Tonight, a friend asked if I would provide a handwriting sample for her, for some kind of project. She needed a few paragraphs, written in cursive, and it didn’t matter what I wrote. So I chose to write down the opening voice-over part from BASEketball. And I found that, if you strip away the video and just put the words on a page, it sounds EXACTLY like a George F. Will column for a while. Behold:
???????There was a time in America when contests of athletic prowess were a metaphor for the nobility of man. Historic moments forged by the love of the game celebrated the human potential to achieve excellence. But as time passed, and the country neared the millennium, something went awry.
The ideal of sportsmanship began to take a back seat to excessive celebration. The athletes caring less about executing the play than planning the vulgar grandstanding that inevitably followed even the most pedestrian of accomplishments The games themselves became subordinate to the quest for money. Stadiums and arenas became nothing more than giant billboards to promote commercial products. Players sold their services to the highest bidder, much like the hired guns of the Old West.
Soon it was commonplace for entire teams to change cities in search of greater profits.
Totally George F. Will, right? Of course, it goes on to get a little more ridiculous, and the images that accompany it are absurd. But to an uninitiated reader, there is little evidence that this comes from one of the funniest (and most poignant, somehow) sports movies of all time.
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