Tag: Sports

Without a Net

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Nick Norwood
Featured Art: “Untitled” by Josiane Kouagheu

Bored, sluggish in the gray air
of a downtown office tower,
we three “junior associates”—Chris,

Ray, and I—absconded to a park
in the middle of the afternoon.
Amid the murdering heat of mid-July

it was deserted, and we slipped out
of our cheap suits and into shorts
and T-shirts in the public bathroom,

retrieved, from the backseat, a worn
Spalding, started pounding the rock
on cracked cement, balling the jack

in a kamikaze game of cutthroat.
And when, late in the action, faces
red as blisters, Chris—who would

make it to “senior associate” only
to grow glioblastoma, call me out
of the thin blue thirty years after this

epically random afternoon and
a month later greet me at his door
in Minnesota, bald head gripped

by tentacles ending in electrodes—
this same Chris, at 25, three years out
of college and still untried, untested,

unsure, cut hard toward the basket
and pulled up to hoist a rainbow
jumper. Ray—who would disappear

from our lives, reemerge, disappear
again—like myself, stopped, panting,
half-dead, to follow the ball

in its immaculate trajectory,
its slow-motion backspin, rising
and rising toward a haloed instant

of solar eclipse, then falling, falling
toward the netless iron hoop, and
passing through in perfect silence.

Or did it? Good? Or no good?
Game winner, or brick? Passing,
as it did, through nothing but air.

In memory of Christopher B. Vanatta

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For My Mother, Who Detested Sports All Her Life but Became in Her Final Years the University of Minnesota Men’s Basketball Team’s Most Devoted Fan

.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Thoreen
Featured Art: “Field Within a Field” by Thad DeVassie

For her, by then, the news was nonsense, names
she did not know, public policy proposals she
could not follow. Ugh, the weather girl, she’d say,
before she stopped talking altogether. What
are windows for? She still sat with a book in her lap
but rarely opened it. Why basketball, I wondered,
until I watched her watch a game. There was no plot,
no morally murky postwar setting, no confusing
characters, no Monsieur Poirot, no Miss Brodie,
no exposition, no dialogue filled with subtext
and subterfuge, no metaphors or motifs. No past
and no future, only this: ten men running full tilt
coast to coast, one catching a pass and spinning
at the top of the key, stuttering, feinting right,
then driving and in three quick steps rising and floating
to the rim, a flick of his fingers releasing the ball
that spins just so against the backboard and drops
through the hoop, riffling the net.

She couldn’t remember her husband or grown children,
but when the Golden Gophers scored and the screen filled
with close-ups of anonymous fans draped maroon
and gold, pumping fists, blowing kisses, waving their beer,
she knew it was her turn to cheer.

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Sports Illustrated

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Joshua Boettiger

All the great middleweights. Hagler–Duran, both times.
Sugar Ray and the HitMan. Duk-koo Kim dead in Vegas
after being knocked out by Ray Mancini.
Ten years old, waiting by the mailbox every Thursday.
Marcus Allen, the last of the balletic backs, glides past
the Washington secondary in Super Bowl XVIII.
The Swimsuit Issue in February—Christie Brinkley
at magic hour in Captiva, a sky of seagulls.
Night games in the graveyard with the Hogan kids.
They call it Smear the Queer. Their father drives a Cadillac,
stares at me when a ground ball goes through my legs
and I mutter, Jesus Christ.  What’d you say, son?
I go on Mike Hogan’s paper route with him. The last stop
the apartment of the man with elephantiasis and the sour smell.
We go up the narrow stairs silently then hold our breath,
take turns walking in and handing him the paper.
Touching the sacred while it is still in motion.
Kim and Mancini fought as lightweights, both 5’6’’.
They stood toe-to-toe and pummeled each other for 14 rounds.
Mancini would later say, “I knew him better than his mother.”
After the fight, having just heard that Kim might not make it,
Mancini is brought by his handlers to Sinatra’s late show
next door on the Strip. Between songs the spotlight finds him
and he stands to applause, raises his right fist weakly.
Sinatra waits for it to quiet down, says, How ya feeling, champ?

