Читать книгу One Game at a Time. Why Sports Matter онлайн

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"FOOTBALL IS THE OPEN-AIR KINGDOM OF HUMAN LOYALTY"ssss1

Not long ago I was speaking at the Baltimore Book Festival, giving a talk about ecological urbanism. It’s a terrific and popular event, and our tent was full of people despite the fact that it was approximately 150 degrees outside and the tent smothered whatever little breeze might have been blowing. I was sitting on a panel, and when my turn came ’round, I did what I pretty much always do: I made a joke about sports.

It’s a kind of a platitudinous speaker’s cliché to drop an informal aside before launching into your shtick, but nevertheless I consistently do it, ostensibly to lighten things up a bit, to suggest to the audience that maybe I’m not a humorless twit, and maybe to relax me a little. I also tend to be talking to academic and/or activist audiences and I like to think it throws them off their game a bit. Maybe not so much, but you know.

I started this Baltimore talk by offhandedly chatting about the Ravens. I could feel the sweat rolling down my back like a faucet and I was towelling off every fifteen seconds. I had just come from a bar where I watched a wild Patriots-Bills game and was hoping to catch the Ravens later that afternoon, so it seemed like the right thing to do. Right away, an older African-American guy sitting in the front row scowled expansively and said loudly “Don’t talk about sports!” I looked at him and said, “Why not? It was a great game.” That wasn’t the response he was hoping for apparently because he immediately stormed out.ssss1