Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Like many sports fans yesterday, I have been thinking about the place of racism in professional sports. Standing in the sun near the new eastern entrance to our UC Davis Arboretum while my son Jukie inspected the archway made of shovels, I wondered what others were saying about how the LA Clippers would respond to the opinions of the team’s owner, so I searched for the term “racist” on Twitter, and discovered that most of the mentions on that day concerned sporting events and teams. Although George Orwell called sport “War minus the shooting,” I was actually encouraged by what I discovered, including mentions of Branch Rickey.
As we consider the private racist conversations of the owner of the LA Clippers, who thought it wise to privately disparage Magic Johnson for being a black man, we might take a moment to remember that it was another sports executive, Branch Rickey, who helped to challenge racism in professional sports in 1947. By signing Major League Baseball’s first African-American player, Jackie Robinson, Rickey broke an important color barrier, gave all Americans a Rookie of the Year to cheer for, and incidentally made it possible for Rickey to recruit subsequent baseball standouts of color at bargain prices. Sometimes it pays to be the first: it could be argued that Branch Rickey remains the most appreciated baseball manager in American history, and not just because he was the first to mandate that his players wear batting helmets. This week Donald Sterling will find out what price he will pay to be the least appreciated owner in sports.
As we have talked about at the Pub Quiz, and as we will touch upon this evening, soccer is a much more popular sport worldwide than any of our American sporting exports. So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to see that my search for incidents of racism on Sunday found many more mentions of soccer than baseball, with much attention paid to Dani Alves, the offensive right back who plays for FC Barcelona in La Liga. Evidently at a match yesterday someone threw a banana onto the field before Alves. I don’t understand such acts of racism, nor do I care to delve into the motivations or symbolism of such an act, but certainly any of us might feel anger or humiliation at being jeered in such a way. Rather than getting upset, Alves grabbed the banana, took a bite, and then kicked his corner kick. Alves later said, “We have suffered this in Spain for some time. You have to take it with a dose of humour. We aren’t going to change things easily. If you don’t give it importance, they don’t achieve their objective.” The six-second clip has been shown on YouTube and Vine tens of thousands of times since, reminding us that the equanimity of the LA Clippers players, Jackie Robinson or Dani Alves (my new favorite soccer player), is sometimes necessary to confront entrenched racism without being confounded by it.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature some international flavor, and thus unfairly advantage those of us who travel. The question topics will include large cats, mad men, Canada, light solids, films that you may have seen the preview for without having remembered the title, Queen Elizabeth, ice, cast members with the letter O in their names, the Nobel Prize, Latin America, a master’s degree from Yale, summer songs, People’s Choice Awards, people named Thomas and Richard, flowability, former Secretaries of War, protein, bands that you may have actually seen play live, whiskey, famous felons, a few other topics that I haven’t chosen yet, browsing, viruses, German companies without slogans, second marriages, and Shakespeare.
Speaking of international flavor, notable Pablo Neruda translator and stirring poet William O’Daly will be performing at the John Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night, for it is Poetry Night. Join us at 8 that night to see why those events are so much fun.
See you tonight!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Newspaper Headlines. A plan introduced in 2010 set the price for Netflix’s U.S. streaming subscribers at how many dollars a month? Hint: Correct answer is a number that is divisible by 4, so of course it is not 7.
- Patriot’s Day. Patriot’s Day is a civic holiday commemorating the anniversary of two battles on April 19, 1775. Name either battle.
- Acreage. How many square yards are there in an acre? Is it closest to 5, 50, 500, or 5,000?
- Pop Culture – Music. What current hit song begins with these lyrics? “The snow glows white on the mountain tonight / Not a footprint to be seen / A kingdom of isolation, / And it looks like I’m the queen.”
- True or False. The median home value in Davis is more than half a million dollars.
P.S. If you recruit a brand new team of first-timers to come to tonight’s Pub Quiz, I will reward that team with a serving of pub fries with curry ketchup.