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Basketball

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Christopher Shipman

Mark was two years younger.
He was 10 to my 12. But Mark had a hoop
with a chain net, the post
planted right in his backyard, its slick metal
gleaming among his mother’s azaleas
and lilyturfs. It didn’t matter
that on our block two years meant
two lifetimes. We were fast friends anyway.
Had to be. The park wasn’t
too far but it was farther than I wanted.
Besides, his mother made the best
sweet tea and gave us all we could swallow.
That summer I honed my skills.
I’d finally have the chops
to take Jimmy Blake to the hole
the next season. That was my only thought
at the top of the key. Then the next
season started and I was 42
and living in another state, married
for going on 13 years, father to a daughter
who just celebrated her 10th birthday,
her smile gleaming among
three bouquets of assorted flowers adorning
the dining room for the occasion.
I can’t even remember what Jimmy Blake
looked like. The new season
will start up soon with or without him.
With no Mark nearby, I’ll air up an old ball
in the shed, head for the park.  

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Watching Football with My Dad

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Williams

Saturday night, fourth quarter underway
of a close Packers game. Bart Starr era.
My dad and I were sitting on the couch
in my Grandma Mabel’s apartment.
My legs barely reached the footstool
that my great-grandmother and I
played Chinese Checkers on. But that night,
I was watching football with my dad.

He played left end in high school.
Leather helmet. No face-guard.
When I was seven or eight,
he bought a white football
so we could play catch in the dark.
He taught me how to throw a spiral.
Fingers here. Thumb there. But that night,
I was watching football with my dad.

It must have been near seven o’clock,
Vince Lombardi on the sideline, when
we heard footsteps coming down the hall.
It’s time for the Welk show! Grandma shouts
before she, my great-grandmother Torsie,
and my great-aunt Pauline entered
the room like an offensive line. That night,
my dad and I stopped watching football

so they could watch Lawrence (an’ a one,
an’ a two . . . ), his Champagne Music Makers,
The Lennon Sisters, and Myron Floren
as, no doubt, Jim Taylor went for ten
and Max McGee went deep. I never played football,
though sometimes when I think about the past
I feel like I’ve been hit. But on nights like this,
I am watching football with my dad.

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The Skater

.Reading time 2 minutes.

                                                                                                                                    —for Bam Margera
By Johnny Cate

Modus operandi: grace cut with chaos, every
drop-in a death sentence he’d somehow
skirt and skate off to nollie another day. 

If we got our hands on a burned Bam DVD
we’d play it until the player was hot to touch,
until every trick was etched into the mind’s 

fish-eye and we were sketched up
with strawberries trying to land one like him.
The kids who by high school couldn’t hit  

a heater pitch for shit or cared to run suicides
found a home in the sheet metal half-pipe,
a new American pastime and a hero in  

an unhinged prodigy. Jackass came later—
what mattered first was the skating, each
varial and crooked grind a live creative act 

that left like a vandal Michelangelo, bank
rails marked with paint, curbs darkened
with candle wax. But the rebellious aesthetic 

was just that—aesthetic. A sly disguise for the
same glory, the guttering flame of a single
God-breathed second. Under Bam’s feet,  

the deck spun like a plywood electron,
elemental and holy: 360 degrees of don’t-care
that would carry him to self-destructive stardom. 

Now, hardly a day goes by that TMZ wouldn’t like
to eat him alive, so I’m pulling up the tape,
posted by a stranger, just to see what I saw  

years ago on those long-gone discs: a man
risking blood and bone with total nonchalance,
his soul sliding recklessly, breathlessly diagonal. 

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Magnets

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

I’m watching the pinball
champ of Wisconsin: super flipper work,
perfect balance, both arms fully extended
excepting a slight bend at the elbows.
He’s playing Pop-A-Card, and Highway Patrol
and when he stops for a bite of his fries
I think, Yes, eating must be different for him
but I mostly mean different for the famous in general
and not only eating but reading, breathing, seeing, swimming, etc.,
because, and I’m guessing now, enhanced or diminished,
filtered, shaped or inflated, for there must be
something not the same.

I think, Immortality experienced from within
must be . . . must seem . . . must . . . or just . . . what is it exactly?
Plus he looks so totally focused
(which at the Barneveld Bowl-A-Drome
on league night with the TVs and the glitter
and glare, the clinking drinks and crashing pins
is no mean trick) but when his last ball bounces
off the lower left bumper and dives
straight down the gobble hole which is,
ask anyone, like a tiny dose of death
and he doesn’t get a bonus ball or free game
or even a match he looks just the way you or I might
suddenly look: sullen and shaken,
and then, pausing and perplexed he says,
he says because I’m watching and I hear
how softly his words reflect
a particular reticence,
Magnets man, magnets.

