Chip shots: my weekend plans? Golf, Baseball… Sort of

My sports viewing will take a slightly different turn this weekend than most of your sports viewing plans.

I’ll turn into The Masters to watch the golf, uh, if Tiger Woods makes the cut. Also, instead of watching Major League Baseball, I’m going to see if the 1976 comedy “The Bad News Bears” is playing among my on-demand entertainment providers.

Let’s talk golf first.

I’m one of those people who, to this day, doesn’t watch golf unless Woods is looking for a championship win. From 1997 to 2009, nothing looked like him. He moved the rankings and created such high levels of scholarship in the game of golf that any professional golfer making a living would have to wake up every morning and bow to Florida before hitting the links.

I haven’t played golf since the summer of 2008. I sold my clubs the following winter.

“A middle-aged, middle-class white man without a club in the Midwest,” you’ll probably say to yourself. “This guy is not right.”

I will continue with you.

Chip Davenport, holder of one of the most iconic WASP nicknames and surnames in North America, doesn’t own a set of golf clubs.

I didn’t want to spend time playing the rounds of golf required to be good, even from a distance. I traveled so much between 2006 and 2009 when I was home my wife definitely wasn’t going to kiss me leaving the house for another four to six hours after already being a single parent with my “little ones” on four or five previous nights.

I missed my kids too, even though I was a younger, but much grumpier version of myself. The bug of playing golf didn’t bite me as hard as assembling LEGOs or playing a fashion designer video game.

I can’t wait to rewatch, for the first time in at least 40 years, “The Bad News Bears” instead of an actual MLB game. How could ‘The Bad News Bears’ be better baseball viewing than MLB’s opening weekend action?

I weighed the pros and cons. Here’s why “The Bad News Bears” had more pros than cons.

The movie ends much faster than an MLB game. I still have a good part of the afternoon when I’m done.

The kids in the movie were like a lot of kids I played baseball with on the sand court. That’s not necessarily high praise when you think of characters like Tanner Boyle and Kelly Leak, but these kids were entertaining nonetheless.

I believe almost every little league has at least one stacked team. I appreciated that they won, as they should have in terms of superior talent, but I appreciated – even more – that Tanner Boyle and Timmy Lupus ruined their victory celebration.

Bears stats nerd Alfred Ogilvie hits close to home. I was much better at sorting out player stats in my brain than at executing skillfully on the pitch. Unlike Ogilvie, however, I enjoyed playing even though I had no talent. Instead of being nervous about a batted ball coming my way when I was placed in right field, I wanted some action because the next chance was a chance to do something right. to get rid of previous errors.

My pre-teen athletic incompetence at home plate overshadowed some other skills I had. I was quick, smart, I could catch most of what was hit in front of me (in front of me), and – it’s beyond me why – I could throw from anywhere in the outfield. However, all it took to send me back from home plate to dugout was a pitcher of at least eight years old who could throw strikes…even when I was twelve.

My baseball card would have read – according to my St. Francis Xavier Elementary School classmate Jim Kirchener – “Chip Davenport, DO” for designated. You could hear the collective exasperated voices as soon as I picked up a bat.

Another classmate, Pete Korte, once asked me as I approached the plate, “Does anyone know the lyrics to ‘Sound of Silence’?

Finally, another fun takeaway from the movie was the parents. They were the biggest morons in the movie, and I remember how the art mimicked life even when I watched the movie as a teenager in 1982, six years after it was released, remembering what I saw and heard at organized ball games.

Enjoy golf if you still play it. Have fun watching the 2022 MLB season in its first weekend. I, on the other hand, have alternative plans.