Context

The IOC did the heretofore unthinkable and postponed the Summer Olympics for a year.  Never has so much champagne been diluted by so many tears as when Olympics officials supped and wept after making the announcement on Tuesday, I’m sure.

 

The IOC had tried to counter calls for postponing the Games with a “fairness” argument, that delaying the Games would be unfair to those athletes who had trained so hard and might not qualify with bodies a year older next summer (though it sure would be harder to qualify with a dead body, I think).  Clare actually knows a wrestler from Elmhurst College, Joe Rau, who might fall into this category.  Rau almost made the U.S. Olympic team in 2016 and thought he had a real shot at qualifying this year.  There are numerous other athletes like him.

 

For them I sympathize, and offer a bit of context while noting that in life stuff happens and things work out.  At least they appear to for George Yankowski, who died last month at the age of 97.  Yankowski played major-league baseball at the tender age of 19.  Then war got in the way.  Yankowski went from playing for the Philadelphia A’s to fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.  He had a cup of coffee with the White Sox in 1949, and that was it, not that Yankowski was bitter.

 

I know this from reading Yankowski’s SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) biography that’s included in his baseball-reference.com entry.  Author Bill Nowlin quotes Yankowski saying he loved baseball as a “kid.  But looking back, baseball—compared to the service and the war—was really almost next to nothing.”  In that context, “Baseball was great, but winning a war dwarfed that.”  So believed a winner of the Bronze Star.

 

The cynic might point out that Yankowski had it easy, if such a thing is possible for a combat veteran, as a member of the Greatest Generation fighting in the Good War.  In that case, consider Al Bumbry, who spent all but one season of his fourteen-year career with the Orioles.  Bumbry went from minor leaguer to platoon leader in Vietnam.  Like Yankowski, Bumbry felt he had no cause to feel bitterness over the interruption of his career.

 

In his SABR biography by John McMurray, Bumbry explained why.  “Because before I went to Vietnam, I was in a Class A league, and I hit .178.  And then I come back, and, in a year and a half, I was in the major leagues.  So I can’t complain.  There was no guarantee that I was ever going to be playing after hitting .178.”  So believed another winner of the Bronze Star.

 

Stuff happens, things work out.  We need to believe that, no matter how much it feels otherwise.