I grew up playing baseball, and I was pretty damn good at it too. I always made the all-star team, and I played up through high school. Growing up I went to Angels games as much as I could, and I was enamored with the likes of Bobby Grich, Bob Boone, Rod Carew, and Freddy Lynn. I remember watching a past-his-prime Reggie Jackson belt homers out of Anaheim Stadium, the whole stadium chanting his name. When I was a kid, all I wanted was to be a professional baseball player. It held so much power and importance for me in those days. But that didn't last forever.
In 1994, the year of the big strike in baseball, I was 19 years old. My appreciation of baseball in the previous few years had diminished somewhat, mostly due to my new interest in surfing--which I had taken up at the age of 12. The strike in '94 was the end of the line for my respect of professional sports. This had less to do with the sports themselves than the ways that our society obsessed over them and deified their participants. It all seemed so ridiculous to me...all of that money and energy being spent on a simple game.
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