Baseball boxing and the baha’i faith

When a series of programs about baseball, a series called The Big Picture, began to unfold on television, I quickly came to realize the remarkable similarity between the story of baseball, boxing, and the story of the Baha’i Faith, all of which grew up in the modern age. Indeed, there are many organizations, activities, interests which were born and developed in this modern age, say, since the French and the American revolutions. The points of comparison and contrast between the great charismatic Force which gave birth to the Baha’i Faith and its progressive institutionalization on the one hand, and the origin and development of other movements and organizations on the other, is interesting to observe. -Ron Price with thanks to Ken Burns, “Baseball: Part Two,” ABC TV, 18 February 1999.

They all grew through
forces and processes,
events and realities
in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries:
baseball, boxing, and the
Baha’i Faith grew along
their stony-tortuous paths,
the latter out of the Shaykhi
School of the Ithna’Ashariyyih
Sect of Shi’ah Islam.

And it would be many years
before the Baha’i Faith would
climb to the heights of popularity
that baseball & boxing had achieved
quite early in their history.

Baseball and boxing were games,
activities whose time had come,
hybrid inventions, growths out of
diverse roots, the fields and rings,
the sandlots and arenas of America,
as American as apple pie.

And the Baha’i Faith was an idea
whose time had come, would come,
slowly, it would seem, quite slowly
in the fields, the lounge rooms,
the minds and hearts
of a burgeoning humanity
caught, as it was,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it apart.

Ron Price
17 February 1999

I love you Ron.:alcoholic:

i like the part about

"caught, as it was,
in the tentacles of a tempest
that threatened to blow it apart."

becasue it shows how much he truly bnelieves that Bahai faith is the answer to all the worlds probs.

After 2 years, it's time to say "thanks."-Ron

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Originally Posted by RonPrice

After 2 years, it's time to say "thanks."-Ron

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Thanks Ron.

Thank you Ron, but watch out there for the Devils. I hear they are hanging out wqhere Andre left his footprints over in the hippy areas of love and peace.

More on baseball while I'm here having a look at some threads.-Ron
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WITHOUT CELLULOID SAFETY

Part 1:

In 1987, twenty-five years after I played the last game of baseball in my teens, Ron Shelton a former minor league player wrote a screenplay called Bull Durham. In 1987/8 it was made into a film by the same name and it starred Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. Bull Durham received many nominations for awards and won: Best Film, BMI Film Music Award and Best Screenplay.

It was nearly 11 p.m. when I started to watch this film in April 2005 for the first time in my home in northern Tasmania. By this time in the evening I’ve had a 14 or 15 hour day, and am on my last physical and psychological legs. Watching TV at this time of the evening is like a sedative. It helps me shut my brain off. I did not find the film as inspiring, as moving, as great a sports film or all-round film as most critics seemed to find it.

Part 2:

Susan Sarandon was, as one critic put it, ‘sizzling,’ but I found the story-line somewhat simple-minded and tedious. If I had not been so tired I think I would have turned it off. I won’t summarize the story-line here; you can read it yourself on the internet if you are interested. But the film did remind me of the everyday details of baseball that I enjoyed myself as a player from 1954 to 1962 and it led to this prose-poem.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, April 16th 2005.

I never found baseball metaphysical,
profound or paradigmatic back in those
halcyon years, although I must confess
there was a reverential feeling in my bones
about the game: I loved baseball back then
in the pee-wee, bantam, midget and juvenile
leagues. I was concentrated & relaxed, mostly.

And by God could I hit a ball, even got
an award or two and pleased my Dad
who was on the eve of his retirement.

It was the year Shoghi Effendi died.
I’d hardly left the proverbial womb,
knew nothing of that pearl cast up
across those Twin resplendent seas,
so little was the little that I knew.

Yes, there are greater glories in age,
Mr Shelton.......Those youthful years
which I summon up in remembrance
of things past, in sweet silent thought,
I do not sigh for the lack of things that
I sought, nor waste my time in wailing
with old woes, although there is an old
sadness sometimes coating my brow.

Yes, there are friends hidden now in death’s
night with their long-cancelled dateless sorrows.
There are so many vanished sights and many
grievances long gone, but some new wind
began to blow in my playing fields back then
unbeknownst to me. Some new, thrilling motion
permeated the life of that young boy even then,
unbeknownst to him in hot summers and now
I’ve put it in my script, flawed and plausible,
ordinary, without that celluloid safety, but
some predictable wonder & awe, yes, awe!

Ron Price
16/4/'05 to 12/6/'14.

I used to write poems and journals and diaries like this when I was in my teens, twenties, maybe early 30s. By the time I was 40 I realized that these are all just rantings and self-assurances and acts of loneliness and desperation, to fill a void, for example. It is better to get off one's ass and go out and actually DO something than to just scrawl and scrawl and scrawl all kinds of SELF-ABSORBED, SELF-REFLECTING, SELF-CENTERED DRIVEL, for years and years and years, and to think this guy is still doing this at the age of 70.

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Originally Posted by brocktonblockbust

I used to write poems and journals and diaries like this when I was in my teens, twenties, maybe early 30s. By the time I was 40 I realized that these are all just rantings and self-assurances and acts of loneliness and desperation, to fill a void, for example. It is better to get off one's ass and go out and actually DO something than to just scrawl and scrawl and scrawl all kinds of SELF-ABSORBED, SELF-REFLECTING, SELF-CENTERED DRIVEL, for years and years and years, and to think this guy is still doing this at the age of 70.

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don't you still write poems and journals here?

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Originally Posted by walrus

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Originally Posted by brocktonblockbust

I used to write poems and journals and diaries like this when I was in my teens, twenties, maybe early 30s. By the time I was 40 I realized that these are all just rantings and self-assurances and acts of loneliness and desperation, to fill a void, for example. It is better to get off one's ass and go out and actually DO something than to just scrawl and scrawl and scrawl all kinds of SELF-ABSORBED, SELF-REFLECTING, SELF-CENTERED DRIVEL, for years and years and years, and to think this guy is still doing this at the age of 70.

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don't you still write poems and journals here?

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yes, HERE, on the Hidden Forum, not spamming them on 8000 sites, and to make it worse, with a religious agenda to boot. Are you friggin serious , mate? HOLY COW!!!! :)

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Originally Posted by brocktonblockbust

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Originally Posted by walrus

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Originally Posted by brocktonblockbust

I used to write poems and journals and diaries like this when I was in my teens, twenties, maybe early 30s. By the time I was 40 I realized that these are all just rantings and self-assurances and acts of loneliness and desperation, to fill a void, for example. It is better to get off one's ass and go out and actually DO something than to just scrawl and scrawl and scrawl all kinds of SELF-ABSORBED, SELF-REFLECTING, SELF-CENTERED DRIVEL, for years and years and years, and to think this guy is still doing this at the age of 70.

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don't you still write poems and journals here?

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yes, HERE, on the Hidden Forum, not spamming them on 8000 sites, and to make it worse, with a religious agenda to boot. Are you friggin serious , mate? HOLY COW!!!! :)

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:-\Your poetry could get you banished from the teaching profession,probably best hidden away from the view of your co workers and bosses.;D