Maybe it was because my father had been a good Finnish baseball player, and had even been on the winning team of an all-Finland sports camp back in the day, or maybe it was just because I was pretty good at catching the ball in pesäpallo, but I always thought I’d be great at baseball.
So when a teammate once told me after a hockey practice that he played baseball in the Finnish league, I said I wanted to play, too.
Nobody else was yet up, not even the sun, when he got up from the bed he had shared with his son, and walked to the kitchen to make some tea. On mornings like these, he felt like an old man, even though he was just 33, and he hated it.
He had slept poorly. Partly because his son had been fidgeting all night, waking him up several times. He had got up a few times and just walked around the room. His father-in-law had offered to lift his son to the sofa so that he could sleep in the bed by himself, but he had said he was fine.
“Tachophobia is the condition of having an abnormal, extreme, and persistent fear of speed, that is, the experience of traveling quickly.”
Each new generation seems to be moving faster than the last one. Take any sport, for example, and you will see world records broken, even if they seemed impregnable when they were set. Yes, Jim Hines, the first person to run 100 meters in under ten seconds, held his world record for 15 years, but his time of 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics would have landed him in sixth place in Beijing 2008.
We are always trying to go and be faster. Faster is the first word of the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius – Swifter, Higher, Stronger. Almost as soon as we learn to walk, we start to run. Just ten years after Henry Ford introduced the Model T, attempts were made to build a car that would fly. And with his Model T, Ford developed the assembly line, a method of faster, uniform production that revolutionized manufacturing.
Webmaster here. I’m probably going to get fired for this, for “invading his privacy” or whatever, but I found these photos on the desk of Risto Pakarinen and I just have to share them. See what he did now? He actually went back to his old track, took a photo of what it looks like there now, and then pasted an old photo on it. He must have copied that from somewhere – probably here – but that’s not my point.
Look at his hat! Oh, boy. Oh well, enjoy.
I know that people laugh at me these days. They call me “Old Hat” behind my back. But I don’t care, I know who I am.
The hat and 200 dollars in my pocket were all I had when I first came to this town. I am the hat.
It may be the Finn in me, but I seem to take missions seriously. Well, mission is too grand a word, really, when I mean favors people ask me and tasks they ask me to do. If somebody suggests getting a cup of coffee “tomorrow”, I hold my day free from other engagements. If I’m asked to find a good restaurant to have dinner at in Helsinki, I ask around and try to find the best one.
And if somebody asks me to deliver three golf shirts to some hockey people when I go on vacation in Vancouver, I deliver those shirts no matter what.
I don’t know for sure what goes through Mikhail Grabovski’s mind when he scores for Belarus, besides general feelings of happiness and pride, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a part of the mental images his brain produces are of a Belarusian man, named Yas, let’s say, out on the field mowing clover, dreaming about Yanina, a hardworking girl!
That’s what I will be thinking about, anyway, now that I’ve learned what the Belarusian goal song, “Касіў Ясь канюшыну” (Kasiu Yas’ Kanyushinu) is all about. Now, I would have known that earlier had I understood the title of the song, which is, in short: Yas mows clover.
Let’s start with a fact. I am officially 170 centimeters tall. I don’t know what that is in feet and inches, but whatever it is, it’s below the average in most Western countries. It is the average height for males in Brazil, and above the average in countries like Bahrain, Chile, and Gambia. In Indonesia, where the average height for males is 1.58, I would be considered tall.
(Seriously, Google tells me I’m 5 feet and 6 inches and fifty-nine-sixty-fourths tall.)
For the next three weeks, I’ll be in Helsinki, Finland, to cover the hockey world championships. It’ll be my longest stay in my hometown since 2004 when Wife and I moved back to Stockholm after a two-year stint as a Swedish-Finnish couple in Finland.
I was born in Helsinki, I started school there, I went to university there, and I got my first real job there. I’ve also moved out of Helsinki four times.
