I had the TV on for company while I ate a tuna sandwich, and the lead event on the worldwide leader in sports — that’s what they still call themselves, with a straight face — was a man in a sleeveless shirt named Stash throwing a beanbag underhand on a piece of plywood in Rock Island, Illinois, for forty thousand dollars.
I watched the whole thing. I want to be clear about that up front, because I am not above any of this. It is mid-August, the Pirates are mathematically eliminated from being interesting, the NFL is still pretending preseason counts, and a man with a forearm tattoo of the state of Kentucky was throwing a corn-filled sack of duck cloth for more money than my first house cost.
The color guy on the broadcast — and they had a color guy, sitting next to a play-by-play guy, in matching polos, like this was Augusta — said the words “release point,” “windage,” and at one point “heliotrope toss,” which I have looked up and still do not understand. He said Stash was “in the zone.” He said Stash had “elite bag feel.” He said Stash’s opponent, a gentleman named Brett who works at a Verizon store in Peoria, was “struggling to find his rhythm in the slop.” The slop, in this context, was a 24-by-48 piece of plywood in an air-conditioned arena.
My old coach, Tony DiMaggio, who ran the wishbone at Lincoln High for thirty-one years and once made a kid run gassers until he threw up his pre-game banana, would have looked at this broadcast and assumed somebody had hit him in the head with a two-by-four. Coach DiMaggio thought Wiffle ball was a sign of moral decay. Coach DiMaggio thought the forward pass was a fad. He would not have understood why a grown man named Stash was being interviewed about his “mental preparation” by a woman in a blazer, and frankly, neither do I.
I called Ray Kowalczyk about it. Ray retired from the loading dock at Coca-Cola in 2009 and now watches more sports than any human being on the planet. Ray said he’d been watching the cornhole circuit for two years. Ray said there’s a points system. Ray said there’s a commissioner. Ray said he has a favorite player who throws what’s called an “airmail flop,” which Ray demonstrated in his driveway with a flip-flop and nearly took out the screen on his porch. Ray is sixty-eight years old.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit. Stash can throw. The man went 14-for-16 in something they called the “final flight” and he never once looked at the board. He’s got a routine — wipes the bag on his shorts, two breaths, eyes on the hole, gone. That is a craft. I am not too proud to say that. The kid’s got hands. If you stuck him at second base in 1962 he’d have made All-Star three times and married a stewardess.
What I object to is the apparatus. The graphics package. The sponsor read for a beanbag company. The post-match interview where Stash, sweating through the Verizon-blue polo of a man who has never once played defense, talked about “the journey” and “trusting the process” and thanked his wife Brittany and his sponsor, a regional chain of car washes called Suds-N-Stuff. Stash has a sponsor. Petey Corrigan, who quarterbacked us to the conference final in ’74 with two cracked ribs and a homemade flak jacket his mother sewed out of a sofa cushion, did not have a sponsor. Petey had a paper route.
I’m not saying cornhole isn’t a sport. I’m saying we have run out of sports and started promoting hobbies, and the people running ESPN know it, and they are betting — correctly — that on a Tuesday afternoon in August an old man with a tuna sandwich will sit there and watch Stash dismantle a Verizon employee for forty grand and feel something. I felt something. I’m just not telling you what.
Denise is bringing meatloaf over for dinner. She says she got the recipe off a podcast. I have stopped asking.