Coach's Corner
By Andy "Coach" Cotton, Fri., April 4, 1997
Today, a long time is spent choosing the perfect carpet from hundreds of perfect carpet samples. Hours later, I'm in a couch store. The showroom stretches out to the horizon. I know I need a couch. I didn't know about the myriad of "accessories" (25% off if I buy the couch!) which the saleslady and The Girlfriend both insist I need.
I figure, I can buy a couch; buy it, deliver it, big deal. I didn't know about picking the perfect fabric, or about the overwhelming mass of fabric samples, making the unimaginable number of carpet choices appear as simple as choosing rock, paper, or scissors. "While we're at it, we (we?) need a love seat and a new couch for the TV room." I hear a familiar female voice say this. I stagger toward a nice, white couch. I hope nobody finds me for a while. I'm exhausted beyond exhausted. I want to go home. I want a peanut butter sandwich, crust cut off. It's the end of a bad week.
It began innocently enough, asleep on the nice, old TV room couch -- the one that just has to go -- on Wednesday morning. I'm dreaming of a waterfall. It's so peaceful. I hear the gentle crash of water cascading down a tropical, lush mountainside. It sounds so real, I can almost feel the spray. I still hear the waterfall, more clearly than I should, as sleep fades away. What's that noise? Am I still asleep, or what? As I move through the house, the waterfall noise turns into a roar. An inch of water on the kitchen floor confirms the reality of the dream. In the living room, the ceiling weeps. Hundreds of gallons of water, as a matter of fact, pouring through my roof, onto the carpet (explaining the carpet samples), onto my leather couch (explaining the couch store), onto the coffee table (ditto accessories).
The source will turn out to be a "split hot water heater" in my bathroom. My upstairs contains enough water to do some fly fishing. I can do nothing now, as I wait for the plumber, rug drying guy, and insurance adjuster to come over, except wonder when the ceiling will collapse. It's a peaceful time. There's nothing to do but watch.
Later that night, in a hotel, after a few badly needed martinis, I feel a tad better. The Girlfriend decides that this is a good time for a relationship talk. "Honey," she says, "maybe this isn't the best time (the vaunted female intuition at work?), but I was thinking, maybe it's time we move in together."
When I arrived back home the next morning, my dogs, to spite me for making them stay out all night, killed a large mammal of some kind. A possum or armadillo or something. Positive identification is impossible. They're proud. They smell very bad. The rotting carpets smell worse. My son, oblivious to the destruction around him, plays his guitar at concert levels. The savaged possum, the roar of fans drying the carpet, the shockwave of electric guitars, my furniture's ruined, the roof's collapsing, The Girlfriend wants to get serious. I'm badly rattled.
So, here I sit in the couch store. The Girlfriend and the saleslady are happy, pouring over books of fabric samples. The Girlfriend has strong opinions on things like carpet and accessories; most everything really. Pronouns have subtly shifted from first person singular to first person plural. I'd give anything to sleep on this nice, white couch. My heads hurts. I'm very, very tired.
Baseball opens its season this week. Each year, I care less and less. Everybody uses the well known labor problems as the reason for baseball's ever-declining popularity, but that's too simple. Until about 1960, baseball was the Lord of all the American sports world. If you were an athlete in the first half of the pre-plugged-in 20th century -- black or white -- you played baseball. Until the mid-Fifties, the NFL was a closed little sports niche, played in a few Midwestern and Eastern cities. The NBA was even more cultish. Hockey was a strictly Canadian game. Baseball was the ticket to fame and fortune.
Things are so different today, it's even hard to imagine those times. Athletes have many other choices today. Since it had it all, it had everything to lose. Baseball's been the only loser in the global tidalwave of professional sports. Its great shortstops are playing point guard for the Knicks and the Raptors. Its sluggers and Hall of Fame third basemen are linebackers in Green Bay. Its superb centerfielders are playing cornerback in Dallas. This enormous talent drain, more than any sport could bear -- along with imbecilic owners meddling with the basic rules of the game, and unneeded expansion further deleting the talent pool -- produced a clear erosion in major league skills. Too many guys are playing the game -- force fed to its fans as Big League -- at a minor league level. I can tell the difference.
