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.