed power play, I was caught up in the excitement. I uttered exclamatory phrases like Brian Elliot! and Whoa, thatsgottabeapenalty! and Icing! (even though I don’t fully get icing). I cheered. I turned down the thermostat. I crunched ice cubes. I muttered profanities. I checked my unsuspecting 13-year old into the coffee table. I began to bond. Actually it was more longing than bonding–a subtle envy of the people who rode the sleigh all season long. Is there such thing as a band sleigh? I vowed, using my best better-late-than-never rationalization, to watch the championship game, but I did not. Something less significant, but of higher priority, intervened and I did nothing to stop it. I realized once again that a hockey fan is not made in the span of two quarters, err, periods. I know I could like it, but I don’t really have the time to like it. The fact that I read about our national champions in an outdated sports section does not make them any less remarkable. As a footnote, I could have been a hockey dad. My youngest, Connor, a basketball player by genetic and environmental endowment, seems, in the past few months, to have been frostbitten by the hockey bug. He has gone as far as tape marking goals on the walls of my basketball court and building homemade hockey sticks out of garden stakes, cardboard and duct tape. He even bought NHL 2K6 for his PS2 gaming system, and he’s good at it. Thankfully, at 13, he is as far behind his peers as Atari is behind Sony. By the time he catches up, he will be 34, driving, possibly married and maybe coaching his kids at the YMCA. In basketball. As I watch him on his in-line skates, cutting smooth curves, effortlessly changing direction, then slap shooting a tennis ball hard between the legs of an imaginary opponent, I silently give thanks for all the weekends I did not spend traveling to Fargo, North Dakota, or Holland, Michigan, for youth hockey tournaments. ____________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column which at times is published at a frequency only slightly greater than that of goal scoring in the FIFA World Cup. The author apologizes to his readership for his long absence. The author also apologizes for Sweden 0, Trinidad and Tobago 0, even though the latter was not his fault. FIFA is a registered trademark of Nike-Tostitos-General Electric, or if not, will soon be. ©2006 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.