Sport

Jim Marquardt was 16 and seeking some privacy. He had an important letter to write and his short attention span couldn’t compete with the TV in the living room, so he retreated upstairs to his sister’s bedroom.

He shut the door and started scribbling. It was a Saturday night, and while his brain was telling his right hand what to write on the white legal pad, his ears were listening to the St. Louis Blues hockey game. He loved the team and specifically its goaltender, Mike Liut. He tuned into KMOX radio to hear Hall of Fame broadcaster Dan Kelly belt out, “What a spectacular save by Liut!”

On this particular night, the volume was low because Marquardt had to be dialed in. In a page or two, the high school sophomore wanted to capture what to say to his sports hero.

He poured his heart into his words, and as a poor student hoping for the letter to be perfect, he later took it to his English teacher for help. The teacher wondered why a student with flunking grades was suddenly motivated but made the corrections nonetheless. It was handwritten, so every mistake meant a rewrite. The final product was five pages and took a month to finish.

“I remember everything I wrote in that letter,” says Marquardt, now 59.

There were reasons for concern. In the wanton day of mass-formation play, of the Princeton V and the flying wedge, football was averaging about fourteen players killed per annum. Chancellors, athletic directors, and boards of overseers were under pressure to ban the sport. Roosevelt wanted to avoid that outcome. Three universities controlled the rules committee of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA): Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, and so Roosevelt summoned representatives from all three to meet with him at the White House on 9 October 1905. Football was on trial, said Roosevelt. To save the game, the IFA would need to reform it. There was only the matter of how.

The forward pass was suggested. At the time, a player could throw the ball backwards or laterally but not upfield. The team on defense could commit all its players to attacking the offense’s backfield, and the offense didn’t have much chance outside of out-bludgeoning the defense. Scoring was rare and far from assured. Apart from the violence, the games were uneventful slogs, melees, devoid of finesse. Some hoped a forward pass would change things – players would be more spread out; the game better balanced, safer, more dynamic. With more field to take into account, teams would not concentrate into mass formations, and defenses would have to commit players to guard the area behind their lines.

The Yale contingent balked at the idea. They suspected Roosevelt had an ulterior motive: helping his alma mater Harvard (their arch rival) gain an advantage over them. Representing Yale was Walter Camp, the (unofficial) director of its football team. Camp was no lightweight: the line of scrimmage; the eleven men on a side (down from fifteen); the safety penalty and it being worth two points; the point system itself – all these and more were his contributions to the genesis of the game. He had been in attendance at the 1873 meeting when the IFA was formed; his name was on the rule book; in 1892 Harper’s Weekly had called him ‘the father of American football’. It would be a great help for Roosevelt’s reform initiative if he could talk Camp into throwing his support behind it.

This seemed within the realm of possibility. Camp’s crowning achievement, the line of scrimmage, had been a player-safety measure. When he took it to the Rules Committee, he brought statistics that showed the greatest number of injuries happened in scrums. If Camp had been for improving player safety then, it stood to reason he could be coaxed to be so again. But the forward pass was anathema to Camp, for whom the essence of the sport was the ground attack. In his game, an edge was sought by forming as many of your players into as fine a point as possible and running it through the adversarial body. Football strategists of the day thought in terms of phalanxes and legions, studied battle formations back to ancient Macedonia in search of an insight, some irresistible spearhead lost to time.

I can’t decide whether to think about catching frogs as hunting, fishing or something else. There is more than one way to skin those particular cats. I’ve shot them with a .22, caught them on fishing rods, gigged them, and simply grabbed them as they sat looking dour and self-satisfied.

Shooting frogs certainly is effective, but not all that much fun, and I don’t care to shoot bullets around water. Gigging requires a bit more skill and stealth; you don’t throw the gig like a spear, but rather reach out and stick them, so you have to get close. Grabbing can be hair-raising at times. More on that later. Force me to choose a single approach and I’d have to go for a fishing rod. More on that later, too.

However you do it, frogging is largely a nocturnal affair, at least in my mind. They’re out and about during the day, of course, but those are targets of opportunity. Serious frogging always raises for me images of clear, starry skies on sultry summer nights. In Missouri, where I lived for nearly 30 years, the frog season opened on July 1. If there’s a more miserable time of year to be outdoors, I couldn’t name it. Heat and humidity do not combine into an environment that’s comfortable to me. But the prospect of frogs makes up for the sweat.

Probably the oldest form of frogging is simply grabbing them as they sit on a riverbank or the shore of a pond.

Absurd as it may sound to our ears, historians contend that Snakes and Ladders was originally designed to teach us about liberation from the transmutations of karma, with the winner being rewarded with moksha; namely emancipation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Known as Moksha Patam, the game in its original form was intended to teach children about the Hindu philosophies of both Karma causality — centred around committing good or bad deeds — and Samskara, which are ritual life events.

The game sounded a lot more sinister back then. The snakes sent players tumbling into the clutches of power-hungry demigods, asuras, whereas the ladders, thankfully, allowed participants to clamber closer to God or one of the Hindu variants of Heaven known as Kailasa, Vaikuntha and Brahmaloka.

