The sports page is always the first thing I read in my morning paper, much as I love politics. I’d rather be out in the hills running than in my study reading, much as I love books. I’d rather listen to a Rockies ballgame than a Beethoven symphony, much as I love music.
Why in the world is that? Sports, I’ve found, feed my soul and fire up my love of life. Sports, whether enjoyed physically as a participant or vicariously as a fan, integrate and harmonize the whole of me, body, mind, and spirit.
Sports situate me in God’s world, feet planted on his rolling globe, lungs gulping his sweet air, arms linked with my fellows. Sports divert me with workmanlike play and elate me with playful work.
Sports spark me. It’s been that way for me since boyhood, and will be until I draw my last breath.
Delight
Starting with sandlot baseball and football before I was ten, continuing with track and soccer in my student days and then with hiking and biking well into my sixties, and still in my blood with the jogging, skiing, and river trips enjoyed even now as I near 80—sports have been a never-ending delight to me.
If I haven’t particularly excelled in any of them, so what? The doing is its own reward. But before I start spinning yarns, let me attempt a definition of what's meant when I say “sports.” Not just any vigorous game or activity can qualify.
A sport, to me, is physical, competitive (if only with oneself), goal-oriented, measured as to results, defined at least informally by rules, and undertaken for enjoyment, not survival.
Thus flag football is a sport, but the kids game of capture the flag is not. The angler with a fly rod is doing a sport; the Inuit who must fish to live is not.
Horseback riding as such is not a sport, but horse racing, polo, and rodeo are. Chess isn’t a sport either, even when it’s a world-class battle of wits. Whereas golf is indeed a sport, even when it is but “a good walk spoiled.”
‘Park One’
Walking the Glen Shores golf links with my dad as a small boy in Michigan, sometimes helping wheel his bag of clubs along the fairway, is probably my first sports memory. I never took to golf in the least, though he never stopped cajoling me to give it a try, almost up to the last day of his life—which happened to include a round of 18 on his beloved Cherry Hills course in Denver.
But Dad’s passion for the St. Louis Cardinals, and for baseball in general, did rub off on me, soon after we moved to St. Louis in 1950, when I was six. Our house at 5405 Bartmer, we learned, had once belonged to the legendary Branch Rickey. There was a whiff of baseball destiny in the air.
I always had my glove with me when my father took us to Cards games at the old Sportsman's Park on Grand Avenue; you never knew when a foul ball would come your way—though somewhat to my relief, none ever did.
Timeworn clichés from Dad’s baseball vernacular became forever part of mine as well. “Park one,” he’d implore the slugger coming to bat with bases loaded. “Can of corn,” he’d scoff when the crowd roared at what became just an easy flyball. Or worse yet, when the big guy struck out looking, the one disgusted word: “Impotence!”
The Cardinals were in a down cycle in those years, and the bumbling St. Louis Browns (whom we ignored anyway, being a National League family) soon moved east to become the Baltimore Orioles. But pennants mattered less to me and my brother Jim than the sheer romance of the game itself. The broadcasts on KMOX, voiced by the great Harry Caray, who later gained fame as the Chicago Cubs announcer, provided the soundtrack of countless spring and summer afternoons or evenings at 5405.
How big did the Redbirds loom in our family's daily life? One morning when the Post Dispatch headlined a Catholic prelate's death with “Cardinal dies,” my little sister took one look and gasped, “Not Stan Musial!” She had probably heard Jim and me comparing notes on our ever-growing collection of baseball cards, where the names, faces, and statistics of Cardinal stars like Musial, Enos Slaughter, and Red Schoendienst were highly prized.
Hickory on Horsehide
My grade-school classmate Jonathan Fisher lived a block from us on one floor of a huge old frame mansion called Maplecrest. Its vast, gently sloping lawn was the setting for many a game of “500,” which involved one of us at bat, tossing the ball up for himself to hit, while a handful of others tried to catch it on the fly or one bounce, amassing enough points—I forget how we scored it—to retire the hitter and replace him at bat.
The beauty of that game was how few boys it required to sustain the celestial music of hickory on horsehide (the sacrilege of aluminum bats not yet having been dreamt of). We were pretty good at making our own fun.
For the summers of 1951 to 1954, Mother and we four kids fled steamy St. Louis for the cool breezes of Fennville, her hometown near Lake Michigan. There I got my one fleeting taste of Little League baseball, discovering to my eternal chagrin that at the plate, I was just flat afraid of that red-stitched white sphere whizzing at me out of the pitcher's hand.
