Word: youthe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high-chair tantrum. TV is the baby-sitter of a spoiled kid's dreams: it promises everything, never says no and lets you change the channel if you don't get what you want. And many movies these days are less adolescent than infantile, spinning fables in which youth is its own reward. The summer hit Big teaches that a 13-year-old boy can find love with the proper career woman and succeed in business without really trying. Who'd ever care to be a grownup when childhood is portrayed as so pure, so powerful, so enlightenedly selfish...
...offers to transform Joe into the greatest slugger in the history of the game. Applegate's price is the usual recompense: a paltry -- albeit eternal -- shift in allegiance. Since this is fiction, Joe resists more than most. But ultimately, how can an immortal soul compete with the gifts of youth, grace, coordination and tape-measure home runs...
These are the boys of late autumn, the last leaves on the tree of my youth. Not too many innings ago, there were others: Reggie Jackson; the knuckle-ball brothers, Phil and Joe Niekro; the great lefthanded pitcher Steve Carlton; and journeyman Outfielder Tom Paciorek, kept around last year by a manager who was an old teammate. A few like Paciorek glided gracefully and gratefully into a broadcasting booth. But most went out cursing the darkening of the light. At 43, Carlton, dropped by five different teams in the past two years, defiantly repeats the old ballplayer's mantra...
Such inner struggles are mostly beyond the ken of us middle-aged Walter Mittys, whose images are those of the grandstand and whose own diamond memories ended with youth-league ball more than a quarter-century ago. For all the cliches about baseball being a boy's game played by grown men, we watch and root with ardor because we sense the truth: what happens on the big league diamond is life magnified beyond mortal dimension. Who in his or her daily existence has an experience to equal the champagne-drenched euphoria of a championship team? How can the workaday...
Sweet Bird of Youth...