Tall fish tales follow every angling method and species of fish, but they may be a bit weightier with noodling since the practice didn’t see statewide legalization until 2011. For most of its modern history, it’s been practiced in the shadows, hidden from the watchful eyes of the law. Noodlers fished primarily at night, wading through dark waters, quietly coming up for air like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Many homeowners were happy to turn them in. More than a few noodlers were arrested, ticketed, or socially scorned for their troubles.

One such instance is legendary within the East Texas noodling community. I kept hearing the story of the “East Texas Toe-Biter” from the 1980s, when a man at Lake Tyler got into some legal trouble for supposedly throwing a 122-pound flathead out of the water because it bit him in the foot. The kicker, though, was that the fish was still alive and well, just lounging around the aquarium at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. The second part of the story is not only false but also caused a bit of confusion when I called the Fisheries Center to ask about it. Turns out the world-record blue catfish, caught on a rod and reel, was actually the fish held in their aquarium for a time. All that said, the 122-pound flathead did exist, as did the legal troubles that followed the man who caught it.

Because of all this, many modern-day noodlers are former outlaws of the waterways who have broad-shouldered themselves into polite fishing society. You won’t find these outdoorspeople donning waders and fishing fedoras, then fiddling with custom-made flies between picturesque back casts. You certainly won’t catch them bedding down at places called The Moose Elk Lodge, unwinding with a bottle of Chablis. Noodlers are more likely to sleep in their boats, rally with Red Bulls and honey buns, then barrel into the water to scavenge under boat docks. One of the biggest of these former outlaws is Jimmy Millsap, a longtime Lake Tawakoni noodler who is, according to some, “the Godfather of Texas Noodling.”

“I had paved the game warden’s driveway one day and got caught by him the next,” Millsap recalls. “I told him when he caught us, ‘I guess you’re tryin’ to get your driveway money back.’”

This wasn’t a football tournament, though the similarities are uncanny: there were corners, offsides and 11 players per team. The sport of bandy is played on vast swathes of ice, up to 110 metres long and 65 metres wide, with curved sticks and a hard pink ball. To the untrained eye it seems like a variant of ice hockey, but the closer you look, the more the differences emerge.

It’s a global game: in Russia, Sweden’s counterpart as a great bandy power, it’s a national sport played by about a million people. Elsewhere it’s growing: India, Japan and Mongolia are members of the Federation of International Bandy (FIB).

So is Great Britain. Bandy originates in the villages of the Fens, East Anglia. But like so many things invented or codified in England it fizzled out, thriving better in the places where it was exported. I went to meet the enthusiasts, undaunted by obstacles and accidents, who have kickstarted the revival.

[I]t was the Camino that set my mind on fire and the matter of relics that gripped my imagination and nagged at me during the COVID-19 pandemic, when New Zealand’s borders were shut to international flights from March 2020 to August 2021. By the time Kiwis were finally free to move and tickets vaguely affordable, I felt like a shaken bottle of sparkling wine ready to pop its cork. I had ruminated on all aspects of pilgrimage and was about to explode with curiosity and the need to escape.

An ancient walking path across the top of the Iberian Peninsula to its northwestern corner was the perfect place to abscond to. For over a thousand years, Christian pilgrims have traveled multitudinous miles to the town of Santiago de Compostela to worship at the shrine of St. James. Many began their journey outside Spain, in places such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Medieval pilgrims often followed the trail on foot for months, sometimes years. The dangers were myriad, and many never made it back home.

The huge commitment of time and resources, the risk — I was fascinated to know what propelled these pilgrims. I wanted to understand what these journeys meant to them, and why, in this world of virtual reality, people still travel in increasing numbers to sites of pilgrimage. Why do shrines and their relics, which should be anathema in modern times, still draw people? Why, when human experience is increasingly digitized, coded and uploaded, do people still feel the imperative to be present in a place and to walk?

So my partner Sue and I joined the throngs of pilgrims seeking answers on the Camino. While we were actually walking the trail, The Daily Telegraph published an article predicting that 2024 would see nearly half a million pilgrims journey to the shrine of Santiago (St. James), the greatest number ever. The article also pointed out the exponential increase in traffic between 1984, when just 423 pilgrims claimed the Compostela (certificate of completion), and 2023, when numbers hit a record 440,367 — a number that is about to be exceeded because 2024 figures are up 12.5%.

But, fortunately for those averse to crowds, the Camino is not just one pathway. The map to Santiago de Compostela looks like the crazy cracks a flicked stone creates on a car’s windshield. Every line radiates out in a jagged pattern from the central point of impact. In nearly a thousand years of pilgrimage, many routes have been traveled. From their end point of Santiago de Compostela, nestled in the far northwest of Spain, the routes spread out across the country — heading upward along the west coast of Portugal, hugging the northern border of Spain, or cutting straight across the country to the Mediterranean. Today, however, the Camino Frances — the one we chose — has emerged as the most popular. In the 1980s, the route was marked out by a local priest who made it his mission to reignite people’s passion for pilgrimage.