Two Friends Talk Sports

3 thoughts on “Two Friends Talk Sports”

1. Hi Ed, liked your mentioning your Bronx days. There used to be a plaque for Frankie Frisch on a field on Webster Avenue near the old 52nd precinct. I wonder if it’s still there? Do you recall? Frankie was the Fordham flash but I went to Iona instead.

   1. Hi Richard,
      I don’t know about the plaque but the field is still there. I played many baseball games there, as did my father who, like Frisch, played for Fordham. Frisch’s house was in my neighborhood, as I recall.

2. As a young man, I remember watching a major tennis tournament match between two superstars, who may have been Laver and Rosewall. Anyway, one of the tennis players made a perfect, unreturnable serve that hit the line but was called out by the referee. When the second, slower serve was made, the receiving tennis player, who knew that the first serve had been an ace, simply swatted the second serve out of bounds because he did not want to win this match and this tournament, even with all of its prestige, on the basis of a bum call. Contrast this value system, common throughout society of that era, if only as an ideal, with the current practice in the NBA to fake a charging foul by flying backwards to the ground at the slightest apparent contact, whether or not it actually occurred. The goal here is to induce and benefit from a bad call by the referee, which is the polar opposite mindset and value system of those tennis players I watched and admired in my youth. In a nutshell, THIS is the societal and personal change, the descent and evolution, so difficult to describe in the abstract, which has occurred in the course of a single lifetime. THIS, on the most fundamental level, is the subject of almost everything Ed writes about, he and I being of the same age and having experienced the same, so difficult to describe, devolution by corruption into a kind of hell on earth.

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