Now that the World Cup is over, it occurred to me that I might begin to cheer for one of the English Premier League soccer teams as a way to stay attuned to top-flight soccer. (Sorry, Major League Soccer.) Thus I’ve picked Middlesborough as my team. I’m fairly ignorant about them, but from what I gather they are scrappy underdogs. Cheering for Arsenal or Manchester United would be like rooting for the Yankees or Braves here. I’m a Twins fan, after all.

Middlesborough – which is in northeastern England between Newcastle and York – is also a northern town not far from an area of England that I’ve had the pleasure of traveling in – the northern Pennines. That area was particuarly important to W.H. Auden, the poet who was the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

Soccer truly is a beautiful game. And at the World Cup it is even more beautiful. With its expansive green “pitch,” or field; its lack of commercials; its unfamiliar and colorful uniforms; its many ethnicities with their different appearances and names; its display of remarkable athletic skill; its powerful crowd noise in the background – with all this, soccer is a great, truly global sport. Only the Olympics come as close as the World Cup to being a truly worldwide event. Read the rest of this entry »

After many years of wrangling, on Sunday, May 21, the Minnesota state legislature approved a deal that provides public funding for construction of a baseball stadium in downtown Minneapolis. According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, this ends “the longest stadium battle in the nation.” The new open-air stadium will seat 42,000 people and open in 2010.

I’ve followed this issue with some interest over the years, particularly when the Twins seemed to be in danger of moving or being eliminated by Major League Baseball. I reluctantly support the current deal because I believe the Twins may not have remained in Minnesota without a new stadium. My reluctance comes from the knowledge that many wealthy individuals – Twins owner Carl Pohlad and the Twins players – will benefit financially from a project that is financed with taxpayer dollars. I would much rather see the money for the stadium come from those folks than from the general public of Hennepin County. At least the Hennepin County sales tax supporting the stadium is small; it’s 0.15 percent.

The Vikings’ football season has been over for a few weeks now. Playoffs are underway without our team again, and a new head coach has been hired.

Readers may remember that in October I was upset by the Vikings “love boat” scandal, the players-and-prostitutes orgies that allegedly occurred during a party on two different Lake Minnetonka cruise boats. I’m still bothered by the descriptions of that incident and what they say about the character of many professional football players. Money and fame and their accompanying power seem to have given these athletes a sense that they can use others for their own pleasure. I don’t feel like being another fan inflating the egos of our puffed-up sports stars.

Here is what I wrote in the October 28 post on the scandal: “Will I watch the Vikings again? Maybe, if the team seems to make some kind of meaningful response to the situation.” Well, there hasn’t been much of a response to the situation from the team or the league, so I didn’t watch a minute of the rest of the season.

I went through some Vikings withdrawal during my boycott. On Sunday afternoons I was acutely aware that a game was going on and that I was not following its progress. I had been a fan for so many years that it had become a deeply ingrained habit. Whenever I came near the living room, I was tempted to turn the TV on, but my resolve to take a principled stand held.

It’s been a lonely boycott. Aside from some newspaper letter writers, I haven’t heard of many others turning away from football, as I did. Life has gone on, and many people brush the incident off or forget about it. And yet, it seems there is less sympathy for the team and less support for a publicly subsidized Vikings stadium.

We’re still waiting for legal proceedings regarding the Lake Minnetonka incident to play out. A handful of Viking players have been charged with lewd behavior. I’ll follow the news and see what happens over the off-season.

The pull to become a fan again is a strong one. We’re inundated with media coverage of the team, our neighbors talk about them, and for those of use who have been fans since we were children, the sport connects us to our region and to the past, to a childhood when a victory by our home team seemed momentous.

If I do become a fan again, I’ll take it all in with a greater measure of jaded cynicism. Like anyone else, I enjoy being amazed and entertained by sports stars whose abilities far surpass us average folk. But I don’t like it when those same players—who receive rewards far greater than those given to most of us—rub their privilege and power in our faces. We have enough of that already in our culture as a whole.

We’ve had a beautiful autumn here in the Upper Midwest. It was warmer than normal for much of October, and skies were generally sunny. With the mild weather, bugs were a problem. The pesky Asian lady beetles, an exotic species of ladybug that bites (and a new addition to our region in the last few years), were annoying when we went apple picking, and they like to get into the house as well. There was also an annoying gnat-like bug with a nasty bite. Aren’t mosquitoes and biting flies enough? The more innocuous box elder bug has been massing on the sunny surfaces of the house and finding its way indoors as well, looking for warmth.

In our Northfield neighborhood the maples and oaks and other trees were glorious, with beautiful yellows and reds. Now the weather has turned cooler, relieving us of our outdoor insect problems. Following the first freezing night, I turned off the water to the outside faucet and drained the water from it, and I covered the air conditioner. I’ve been piling leaves around the plants to protect them for the long winter ahead, and we’re putting up shades on uncovered windows.

I don’t have quite the dread or anticipation of winter that I had last year, my first Upper Midwestern winter in six years, which also followed a two-year stint in mild northern California. I’m hoping for a snowy winter and lots of cross-country skiing.

Autumn is also football season, of course. I’ve been a lifelong Minnesota Vikings football fan, but I’m boycotting the team now. It’s not because of their poor record or the fact that they “stunk up the joint,??? as my dad would say, in some embarrassing, one-sided losses this year. It’s more that I don’t respect the players following the well-publicized bacchanalia on two Lake Minnetonka cruise boats. You can read about the alleged orgy in an October 12 Star Tribune article and in a Nick Coleman column, if you haven’t already done so.

