Why Bother?

I don’t get it.

Well, nothing new there. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get. But this has bothered me for most of my life. Why are people into sports?

What’s the point?

OK, Mr. Fernández came home, switched on the telly—for unknown reasons he’s feeling particularly British these days—and there they were. Gymnasts! And none of them lacking in muscular development….

Right, put down the Sudoku. Watched intently. The Chinese, predictably, were amazing. (Did they invent the sport? Feels like it….). A Japanese kid sailed smashingly onto his knees, walked to the sidelines, then started to hop. Interesting how strongly culture reigns behavior.

Amazing what they could do—hop, flip, twist, suspend, rotate, swivel. And clearly, they didn’t take this all up twenty minutes ago. Add all of the hours of all of the athletes spent in practice and you’d have years, if not decades.

What for?

Disclosure time—I spent years of my own life as a sort of athlete. I was a cellist. And I’ll freely admit, it didn’t do anybody much good either.

And it was a musical analogy that I thought of, yesterday. Seeing all of these amazing gymnastics was exactly like hearing a master pianist—Serkin, for example—play…

…scales.

Well, apparently people want to see it. The crowd was going wild. OK, not soccer-fan wild—there were no riots or fistfights. There also weren’t any empty seats. We’re in the grips of Olympic mania.

Now here more than Puerto Rico. After the opening ceremony, all three papers had headlines screaming about orgullo boricua and pro patria.

What for?

For carrying a flag into a stadium? For being—in the eyes of the Olympic Committee—an entity to ourselves? Sure, we were in the club with the big guys—Russia, China, the US. But also the little guys—the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Mauritania….

So why is it, I wondered, that people spend inordinate amounts of time training their bodies, just to do silly things on bar or ropes? They could put easily the same amount of effort and discipline, and do ballet.

And that made me think of the question Alfredo, Raf’s first lover, posed me.

“What’s the one moment in ballet that has most impressed you?”

Finally a question I can answer!

Concerto Barocco, second movement.

He knew immediately.

“The lift,” he said.

I was eighteen, alone in Boston, friendless. And yes, practicing and struggling. I went to see the Boston Ballet in an old movie theater in the city’s red light district. The first movement—lovely. The second movement?

I swear, the moment the male dancer lifted that ballerina—the crowd gasped. The theater breathed.

Something got changed in all of us.

Call me elitist. Say I’m a snob. There’s a difference between a C Sharp minor scale and a late Beethoven Sonata. There’s a difference between art and gymnastics.