The past seven days appeared to be the Week of the Rant. We had Oscar Robertson's diatribe against modern basketball, Charles Barkley's harangue against numerical analysis and Goose Gossage's frothing over a multitude of imagined sins, best I could tell.
These three gentlemen have three important things in common:
1. They were all spectacular ballplayers.
2. They stopped learning anything about their sport after 1999.
3. They revel in their ignorance.
This appears to be the year of the ascendant crazy uncle -- witness the presidential nominations -- so Big O, Sir Charles and Goose can all be forgiven for assuming their personas, if not their comments specifically, would be warmly embraced. But whereas the electorate, particularly in the primaries, skews towards the visceral and the loony, the sporting public pays attention. After all, sports matter.
Most sports fans recognize these outbursts as cries for attention and dismiss them accordingly. There are enough of us who appreciate that games evolve, tools improve, practitioners get better at their sport over time in an almost linear vector and that those who don't understand it are doomed to fulminate, like the homeless guy on the street pushing the shopping cart and arguing with Jesus.
It's sad for them that they can't see how pathetic their ignorance sounds. It's sad for them that we hear their opinions and know that they are simply condemning what they don't understand. Or perhaps it's merciful. If they realized that their bitter jeremiads were tantamount to proclamations of ignorance, they might be mortified.
Or, they might not.
We all have a choice. I choose to learn new things all the time, some of which contradict what I thought previously. If you're reading this, you have likely made a similar choice. People like Gossage stagnate, wither and die bitter old men tilting against an ever-growing array of windmills. People like us stay relevant, evolve and grow.
That's my rant.
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