By Ron Leir
Well, it’s officially March which means we can start actively thinking about outdoor – and indoor – sports.
Yes, there’s the March Madness basketball brackets – and, therefore, a big motivation to visit your friendly neighborhood pub and enter your choices.
Unfortunately, since I don’t follow college hoops (apologies to Dr. Naismith in Springfield, Mass.), I have no reason to venture inside any of the local bars … other than, of course, to drink lots of beer.
That’s something I used to practice pretty regularly as a thirsty undergrad in Pennsylvania and then as an even thirstier sojourner in Newark, Del., as a respite from reading the ever-popular works of folks like Edmund Spencer, John Donne and the Bard of Avon.
One April morning after an all-night session trying to achieve the act of balancing a bunch of beer mugs – much like a gymnast team – which went dreadfully wrong, I remembered that I desperately needed stamps to update my collection.
So I ambled, er, make that stumbled, to the campus post office where, once safely inside, imagine my shock when I espied, a framed photograph of the Bard – which I surmised was being merchandised as a new stamp. But when I drew closer I noticed a large notice attached to the photo announcing that the subject of the photo was an international fugitive who was “WANTED FOR PLAGIARISM.”
An arrest warrant posted below the image warned that this wily wretch – whom I had apparently mistakenly assumed had been dead 400 years – was still very much in demand by the authorities for having violated the terms of his literary license.
Emerging from the building, I have expected to see the head of the Pretender Playwright embedded in a pike sticking out of the ground.
Turns out the whole episode was an April Fool’s prank invented by a bunch of besotted English majors convinced that an English nobleman named Edward DeVere had actually penned all the plays credited to Will.
But, after giving the matter much thought, I was convinced that the so-called Shakespeare scholars had perpetrated a hoax and that we students who had worshiped at his shrine were the sappy victims of a great myth.
Old Will has been on my mind ever since I abandoned the idea of teaching English literature in favor of posing as a perambulating penman of prattling prose about the week’s events.
(You can see how that has turned out. Would that I had gone to the well of wit when that well was full; then would I be well-known like old Will whose birthdate and death fall in the same cruelest month as mine. But that’s a story for another day.)
Meantime, there’s March … and pre-season baseball … and that means opportunity for all.
So I was thinking – a habit I can’t seem to break – that since the Yankees are searching for a fifth starter to put in the rotation, there could be an opening for a new job opportunity.
I’ve been known to spin a mean softball on Central Park mounds in recent years and I’ve accumulated a mean assortment of junk to fool the batters, just as I’ve fooled Observer readers since the days of my rookie writin’ back in ‘ought ‘nine.
I’ll simply trade in my leaking pen for a groovy glove and a baggy uniform and head for the Sunshine State.
Move over, C.C. and Tenaka, and make way for a made-over sunshine boy.
Watch for my name in the box scores and keep open a World Series bracket for me and the Bombers!