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In Center Field

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ted Kooser

Ball glove a big clown’s hand on my hand
and punching my other fist into it
as one was expected to do, ten or twelve then,

I stepped backward and backward, farther
and farther away from the bright, buzzing
diamond, and on into the dewy, tall grass

and ticking crickets, where the Milky Way
began to take over, and, stepping backward,
I entered the universe, the stars brighter

and more numerous the farther I went,
the air cooler, and I no longer cared much
about softball, about catching that high fly,

the ball coming down out of the mothy glow
like a planet, slapping right into my glove,
teammates far in the distance, applauding,

as I backed into that great, spacious dark
sprinkled with stars, feeling light on my feet
as if I were floating, spreading my arms out

like wings as I slowly fell back against it
though not really falling, dissolving into it
backwards, eons beyond center field.

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Rodeo

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Selected as winner of the 2020 NORward Prize by a panel of previous poetry contributors

Featured Art: by 2 Bull Photography

Tonight is a rodeo night, the announcer blaring his bull
and clown doctrine so loud it carries two miles
east to our block, where just now a hummingbird
hawk-moth drinks from the pink phlox
with its long wand
and I’m alone for a moment and the sky
is bleeding itself out over the train tracks and the brick
abandoned factories. The lights
of the carpet store by the mall flicker carpe
and I wonder just what I can seize.
The homeless shelter bearing some saint’s name
fills up every night and spills
downtown next morning,
wings of strange creatures brush our flowers
while we sleep, and a hapless moose wanders
a schoolyard before it’s caught,
tranquilized. Everyone’s looking for it:
a warmth, a softness in the belly, in a bed
of grass. Take it when you can. Seize it.

Lately sleep is a myth and my brain
is so hard-wired for worry my whole body
crackles, then a deep fog rolls in and all day
I’m lost. Unlike this moth, greedy in its guzzling,
drinking sweetness without asking,
and now the buzzer of the bull riding sounds.
I think of the grace of that single man,
one hand on the saddle
and the other a flag waving violently
above him. A wild show of surrender.

Some days it’s like this: one part
anchored while the other begs for mercy.
And some days it’s the other, the posture
he begins with: both hands together, holding tight.
Sometimes you hold your own hand.
That’s all there is to take.

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Zenyatta

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Grady Chambers

Featured Art: French Knight, 14th Century, by Paul Mercuri

              Breeders’ Cup, November 2010

In a different life she wins.
In a different November in Kentucky she leans
into the last curve of the brown-combed track
as she passes the thick of the field. In that one,
in a bar far away, in our lucky coats
and muddy white sneakers, we rise
with the televised crowd as she quickens
at the flick of the jockey, as the grandstand churns
at the distance beginning to close, as the line comes closer.

And we know it as her rider leans forward,
as Zenyatta knows it in her legs
as the horse before her turns
and knows it’s over, the brown mane flying by
in a whip of color and dust, as the stands become a flicker
of white tickets, as her name is spoken skyward like a chant.

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Midnight Snack with Leon

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Darren Morris

Featured Art: by nrd

I ran into the boxer Leon Spinks in 1992.
Spinks had won the heavyweight belt 14 years before
from Muhammad Ali. He had also won bronze
in the Olympics and gone to the penitentiary
for possession. By the time he got to me
he was all done with fame and fortune.
But he still scrapped with life, just trying to be.
At that time, I was staying with my brother
in Springfield, Missouri. He ran a pool hall
and kept an apartment in back of the place.
I snuck into the kitchen late one night for a slice
of that industrial orange cheese that I was
addicted to. I flipped on a light and
there was a large man sleeping on a cot
in the middle of the white-tiled room. But
I went ahead and opened the fridge because
when you are visiting someone, nothing is
unusual. It should all be that way, every day,
everything new, but it rarely is. I reached in and
lifted out a long orange sleeve. That’s when
the sleeping man said, “Leon hungry,” and instantly
I remembered my brother telling me that Spinks
had started coming into the bar, but I did not
believe him. It had been so matter-of-fact
that I barely retained the anchor to the info.
I made sloppy towers of tomato and cheese
sandwiches for Spinks and me and we ate them
in silence except for all the tooth-sucking
that bread and cheese promoted, especially
for Spinks who had more than a few teeth missing.
I cleaned up and Spinks lay back down. There
was nothing really to say. But when I turned off
the light, as if still a boy, Spinks said, Nigh-night.
They call it American cheese because it is processed
from nothing much. In 1978, Ali taunted him
and Leon beat his ass in one of the biggest upsets ever.
I met a ton of people back then who ceased to matter.
But that did not stop them and they persisted.