Perhaps I should withhold judgment until the facts have been confirmed and the players get their day in court. But no, I don’t feel like doing that. I’ll reconsider my choice in the unlikely event that the allegations are unfounded.

Imagine being one of the employees on these boats, especially one of the female employees. You report to work, anticipating a pleasant or at least tolerable few hours with some of our famous sports heroes. Then the cruise quickly becomes a players-and-prostitutes sex party, which you must witness because you’ve got a job to do. Some big, rich players start to act belligerently, demanding to pour their own drinks. One of them asks you to dance for $100.

I don’t think I’m just being a prude or scold. A group of people with power—football players—are lording it over others. Something’s rotten in our circus-gladiator sports culture, and I’ve got better things to do than watch football.

It will be interesting to see if anything happens to the Vikings players on the legal front. Perhaps we’ll learn that the sex cruises have been exaggerated, though I doubt it. Perhaps the money and power of the players and the National Football League will whitewash the incident. Perhaps the team will go on a winning streak and most people will forget about it.

Or perhaps more fans like me will wake up and conclude that football isn’t so great for our culture. Perhaps there are a million better things to do on a weekend than watch football, better things to talk about around the water cooler.

Will I watch the Vikings again? Maybe, if the team seems to make some kind of meaningful response to the situation. Will I watch the team next week? No. Let the players and the owners try to have a football game in front of empty seats. Let the TV signal of the game go ignored. Let the players, their wealthy owners, and especially their adoring fans think about what they’ve created in their sporting spectacle.

You may have seen it on TV: a person sends a round stone sliding down an ice surface, then two people sweep furiously in front of the stone as it approaches a target at the far end of the ice. The sport I’m describing, of course, is curling, and I recently had the opportunity to give it a try.

On a Saturday morning in February about a dozen of us traveled south to a curling club in Owatonna, Minnesota. Steve McKelvey, an experienced curler and a mathematics professor and dean at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, generously organized the outing as a way for people to learn about the sport.

We began by gathering in the comfortable warming area of the small club, where Steve gave us a primer on the game. He informed us that curling probably began in Scotland hundreds of years ago. The sport is especially popular on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota and in Canada’s prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The St. Paul Curling Club, founded in 1888, boasts that it is the largest member-owned curling club in the United States.

A curling match involves two teams of four players each. They take turns in a series of rounds called “ends,” in which each player throws (slides) two stones. The stones really are made of quarried stone, and at 42 and a half pounds each, they’re quite heavy. A match usually consists of eight ends.

Teams win points by having their stones stop in the targeted area at the end of the ice, called the “house.” A team receives one point for each stone that is closer to the center of the house than any of the other team’s stones. Stones can be bumped from the house by other stones.

Teams alternate in the delivery of stones, and the team that goes last has an advantage called “having the hammer.” They get the last chance to knock the other team’s stones out. The team that has the least number of points gets the hammer for the next end.

The person that delivers the last stones for a team is usually the best player. The “skip,” as this person is called, also directs the other players in the placement of their stones. The “curling” part of the sport comes into play when a player “curls,” or curves, the stone by giving it a slight spin left or right when it is delivered.

According to Steve, curling is “a game of character and honor.” For example, all fouls are called by the person committing them. Both teams treat each other with respect, and players avoid celebrating the other team’s errors or misfortunes. The winning team even has to clean the ice at the conclusion of the match.

After our primer, we progressed to getting familiar with the ice and the movement of the stones on it, sliding the stones back and forth across the narrow width of the club’s two curling lanes. The ice surface itself differs from a typical skating rink. It’s altered by sprinkling drops of water on it, which somehow allows the stones to slid more easily and therefore farther.

We then practiced sliding the stones the length of the ice. Delivery of a stone begins by putting a foot in the “hack”–a wooden block similar to a starting block on a running track. Holding onto the handle of the stone, you then push off from the hack, slide on the ice, and release the stone–all while in a crouching position close to the ice. Curlers wear special “sliders” made of plastic on their feet to allow them to slide while delivering the stone. We also practiced sweeping. The purpose of sweeping is to slightly alter the ice surface and allow the stone to slide with less resistance.

As we played an abbreviated version of a match, I managed to become somewhat competent at delivering the stone. It reminded me a bit of throwing a bowling ball, though curling involves the more difficult task of sliding on ice. I found it difficult to get the range down and managed to get only one or two stones to stay in the house. Others in the group had similar difficulties, as stones usually went short or long. Most of us ended up losing our balance and sprawled on the ice at least once as we practiced our delivery.

Curling reminds me of shuffleboard and lawn bowling or bocce ball, games that more people are familiar with. All of these games involve getting objects close to a target, and they include the option of bumping the other team’s objects out of the way or using the object to block those thrown by the other team.

I enjoyed my curling experience, though my middle-aged knees hurt afterward because of the crouched position required when delivering the stones. Also, I didn’t wear warm socks, and my feet got very cold from standing on the ice.

As I warmed my feet on the stove in the warming area and the circulation painfully returned, I was reminded of similar experiences in warming houses long ago as a hockey-playing kid. The next time I go curling, I’ll definitely wear wool socks.