What If Your Hand Was on the Plunger of All Sports?

3/30/2015

This was the kingdome. It was a dump. Courtesy ESPN.com

All my apocalyptic tendencies toward sport -- mostly from covering the NFL, but other stuff, too -- were sorely tested the other day.
An ambitious web site, medium.com, asked me to wax profoundly on the question of whether we -- we? -- should ban sports. They handed me the symbolic plunger of 500 words and said, go for it, big guy.
Then I had the vision of a nice May day, in the company of a few friends or relatives, sitting behind right field at New Shea, my hands clutching a hero from Mama's of Corona, watching Juan Lagares go back on a fly ball.
It was the moment of truth.
Seven philosophical souls got to express themselves on the subject of whether sports should be totally banned.
Readers are urged to give their opinions -- NOT HERE but on the site, after reading the contents in the link below:

https://medium.com/matter/should-we-ban-sports-201be54dd523

bruce

4/3/2015 03:41:58 am

George,

you nailed your piece on banning sports.

I know you only had 500 words but I was a bit surprised you skipped hockey since you seem to admire hockey players.

made me think of the comment I made to you once about enjoying your edgier writing since you, sort of, retired from the nyt.

all moot tho. ain't never going to be banned.

George Vecsey

4/3/2015 10:25:43 am

Bruce, you as a Canadahooskie noticed, Truth be told, I hardly watch hockey, but I didn't want to lump it in with NFL or NBA. I love my time covering the Islanders, and expect to do some reprises in their final days, weeks, in the Coliseum this spring, so I just stayed away. GV

bruce

4/3/2015 10:31:05 am

George,

we prefer canuckistani......

I recall you saying with a lot of fondness about how much you enjoyed the islanders as a team and as individuals.

I think there's an appreciation of--plus knowledge of their sport's past--that is different from the other major north American sports. baseball is similar that way, but you read stories of ball players who are clueless of baseball's storied past.

bruce

George Vecsey

4/3/2015 12:57:43 pm

Bruce, you got me. I wouldn't blow up hockey if I had my hand on the plunger., Pierre Larouche, one of my absolute favorites, once described playing pond hockey in the dark -- by the sound. Hockey makes the cut!!! GV

bruce

4/3/2015 01:25:07 pm

George,

I used to love playing hockey at hyslop's pond when I was a kid. all day on the weekends for a few years. I recall a story in, I think, sport magazine, quite a long time ago. maybe the 1970s. my memory is they talked to NHL players about their experience as kids. also, they were from the prairies. they talked about playing under the full moon. also during lulls, they could hear other players' skates cutting into the ice from a long, long distance away. perhaps their voices and sticks clacking against each other too. it cut a beautiful picture in my mind's eye. also, tho i'm sure American kids, Russian kids et al might've had the same experience it made me feel very Canadian...

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

What If Your Hand Was on the Plunger of All Sports?

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