In the field, as a lefty with an erratic throwing arm, I was deemed by the coach as best suited (or least damaging) for first base or right field. It was usually the latter, and I would stand nervously out there hoping nothing would be hit my way.
Overall, it’s fair to assume none of the locals with an eye for rising athletic talent had any reason for disappointment that the shy young Andrews boy was no longer a year-round Fennville resident.
Oldtimers vs. Whippersnappers
Starting in 1955, our family's summer destination shifted from the Sand Acres cottage in Michigan to the boys' camp my father set out to establish in Buena Vista, Colorado. This provided my first glimpse of Dad’s burning competitive spirit on the diamond.
Camp routines and rituals evolved through the years, but one tradition was constant: the Sunday afternoon staff softball games between the Oldtimers and the Whippersnappers (with an age cutoff that couldn’t have been much over 25, if that). Cap, as my father was called, always pitched for the Oldtimers—and swung a mean bat. The contests were all in fun, but he was in deadly earnest about winning.
There were towering home runs, improbable triple plays, comical baserunning blunders, errors and miscues galore. Week after week it seemed no matter how far ahead the youngsters got in the early innings, the oldsters would always find a way to come back and win—a bit like the Harlem Globetrotters vs. Washington Generals classic set pieces.
When I aged out of the camper ranks and became a dishwasher in my mid-teens, there I’d be on Sundays in right field for the Whippersnappers, still hoping they wouldn’t hit one my way.
Scrawny QB
During the school year, football and basketball were something all the boys in my circle followed as fans and hacked around at in the neighborhood, gifted or not (I wasn’t). In hoops, hot-shooting Bob Pettit and the NBA St. Louis Hawks, later relocated to Atlanta, were fun to follow. Though the St. Louis University Billikens fielded some great basketball teams in those years, we paid them no mind, the Jesuits being in disfavor with our church.
The NFL Chicago Cardinals and star running back John David Crow moved to St. Louis in 1960, but I never warmed to them for some reason, perhaps because by then my own sports endeavors in high school were more absorbing.
My first NFL memory is seeing the Colts beat the Giants in overtime for the championship on December 28, 1958. Dad, Jim, and I were huddled around a little, grainy black-and-white TV set in the back room of Guy Wiershing's liquor store (all of us cold sober, thanks for asking) in Buena Vista, where our family was then living year-round.
That was the middle of my freshman year as a boarder at Principia School in St. Louis. I had just come off my first season of tackle football as the scrawny, jittery quarterback of the C team. Notable aptitude as a ball-handler or playmaker I had none, but as a bright kid I was tapped to be the signal-caller for Coach Ross Hampe, the revered (by all of us) older brother of our fullback Bob Hampe, my pal since first grade.
My only vivid memory of that season in jersey number 88 was “getting my bell rung,” as we then blithely called a near-concussion, when sacked one day in practice, and seeing stars for a few minutes before doggedly shaking it off and rejoining the scrimmage. Permanent damage: none that I know of, though my political opponents in later years might beg to differ.
I went on to play three years on Principia’s A football team and one year of small-college football, all of them as an undersized guard on offense and a linebacker on defense. Of glorious moments there were few or none, but the lessons of hanging tough amid adversity were priceless.
Principia C football, 1959. I’m in the 2nd row, middle, No. 88. An odd number for a quarterback? Yes, but I was an odd QB.
Founding Fathers
Soccer in high school and college was a far more satisfying experience for me. It was played as a winter sport in the St. Louis prep leagues in those days of the late 1950s, and played at a higher level of competitiveness than one found in most parts of the country back then. Somehow I became the only freshman to make A soccer, and I ended up as a four-year letterman.
Where the small-motor skills and cerebral demands of baseball, basketball, and football were never a good fit for me, my attributes of stamina, scrappiness, speed, fire found a pathway to success on the grassless, windswept soccer pitch where play was fluid and the tense halves seemed endless.
Disappointed that soccer was not offered at Principia College, four of us who had been high-school teammates hatched a plan to launch it as a club sport there in the fall of 1963, our sophomore year. Jonathan Fisher and I, along with Bill Foster and Pete Link, became “the Pri-Soc founding fathers,” and thus began the richest learning experience in all my 17 years of formal education, inside the classroom or out.
Athletic Director James Crafton, who also happened to be the head football coach, bitterly opposed our effort, fearing (correctly) its gradual drain on his football manpower. Every inch the Southern gentleman, however, he finally growled his assent, glowering at us. Fish, Foster, Link, and I were soon neck deep in all the challenges of recruiting a team, improvising a field to play on, buying uniforms and equipment, cobbling together a schedule, and drafting a coach.
