He would race teenagers for foul balls. When he got one he’d hold it aloft, beaming like a prospector who’d just panned a gold nugget. Then he’d give it to a child.
Dennis resided in the family homestead on Ridge Road, fruitbasket of the Northeast. He lived alone and drove a rusting jalopy distinguished by its varying shades of blue. Now and then he’d stop by my parents’ house to pour water down its chronically leaky radiator.
He farmed as many acres as he could and sold his produce at a roadside stand. He brought corn to the games and gave it away. He also painted houses, taught hunter-safety courses, drove a tractor for Becker Farms, and in winter he substituted at local schools. No kid who ever had Mr. Bowler as a sub forgot him.
Dennis worked hard and with an almost beatific cheerfulness, but he could not afford health insurance. He hadn’t visited a doctor in many years. What if? Yeah, what if.
One abiding memory of Dennis: in his last summer, he brought a telescope to Dwyer Stadium. Not to check out the chicks; rather, Mars was at its closest approach in millennia, so he trained the scope on the Red Planet and the moon, and we took our peeks.
Dennis was so utterly without guile, so joyful, so ravenous for knowledge. He lacked entirely the internal brake that keeps most people from bringing telescopes to baseball games. And good for him.
During that game Dennis ran over to the first-base bleachers and taped a napkin to the fence. He dashed back, pointed the telescope at the napkin, and asked our then ten-year-old daughter to take a look. It read HI GRETEL.
He was such a sweet, innocent man, poor in purse but rich in spirit. Sometimes I think of Dennis keeling over in his bathroom, perhaps at three a.m., the soul’s midnight, as Ray Bradbury calls it. But more often I think of him bounding up the bleacher steps two at a time, talking about Western Canada, running after foul balls, telling Gretel corny jokes, and smiling. Always smiling.
It’s been almost six years now and I suspect he’s still talking St. Peter’s ear off.
Aw, Canada
The American Conservative, 2009
Overcoming my aversion to seasonally inappropriate acts—I hate leaves that turn in August or Christmas carols sung in September—some buddies and I made our annual midsummer creep over the border to cheer on the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League.
Hamilton is a steel and port city of half a million on Lake Ontario. It has history and soul and a meet resentment of Toronto, which in its endlessly advertised multicult glory is like Henry James’s definition of a cosmopolite: a little bit of everything and not much of anything.
The Ti-Cats play at venerable Ivor Wynne, a circa 1930 stadium nestled into a Hamilton neighborhood that is as human as Toronto’s domed Rogers Centre is hideously sterile. Not that Ivor Wynne presents a traditional tableau: the cheerleaders seem to be recruited from Hamilton’s skankiest strip joints, and NFL-ish schlock-rock and TV timeouts offend the game itself.
The rules of Canadian football are familiar yet awry, like one’s spouse sporting a fetchingly strange new hairstyle. The field is longer and wider (I never tire of hearing that the ball is on the fifty-three-yard line), and a single point—a rouge—is awarded to a team that kicks an unreturned ball into or out of the elongated end zone. My favorite CFL score is 1–1. Most significantly, an offense gets three downs to make ten yards. Unlike four-down American football, teams are reluctant to either waste a down with a long pass or patiently build a drive on running plays, so a premium is placed on safe short passes. Not my bottle of Upper Canada ale, but I am a foreigner so I do what all foreigners should do when visiting a country: I shut up and enjoy it and then go home.
The CFL limits imported players to twenty-two per team, but this is too lax. The league once proved a haven for quarterbacks whose race (Warren Moon) or size (Doug Flutie) ran afoul of NFL prejudices, but today the presence of American players is as irritating as seeing Europeans in the NBA and the NHL. Stay home, mercenaries.
Hamilton’s adopted son George Parkin Grant, the philosopher at McMaster University, made at least one published reference to the local gridders. In Time as History (1969), his book on Nietzsche, he attached the word “pathetic” to “the performance of the quarterback for the Hamilton Tiger Cats this season.” A hardy perennial, that remark.
Before going this year, I reread Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965), that rare volume written in response to a specific political episode—the eclipse of Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker—which endures as a work of richness and imagination, a statement of Canadian nationalism that is far more than tiresome anti-Americanism.
Grant mourned Canada’s reduction to “a branch-plant society of American capitalism.” He honored prairie lawyer Diefenbaker and those “nationalist hayseeds” who defied JFK in trying to keep nuclear weapons off Canadian soil. The story misfits our lazy assumptions: Grant, an organic if statist conservative, was also a Christian pacifist. The Liberals who scorned Diefenbaker as a Saskatchewan hick were pro-nuke Cold Warriors who “paid allegiance to the homogenized culture of the American Empire.” Grant’s reactionary—and I mean that as praise—essay became a basic text of the Canadian New Left. It is as if Russell Kirk had written the most damning indictment of the Vietnam War and then become the eminence grise of SDS.
Grant saw as heroic Diefenbaker’s last-ditch attempt to keep Canada from being absorbed into the “universal and homogeneous state” whose HQ was DC. The prime minister, operating from a mixture of “prairie populism with the private-enterprise ideology of the small town,” had asserted that Canada was no mere satellite but an independent nation. For his audacity he was crushed by “the full weight of the North-American establishment.”
(An aside so depressing that I have to quarantine it in parentheses: Grant’s nephew, the deracinated war-craving intellectual Michael Ignatieff, is the new leader of the opposition Liberal Party. Ignatieff, who lived abroad for a quarter of a century, has said, “I do not believe in roots.” George Grant, alas, would have believed all too well in Ignatieff, and in the nightmarish prospect of a self-extirpating Canada electing a prime minister who would like nothing better than to ship the eh-saying clods of provincial Ontario off to die in Iraq or Afghanistan for his globalist abstractions. No, Canada!)
Scarlett O’Hara-like, I refuse to think of Michael Ignatieff. Instead I envision George Grant in the end-zone seats at Ivor Wynne, nursing a Molson, cursing the ads for foreign corporations, and joining in a lusty chorus of Hamilton’s fight song: Oskee-wee wee/Oskee whawha/ Holy Mackinaw/Tigers/ Eat ’em raw!
Bullish on Buffalo
The American Conservative, 2009
If it’s January the Buffalo Bills must be scattered to the greens of fifty golf courses, far from the howling winds and superabundant snows of their autumnal “home.” Only one Bill, backup linebacker Jon Corto, is native to the region. The remainder are about as Buffalonian as Caroline Kennedy.
The localist solution is a territorial draft, so that the Bills would be of Buffalo and not just mesomorphic mercenaries. Of course this would lead to an NFL based in California, Texas, and Florida, with western New York kicked into a minor league. That’s okay. Majors have cash but minors have soul.
Far removed from the glory days of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances in the early 1990s, the Bills’ only recent distinction came from the Sunday morning boostering of my old boss Tim Russert of South Buffalo. I remember Tim before he was a saint, when he was a hail-fellow political operative picking off Pat Moynihan’s
