Recently while I ate dinner at a community meal, the community TV was on, tuned in to some sort of friendly community game.
It was a game of hit-the-ball, and boy, were those people ever bad at it. As I watched in between bites of my corndogs and tater tots, I saw one guy after another try to hit a ball with a stick and out of at least a dozen times only succeed four. They obviously had worked very hard at preparing for this. They even had uniforms with their names written on them, and they furrowed their brows very hard when the ball came their way, but they could only manage to hit it one time in three.
Admittedly the man throwing the ball all the time did a horrible job too, scarcely ever getting it anywhere where you could hit it without letting go of the stick with one hand and reaching for it -- something that never occurred to the men holding the sticks.
Later I found out the last of the hits won a game for the "Yankees." So I thought it was some sort of activity in celebration of the Civil War, until I learned the other team named themselves after female horses!
Anyway, that, and some remarks by some friends to me concerning my observations of that, got me thinking about the value of sports vis-