My phone had overheated, so I could no longer check, but by all accounts, it was just over 110 degrees in Lancaster, California, as—for the second time in three years—I was beginning the home plate meeting of a USA Softball tournament championship with an apology.
“I’m sorry—we’re done. We can’t give you anything close to a real game.”
The opposing coach shook my hand and nodded—he already knew. Coming out of the winner’s bracket, his team from San Juan Capistrano had reached our late Sunday final by winning a single morning semifinal. Meanwhile, after staying alive with a win well after 10 p.m. Saturday night, we’d climbed out of the loser’s side of a double-elimination bracket on Sunday with grueling back-to-back-to-back-to-back wins, starting at the crack of the dawn and battling onward through the day’s escalating heat.
An hour northeast of Los Angeles, on the western edge of the Mojave, Lancaster is mostly known for hosting sports tournaments and having a stretch of road that vibrates the Lone Ranger theme if you drive your lane at a designated speed. Across the city’s sprawl of field complexes and city parks, the desert wind blasts bullying waves of dinge and tastes like freeway exhaust and fryer oil. As the Capo Beach girls warmed up with pop flies and pump-it-up music, my middle-schoolers zoned out around misters in our dugout, trading cooling towels and ice cream dreams.
The plate ump, Joe, winked and said he would put the game on a clock—he came from a family of umpires and liked to joke with the players about how he could still show the correct ball and strike count despite missing fingers on one hand. Instead of the seven-inning final dictated in the USA Softball rules for the B-State Championship, we’d just play for an hour and 20 minutes or until a mercy rule kicked in, whichever came first.
The Unnameable: Where Poetry Meets Performance
“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” – Samuel Beckett
In the world of sport, one of the most galvanizing moments is the injured or exhausted athlete rising off the track to limp, hobble, or even crawl across the finish line. The time is no longer of any consequence; the pure act of finishing the race is a triumph of the human spirit. Stay down or get up, that you-can-do-it inspiration quickens and swells an innate rooting response among spectators whose daily lives turn on small and large iterations of that exact decision.
I can’t go on…I’ll go on.