Our draftee was a Swiss man, Reinhardt Ross, who taught music appreciation at the college. European though he was, the poor fellow turned out to know scarcely as much about soccer as we did, but we all groped our way forward together. What a grand adventure. We won our share of games and made memories for a lifetime.
Someone got into the back of the jukebox in the campus pub and changed the name card for the Vandellas' hit “Heat Wave“ to “Pri-Soc,“ setting up lusty sing-alongs. My best friend Allen Orcutt, a wrestler in high school, yielded to my entreaties and became our goalie, absorbing punishment from the onrushing attackers with a stoic toughness that would later serve him well as a Marine in Vietnam. My brother Jim played for us in the club’s second year, the only time he and I were ever teammates. I savor that.
Ebb and Flow
For icing on the cake, headed into our third and final year, 1965, Coach Crafton generously elevated the soccer club to varsity status. Pri-Soc had arrived at last. Soccer at Principia College, now with both a men’s and a women’s varsity team (on the latter of which my niece, Melanie D’Evelyn, played a few years back) heads into its 59th season in 2021, having taken its fair share of honors along the way. Feels pretty good, I must say.
Over the years, spectating at soccer matches has never interested me at all. Perhaps the often-glacial ebb and flow of the game, part of what attracted me to it in the first place as a player, has to be enjoyed actively and not just passively. (Or perhaps not, say a billion rabid fans in every country of the world except the USA.)
Yet the game did soak deep enough into my psyche that even now, if I’m having an anxiety dream, it takes the form of finding myself in a do-or-die situation on the soccer field and being just half a step too slow to reach the dang ball. Foiled again.
In real life, though, I did have the joy of seeing my daughter Jen win all-state honors as a goalkeeper for Kent Denver School in the 1980s, and more recently I had the pleasure of rooting for my grandson Ian on the Front Range Christian School soccer team.
Principia College soccer club, 1963. From left, John Andrews, Jonathan Fisher, Peter Link, Bill Foster. Look out, world!
White Whale
None of the sports played with a ball, however, have captivated me lifelong the way running has. Some experience or circumstance when I was about 14—maybe just the default realization that if baseball and tennis as spring sports at our school weren’t for me, track would have to be—got me out on the cinder oval to race and out on the roads to train. Soon I was a goner.
The half-mile became my event, really my white whale. I could do the quarter in well under a minute—often proved it in workouts and in anchoring our mile relay foursome—so logically I should be able to break two minutes in the half, right? If only logic translated so neatly into performance.
The chase for 1:59.9 or better came to define my eight seasons of track at Principia School and Principia College. More wonderful times than I could count befell me along the way. But the one “time” that mattered most to me, my 880 personal best, inched down only as far as 2:00.0 and stopped there; stopped cold.
Naturally this bedeviled and galled me, especially in the latter years of college when one pesky injury after another kept me plateaued at two-flat. What I didn’t realize at the time was how the bright flame of running just for its own sake was taking hold of me in a way that would forever burn undimmed as the decades rolled on.
To have medaled in the half-mile at the Missouri state meet one year, to have run a decent time in the indoor mile at the University of Illinois meet another year, to have formed enduring friendships with the two fellow Principians who so often blew past me at the 880 finish line, Jim Birch and Win True: all these things I treasure.
God’s Pleasure
But I cherish even more the innumerable hours of solitary contentment and soul-communion that I’ve experienced in striding out the miles (or nowadays, merely shuffling them) under the open sky in locales around the world. Let’s see, where have I gone out running?
Tehran, Tashkent, Vail, Palos Verdes, the back roads of Elsah and Hillsdale, the Potomac riverfront in Washington, the moonlit six miles from Sky Valley to Buena Vista, the lower slopes of Fuji while on liberty from my sub, the airy heights of Pikes Peak in a marathon I was absurdly undertrained for, and the trendy streets of Boulder—completing their famed annual 10K race a number of times before, and even once after, having a hip replaced.
The beautiful simplicity of running is that you can do it anywhere in any weather at any age, alone or together, needing no equipment or gear except shoes, and not even those if you’re at a beach—or Kenyan-born. That high you get has never been put better than by Eric Liddell, the 1924 Olympian in Chariots of Fire: “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” Me too.
Running goes back into the primitive mists of time, probably the earliest thing humans ever did for sport, having had to do it even earlier for sheer survival. Its popularity today in America and many other countries far exceeds that which it had when I was just starting out in the Roger Bannister-Jim Ryun days 60 years ago.
