When I was eight, my best friend was Brian Bennett. Brian and I enjoyed the same games. We laughed at the same nonsense, the same elementary school jokes. We played so hard together my father says that when he tucked me into bed at night I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. It was 1967.

Brian’s mom and mine often took us to the library there in Fort Bliss, Texas. That year, he and I read one hundred books a piece, recording each title and author on a certificate I still have in my scrapbook. We enjoyed sports, and books involving sports. I remember Matt Christopher’s Too Hot to Handle. A boy named David Kroft loves baseball — his father and big brother were really good at baseball — but David is a slowpoke and thinks he makes too many errors. How will he handle the pressure of living up to the family name?

Brian got sick. He had a brain tumor. I didn’t know what a tumor was. He was at William Beaumont Hospital up the hill from our house on Field Road. I was born in that hospital. My mom and dad had both gone there for surgeries. I thought Brian would get better.

They didn’t let kids visit patients in hospitals back then. One night, I woke up in my father’s arms. He was holding me tight. His chest was heaving. His tears were falling on my face. He rocked me back and forth as if I were a baby. And he told me that Brian died.

I was confused. Why couldn’t I have gone to the hospital to tell Brian to get better? Why didn’t he come home? At the funeral, on a sunny day, I watched Sgt. Major and Mrs. Bennett crying. I watched the casket being lowered into the ground. I rubbed my eyes with two questions. Why did Brian die? What will I do without him?

We didn’t go to church when I was growing up. We went on Christmas and Easter, I’m told, but I have only vague memories of that. My first vivid memory of church is of being in the Fort Bliss main chapel for Brian’s funeral. I became aware of something that day, something that I would appreciate only later; that Church was like my mother. She was where you could go when you couldn’t cope; the one whose skirt you could hold on to when it was time to say goodbye. And she was better than the hospital. She let you in.

The cemetery where Brian was buried we could see from our house. It was down the hill, beyond the other end of Field Road. My mother says that every day for months she could see Iris Bennett, Brian’s mother, walking back and forth at the grave.

He was a bachelor when I first met him, living in an apartment that was said to resemble a bachelor’s nightmare. I never saw it. Few did. When he got serious about Marlene and realized he would sooner or later have to take her there, he asked his sister to clean it up “just enough so I can have a cleaning person come in.” I gather it wasn’t filled with rotting Kentucky Fried Chicken or anything. It was simply filled with everything he had ever brought home and put down, still there wherever it landed, and had never been dusted. He and Johnny Morris made a bet once with a TV set as the wager. When Johnny lost, he got a giant old console set and had it delivered to Gene’s apartment. The delivery guys dumped it inside the door. It was never moved, and from then on the door never opened all the way.

There was always a little of the Yale undergraduate in Gene. Tim Wiegel, his roommate there, later a sportscaster, told me Gene was famous for wearing a Batman costume and dropping out of trees. He studied philosophy, considered law school, decided to take some time off first. “I told my dad I thought I’d like to try a job in newspapers,” Gene said. “He said he’d give me a ride downtown. We had always been a Sun-Times family. For some reason, I never knew why, he dropped me off in front of Tribune Tower.” Less than a year after walking in the door, he was the Tribune’s film critic.

from Roger Ebert’s blog at the Chicago Sun-Times

All that remains to be proved is the value of sport to American society as a whole. The conclusion follows naturally from an understanding of America as the bourgeois nation par excellence. The great spiritual threats to bourgeois society are apathy, enervation and acquiescence to mediocrity. Sport is uniquely suited to combat these evils, because it carves out a space for honor, excellence and the pursuit of glory.

At the same time, the modern form of sport subsumes the honor ethic under an institutional structure that does not consider the things of this world to be of ultimate significance. Sport thereby avoids the tribulations of pagan society in favor of the modern Protestant order. Religious devotion to a football team coexists with American Christianity because the fan knows that the former is temporary, but he awaits the eternal satisfaction promised by the latter. Sport is simultaneously an antidote to the worst of the bourgeois order, and a great bulwark thereof.

The supposed insignificance of sport to education is thus shattered. Sport is much more of an educational enterprise than the utopian dreaming of those obsessed with changing the world. Sport recognizes that a thing can possess excellence without possessing perfection, and that there is some good in its preservation.

Athletes of Yale, stand tall. You have the admiration of this second-string second baseman on the club baseball team. The wider student body will sip lattes, wear eclectic scarves, and disdain your allegiance to the institutions of the bourgeois order, but they are mere ingrates. For all the while, in a small way, you have been holding up civilization unawares.

Peter Johnston is a senior in Saybrook College at Yale University. Read the whole column in today’s YDN.