On Tuesday afternoon, with God in his heaven and a sweet breeze holding the temperature in the low 80s, I’m gazing across the green and pleasant expanse of Cockeysville Middle School’s playing fields. But the only ones doing any playing are a middle-aged lady and her Scottish terrier.
The lady tosses a ball, and the pooch fetches it. This seems to delight the pair of them. But, on this lush acreage of baseball fields and soccer and lacrosse fields and running track, where in the world is everybody else?
Especially now.
So I head over to the marvelous Meadowood Regional Park, out there at the far end of Falls Road. There we find the track for walking and running and biking, and the football and soccer fields. But there’s nobody out there on the playing fields.
Even now.
Some preschoolers watched over by parents are climbing on playground equipment. A couple of kids ride bicycles. They are 9 or 10 years old. The only ones out on the track are a couple of middle-aged types walking slowly enough that they don’t dislocate any hips. Some teenagers are here, but they’re all huddled in a shaded picnic area, sitting around some wooden tables and chatting away their time. Nobody in that little crowd’s breaking a sweat.
So I head over to northwest Baltimore County, to Pikesville High School, where the same thing’s going on: almost nothing. All those empty basketball courts (with the baskets unfortunately removed) and empty baseball diamonds, and that quarter-mile track behind the school, where a woman in slacks walks lonesome laps with no one else around.
I bring this up today, because I thought this would be a moment of heart-thumping inspiration to go outside and play.
Michael Phelps slices into the waters of Beijing, and a nation holds its collective breath for him. LeBron James sinks another jumper, and it’s high fives across the whole country. Venus and Serena Williams wipe out the opposition, and we marvel at their tennis skills.
But where are all the local kids racing outside to emulate the Olympian efforts seen on television screens this week?
We used to take our inspiration from the great athletes, and I wonder if we still do. The athletes made us dream, and we took our dreams outside and stretched them as far as we could. Now we watch hours of the Olympics from Beijing, and who’s getting out of their easy chairs?
Whatever happened to the games of summer?
It’s not just the Olympics. In the old days, you moved through any neighborhood this time of year and saw kids playing games that have all but vanished: stickball and curb ball, and running bases and three flies in. Punchball and tag, SPUD and buck-buck, and the traditional stuff like baseball and tennis and lacrosse. Or you just had kids running from here to there, to see who was faster at racing up the block.
Part of this was youthful energy bursting through our pores. But part of it was imitation. You watched a sporting event, and in all available daylight hours you were out there tossing a ball around and hearing the faint echo of cheering crowds.
That was the stuff that dreams were made of.
Now we have the marvelous Olympic athletes, and the local fields seem empty of ambition. I went to half a dozen places this week and found almost nothing doing.
We hear about this all the time now. A new American Medical Association survey says fewer than one-third of high school kids meet the recommended levels of physical activity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the percentage of overweight American kids has tripled since the 1970s. We now have children under 10 being prescribed cholesterol-lowering pills. They’re eating carbohydrate-rich foods — and they’re staying indoors when they ought to be running around the neighborhood.
In the old days, before anybody had air conditioning, who wanted to stay in the house? It was 90 degrees outside, but it felt like 90 inside, as well. Today, the kids have air conditioning, and a limitless number of easy distractions: Round-the-clock TV channels, and video games, and computers to bring them the world without effort.
And they have the Olympics on television, as we have for the past half-century.
But the games used to be a starting point for something better: testing yourself.
Now, every time I pass a schoolyard or a park, I wonder where everybody went.
Maybe they’re all down at some swimming pool, pretending to be the next Michael Phelps.
Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at [email protected]
