From armchair athlete to bloody Sunday
FRIDAY NIGHT: He could hear them yelling "Slide! Slide!" Home plate was only a few feet away. So what if he hadn't played softball since college 20 years ago? So what if he now weighed 275 Ibs. ? He could do it. He knew he could. He slid ... They carried him off the field.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON: She had run two miles her first day of jogging, then three miles the second. Now she was going for six. All right, she felt a bit sore. But she was young, only 35, and in good shape ... Next day she had to go down the subway steps backward on her way to the doctor.
SUNDAY MORNING: He was 50, but he wasn't going to let any 17-year-old beat him, especially his own daughter. He'd taught her to play. O.K., so he only hit on weekends, and she played every day. If he just stretched a little more on his forehand shots, he could put the kid away. He knew it. He stretched ... She got the car and drove him to the hospital.
Stirred by dramatic TV shots of derring-do afield, badgered by friends, family and physicians to stop smoking and start shaping up, armchair athletes all over America in far greater numbers than before are becoming the weekend warriors of sport. But the years, and the gin and the weed and the encroaching flab, have taken their toll. The net result can be painful, and sometimes lethal.
An estimated 12 million Americans were hurt in recreational athletics in 1963. By 1971 that figure had climbed to 17 million. Last year it reached 20 million. In hundreds of hospital emergency wards and physicians' waiting rooms they sit, these weekend warriors, with their tennis elbows; stress fractures; broken noses; tendinitis; dislocated shoulders, hips and fingers; strains and sprains; not to mention sundry bruises, abrasions, lacerations and concussions. "People should realize they simply cannot ask their bodies to do as much at age 30, 40 or beyond as they could at age 20," says Mount Sinai's Dr. Burton L. Berson, a New York City orthopedist who runs one of the many new sports-medicine clinics that have sprung up all over the U.S. to care for men and women wounded in the pursuit of health and happiness.
Some injuries are simply the result of the athlete's being a klutz. California Tennis Guru Vic Braden points out that neophyte tennis players quite often cut themselves opening a can of balls, regularly rap partners in the head during warmups, or slip and fall on balls dropped on the court. Even the experienced player occasionally comes to grief. Says Columnist Art Buchwald, who has been sporting a cast on his badly sprained left leg: "I was going for one tennis ball and slipped on another." And there are the freak accidents. Like the Kansas City, Mo., runner who was knocked to his knees, and suffered puncture wounds and scratches on his head, when he was attacked by a bird with a white underbelly and a wingspan of 5 or 6 ft., presumably an eagle or a hawk.