davidgagne.net

  • About
  • Archives
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • bartender.live
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn

On Loving Sports

September 19th, 2018 @ 8:52 am PDT

“Almost winning is almost the best. But you’ve got to win once in a while.”

On Loving Sports

Today is the birthday of essayist Roger Angell, born in New York in 1920. Angell wrote one of my favorite quotes about being a baseball fan in his 1975 essay, “Agincourt and After”. It applies equally as well to college football or pretty much any sport:

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut […] is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring – caring deeply and passionately, really caring – which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. […] It no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté – the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball – seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

More posts tagged:
authors / baseball / quotations / sports

More posts categorized:
quotations sports

More posts from:
September 2018 / 2018

Post navigation

Previous Post
Previous Post #FridayFive: Dire Straits
Next Post
Next Post #FridayFive: Weather Notices

Search


Switch to FreshBooks

Switch to FreshBooks

I switched from QuickBooks to FreshBooks in 2015 and am so glad I did. Everything about their billing system is easier.

  • Take Control of Your Invoices

© David Vincent Gagne. All rights reserved. Custom WordPress Theme by Jacket Industries.