Basketball … pooh!
Media
Part of The Carolinian
- Title
- Basketball … pooh!
- Creator
- Teves, Rosario
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1953
- Rights
-
- Fulltext
- J^asketbaM... by ROSARIO TEVES HAT, at four, just to see the games? Count me out! Basketball... pooh! Every school-year, at this times, the basketball season starts. It draws quite a sizeable crowd of boys and girls even college stu dents at that! Silly, isn't it? All they get in turn is a hoarse voice and fatigue, not to mention the peso-detached wallet. Suckers, huh? I just don't see what they like in. . . in the Thing, er. . . I mean basketball, unless it is the monoto nous dribbling of this brown spher oid. On second thought, girls, is it the players? I wonder if the basketball fans don't get bored looking at those same old faces and funny queer out fits with loud colors familiarly known to them as the team's uniform. But what do they care about such things. After all there is the au dience with several pretty faces to look at. In fact that is one of the boys' main reasons in going to the games. I can't for the life of me understand the fun of watching that silly games, what with the players just going back and forth, occasionally tossing a ball in mid-air, and then assum ing a pretended that-was-nothingat-all look when they accidentally happen to make a one-hand shot although they for themselves consi der it a rare feat, or give a defiant shocked expression when they miss as if it were for the first time. After that there is again the ridiculous running motion of going around in circles, or back and forth. One might just as well see a clock and watch the continuous motion of its Pooli! pendulum. There is not much dif ference anyway except that in a clock there is only a single object going back and forth, while in bas ketball there are several persons. But then in a clock you hear a pleasant melodious tune every quar ter of an hour, while in basketball there is only the shrill, irritating whistle of the referee or the con tinual deafening cheers and chal lenging shouts. And if watching basketball has an advantage to watching a clock, so what, at least you see it for free. I am sick of pivot-shots, set shots and the rest of those basket ball manipulations. Yet they would rather miss their classes than miss seeing the eagers play. Well, not me. I am still unaffected enough by that latest craze to bother with that game. I will rather stay at home. Imagine, such a waste of time and money! The money could be used for something better. The time could be utilized by spending it with things more worthwhile. The boys may perhaps repair that door knob which have been put off for so long, clean the yard, white wash the fence, etc., etc. That same goes for the girls, they can stay at home and make themselves use ful, maybe darn their brothers' torn socks, instead of shouting, making their throats dry and their voices hoarse while their corns and leg muscles ache for rest. It would really be much better that way, don't you think so? Just like me, I am staying home. Look, it is al ready four o'clock and yet... oh, is time that fast? Hey Lil, Vicky, Nestorius, wait for me, I want to see the basketball game! ~ Mhat U , (Continued from, page IS) bor," writes Eugene Lyons, "has been almost forgotten in the last twenty years. It's not any new sex equality' but a new economic necessity that obliges Russian wom en to work at the heaviest kind of men's tasks." (Op. cit., p. 8.) "Re cently," continues this writer, "a study of living standards in 34 coun tries before the war was published in Washington by a group of lead ing economists. Soviet Russia stood 28th on the list, just above China, and India. Since the war, of course, conditions have become unavoid ably worse. In some regions, such as the Ukraine and White Russia, virtual famine has been the lot of millions" (p. 9). Writing of the much vaunted "economic democracy" publicized by Ruscomist propagandists (amongst whom we may place the ineffable Henry Wallace, recent candidate for the Presidency of the U.S.A.), Victor Kravchenko says: "Having tied the workers to their machines and exacted more work for the same pay, we were ready for the next and most humiliating proof of the dignity of labor under the dictatorship of the proletariat. First came a loud and lusty propa ganda storm on the theme of loaf ing and lateness. .. Then came the Draconian edict on ’strengthening socialist labor discipline." Let for eign innocents who profess to see ’economic democracy' and a ’work ers society' in Russia study this edict. Let them consider whether the oppressed workers in their be nighted lands would tolerate such treatment. "The new law provided that any one late to work by more than twenty minutes must be automatic ally denounced to the local Prosecu tor. He must then be tried and if found guilty, sentenced to prison or to forced labor. For fear that soft' officials and ’rotten bourgeois libe rals' in the local courts might be lenient, the decree made arrest and punishment mandatory for execu tives and others who failed to re port or otherwise shielded the "cri minals' of lateness! Only serious illness, formally attested by the fac tory physicians, or the death of some member of the family, was acceptable proof of innocence. Mere oversleeping or transport difficulties could not be offered as excuses. "In my years as an industrial administrator I had seen many (Continued on page 31) OCTOBER, 1953 Page 21