Maybe it’s in the blood. Sports fan DNA or something. Some of us jump up and yell and some of us wonder – What’s the Big Deal?
Confession here: I’m a jumper.
I’m blaming it on the blood. I remember sitting with my Grandpa John in his big easy chair – talking baseball – when I was young enough to fit in the chair beside him. Kansas City was close enough to his house in Parsons that their team worked just fine as the one to cheer for. Probably are some folks in Parsons pulling for KC to win the World Series, but these days they’re rooting for the Royals.
Back in Grandpa’s easy chair days, they were the Kansas City Athletics and he was tolerant of my NY Yankee sentiments. Before the A’s, Kansas City had one of the Yank’s minor league teams and they had been doing about as well as their Major League brothers. Grandpa John probably could have recited the league standings on any given day.
There in the big chair, I squirmed around the newspaper he was reading – sports page, of course.
Next to the chair, on the little table, was a radio tuned to a baseball game. The sound was down on that big wood-cabinet television across the room, but grass-lined diamond on the screen clearly indicated baseball, even if the picture was in black and white.
Here’s the deal though. My memories of Grandpa John are of a man not much given to shouts and whoops at the crack of bat. Maybe others have different recollections of him, but in my memory he always seemed to be a laid-back, quiet sort of Grandpa. (He was said to have some harsh discussions with other drivers while he was on the road and behind the wheel, something else I may have inherited.)
I don’t remember him giving an approving shout at a line drive through the gap with men on base, score tied, bottom of the ninth – but he was a fan all the same.
And he was certainly patient.
Grandpa John’s television pulled in those ball games through an antenna mounted on the roof of the house. And that thing had to be aimed at the TV station to get a decent picture. Toward that end, he had a box on top of the television with a big plastic knob that controlled the motor that turned the antenna.
It made a great ratcheting sound, that box. Turn the knob and ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, the arrow moved around to indicate the direction of the antenna. I turned that thing often enough that the neighbors must have imagined the Huston house was helicopter-powered and ready to take flight.
Probably I didn’t know about anything skyward being turned by my fiddling with the rotor box. There was some kind of explanation once, kid-level-science details that whipped right through my ears and back out.
The box looked a lot like the one in the picture, to the best of my recollection. Thinking back on it, there is a vague memory of the TV growing all-fuzzy and then clearing up again. But the ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk was the thing.
You just don’t get that with digital, kids.
The KC cousins and I are pulling for the Royals. Pick a team and do your own jumping, or just watch us and wonder: What’s the deal?
We’ve got sports books on the shelf and Dustin and I will be stepping up to the plate at lunchtime, so…
Come visit!
McHuston
Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 S. Main St. Broken Arrow OK!
