Are You Ready For Some Football?
By Chris Stucchio
What if I said “Gaelic football?” Would you even know what I was talking about? If you’re from Ireland, there’s a good chance you might. Gaelic football originated in that country centuries ago.
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Today, Gaelic football clubs are located in cities all around the world. An official game involves two teams of thirteen or fifteen players each and lasts for sixty to seventy minutes, on an outdoor rectangular playing field. Players advance the Gaelic football, which is similar in size to a soccer ball, by striking it with a fist or kicking it. A team scores one point for kicking the ball above its opponent’s goalposts, and one goal for kicking it below the goalposts into a net, which is guarded by a goalie. One goal is worth three points.
Even though Gaelic football is a physically demanding sport that can sometimes involve violent side charges and collisions, you don’t have to be a boorish ruffian to play it. For example, take twenty-nine-year-old computer programmer and business owner Peter Flannery. He’s in his second year of wearing the green and yellow colors of Nafianna, one of two clubs in Buffalo. Flannery sports a stylish pompadour, listens to the Smiths, wears striped Ben Sherman shirts, dines at Left Bank regularly, and owns a Sarah McLachlan cookbook. He also has a macho alter ego that is drawn to this tough ancient game.
“American sports are cool, but I wanted something different,” Flannery says when asked why not a more traditional or safer pursuit. He also says his normal routine of dealing with clients and writing code can get pretty mundane. Running around with reckless abandon during a Gaelic football game helps him rekindle the simplicity and excitement of his sports-filled youth. The adrenaline rush he gets from partaking in something that involves hitting is an added bonus.
Last year Flannery’s team did well enough to reach a season-ending tournament in Denver. This year they’re playing eight regular season games over the summer and vying for a trip to Philadelphia in September. Regardless of how well they do or who wins every week, Flannery enjoys knowing he and his teammates will likely share a few beers with the opposing team afterward.
And that, I think you’ll agree, is not such a foreign concept.
Chris Stucchio (fleawarhol@aol.com) is a freelance writer living in Buffalo. To learn more about the Gaelic football club Nafianna, visit www.buffalogaa.com.
A Father's Baseball Diaries
By Edmund Cardoni
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Ed Cardoni and his daughter Flora at Flora's
softball practice. Photo by Cheryl Jackson. |
June and July sit smack dab in the middle of major league baseball’s six-month-long regular season, like the two halves of a fat watermelon hacked open and rocking in the middle of a picnic feast. By the time July 1 rolls around, three full months of games (minor league as well as major) will be under our belts, including all those unseasonable April games played prematurely in the damp chill of mostly-empty northern ballparks, where the few fans that show up sit huddled beneath stiff plastic ponchos, with the one frozen fist (the only flesh visible) clamped in a death grip around the handle of an umbrella. Unless, of course, the games are rained out altogether, and have to be made up later, throwing the whole schedule out of whack, sometimes clear through September. As I write this, such miserable or called-off games—whether in Baltimore, Boston, or Buffalo—are blessedly behind us (though the raw memory is fresh), and by the time you have this issue in your hands, we’ll be in the thick of the marrow-filled shank of the season. Even as July turns to August, there’ll still be two full months of big-league baseball left to go after that, more if your team makes it into the playoffs, as mine did last year.
In fact, in the sweet summer of 2004, all three teams I root for—the Boston Red Sox of the American League, the Buffalo Bisons of the Triple-A International League, and the Astros of Buffalo’s West Side Ponytail Softball League—made and won all their championship series, extending major league baseball into October, Triple-A baseball into September, and softball season into mid-August. (The latter’s playoffs usually start the last week of July and wrap up not very deep into August, so teams—which seldom carry more than a couple of players above the ten required on the field—aren’t decimated and forced to forfeit on account of family vacations.)
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Ed and Flora spend an evening with
the Bisons. Photo by Cheryl Jackson. |
I’m not from Buffalo, but grew up the grandson of Italian immigrants—on my father’s side, at least—in a then very similar neighborhood of Boston, a neighborhood where the only “Other” was Irish, the same neighborhood, in fact, where Boston’s Italian-American mayor, Tom Menino—successor to two long-term Irish mayors—lives today. Not counting the silk-screened name of County Legislator Al DeBenedetti (last season’s team’s sponsor) which every player (regardless of party affiliation) wore on the back of her gold and purple jersey, my daughter Flora Lucia Cardoni is at this writing the only player with an Italian name on the Astros, a team otherwise made up almost entirely of proud Puerto Rican/Latina girls, Vietnamese and other Asian-American girls, Seneca Nation girls, African-American girls, or various combinations of the above—mirroring the fusion cuisine of professional sports. As in the majors, half the chatter from the dugout and cheering (and cursing) from the bleachers is in Spanish. That, combined with the stiff summer breeze off the water where Lake Erie narrows into the rushing Niagara River, and the ice cream cones afterwards at Custard Corner, especially in celebration of victory, makes for a very interesting and pleasant two months for father and daughter alike.
