Sport in the Rear-View Mirror – I

Looming over the city, all ego, not much substance.

One thing I have noticed: when you don’t watch football,
Your brain does not become concussed.

I have not watched a down all season,
And don’t plan to start now.

Best thing about retirement
Is not having to trek to the Meadowlands.
Unchurched on Sundays,
I thank the maker for sweet entire liberated days.

One Saturday we were enjoying barbecue in Red Hook,
And a college game was blaring over my shoulder.
Somewhere in the South. Alabama. Ole Miss. Whatever.
The cadence was familiar. Run-pass-kick.

                        *       *     *
I think I could still love basketball,
But that is impossible
In a city of new pencil skyscrapers
And Carmel Anthony.

I cannot believe Phil Jackson took that job
Without permission to unload him.

The Knicks are currently 5-and-26.
I would have thought with a gunner like Melo
They would at least
Be 6-and-25. 

                          *      *    *
Soccer helps, but it comes at the wrong time of day.
I need to write in the morning.

Still, Boxing Day. I love that name. 
Rooney and Stevie Gerrard and even that vile John Terry.
There’ll always be an England --
Maybe into the knockout round of the World Cup.
                                       
                                *     *     *
My dream (see Tim Rohan’s piece in the Sunday Times)
Is that on the first warm day of spring
I will slip into the vast empty steppes near the food court,
With a mozzarella hero from Mama’s,
In the presence of other hard-core lifer true believers,
Who are not there to take freaking selfies.

Entire sections for each pilgrim,
We separately watch Lagares go back on a fly ball,
(“He’s got it,” I reassure my wife, when we watch at home),
And DeGrom’s hair and arms flap in the spring breeze.
And the two kids strut out of the bullpen,
And earnest Daniel Murphy (the Peepul’s Cherce).

That sustains me
Through the winter of bad teams and ugly new buildings.