Word: game
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...possibility, and enjoy the catharsis of a well-defined universe, presided over by umpires who distinguish fair from foul. This year, however, as the regenerative cycle of baseball's spring comes round again, there is less of a sense of a new beginning: not only has one of the game's most upstanding onetime icons, Steve Garvey, been revealed as a three-timing playboy, but its finest hitter, Wade Boggs, has been hung with the "A" of adultery...
...inspire us with feats of self-transcendence, to do the things that we can only dream of doing -- like hitting a 100-m.p.h. fast ball or leaping over fences to make the catch that saves the day. By those standards Boggs is one of the greatest wonders in the game today, whose level of consistent excellence would be the envy of anyone in any job. The vicissitudes of his private life are as irrelevant as his habit of eating chicken before every game...
...then, does the exposure of Boggs, though so much less important, feel so much more plangent than the rejection of Tower? Perhaps because we place more faith in our athletic superstars, and expect more faithfulness in return. Heroism is famously a game of inches: get a little too close to a role model, catch him at the backstage entrance, and the loss can be desolating. Admiration is itself a form of suspended disbelief; turning a blind eye can be as much an act of forgiveness as turning the other cheek. We cannot afford to see our heroes at too close...
...baseball team in Osaka, got rid of their longtime star, the American Randy Bass, because he stayed at his ailing son's bedside instead of returning to the team. For the Japanese, putting family before company was the ultimate sin; to Bass, no doubt, abandoning his son for a game would have seemed the greater treachery. Many fans these days believe that baseball players who turn their heroism to capital, selling autographs to kids (Mickey Mantle earns more from signing his , name than he ever did from playing ball), are committing far sadder infidelities than Boggs...
Generations' game is considerably more radical. A program integrating the two races as equal partners might just attract more viewers among blacks, who constitute a significant 20% of the daytime audience. "Nobody," says NBC entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, "had tried to create a show for a large black population that exists in daytime audiences. I thought we should do it." Serials, moreover, can be long-lived (Guiding Light is in its 37th year), and NBC thinks it has designed a breakthrough, "a new automobile for the late 20th century," says Tartikoff...