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(Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images) |
I’m not that good at sports. I’m okay-to-good at softball, decent at basketball under the right circumstances, mostly a liability in football, and a ghastly, inhuman disaster in soccer. But just in the past year I’ve played on two outdoor-soccer teams, an indoor-soccer team, three softball teams, as well as in a weekly semi-organized pickup football game and a weekly semi-organized basketball game that goes almost until midnight on a lonely block of Chinatown miles from my apartment. In one week in early May, I played one game each of soccer, basketball, and football and two of softball. If it were not impossible logistically, physically, and not-provoking-my-wife-to-�divorce-me-ly, I would do it every night.
Wherever you are in New York, there is probably a game being squeezed in nearby. You have to make compromises to engage, in this city, in activities that require permanently open spaces that could be used far more profitably for condos � and something about that extra challenge makes the escape of chasing a ball feel all the more freeing. I’ve seen softball games played on concrete in Tompkins Square Park and McCarren Park; there are hockey games at Chelsea Piers that start at 11:30 at night. (Says one participant: �I’m not home until 1:30 or 2 a.m. depending if we have beers.� Me: �I like that you still have a beer after.� Him: �More than one.� Another guy on the thread: �Hockey players!�) There are lunatics playing soccer in the coldest freezing-rain gusts of February at the fields inside the Pier 40 parking complex at the end of Houston Street. Between April and August, there can be 26 softball games happening at once in Central Park. On some fields outfielders are backed up next to the outfielders in the adjacent fields, and the longest fly balls land near the pitcher’s mound of the next game over.
I asked ZogSports, the city’s most ubiquitous recreational sports league, to put me in touch with its most ardent player. Zog’s marketing manager introduced me to Toria Gibbs, a 28-year-old native of Stouffville, Ontario, and a software engineer at Etsy who has played 13 consecutive seasons of touch football � winter included. She’s also played Zog soccer and kickball and is signed up to play floor hockey starting in January.
Gibbs is a standout urban athletic warrior, no doubt. But I have to be honest: I may be even more of one, if you look at the numbers. And I’ve been at this � the New York sports lifestyle � for over a decade. So why do I do it, given that it’s surely not because of the feeling of constant triumph and physical grace?
It’s good to be part of the camaraderie of a team or a regular game. It’s good to feel your body doing something besides sitting, clicking, and typing. But more than that, games are a way to be in the city in a manner that I wouldn’t otherwise have time for. The most positive interaction I’ve ever had with police officers happened when two of them brokered a cash settlement in the West Village between our softball team and the Leroy Street homeowner whose front window had just been broken (not nearly for the first time, in his telling) by a home run. I’ve hustled against a basketball team of sculptors, painters, photographers, and installation artists (they were good!) and against the media-league softball juggernaut that is the High Times Bonghitters. I’ve been in a softball game in which my team’s best hitter was an Irishman whose only previous experience swinging a bat was cricket. And I’ve learned that there are few better places for meditation than a soccer field on a Brooklyn pier or Riverside Park at about 107th Street, at the best softball field in the city. The sun sets behind home plate over the Hudson River and the highway, which is bad for the right-fielder’s sight line but good for the soul.