Watching Florida State University clobber Alabama in women’s softball on Monday night was way better than I expected it to be. Gosh, it was outstanding.
There was a women’s softball team in Eureka Springs in the early ‘80s. We played at Van Pelt Stadium and were sort of good, but not very. We filled the bleachers and justified the confession stand being open to sell peanuts and Crackerjacks. We had our pictures taken a lot.
Women’s softball was played in 1895 at West Division High School in Chicago, and nobody found it interesting. George Hancock, a reporter, invented the game after a Yalie threw a boxing glove at a Harvard grad who batted it back with a broomstick.
Then baseball players needed a way to stay in shape in the off-season when it was nippy-to-brutal outside, and high school gym softball slid perfectly into that home.
When Spalding’s Indoor Baseball Guide included a section on women’s softball in 1904, whoosh! Crowds stood in line to get in.
The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair drew 350,000 softball spectators.
Women’s softball was slow pitch as men believed fast pitch would break women’s bones. Who knows the depth or deception of that reasoning, but fine, we’re good with bigger balls and longer bats. Than baseball.
High school and college softball today are women’s sports, and since 1999, a girl can letter in it.
Softball has only seven innings, which eliminates the need of a 7th inning stretch, but walking to the trolley and riding home has its athleticism. That’s what Eureka Springs sells best – health.
Which brings us to the Parks workshop last week when, as we understand it, a woman presented a most excellent plan for softball at Lake Leatherwood, that 1600-acre park owned by Eureka Springs that has nightlights, bleachers, parking and food. The summer evening weather is free.
There might have been some commissioners who thought the ideas of “women’s sports” and “sports management” deserved air quotes. I don’t know how to write “air quotes,” those obnoxious two-handed, four-fingered nun-things meant to mock. Air quotes make my insides queasy, the way they would feel if I were required to climb a cell tower.
Eureka Springs has relied on legends, weddings, honeymoons, steam cabinets, fried chicken, Dwight Yoakam and Kinky Friedman to fill our cabins, campgrounds and ballrooms for years. We’ve attracted tourists to a town that if it were any more beautiful it would qualify to be a Hans Christian Andersen book illustration.
Times have changed. Again. Whether it’s economics or healthonomics, this town adjusts by using what we have rather than buying something we think we want. We don’t have a parking garage because no one, deep down, wants to mess with our aesthetics. If it were only about money, we’d have a four-story concrete parking hydrant where you pay with your phone.
We have the park. We have the interest. We have someone who knows what she’s doing. We could be on the 5-state women’s softball tour.
We’ve done well with wine weekends, zombie crawls, midnight Corvette parades, Lucky 13 Starlight Cinema, ghost tours, classic car shows, Books in Bloom, art walls and 73 straight years of an Ozark Folk Festival.
Women’s softball – an Olympic sport played here. It’s time.
OK, concession stand. If we just stand outside, will we still be outstanding?