Spit: It’s Not Just Something You Roast Meat On

The athlete was working his way through a cheek-full of sunflower seeds, spraying shells and spittle in the general direction of 30 million TV viewers.

Inspired by this charming image, I embark on today’s thoughtful reverie: The Manly Art of Spitting.

(Pause while readers wonder why they should bother to read this kind of reverie, especially at breakfast time.)

Because it’s part of life’s rich pageant, that’s why, though a disgusting part.

Spitting is a disgusting pastime, and for proof just try sharing a sidewalk with a spitter. The other day I was walking downtown, passing a man going the other way, when he suddenly deposited a little bit of himself right on the pavement.

I almost said something, but what was I going to say?

“Excuse me, the spitting area is across the street. This is the no-spitting section.”

“Thank you for missing my shoe.”

Let’s face it, spitting is rife in our culture. Baseball players and football players spit 50 times an hour on TV, or in the case of Tony Phillips of the California Angels, 50 times a minute. So much stuff goes spraying out of that man’s mouth, he looks like a human juice machine.

At least Phillips only spits on the ground. Fellow baseball player Roberto Alomar launched a moist one in an umpire’s face last year, which only goes to prove my thesis: Spitting is not a victimless crime. I’m surprised there wasn’t an anti-spitting initiative on the ballot last week: The No Spit Sherlock Initiative.

Spitting is ingrained in American culture, probably because of our nation’s long and noble heritage of sticking big old plugs of chewing tobacco in our mouths. America was founded by spitters, made great by spitters and defended by spitters. Even today, the U.S. Senate contains spittoons, although observers say they are rarely used anymore. I take this to mean that Strom Thurmond usually misses and hits the floor.

Today, tobacco chewing seems to be on the decline, but sunflower seeds have taken over, especially on the athletic fields. People take big handfuls of sunflower seeds, jam them in their mouths and then spend the next two hours spewing shells out like a chipper-shredder.

Also contributing to our national spitting epidemic - bridges. Put a boy on a bridge, and he cannot resist the temptation to let a juicy one fly over the railing.

Notice that I said “boy.” Males, it seems, are far more frequent spitters than females. Women can spit, too, and some of them are far more accurate than Strom Thurmond, but as a general tendency, spitting is a manly art.

So I can blame my genetic makeup for the fact that, against all rules of decency, I have been known to spit a bit. Actually, I have been known to spit a lot, especially while jogging. I can’t explain why I persist in this habit, which is no better than spitting on a downtown sidewalk, except to say that I somehow imagine that I have lost the ability to swallow while jogging. Apparently, even professional runners can be spitters. A female runner of my acquaintance, a non-spitter, said she once was stuck behind a spitter for an entire marathon.

“He spit the entire 26.2 miles,” she said. “By the end, I couldn’t believe he had anything left to spit.”

I don’t run marathons, but I am chagrined to say that I have been known to spit for the entire 26 miles of a wilderness trail, which may provide a clue to the age-old question: Does a bear spit in the woods?

If it’s a male bear, you bet.

And it also explains how I discovered, after all of these years, that I possess a special talent. I was deep in the Montana wilderness, trudging up a timberline trail, when my hiking companion, a grizzled woodsman, said, “I wish I could do that.”

“Do what?”

“Spit like that,” he said. “I’ve never been able to spit for distance like that.”

“Like this?” I said, letting fly onto a distant boulder.

“Wow,” he said, wistfully. “Nice shot.”

The man had Spitting Envy.

I felt quite proud of my talent, until I remembered how disgusting it was.

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