Caught in the rain walking home, head down, neck wet, the front of my trousers drenched to chill the skin of my thighs, and there in the gutter was a blockage of twigs and leaves and a...
What is it about balls? Some are better than others, but all balls are lovely. A ball is a globe, a sphere, the most perfect of shapes, the shape of a drop of water, the shape of the earth we stand on, the shape of the sun that runs things, the self-forming, cornerless, straight-lineless shape that seems somehow to be at the heart of the natural world. I cannot tell you why. Nor, I suspect, can physicists, but there’s a beauty in its simple symmetry.
A new cricket ball’s a fine thing, with the cherry-red hardness of polished leather and the stitched seam proud enough to cut flesh. And an old one is a fine thing too, the seam worn flat, the leather scuffed and softened by battery and abrasion. But a cricket ball is too specific to cricket and too hard to be kind. It breaks windows and fingers. And it doesn’t bounce as a child wants.
For bounce, the anti-gravity that gratifies the child in us, a golf ball’s good. Its heart of wound elastic fizzes with responsiveness. But it too is a window-breaker. In size and density, it is too much like a stone to be a plaything in a fragile world.
A football’s a simple leather or polyurethane bladder, as befits the simplest and most popular of sports. But a football won’t fit in a pocket and also, in the end, we are not creatures of the foot. We are our hands. We feel and shape the world with hands, we fight and stroke and seize with hands. Hands, not feet, are our interface with things.