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The Wall

.Reading time 13 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up for the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Ruins of an Ancient City by John Martin

                At mile twenty, roughly, the muscles
of the legs will collapse. Calves
                 twitching at random. The hamstrings’
                                                    sacked meat seizing. Scarry,
in The Body in Pain, explains
                                             that language too, tasked
                    with conveying affliction, fails. That pain,
   she argues, obliterates
                                                          discourse. I limped

                           past the drunk undergrads
of Boston College, my body’s stock-
                                                           pile of glycogen finally
                                       exhausted. The wall, runners
               call it.  The bonk.  The blowing
                                                                                         up. & after,
             the body in pain will make
                                                       of its own fat fuel. I followed

               the shimmering column of runners right
                                     onto Boylston Street. In three
                                                                                            hours two
           coinciding explosions would themselves
                                                                   leave the city—except
    for its sirens—speechless. The limes, Latin

        for boundary line, signified
                                         to ancient Romans the most remote
                              walls of the sacred Empire. Lie-
       meez Arabicus for instance.
                                                         Limit.
                                                                      The legions
                           Caesar trusted most though & therefore
    dreaded, he kept
               stationed on the Plain of Mars a mile only
                                      west from the city walls. He watched
     from the seventh hill the drilling
                                                                    columns, consulted
                                          each morning in the sky above him
             the wheeling birds.  A body,
                                                                            he knew well, will
                      at sometime or other, hungry
                                                                                for blood, break
               in on itself & eat.

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Scooter

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Rivard

Featured Art: City at Night by Arthur B. Carles

Phil Rizzuto, shortstop, the Yankees’
Scooter & play-by-play announcer & The Money Store’s
man of a certifiably trustworthy nature,
but invented for me first in war stories told
by my father—
on a South Pacific island naval air station
maybe it’d be fun to put Scooter
in the game, brass thinks
a sports star visitor to war zone
great theater of operations P.R.—
but basketball, not
civilization-beating baseball, basketball
my father’s game—
“I could take him,
he couldn’t get by
me”: sayeth Norman
Rivard, testimony of
a former All-State point guard
1942 season Mass state champs
team captain
Durfee High School Fall River;
his torpedoed destroyer sunk
by a two-man Japanese sub
(a sake brewers’ assistant & an Imperial War College ensign?),
a few days earlier their suicide mission
had sent my father
to the base, rescued
just in time for Scooter’s morale boosting
visit, the two together on an asphalt court
in cosmic time Holy Cow!
an immortal, lucky accident—
but will, pride, intensity
count more for Norman—“don’t depend on luck
OK, why don’t you just apply yourself?”
my father’s question, frustrated by
his distracted, blurry
son—
apply yourself, stay on track,
stick to it, that’s the thing,
you’ll adhere
successfully to whatever you want
(not sure I know what the wanting is for even now),
you can be
an architect, trial lawyer, oncologist, surveyor,
if only you apply yourself—
like a wing decal on the model
of a Mustang P-51 Fighter
or whiskey dried in a glass-sized ring
on a liquor cart?—
skim the ear wax off your eardrums,
Dad—here is your poet, & here
is your poem.

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for Claude Monet

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Michael Casey

Featured Art: Water Lilies by Claude Monet

I mean the excitement level
was just about in negative numbers
as my sister’s basketball team
lost its seventh straight
and after it
the girls are jumping up and down
in total glee
genuine happihappihappiness
the reason? they broke the magic number
ten in the losing score
they didn’t actually break it
but they finally made it to that number
no sense of perspective
in art too you have to see
my sister’s painting
of the flour mill with water wheel
the central subject of which is a frog
amidst the water lilies

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