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Chapter9 sports of sorts Although I played varsity football—ineptly, sloppily, and without one scintilla of skill—throughout my years at Knoxville’s Young High School, I’ve never been much of a fan of organized sports. Oh, I follow baseball in early fall and usually know which teams are headed for the World Series. And I watch enough college and professional football on TV to keep up with who’s who in their respective championship quests. Beyond that, pretty much zilch. You could hand me a list of players from the National Basketball Association and National Hockey League, and I couldn’t tell you which athletes belonged to what outfits. (Then again, perhaps I could guess the NHL guys, since it’s a requirement that hockey players have strange surnames, like “Vltchiklsvchwokd” and “Swzyplkuntro,” largely devoid of vowels.) I suspect the root of this noninterest lies in my loathing of statistics—those mind-numbing, brain-blowing sets of numbers sports fans are expected to cite by rote. It is impossible to carry on a conversation with these people because they speak only in numeric tongue. If you happen to casually mention around the office coffee pot some Monday morning that quarterback Peyton Manning threw for two touchdowns the previous afternoon, the stats squad strikes like a pack of jackals: “True, but his overall efficiency rating was down by 15.74 percent based on other games played when the temperature is above sixty degrees.” “Perhaps, but remember that both of those passes came on two rare firstand -short situations from his own 36, which he is going to hit 87.35 percent of the time when throwing into a wind of less than fourteen miles per hour.” “Also, the average weight of blitzing linebackers was down 21.9 pounds, giving his blockers a superior advantage in keeping him protected. This only occurs once in every 66.3 games during months not ending in ‘-r’.” Sports of Sorts 212 Arrgh! Enough! I can’t stand this mindless gibberish! Statistics, staschmistics! Truth be told, though, I do owe statistics a huge vocational debt of gratitude. A failure to comprehend numeric relationships, aka Statistics 201 at the University of Tennessee in fall quarter 1966, made me realize I had no future in the forestry profession. Well, yes, that and Chemistry 213 two quarters later. Whatever the case, I had to settle for a degree in journalism, a profession that requires no expertise in numbers whatsoever—which is why newspaper reporters and radio-TV commentators can enthusiastically engage in learned debate about millions of dollars here, billions of dollars there, and trillions of dollars over yonder without the slightest idea of what these figures actually mean. This is a talent we share with politicians. Over time, I discovered it’s permissible to write about organized sports without mentioning the dreaded “s-” word because the odds critical to the story are so outlandish as to be incalculable. Such as a bizarre set of circumstances that played out in Florida, March 2006, at a preseason baseball game between Detroit and Houston. For the record, the Astros prevailed, 13-3. But that didn’t matter, for a much larger story occurred in the stands. I learned about it from Carl Rietman, a retired executive from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development who lives in Knoxville. Carl and his wife, Sarah, were vacationing in Florida. He was glancing at the local paper one morning and noticed that his beloved Tigers would be playing that afternoon. So he drove over to the ol’ ballpark to take in a game. “It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things,” he told me. “My wife doesn’t care about baseball, so she stayed at the time-share. I bought my ticket in the parking lot.” Carl found his seat and settled in. Pretty soon, a couple sat down next to him. Carl and the other guy started shooting the breeze. “How ya’doing?” “Great weather, ain’t it?” “Where are you from?” That sort of thing. Said Carl: “I told the fellow I was from Knoxville. Turns out we both had time-shares in Florida. He said he was from Michigan originally. I said, ‘Oh, yeah? What city?’” When the other fan answered “Holland,” Carl did a double take. “I grew up in Holland, too,” Carl said. “What’s your name?” “Hopp.” Carl chuckled. “I once knew a guy named Hopp from Holland, Michigan,” he said. “In...

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