The Public Eye
A friend ask- ed me last week to promote a beach lacrosse fundraiser (see info below) and I agreed, even though I know as much about la- crosse as I do about quantum physics (a quantum of this and a quantum of that, I suppose).
All I am sure of is that lacrosse was invented by the Iroquois, who concluded when the white settlers arrived that ticket sales would be brisk because this surely was a bunch of athletic supporters.
On the other hand, history books tell us they played the game entirely naked, which would almost certainly affect attendance either positively or negatively, depending on your point of view.
Early accounts also say they used rackets that looked suspiciously like the snowshoes worn by French trappers (“Hey, Marcel, they found LeDoux in a snowdrift yesterday, as stiff as le popsicle.”) and used them to throw an extremely hard wooden ball extremely hard around, to or at each other.
This would explain why spectator involvement in those early contests mostly consisted of saying, “Yeeeowwww!” at certain critical junctures. Obviously, each player was responsible for his own equipment.
My only real exposure to lacrosse occurred many years ago, when – and this is a true story — I decided to leave my newspaper job and make even less money at a radio/cable television station.
I was assigned, ace broadcast reporter that I was, to do a live interview with a lacrosse coach, who would introduce me to the fundamentals of the game.
With cameras and sound on, he gave me a stick, walked about 20 feet away and said, “This is how you catch the ball” and threw it directly at me at about a million miles an hour.
Immediately, my stick went up out of reflex and the ball landed squarely in its net or whatever it’s called. Two things happened almost simultaneously: 1) At the precise moment the ball hit the net, I let out, on the air, a one-word exclamation and 2) I was not destined to be a great broadcaster.
Suffice to say things might have been different if all I had said at the time was,” Yeeeowwww!”