Half-mile blues: The quixotic quest to break two minutes
Episodes and Enthusiasms
Sorry, where were we? A few sentences back, I was a college senior, ruefully hanging up my spikes after one last shot at a sub-two half. Then suddenly memory was hopscotching far away across the world and down the decades, almost to the present moment.
Sports memories will do that. The pleasure of recollection, long afterward, is almost as great as experiencing or witnessing the contest fresh and firsthand. I have friends who can tell you the score of some antediluvian high-school game they played in, the season won-lost record, even the play-by-play of a decisive touchdown drive. Their faces glow with relived excitement. I’m not that way.
For me, there’s just this vast, varied, vivid mural painted, as it were, on the outfield walls of my life’s playground, gauzily depicting a happy jumble of sporting episodes and enthusiasms through the years, many involving my father or brother.
Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, and Orange Bowl games that Dad took us to. The AAU national track championships in St. Louis where a pole vaulter narrowly missed the world record. Flying to the Indy 500 in my uncle Bill Andrews’ small plane, just after college final exams one year. (I dozed through much of the race, wrung out from an all-nighter.)
Principia athletes we idolized, such as basketball star Ty Anderson or miler Bud Krogh, coming over for waffles on Sunday evenings. Sports Illustrated as the most avidly-read magazine showing up in our house each week—well, maybe tied with a couple of church periodicals. Dad’s hard-fought tennis matches with his friend Bill Van Vleck; Jim and I loved the way they called each other “laddie buck,” like two chaps in a Hardy Boys novel.
Forty Peaks
The tumbling class my parents signed me up for with the oldest Van Vleck boy, Pete, at which he was a natural and I a flop. The swim lessons they also enrolled me in, taught by the comely Miss Francis and the plump Miss Cabbage. The ice rink from which I walked home in tears after busting out a front tooth trying to skate backwards.
My Red Cross swimming badges finally earned during a teenage summer at the waterfront-focused Camp Leelanau in Michigan, where I also got my first taste of sailing and canoeing. Learning tennis and failing to learn volleyball, back at the family’s Colorado camp. Intense bouts of horseshoes or ping pong (if they count as sports) as we awaited the dinner bell on those long July afternoons.
Being there for the big moments on the big stage—when the Rockies came back in the bottom of the 13th to snatch a 2007 World Series berth from the Padres, and when Tim Tebow threw for a TD on the first play of overtime to beat the Steelers in the 2011 wild card.
And the big moments on the little stage—when my daughter starred in junior high hoops with Broncos coach Dan Reeves yelling her name from the stands, or when her sister sprawled on the cinders in an 880 relay but got up and finished the race, or when my son sprinted back to haul in a long fly ball over his shoulder in Little League.
Unforgettable hikes that included reaching the summit on forty of Colorado’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet (starting with Mount Princeton when I was 13 and finishing with Mount Sneffels when I was 69), backpacking from rim to river and back during a week in the Grand Canyon, and negotiating the treacherous moonlit glaciers of Mount Rainier by headlamp in order to crest the top at sunrise.
Technical mountaineering with pitons and belays intrigued me in my camp-counselor days at Sky Valley, but my only fling at it was tagging along with my father’s brother George for some climbs in the Sierra Nevada when I was just out of high school.
Uncle George’s spirit of derring-do, whether on a sheer rock face in a blizzard or on one of his myriad transcontinental bicycle treks, always stirred me.
In pale homage to him, I undertook several far less epic cycling feats, such as the Pacific Coast 100-mile “century ride” from Carmel to San Simeon, the Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park, and—with brother Jim—the 130 miles from Denver to Buena Vista as well as the Mississippi River levee trail between Vicksburg and Natchez.
Lion Heart
Here let me say a word about my Pard, mon frere, as we called each other: James H. Andrews, 1946-2019. Jim was small in stature at 5’4”, owing to a childhood illness, but he had a lion heart and a quenchless competitive spark. By sheer will and grit, he made a go of both baseball and football at the varsity level in Principia School and Principia College. Where I had washed out of those two sports, as related earlier, Jim stuck at them and prevailed.
In adulthood, right to the end of his days, part of the deep loving bond between us rested on the sports stuff we did together. Being there when the Cardinals, impotent no more, beat the Dodgers to win a World Series berth in September 1964. Summiting four 14ers on a single morning from a campsite on Kite Lake. A Super Bowl party he and Becky hosted in one of the Broncos’ glory years. The cousins canoe trip tradition we collaborated on for almost a quarter-century, climaxing on Oregon’s Rogue River in the final months of Jim’s too-short life.
