Published: June 25, 2009 09:54 pm      

ADAM VANKIRK: A little more sandlot, anyone?

All of my colleague Mark Maynard’s recent writings about sandlot games stirred up a conversation between the two of us the other day.

He contends gone are the days of sandlot games, replaced by strenuous practice schedules and year-round organized leagues and camps. Now it’s all about proper structure and proper learning, crammed into a tight package. No room to wiggle and no room to experiment.

And I’ll give it to him. There’s very little evidence to contest what he’s saying.

I should probably be careful here since I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but I think Mark would also tell you we aren’t necessarily better off now that we have gravitated so far away from simpler, more traditional ways of learning sports.

And I’m with him.

Mark and I are a generation apart (I’m not sure if that makes him old or me young), but I’m sure he’s glad to know sandlot games were still alive and well when I was a kid. And that’s what I told him when he stopped by for a chat in the office the other day.

Naturally, in the line of work I do, people ask me all the time what sports I played growing up. Truly, the best answer I could give them is that I played them all — and I learned them all. Just not all of them the way kids do today.

It went something like this:

Prime time baseball was in a not-so-busy city street lined with cars on both sides. We used a normal aluminum bat and a tennis ball.

I remember well, too, smashing into those cars at full speed in pursuit of fly balls. Believe it or not, it was actually fun.

No one really cared much about a car ding or dent here or there either. No Turtle Wax was needed for those babies.

Hubcaps were our bases and there really was no need for home plate since no one ever made it there in one piece anyway (you ever try to stretch a single into a double while rounding a ’75 pinto?).

If there was a play at the phantom plate, the ball always seemed to get away and roll down the slight incline of the paved street some 300 feet away before nestling down in the same spot it always did next to the curb.

We didn’t slide much — notice I say much — but somehow we all still ended up with scrapes up our arms and legs. Oh, the fun.

Another variation of baseball was in the back yard of a close friend up the alley across the street from my house. We played home-run derby there on a makeshift field. Our catcher was a shed building that collected plenty of foul balls and our home-run fence was a straight line separating our territory from my friends’ neighbor’s yard. I don’t think he liked us much.

The kicker in this game was that since our fence was only a few good strides deep, we used an oversized, air-filled balloon ball as our baseball. We did that so not everything went flying over the fence, but as it turned out it was actually a pretty good tool for hitting line drives rather than ballooning fly balls. Line drives would flatten out off the bat before rising up for some extra carry.

That baseball sandlot is also where we got to impersonate the swings of our favorite players. You should have seen my Darryl Strawberry. Not pretty.

As far as football, that was in a field behind my buddy’s house on Sunday mornings. Neighborhood kids would meet there bright and early (like 10 a.m.) before we would pick sides. The field was not much smaller than a regulation field, but that’s were the similarities to a real field ended. Ours was more like a Blood Bowl.

One end zone was on the fringe of a wooded area (I mean thick, thorny, nasty stuff), as was the out of bounds line down one sideline. You didn’t want to go there.

The other end zone was half grassy area, half concrete parking space. Concrete lined the other sideline also. You didn’t want to go there either.

We had tackle games, too, and you can imagine what that meant. I still feel sorry for a couple of those kids who ate pavement back then. And some of them I don’t feel so sorry for — this was football after all and we didn’t all like each other anyway.

That same football/utility field also served for a nice spot to dive after fly balls on a rainy day. Catching a ball was just a bonus, seeing as the 12-foot-long slippery slides are what we really wanted.

As for basketball, me and my friend who lived next door used to walked up to the middle school and play games of one-on-one to 100. We beat up an old powder blue and white North Carolina basketball pretty bad doing that. Chain nets just sound better than roped ones do. Don’t you think?

That court is also where we picked up several two-on-twos and where I picked up some gambling knowledge. It could sometimes look like a scene from “White Men Can’t Jump,” though without Wesley Snipes in his short cotton shorts.

Our Olympics of the Sandlot had it all. In addition to some of the more known sports, we also had tag-team wrestling, window-targeting slingshot from the rooftop and smoke-bomb long toss (also from the roof).

There was egging houses on the weekends, too, which took careful planning, form and execution to perfect. I wonder what those grocery store clerks thought two kids were up to, buying four dozen of the cheapest eggs and nothing else. And then coming back the next day for the same order.

And if the weather wasn’t suitable for outdoor activities, we stayed in and played baseball or football on our Nintendo. Video games were a lot more stripped down then, which forced us to math and keep our own stats on paper. It’s how I first learned to figure a batting average.

Point is, we knew how to pack our bags full. We got a little of everything instead of a lot of one thing, which is more like sports commonly is for kids today. Which route is the better of the two is open for debate I suppose. There’s good arguments for both sides, though you know where I stand.

Sorry, Mark — and the rest of you out there. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse on the topic, but I thought I’d just throw in an old sandlot story or two while we were talking about it.

Besides that, this is what I do when it comes to sports.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

ADAM VANKIRK can be reached at avankirk@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2664. Mark Maynard is The Independent’s managing editor.