57 Quotes by John Thorn

If this is how children's play enters the adult world, is it any wonder that adults long to retire so that they can at last get their childhood right?

But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts.

We are fans because the game also appeals to our local pride, our pleasure in thinking of ourselves as, yes, Americans but nonetheless different from residents of other towns, other states, other regions.

The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor.

This illuminates not only fans' interest in major league teams but also the minors and even Little League.

There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.

For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about.

I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.