European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - April 23, 1977, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Necessity of How strange to learn that Ted Gold was a devoted baseball Ted Gold the Colum Bia University ads Leader who joined the weather underground and then got blown up in that Brownstone on Lith Street in Manhattan was a fanatic Follower of the san Francisco he read the Box scores every he once said that he would have to wait until Willie Mays retired before he could become a True did he think he could orchestrate a revolution and still go on rooting for capitalist baseball had he never Learned to put aside childish things its not strange its or take the Case of Howard who describes Ted golds baseball Devotion in baseball and the cold being a Soliloquy on the necessity of baseball Harcourt Brace Senzel was a passionate Follower of his Home towns bus league the Rochester red wings of the inter National while he was growing up in the years following world War then when he went off to he switched his allegiances to Marx and Hegel and the new the Only connection he could Sec Between the Root ing interest of his childhood and that of his adulthood was that baseball was a symptom o his alienation in the baseball was the opiate of the the pornographic fantasy of love without or so he As he strode Forth in search of revolution against the corporate but the revolution and part of the reason it As far As senior could was precisely because his generation dismissed its youth As trivial and Early in the 1970s he Doest say exactly when he went Back to his family in Rochester and bean to investigate his the most visible put of which was his passion for after weeks of Reading in old copies of the Koe Heiter Democrat and chronicle be Story of How the International league removed its representative from he thought he saw the crucial connections Between baseball and the cold and after his passion for baseball was reign Ltd by the world series of he saw the crucial connection Between baseball and baseball is so deeply rooted that it subject to baseball is be least vulnerable and most confident piece of myself that i am in touch and so i am Able to see All i and do All i through the metaphor of and no other framework could do this because no other framework could Ever allow me the Iamb kind of Access to give Howard Senzel the Rochester red and he will move the is this ridiculous an elaborate justification for not putting aside childish things a demonstration that the new left was always childish to begin with it might seem so from the foregoing but such a conclusion fails to account for sentels self aware when he sounds like a he is the first to admit when his friends and family stare blankly at he has nothing but sympathy for there is even an element of self mockery present when he laments baseballs switch to artificial grass and gone from the game is one More of the imm Easu unpredictable sources of the bad in Senzel seems to know be is not to be taken Loo and he seems to know that we know that he knows it which somehow gives him License to be All the More lugubrious Over what capitalism has done to his be loved and still get away with Given this Boie Ball and the cold War becomes much Mare than a mock serious disquisition on the importance of childish it a tender Memoir about growing up jewish in the postwar it pays homage to stoop Ball and autograph collecting and the Boardgames Allstar baseball and a dozen other bits of trivia that made life Worth in those Long ago mind less it is a telling criticism of the new Lett and its tendency to deny the past this made us particularly naive about our own growth and and consequently naive about our personal we always and we still that anything desirable is and you cant get More naive than it is an equally Tell ing denunciation of corporate America and its aptitude for turning culture into and of course it is a marvelous meditation on baseball its its timeless the evils of not All of the 60 million or so poker players in America necessarily want to get better at the a sizable number of them Are compulsive gamblers and therefore want to lose As Freud and his follow ers have need to punish them selves for their childhood sexual fantasies by having their Money taken away from there Are plenty of men and women around who see poker As the game of skill it essentially and genuinely want to improve at a constructive Way to do so is to read a Goodboo about the which brings me to David Span hers Totol Poter Simon pc an entertaining Survey of the game and its manners by an economics correspondent that while it teaches some of the finer Points of it also this is not always the Case with poker which tend to be either so theoretical As to numb the mind or so entertaining that theres nothing to the most delightful poker Book i have Ever Herbert Yard cys the education a poker sins in both these Yardley wonderful about his career As crypt analyst and foreign Corre often have rather Little application to the games you and i play while us highly conservative strategy too conservative Tor players who enjoy poker for its action is really Only useful for games in which the stakes Are on the other manages to blend theory and anecdote there Are tables of Odds to study probabilities of getting a Pat Odds against improving in the seven card stud and so on and there Are strategies to figure the investment Odds on a Given which must be greater than to be but Spanier Doest just Challenge you to memorize these tables and Back ing up his advice with the observation of 1972 world Champion Amarillo slim Preston that there Are probably not even 40 people in the United states who know the proper percentages involved in drawing out a he also illustrates the Point by in his chapter presidential How Dwight Eisenhower became a first rate player by having the percentages dinner into his head by an old Kansas woodsman named Bob who used to take the Young Eisenhower on camping trips and play poker with him for match Sticks until the boy collapsed exhausted by the Camp what Spanier seems to be Demon Strating is unlike certain other sack As chess Aad tiddly poker really does apply to so goes his at any whether he is discoursing on compulsive losing and the strategy that Muhammad Ali applied in relieving George Foreman of the heavyweight boxing championship at he relation ship of sex to or the fact that the Best film Ever made about the game is the is actually about As Waller Matthau once the game exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so is it really naughty to play especially when 60 million1 other americans continue to ignore the fact that in is illegal to do so in every state but Nevada and Cali fornia Spanier cites Modem jewish which in his that the degree of the evil of gambling diminishes to the extent to which Al the game involves skill As Well As Chance b the stakes Are Small c the beneficiary is a Chanty rather than the individual player i the game is Only a subsidiary part of the evenings entertainment and Al the primary motive is the companionship that the game provides especially for lonely people rather than the titillation of the gambling these human classifications seem to me eminently sensible for anyone who seeks a moral Frame for his gambling activities or for that for any authority concerned with regulating april 1977 the stars and stripes Page 13