The Power of Words. Baseball when you really need it

10.16.98
Baseball when you really need it
By ELIZABETH ABBOTT
Journal Staff Writer

       When Mark McGwire was closing in on Babe Ruth's record, my mother was in the hospital heaving from narcotics pumped into her after cancer surgery a few days before. The poor woman. Bad enough learning that the little spot on her lung was, indeed, a malignant tumor, that she hadn't escaped the frightening disease even though she had quit smoking 10 years before.
       "A lot of people never get it," she angrily said from her intensive-care bed, when the reality of what had happened to her was beginning to sink in.
       And, of course, a lot of people do.
       Now this heaving business. Enough already. But what does this have to do with Mark McGwire?
       Because as I watched my mother suffer in a way no one should have to, as I watched her have to suddenly confront such questions as how long she would be on this planet, whether or not Mark McGwire hit a home run seemed ridiculous to me. That's putting it mildly. Just the idea that people could care about something like baseball made me angry. Don't you get it? I wanted to holler. It doesn't matter!
       But then I learned a valuable lesson about sports. And not surprisingly, given how much I have learned from her through the years, I learned it from my mother.
       It was the day after the surgeon removed not only the tumor in my mother's lung, but also part of her chest wall, where the cancer had unexpectedly spread. She was hooked up to all kinds of machines, unable to eat, sleep or do anything else in her discomfort. This must be what hell is like, I thought, as I watched my mother squirm. This is pain, not the penny ante suffering my family had experienced up until now. Such were my musings when my mother suddenly said, "Did you see McGwire got another one?"
       What???????
       "I think he's going to do it. I really do."
       Now the fact that my mother was talking about baseball, in and of itself, should not have come as a surprise. Unlike me, she's something of a fan. But, frankly, I couldn't believe she was talking about baseball under the circumstances. How can you possibly care about Mark McGwire at a time like this? I wanted to scream. But the look on my mother's face made me pause.
       For the first time since this nightmare began to unfold, my mother looked like herself, not the victim of some unforgiving disease. Not only that, she sounded like herself, that is, a woman who is incapable of dwelling on herself even when she has a right to, someone who loves life and shows it daily in her keen interest in everything around her.
       I realized then what most sports fans already know, that the beauty of sports is not just in the grace and power of the athletes, who play the games. It's not in the competition, even when that competition is as pure and true as this summer's home run race. No, the true value of sports lies in its ability to lift people outside of their lives, even if it's only for a minute or two. Or so it seemed to me as I watched my mother's eyes come to life that day talking about the game.
       The next time McGwire whacked one, I pictured all those people in the stands watching the ball sail through the air. I imagined all their hopes and cares, of the tragedies, big and small, that afflict all of us from time to time. And it was comforting to know that for that brief moment in time, when all eyes were tracking that ball, they weren't thinking about anything else but whether it would make it out of the ballpark. That the crack of a bat had lifted them above their daily concerns.
       "Good ole baseball," my mother said a few days later, when McGwire hit number 62.
       Good ole baseball, indeed.

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