Friday, __ .- - - November -
stports
Orienteering ‘I’ll
try anything
once. ”
- George Plimpton, in a commercial for a video game 1. The Genre Once we get past the invted-pyramid, meatand-potatoes style of sports writing, distinguished mainly by endless vacuous substitutions for the verb ‘beat’ (“The Camptown Ladies decimated Wallace’s Weasels 10 - l”), there emerge three not very distinct schools of thought. The first is inspired by Grantland Rice, the acknowleged dean of American sportswriters, .and it sees Sport as something more than a simple contest, a metaphore for the glorious and noble aspirations of mankind. This results in marvellous amounts of hyperbole. Listen to this paragraph of Rice’s on the 1924 World Series: It was something beyondallbelief beyondall imagining. It 3 crashing echoes are still singing out across the stands, across the city, on into thegatheringtwilightofearlyautumn shadows. There was never a ballgame like this before, never agame with as many thrills and heart throbs strung together in the making of drama that came near tearing away the soul, to leave it limp and sagging, drawn and twisted out of shape.
There was a slight problem with this approach: Quick! Who won the 1924 World Series? Columns in this style appear with depressing regularity in the pages of major metropolitan daily newspapers, and it tends to pall after a while. The second sees Sport in terms of its power relations, heavy with paranoia, disgust and mysterious happenings behind the scenes. It draws fevered parallels with Life as an endless struggle between Evil and Evil, with the poor befuddled spectator caught in a web not of his own making. Norman Mailer occasionally writes in this fashion, but the champion is Hunter S. Thompson:
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We were talking of Sport, and Big Money. Which gets us back to pro boxing, the most shameless racket of all. It is more a Spectacle than a Sport, one of the purest forms of atavistic endeavour stillextant ina worldthat only big-time politicians feel a need to call ‘civilized’. Nobody who haseversat inafront-
6,198l.-___- Imprint-
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is man against nature
row ringside seat less than sixfeet just below and away from the sickening thumps and cracks and groans of two desperate, adrenaline-crazed giants who are whipping andpounding each other like twopit bulls in a death battle willeverforget what itfelt like to be there.
The problem here is that it doesn’t work on less than a national level - there simply isn’t enough intrigue, in, say, intercollegiate football, and what there is isn’t very interesting. And something as simple as marathoning defies this sort of analysis completely. It’s not difficult to write this way; it’s difficult to do it well. The third is championed by George Plimpton, and is the only one not dependent on writing skill. No one will ever use Plimpton’s books in a college course: they’re too pedestrian. What he substitutes for ability is participation; indeed, a participation which depends on lack of ability for its success. Plimpton has pitched in a major-league AllStar baseball game; he’s quarterbacked for the Detroit Lions in a pre-season scrimmage before thousands of screaming fans; he’s climbed into the ring with Muhammed Ali. And he’s been gloriously lousy at it, splashing his failures across two books and countless issues of Sports Illustrated. There’s a certain devious logic in all this; he’s playing on the desire of every fan to be there, to become their heroes and ‘be capable of something more than just downing a twelvepack during the Super Bowl. But more than that, he’s playing Beat The Bastards At Their Own Game. If he succeeds, he becomes a hero himself, a mortal deified, and we look at him in awe. But if he fails, he’s still one of us, except he’s distinguished by the fact that he’s tried. He’s got guts; he’s got nerve. He’s won a moral victory. Even this, of course, doesn’t quite explain how I came to be crashing-through the thickets surrounding Laurel Creek, wearing a wino coat, a shirt three sizes too big, and work boots, and staring in vain at a tiny map. “Lead-footed, three-quarters dead, and cursing himself, the Hooligan, the human race, God. the Creator and the entire imaginable cosmos with the last breath in his
body, Cavanaugh reached the corner offorty“” _ Ninth and Second. . . ” - Damon Knight, “Babel II”
The Sport Remove orienteering from the context it was put in by the Boy Scouts. Forget the pettybureaucrat weekend-fascist Scouters lashing you verbally because your damned compass needle won’t stop spinning. Forget those hours of learning to walk a straight line through the woods. Step into the twentieth century. You register, sign a waiver and get a start time and a little card. At start time, you are handed a topographical map with numbered circles drawn on it. Using a compass and your wits, you must visit each circled area in order, find a small piece of nylon called a “control”, punch your little card in the appropriate location with the punch hanging nearby, and go on to the next area. Tough stuff. But when the fledgling Waterloo Orienteering Club decided to hold their first meet, they decided that the best way to bolster their meagre ranks was by not scaring beginners away. So they passed up the traditional forested location in favour of the familiar campus, scheduled it for Hallowe’en, and placed a Campus Event in Imprint saying “Beginners welcome. Wear a costume if you wish.” So, on Saturday afternoon, I took my twingy knees, my one good eye and a full wino rig over to the PAC. There was a handful of strange creatures milling around. I was registered for the medium course by a rag doll (actually, Sue Budge, several-time Canadian Senior Women’s Champion). More cutbacks: we filled out our own maps, and in lieu of punches had to copy letters written on the controls to verify that we had actually found them. “Start time twenty-five,” someone said. “That’s me,” I said. It was twenty-five past one. “You’re off.” I broke into a graceful run towards the Math Building, and quickly discovered that the work boots were not a good idea. I got around the corner and slowed to a trot, panting heavily. The first control was somewhere in the vicinity of Humanities. I forsook the straightline route for established paths, and found it easily enough, hanging on a tree by the parking lot. It