Which brings me to the real “guy thing” of summer, baseball statistics. Stats are a definite guy thing, and—like many “guy things” actually (including all the other team sports except baseball, with the possible exception of Tour de France bike racing for three weeks in July)—one I’m not much inclined toward outside of baseball. I’m not a numbers guy, but a word guy. In the fifth grade at City Honors, my daughter already has more math (not to mention science, from which corrupting influence the nuns shielded us religiously) than I managed to acquire through all of high school and college. But in the context of baseball (real, mind you, not “fantasy”), I’m fascinated by stats. I follow all the standings in both MLB and the International League first thing every morning, as well as daily Red Sox and Bisons box scores in minute detail, with the same fervor those nuns brought to their morning rosaries. And last summer, along with following the Red Sox on the up-and-down road to their first World Series victory since 1918 (a journey I shared with both Flora and my own long-suffering father), and the Bisons from their slow early start to another Governors Cup, I kept a record (usually jotted in the margins of my daily newspaper) of my daughter’s batting stats. And—though not as important as her good grades, graceful port de bras as a budding ballerina, kind heart, or winning personality—they were awesome.
On June 12 last year, after the first of eight regular season games, her batting average (AVG) and on-base percentage (OBP) were each a perfect 1.000, 1 for 1 with two walks, plus 2 runs scored. OK, too early to mean anything, just one game, I mean, it could’ve been just luck, right? But she finished the season in early August (regular and playoffs combined) with an AVG of .533 and OBP of .632! (OK, so they count reaching base on fielder’s choices and opponents’ errors, which happen more often than not at this level, as “hits,” but still!) The lowest those dipped all season were after the seventh game, in which she went 0 for 2 with no walks, dropping her AVG to a “mere” .471 and her OBP to .607. As anyone who follows the game and its stats knows, even in the depth of her one-game “slump,” either of these numbers would, were she a major league baseball player, put her not only squarely at the top of all hitters in both leagues, but—with the exception of Barry Bonds’ OBP—off the charts. Playing second-base, and hitting either leadoff or in the two-hole, Flora helped her team get to the playoffs by being responsible (either by scoring runs or driving them in) for twice her fair share (20) of the 150 total runs scored by the Astros against their opponents’ 115.
There was much less parental involvement in kids’ organized sports in my day, or play of any kind for that matter; we’d play outside till after dark, wandering far and wide unsupervised until our mothers would lean out the window of our triple-deckers and call us in for late supper. I don’t remember my father being present at all for many little league games (it was probably too painful to watch, since I stunk), and he definitely didn’t record my stats, which is a good thing, since they were abysmal.
This year will be a building year for Buffalo’s West Side Ponytail Astros, which had at least half their veteran players (including both slick-fielding, power-hitting pitchers, who happened to be from the same extended Puerto Rican family) move up to the 12–14 division after their championship season. Only Flora and a handful of other eleven-year-old veterans—none of them with any mound time—remain. Last year’s nine-year-olds were still pretty little last I saw them, and there’ll be new nine-year-old rookies filling out the roster. But, hey, that’s baseball. Well, softball, but you know what I mean.
Edmund Cardoni is a Buffalo-based writer and director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
Baseball: A Tale of Two Cities
By Mike Keenan
It’s spring and the Bisons are playing the Syracuse SkyChiefs at Buffalo’s Dunn Tire Park. I’m transported back in time to an outdoor, agricultural setting, brown dirt and green grass preserving an unhurried boyhood game, not governed by constrictions of time. The frantic world of looming deadlines, busy schedules, and zooming cars seems far away, though I can see the highway beyond right field. The pace is leisurely. The season will stretch through long, hot summer days and culminate in a bountiful fall harvest, an appropriate time to determine champion teams and the size of prize pumpkins.
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Bisons at bat.
Photo courtesy of the Buffalo Bisons. |
A huge center field scoreboard flashes incredibly sharp LED pictures of instant replays, computer-fed with updated statistics that baseball aficionados love to banter about as the game unfolds. Programs are redundant. Each team’s batting order is displayed with averages, balls, strikes, errors, the pitcher’s ERA, the player’s home town, and much more. It’s twenty-first-century information overload—Marshall McLuhan’s “medium is the message” applied to modern sport.
