Something for Joey

Sports always involves some degree of nostalgia, the sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful aching for the past.

Parents love watching their children play soccer in part because it allows them to indulge in pleasant memories of their sporting past. This pleasure, however, can turn painful very quickly. Every parent has to watch out for the evil of living vicariously through their child, expecting their child to meet and exceed their own past.

Nostalgia incurs other risks. Bruce Springsteen warned all of America about indulging in their sporting past with his hit "Glory Days," the song about a baseball pitcher who "could throw that speedball by you, make you look like a fool boy" whose life had fizzled after high school sports. The pitcher can only talk now, boringly, of those "glory days."  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inCC-PAggRA

Perhaps the worst kind of sports nostalgia, though, is the nostalgia that renders all sporting pasts better than the present. Things were better back then we like to believe, more pure, more innocent, more authentic. We remember idyllic hours of unsupervised baseball in the park, hockey without helmets on a frozen pond, or basketball games played in the dusk in a small backyard.

The film Hoosiers plays on this and oozes nostalgia in its very lighting and sounds.The film even defends, for one moment, what Springsteen's "Glory Days" critiques. When Barbara Hershey (one of my favorite all time actresses!!) asks head coach Gene Hackman why everyone gets so excited about a high school basketball victory Hackman says, convincingly, that many would "kill" to have just one moment in their lives when friends and spectators hoisted them on their shoulders. That is, it may only be high school sports glory -- but, for most, that is better than no glory at all in later life.

Why not indulge it?

This danger is inherent to all nostalgia. We almost always remember the past as greater. That the past wasn't greater is perpetually refuted by the simple fact we discover nostalgia in that very past we honor. That is, the past we imagine as being so great imagines their past as greater still. In Woody Allen's (a troubling figure for where this post is heading) recent film Midnight in Paris the lead character is nostalgic for the Parisian ex-patriot scene (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, et. al.) of the 1920s. The "shock" of the film is that he gets to go back there and even fall in love -- but the girl he falls in love with is nostalgic for her previous era -- the belle epoque of the late nineteenth-century.

Nestor, the oldest Greek hero in Homer's ancient epic poem the Iliad lambasts his colleagues -- Achilles, Odysseus, Agammenon, Ajax -- for being wimps! You aren't tough like we were says this character from the "oldest" western poem.

In getting overly nostalgic about the past we can miss the flaws that those living in a particular era saw with great clarity. The past, in short, can be pretty bad. This is true certainly for nostalgia and sports.

I remember watching *Something for Joey* at home as a made for TV movie and crying as a kid.

The film is about Heismann trophy winner John Cappeletti from Penn State. At the end of the film Cappeletti  gives his trophy to his younger brother, Joey, who later dies from leukemia. In this last scene an already middle aged football coach, Joe Paterno, looks on at his star doing the right thing. This, one could imagine, as I did, even as a child indulging in nostalgia, was the way sports should be.

Tough, hard nosed fullback from working class family does everything right for a football program that was simple and pure (those plain black and white uniforms). Perfect.

Past meets present for me in that Paterno, who seemed old to me then, still coaches.