The Great Game of Frizzball

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I hope the drubbing that movie critics gave a summer gross-out called BASEketball--which concerns a homemade game similar to one that the director once actually invented--will not poison the public's mind about hybrid sports created by bozos with nothing better to do. I speak as one of the founders of frizzball.

Even before the release of BASEketball, I did not entertain hopes of winning my wife over to the view that frizzball was a serious competitive sport. In the more than 30 years since its invention--at a summer house, on a day when it was too cloudy to go to the beach--her kindest description of frizzball has been, "It was the dumbest thing I've ever seen."

"They tried to hit a Frisbee with a stick," she'll say. Not so. It was a broom. The batter, standing in front of an old barn in the backyard, tried to hit the Frisbee with a broom--no cinch, I can attest, when the pitcher's repertoire included an effective slice ball. Imaginary base runners advanced according to a formula having to do with logarithms. After that, the rules got complicated.

The summer house, which was shared by several young couples, would have been a friendly enough place except for frizzball. This was at a time when society mandated different cultural norms for males and females--the days before women began following the NFL and men began weeping softly in movies about doomed love or lost pets. The women in the house couldn't understand why anyone would want to spend hours playing frizzball and more hours analyzing each game. They didn't understand how the men could judge someone's character by the way he played frizzball. Cruelly burdened by a culturally imposed sense of perspective, these women were unable to take frizzball seriously.

The progress made in the decades to follow did not completely wipe out such differences between the genders. When the U.S. invades a tiny country, for instance, women are still more likely to dwell on the disparity in size. Men understand that, regardless of the size of the opponent, combat is combat: you detonate large bombs; you win medals; you could get killed. In that summer house, the men understood that regardless of the origin of the game, you still have to analyze the plays. You still have to keep statistics. You still have to play to win. You still have to cheat.

After BASEketball came out, I began to regret that no founder of frizzball became a movie director. What a film Frizzball would be! You'd set the historical period in the opening scene by simply not having any jokes at all about bodily functions. Everybody would be talking about frizzball--at least all the men. The women would be rolling their eyes.

The climactic scene is a game for the Frizzball Championship of the World--which is, by chance, what we called all our games. The batter resembles me. The pitch is a slice ball. I hit it to the second garbage can--a 7.3-run homer. The game is won. I glance up to see my wife in the stands (well, all right, the backyard). She has been caught up in the excitement of the game. She is cheering wildly.