Scores of major league games shine brightly on smaller display boards. One terminal reports that Jason Giambi (a steroid user according to Jose Canseco’s book, Juiced) is currently at bat in New York City. Sweeping displays wrap around the stands at the 300 level, flashing commercial messages. In the first level stands, behind the seats near the hot dog and nacho merchants, there’s a fleet of Sony PlayStations allowing kids to play virtual baseball instead of watching the real thing. As in Buffalo, a plethora of souvenir caps, jerseys, and memorabilia such as balls, miniature bats, and pennants are for sale.
Bison players sport the same attractive green and white unforms that they wore last season when they emerged as league champs. In contrast, the Jays, who floundered in their division, now seem police-like and aggressive in radically new black tops that have replaced the sedate blue.
In Toronto, the sound system reverberates with loud, thumping music during stoppages in play. To picture the turf, think shag rug. AstroTurf is banished along with its dramatic, concrete bounces. The new synthetic simulates grass, slows the ball, and provides consistent hops for fielders, but the color, a washed-out green, is uninspiring, requiring a deeper, more inviting saturation.
In Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, the focus is literally on the fan. Hand-held cameras courier video to the scoreboard which zips through candid stadium shots; ecstatic fans are alloted five seconds of fame. Time is compressed, maximized and strangely trapped inside the cloistured dome.
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Fan shot by Mike Keenan
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The Jays remarkably hit back-to-back-to-back homers, which doesn’t faze “Boomer,” not bothering to dust off a subsequent batter with the customary high, hard, inside pitch. There are slick plays, one by the Jays’ Orlando Hudson at second base, performing a ballet move, racing to his right, snagging the ball, leaping and throwing to his left, implausibly nailing the runner at first.
In the eighth inning, a wave erupts in the left-field stands and, tsunami-like, gathers steam, speeding around the dome nine consecutive times before it peters out. Boston fans shout support from every section. Toronto fans, subdued, require six or seven innings and several $6 beers before they turn semi-raucous.
Opening night in Toronto attracts 50,000 fans, reminiscent of World Series Champion days when the SkyDome set major league attendance records. Today there’s 28,000 (a comparatively small turnout for the Sox and a city of millions). The Jays’ public-relations staff is inventive. On the screen a young boy acts as guest announcer for an inning, introducing batters, and performs a credible job. After the game, hordes of children run the bases.
The problem with Rogers is that it’s a multipurpose stadium, unlike Dunn Tire Park, Baltimore’s Camden Yards, and other fields built expressly for baseball. Sure, there’s something to be said for domes in bad weather—the Bisons’ opener vs. Syracuse was rained out. But weather is an important ingredient in baseball, sparking anxiety over looming rain and a corresponding strategy for four innings (an abbreviated complete game) when it does sprinkle, depending on whether you’re ahead or behind at the time. Weather affects equipment, style of play, and tactics. (The classic Norman Rockwell baseball painting features weather, depicting umpires standing solemnly while drops of rain slowly descend from above.)
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A day out with the Blue Jays at Roger's Centre.
Photo by Will Hill, courtesy of the Toronto Blue Jays. |
Nonetheless, Rogers Centre, with its continued improvements and major league action, is a must-visit for Buffalo fans looking to add a ballgame to their Toronto entertainment package.
Western New York’s emerald gem opened sixteen years ago on April 14, 1988, to some fanfare, and the acclaim continues: Erie County politician Joel Giambra rates Dunn Tire Park “one of the finest ball parks in all of professional baseball.” I agree. There isn’t a poor seat in the house; the immediacy is exciting. You feel that you are at a ballgame even without vendors shouting, “Popcorn, peanuts, cold beer!” The architectural underpinnings are purposefully designed to accomodate an extra level if Buffalo acquires a future major league team; currently, the stadium accommodates 20,000 fans and has a restaurant and the biggest electronic scoreboard in the minors. Toronto also boasts restaurants and an infamous hotel in center field that once featured two romantic fans in action, but no sun-drenched bleachers.
The Dunn Tire scoreboard signals electronic replays, and buoyant fans of all ages dance in the stands between innings. A smaller video display records speed and type of pitch, allowing us to track fastballs, sliders, and curves ranging from a swift 96 to a sluggish 76 mph. A farm team for the Cleveland Indians, the Bisons won the AAA league last year, and their team members routinely move up to the majors. At the game I attended, all tickets cost $7. Toronto tickets range from $9 Cdn. in nosebleed territory (500 level) to $195 Cdn. directly behind home plate.
The good news is that baseball fans on both sides of the border can have it all—major league dazzle and an old-fashioned ballpark.
Handy web sites for your visit:
Toronto Blue Jays: toronto.bluejays.mlb.com
Buffalo Bisons: www.bisons.com
Toronto Novotel Hotel: www.novotel.com/
Mike Keenan is a Southern Ontario-based freelance writer who specializes in architecture and history.
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