By Kyle Jorrey
Sports Editor
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain …
Yes, there’s nothing that can get Los Angeles County in a furor like little droplets of moisture falling to Earth from the sky. Except maybe a forest fire or an earthquake, only getting drenched is so much more aggravating.
I mean, after all, this is Southern California, right? Pepperdine recruits did not sign letters of intent to play with their jerseys and equipment all wet, did they?
While I feel sorry for these unfortunate athletes, we can’t deny the special relationship sports and bad weather have had over the years — a relationship I feel is necessary for the survival of athletic competitions.
Starting way back in early childhood, when we were, as my grandfather says, “Knee-high to a pork chop,” children are taught when it rains, it means it’s time to go home. Many a dramatic game of hide-and-go-seek with the neighbor kids was ruined because of my mother’s incessant screams from the front steps – “Get in before you ruin your new shoes.” Only they weren’t new, and they were already ruined.
Then sometime around 9 or 10 years old, when we start to pick up sports like football, rain takes on a whole new meaning.
Now it means mud, and it means switching from the always controversial two-hand touch (Was it one? Or two? And if I tap you twice with one hand does that count as two?), to tackle. To this day, it is hard to duplicate the rush of being dragged through muddy sludge by a 12-year old-ADD kid far too big for his age.
You get dirty, you get bloody and you love it. Now your mother warns you about lightning and the conductivity of water. You tell her you won’t figure all that stuff out until middle school.
About freshman year of high school you really would rather not deal with rain, so you play an indoor sport like basketball or wrestling. I mean, how can you attract that hot senior when you’re covered in filth and smell like a dog kennel. But every once in a while you still find it funny to jump in a puddle, or drive your car real fast through a flooded intersection (especially if you see that jerk hall monitor strolling along).
Rainy days often confine you to your couch, where you try to catch every showing of ESPN’s SportsCenter in one day.
By the end of the marathon, you wish some heavy downpour would just get Stuart Scott to stop using those ridiculous hip-hop innuendos, and you think about spinning some cookies in the parking lot of your local grocery store.
Then all of a sudden you’re in high school, and unless you’re still playing football or stay indoors, rain is the anti-sport. Rainfall means cancellations and reschedulings.
It means driving two hours to catch a baseball game in a nearby city only to spend three hours watch ing mascot Slip n’ Slide before they tell you to take your foul ball mitts and go home.
Rain means that a stupid referee or umpire is going to call the game, it means you have to go home in the fourth inning, the second set, the seventh hole. When it rains these days we start running for cover like Joe Namath running for a bottle of 11-year-old scotch.
There’s just something immoral to me about calling a sports contest on account of precipitation, especially baseball games. Granted, the threat of lightning may be a just reason, but what is really going to get hurt by some spring showers?
I guess there isn’t just one person to blame for this unappealing trend, it probably goes way back to those childhood days and are mother beckoning us back to the house because she caught a thunderstorm warning on the Channel 9 news.
Or maybe it’s one those trends that started in Southern California. After all, Angelinos would cancel childbirth because of rain if they had the chance.
Ahh, it’s too bad rain and sports have to be at such odds. I think we need more sports that incorporate rain – like community mud wrestling or a game of soggy-balls tennis. Then maybe, we could take ourselves back to the days when rain didn’t mean umbrellas and trench coats, it meant having fun and getting dirty.
A wise man once said, “if you can’t play wet, don’t play at all.”
After all, what would we do if it snowed?
February 26, 2004
