Boys of Summer : : Anne McAllister

When I was growing up, the boys of summer were baseball players.  And we watched a lot of baseball in my family. 

When my kids were growing up, they played a lot of baseball – on the street and in leagues – especially our oldest son who seems to have inherited what we have referred to as “the baseball gene.”  The apples didn’t fall far from his tree, either. All four of his boys play baseball.  Not just in the summer, either.  Even in Iowa they somehow manage to play all year round. 

But summer is when we go watch them play, which we did this past weekend when the oldest, playing now in a Minnesota college league, was on the field near his hometown.  It’s always fun.

Most summers, too, we either tune in early or set the DVR and record the Tour de France. Those ‘boys of summer’ are exciting to watch, too.  Talk about endurance and stamina and sheer guts just for riding in such close confines where road rash and broken bones are a split second away. 

They provide daily examples of focus and determination and a lot of those ‘heroic’ qualities that I look for in my heroes.  I haven’t ever written a bike racer, but Freya North did some years back. Very entertaining.

It is, too, a lovely way to see a lot of France – which is quite gorgeous, especially on an HD TV.  Sometimes I find myself watching for the geographic scenery, not just for the men!

And this summer, of course, there has been the World Cup to watch. Not regularly ‘boys of summer’ – at least not in their club football – but every four years we get to watch the national teams who have qualified battle each other for soccer/football supremacy.

Again, stamina, endurance, and determination are on display for the better part of a month.  Not to mention the sheer physical spectacle of very fit men in shorts.  I’ve had a hard time focusing on my revisions.  I keep getting distracted!

If you haven’t bothered until now, you still have plenty of opportunity to get into the Tour de France. It’s still in the first week.  The World Cup Final ends this weekend, so you can catch the top two teams, Germany and Argentina, kicking it out on Sunday afternoon (in the US and South America), on Sunday evening in Europe, and sometime in the middle of the night the following day if you’re down under. 

Worth a look!

Do you watch sports? Which ones?  Feel free to add to my list of revision-avoidance activities. 

(soccer photo: Erik Daniel Drost, Flickr, wikimedia commons)