said “T”. An auspicious start, I thought. The weather was perversely warm, the sun beat down. This is apparently rare in orienteering. The second control was on a boulder near Minota Hagey. I was discovering that the campus is not as flat as I thought. This is simple, though, I thought, and took the luxury of taking the bridge across Laurel Creek instead of splashing across. A girl in a track suit passed me. Walking briskly, I caught up to her at the third control, on a tree just east of Conrad Grebel. She took off at a run; I followed enthusiastically for all of thirty metres before deciding that risking cardiac arrest was not worth it. Afterall, I thought, I’m just a beginner. My preconceptions of the way the church colleges are laid out led me around the west side of Renison instead of the east. I came across two friends in the parking lot. “What’re you doing?” they asked incredulously. “Running an orienteering meet,” I gasped, breaking into a weak shuffle to try to justify the verb. Into the thicketsaround Laurel Creek, north of Renison. For once the work boots were handy; I stuffed the map in my pocket, threw my arms around my head and blasted through the vegetation, slowed only by the occasional tree. Reaching the creek, I hauled out the map and tried desperately to connect its squiggles with the creek’s reality. ’ I noticed a kid following me. I spotted the control; as soon as I got close enough to read the letter, I dashed off in a different direction. No good; he had a friend on the opposite bank. “You can read it from this side!” shouted the friend. It was hardly fair; the description specifically said “Streambend, south side.” Damned supercilious little kids. I lost the kid somehow, or maybe he was running the long course. On Westmount Road heading for the Villages, I decided that I had had enough of the damned costume; I whipped off the trenchcoat and tied it around my waist. I had by this time developed a sort of awkward amble, but the trenchcoat complicated things periodically by wrapping itself around my legs. Coming around the back corner of Village II, I saw a student who had lowered a chair out his window and was studying in the warm
sunshine. He was evidently used to this sort of intrusion; “They went that-a-way,” he called as I went by, pointing in the direction I had come from. Curse you, I thought. It took me a few minutes to find the control in the gully that Laurel Creek flowed through. In the process, I quite embarrassed some poor frosh out walking with his parents. I took the covered bridge across the creek and struck out for Village I. A couple of orienteers passed me going the other way. Even in first year when I had friends in the Village, I could never quite get the hang of the place. It did not help that the sixth control was within a circle on the map that encompassed three buildings. Curse these rowdy idiots, I thought, they’ve stolen it to hang on their walls. But I found it, eventually, on a stake that I had passed at least once. The seventh control was ‘way across campus; a straight-line path took me over the rolling grounds of the Faculty Club and through the PAC, where I nearly trampled a lost squash player. I burst out the Red North door at a run, threw my coat on the ground near the registration table, grinned at the organizers, and took off. Again, I slowed down on the other side of the Math Building. This was a significant change in image: I was no longer bizarre enough to be acceptable. Now I was just another slob trying to go someplace in a hurry. This may be one reason that meets are usually held in the wilds. Dashing around the back of the Physics Building on my *way to Engineering \ II, I noticed a control. Sure enough, I had misread the map. God knows what would have happened had I taken to wandering dazed around the Engineering quadrangle. I noticed another control on the way back past the Math Building, but decided that it was definitely a red herring. Up past Admin pardon me, Matthews Hall - to a “depression” just south of Columbia. It was downhill from there - literally, to an obvious control in back of the PAC. Chlorine fumes tearing at my nostrils, I decided on a big finish, and tore around the corner full blast to the finish table fifty metres away. It was 2:07. I had taken 42 minutes to cover 4.6 kilometres.
“Never look back. Someone be gaining on you. ”
might
- Satchel Paige 3. The Post-Mortem Plimpton was on to something. More importantly, I think the orienteers are on to something. Why? I’m glad you asked; it gives me the chance to prattle on for several more paragraphs, and exhume ideas I haven’t touched since Grade 10 English. Too much of sport depends on Man versus Man conflict for its motivation -football, for example, in which it’s to the participants’ advantage to cripple each other, and the rules sanction this. There’s enough hate in the world without going around fostering it in the name of recreation. It’s one thing to take Sport as a metaphor for War; but as with all analogies, there are always idiots who will get it backwards and see War as a metaphor for Sport. There’s ample evidence for this; I won’t pursue the point, because it frightens me. Distance running, the pleasure of which is largely an abstraction, is a Man versus himself conflict; most of the competitive aspect is surface gloss. This is not a good thing for the “I’m my own worst enemy” school of Western neurosis to get involved in, even though it’s a lot more sociable than the first category; it fertilizes introspection plus. Driving your body over several miles of preset course is a triumph only of will. In orienteering, on the other hand, the enemy is clearly Nature. You outwit hills; you conquer streams. I don’t like Nature. I don’t like the way it tries to kill my every hay-fever season, or the way it scratches and bites and drenches. I think the reason we never see Mother Nature’s face on those De1 Monte commercials is because she’s an ugly bitch. But she’s good for me, and if I have to face her I’d rather do it aggressively than complacently. It seems perverse to enjoy nature by blundering through the woods at high velocity, but it was enormous fun. Interested people should contact Sue Budge at 884-l 754. I’m going to try it again myself, in the spring when the season begins again. But I think next time I’ll leave the work boots at home. Prabhakar Ragde
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