Good Grief! We Lose
B y scores such as 63-0, 40-0, 41-0, 48-0, 200!!!-0, 123-0, 184-0, 57-0, 293!!!-0 and another 123-0, Charlie Brown’s sandlot baseball team one year lost all 40 of its games to unseen opponents whose line drives up the middle kept Charlie in a constant state of undress. His ERA was 80.00. His team once made 12 errors in an inning, though not the same inning when he walked 35 straight hitters. His center fielder, Lucy Van Pelt, once refused to catch a fly ball because her glove already was full of tapioca pudding.
What a know-it-all grouch, Lucy. She marched to the mound every inning or so to counsel poor Charlie (and to draw within kissing distance of Schroeder, the concert pianist/catcher who preferred Beethoven).
One day, Lucy told Charlie that good pitchers had nicknames: “You should be Catfish, or Babe, or Doc, or something.” Back in center field, she shouted, “Throw it in there, Cementhead!”
Lucy’s brother, Linus, wasn’t much help, either. “I got it,” he shouted on a popup. “At least I think I’ve got it! Who knows? Actually, who cares? When you’ve lost at love, you’ve lost at everything. Nothing matters! Who’s got it? That’s a good question! I’ve got it! You’ve got it! Nobody’s got it! We all lose in the end!”
As the ball bonked down, Charlie Brown, his cap twisted sideways, stood on the mound muttering, “I can’t stand it! I just can’t stand it!”
Nor can we stand the recent revoltin’ developments. Charlie Brown’s creator, the cartoonist Charles Schulz, has done a Jordan/Elway/Gretzky thing. At the top of his game, Schulz has retired. Y2K didn’t get us, but Charlie Brown did, for this truly is the End of the World as We Have Come to Love It.
No more Charlie Brown? Think what that means. No more Charlie trying and trying and trying to kick a football or win a Stanley Cup. This is terrible. Because if you love sports for what sports can be, you had to love good ol’ Charlie Brown. In 1993, after 43 years of trying, Charlie cartwheeled his way home shouting, “I hit a home run in the ninth inning and we won! I was the hero!” His sister, Sally, looked at him and said, “You?!”
He’d never quit trying, and he knew that trying was all that mattered, as on the occasion of that 184-0 squeaker when he asked, “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?”
The real world sneaked into Charlie Brown’s games. There was a gambling scandal (Rerun Van Pelt, Lucy’s baby brother, bet a nickel on a game). There was talk of moving the franchise (but who would have such a team?). And Snoopy, the power-hitting beagle at shortstop, once came to the mound with his supper dish clamped between his teeth, causing Charlie to mumble, “I hate these salary disputes.”
But if Charlie’s team lost games, that never made Charlie a loser. No adversity could discourage a warrior whose hero and role model was Joe Shlabotnik, the .004 hitter who played in the Green Grass League and was famous for making a spectacular catch of a routine fly ball. “After all,” Charlie said, “it’s not the winning that counts. … The fun is in the playing!”
Well, most times. My favorite Peanuts strip begins with Linus in front of a TV set, his arms raised, shouting, “FANTASTIC!” He runs outside to Charlie, who’s holding a football, and he says, “Charlie Brown, I just saw the most unbelievable football game ever played … What a comeback! The home team was behind 6-0 with only 3 seconds to play. … They had the ball on their own 1-yard line. … ” Charlie is listening.
“The quarterback took the ball (Linus goes on), faded back behind his own goal posts and threw a perfect pass to the left end, who whirled away from four guys and ran all the way for a touchdown! The fans went wild! You should have seen them!”
Charlie stands there, his football at his side.
Linus goes on. “People were jumping up and down, and when they kicked the extra point, thousands of people ran onto the field laughing and screaming! The fans and the players were so happy they were rolling on the ground and hugging each other and everything!”
Linus clasps his hands together in warm contentment and says, “It was fantastic!”
At which point, Charlie Brown looks blank.
Finally he turns to Linus and says, “How did the other team feel?”
Anyone who paid attention to Charlie Brown’s gang for even a little while surely came away smiling at the great good sense. I cut out, pasted down and enlarged a strip that begins with Snoopy at a typewriter atop his doghouse. The first panel shows Snoopy typing one word, “It … ”
Then comes a panel showing the world-famous writer in deep thought. Finally, he types “was …” followed by more panels in which Snoopy furrows his delicate brow before finishing the first sentence of his novel “ … a dark and stormy night.”
Snoopy then looks at us and says, “Good writing is hard work.”
At that work, I’ve long followed the advice of Lucy Van Pelt. On a shelf in my office, I have propped up a cardboard figure of the know-it-all grouchy center fielder. A word balloon carries her philosophy of life: “If you can’t be right, be wrong at the top of your voice!”
My, my, the trouble that girl’s gotten me into. But today, for once, I’ll be right, and I’ll say it softly. We’ll miss you, Charlie Brown.