Jim wouldn’t claim that as a baseball player he was ever much more than a journeyman. But he was a student of the game and loved it with a passion. For a couple of summers, Dad sent him to the Art Gaines Baseball Camp in Hunnewell, Missouri, where aspiring young players would travel the boonies sharpening their skills in games with podunk town teams like something out of Ring Lardner. My brother thrived on it.
As for football, Jim as a college sophomore, having been my soccer teammate in his freshman year, veered back to the gridiron—determined, I guess, to prove something to himself. “I couldn’t not give football a shot,” he wrote in Downstream, the 2018 memoir we co-authored. After two seasons as a scrub, part of what he sardonically called Coach Crafton’s “hamburger squad,” Jim in his final year saw more playing time and earned a letter.
In Downstream, Jim said he remained unsure, all these years later, why college football played “such a prominent role in my origin story.” But I think I know the reason. It was one of his life’s Invictus moments, a rite of passage in taking on something hard, standing the heat, and gaining the prize; a crucible of character that would see him through half a century. Well done, Pard. Miss you.
Jim and I captained seven trips in our Cousins Canoe series, 1996-2018. This was our final one together on the Rogue in Oregon.
Marred
The Invictus movie, come to think of it, is about exactly that: how sports can elevate the human heart and sometimes even the human community, in this case South Africa and its 1995 national rugby team. Whereas the Invictus poem by William Ernest Henley doesn’t specifically concern sports, though its famously defiant lines, “I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul,” if not carried to a Promethean extreme, give voice to many an athlete’s indomitable will to prevail and excel.
The bitter politicizing of American sports in these times, a distorted echo of the racial angst that gripped Nelson Mandela’s South Africa, has tragic implications with no end in sight. Baseball’s all-star game, football’s anthem protests, basketball’s BLM sloganeering, even the youth sports imbroglio over who’s really a female: where will it end? I pray our country may soon find a way to deescalate all this, though honestly I am not optimistic.
Just as war is too grave a matter to be left to the generals, sports are too beautifully innocent to be marred and tarred by the identity demagogues. Sports, even at their most commercialized, possess an almost sacred on-field purity that is worth fighting to reclaim, protect, and save. Sports enchant us with the distilled essence of drama, risk, sacrifice, and heroism that renders life, at least for an hour or two, more fully alive.
Sports remind us that DNA is not destiny. Nor is it a moral determinant. Dedication, devotion, desire, decision, and drive count for more. Determination transcends determinism. And the whole American experience proves it.
America astonished the world, back when aristocracy still ruled most countries, by demonstrating the limitless possibilities of a place that doesn’t ask who you are, but merely what you can do. The openness to all talents, it was called. We seem to have lost some of that amid the culture wars of this new century. Can sports help us begin restoring it, first on friendly fields of athletic combat and then across our whole society? I do most earnestly hope so.
Finish Line
I thought about concluding these reflections with a grab bag of personal what-ifs, a retrospective sports wish list. How good it would have been, I muse, to have become a better skier, a better tennis player, to have run a bunch of marathons and maybe even a triathlon (as my son’s intrepid wife Stephanie did).
What a satisfaction if I’d kept at it and peaked the remaining dozen of Colorado’s 14ers, if I’d learned to box, if I’d taken up golf when I was younger—though indeed, who says I couldn’t take it up now, at a ripe young 77?
Heck, if I’m so bent on pushing the geriatric envelope, why not, after enlisting expert help (or a shrink), try riding a steeplechase, rafting the Grand Canyon, or joining other geezers at a Colorado Rockies fantasy camp?
The upshot of that whimsical riff was to bring me at last to what may be the very core of why sports fascinate me. It’s about the elemental questions most of us can’t help asking ourselves: Can I do it? Can I make it? Can I win? We confront these both hypothetically as spectators and as a real-life self-test or self-dare in doing sports.
Can I make the team, make the cut, make the basket, make my parents proud, make the crowd roar, make the playoffs, make the big time? Can I win on the scoreboard, win the matchup, win others’ admiration, win over the doubters, win the inner struggle against fear or fatigue or my demons, win even when losing?
What is winning anyway? What is losing? Where’s the finish line? How will I know when it’s the bottom of the ninth? Why are we here in the first place?
Everyone has to sort this stuff out as we all compete and collaborate in the game of life, often with far more at stake than in any sports contest. But sports provide us a safely structured setting in which to experience the pleasures, benefits, hazards, and rewards of striving for clearer and clearer answers. I guess that’s why I love them so.
Rockies vs. Nats, 2019, with my friend Larry Williams, a former homeless man who now helps run the ministry that saved him