A unique pen pal board found by medicmike:
Too often these days, the mixture of sports and war proves rhetorically combustible, leading directly to misplaced profundities and furrowed-brow pleas for perspective. The grim visages of sportscasters appear, sermonizing on the relative insignificance of a ball going through a hoop.
And then, of course, back to the game.
It’s no coincidence that extended peacetime elevated our games and those who play them. Absent Pattonesque heroes, we gradually substituted those who can shoot or hit or throw a ball better than the more common among us. Which makes sense, in a nonsensical way: War and sports are the primary fantasies of childhood. (Male childhood, anyway.) Proof of how seriously we now take our games is there in our overpowering need to link them-unlike movies or plays or nights out with friends-to the unrelated events of faraway dictators and local presidents.
[…]
In war, the games don’t necessarily become small. They just become games again, reverting to their original purpose: diversion. Much-needed diversion. “There’s an anxiety I feel all day long,” says Swin Cash, the Detroit Shock guard. “I can’t shake it.” Her brother, Steven Menifee, is a college graduate who enlisted in the Army following Sept. 11 and is now in Iraq. “Pretty much the only release I have is to get in the gym and work out for a couple of hours, play some basketball and let my mind go,” says the WNBA star. “That’s my sanity, the part of my daily routine I’m holding onto. But every second there’s a silence, I’m back to thinking about it. He’s not ready for what’s happening over there. I think about him and wonder how many others are like him: too young.”
There should be no surprise at the number of jocks bound by blood or friendship to the war in Iraq. Most American athletes grow up in the kinds of families and neighborhoods that make pro sports a dream and the military a viable career option. And, every day, the list of athletes with all-too-real, all-too-close connections to the war seems to grow longer.
