Word: feats
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During the long nights and weeks I spent at The Crimson this past year, I wondered on occasion why we--100 or so volunteer students--put out a newspaper every day. It is not an easy feat. Sometimes, there is simply a lack of important events to cover. I cringed the day we led with a minor flood in a House dining hall, accompanied by a six-inch-wide photo of a sign informing students of flood. The kind of feedback we usually get from readers is criticism, which can be vocal, as it was in response to our coverage...
...another massive merger in the Internet biz. Last week At Home picked up Excite; today Yahoo throws free home page service GeoCities into its shopping basket. The latest deal makes Yahoo much bigger, second only in reach to the mighty America Online. Quite a feat if you consider that no one's browser comes preloaded with a Yahoo home page. And what a validation for GeoCities, a company that seemed absurd as recently as last year -- will anyone ever make money on free web sites...
What does shock us, though, is the fact that no one is doing anything about those problems that are real to us. The impeachment of a president over a feat of semantics seems a lot less real than the fact that my mother teaches at a school where 12 different languages are spoken, a lot less real than the schools I've seen where there aren't any books for the students...
...than it is in baseball. The other team sports, so dependent on the careful knitting of disparate talents for every act, never isolate the hero quite the way baseball does--especially when it places him alone in the batter's box and challenges him to perform the most difficult feat in all of sports. Even off the field, the baseball star has always seemed to have a more sharply defined persona than other athletes do. Decades pass, and still we feel we know them. Babe Ruth, the profane if lovable libertine; Mickey Mantle, the gifted man-child; Roger Maris...
...professional athlete; rarer still, he spoke about it in public. In time he regained his confidence, his health and his unprecedented ability to hit home runs. When he finally had a 50-knock season, in 1996, he apparently decided to make it a habit. He repeated the feat in 1997, and now, in 1998, he has shredded it, performing prodigies unheard of in sport or in most other areas of human endeavor. Thirty-seven years ago, Maris surpassed Ruth's record by 1.6%; McGwire catapulted the same record forward by a nearly unfathomable 14.75%. Here is what a 14.75% improvement...