Connections/Sports

My name is Dan Lipcan, I'm a librarian here in the Watson Library, and my topic is "Sports."

I was raised in an area where sports is a huge sphere of influence, you know Boston is a sports town.

I grew up playing sports, I grew up watching sports, all my friends were into it. Being on a team, you build camaraderie with your teammates

you learn how to work in a group. And watching them, being a fan, there's a lot of regional and community pride. I've been playing soccer since I was four or five years old.

Baseball I played at a very young age, I don't play any longer, but I do still follow the Boston Red Sox.

I never was a football player, but I'm a big fan of the Patriots.

I played golf, I played lacrosse, I played basketball. I was on the diving team for a short period of time.

Librarians are generalists. I sit at the desk and I'm expected to help people figure out what they need to figure out.

My background in sports reflects who I am because I was interested in doing something in every season. I grew

up in Massachusetts on Cape Cod and we've got cranberry bogs all over the place, and so in the fall they flood the cranberry bogs, harvest the cranberries

and once winter sets in, the water in the bogs eventually freezes and

so it's basically a free ice rink. We didn't put on suits and

fedora hats to go out skating, so we didn't look this good. You can almost feel yourself when you look at this picture on that outer edge of your right skate, and skating in this what you would hope to be is a graceful arc. You know, I mean, it doesn't always work out that way.

These Mexican ballplayers, they're presented as these icons of physical achievement. If he were a basketball player, it looks like he's about to make a chest pass. Growing up, I adored and idolized Larry Bird. He was the leader of the Boston Celtics when they were winning championships in the early-to-mid-eighties.

If I were back in Mexico I would have a statue of Larry Bird buried with me in my grave, just like I had pictures of him tacked to my wall in my bedroom. That idolatry for a sports fan is very familiar.

These jars are prize jars, so if you won the event that is illustrated

you would get one of these jars filled with olive oil.

Sounds like a much more useful prize than an Olympic gold metal. I really love the one

where you have the judge on the right, and then two wrestlers doing this pankration, a combination of wrestling, and boxing, and kicking.

It's just like the UFC fights today where they put the guys in the steel cage and they can do whatever they can do to win, including beating the other guy to a bloody pulp. It's just really impressive and something I would never want to get involved in, but I can appreciate the courage and the bravery that it takes to go through this.

As a kid, I would go to the baseball card store and I'd spend a few dollars on a pack of cards. The pack of cards would have a piece of gum in it. You had kind of paid for it but it wasn't really anything that you wanted to keep in your mouth for very long. There's that dramatic moment where

you're opening and hoping to get somebody well known, somebody that was a good player, somebody that was on the team that you were a fan of.

As images they are really beautiful. These were paintings based on photographs of the players. I have this Boston

Red Sox hat, and I wear it around, both here in the city and when I travel. I'm displaying the pride that I have in my team and in my region, and you'd be surprised how often other people respond to that.

These shields have crests on them, they have symbols and colors that reflect the city that they're from or the king that they're fighting for, and it acts in the same way.

This rider is approaching these guys under this canopy. And they've all turned in expectation of the word from this messenger. It made me think about the World Series in 2004 when the Red Sox were in it for the first time since 1986.

I remember there were two outs in the ninth inning and I called my sister on the phone. I remember the pitcher throwing the ball and then the guy at bat hit this slow ground ball back to the pitcher, and it was obvious that this was going to be the last out, the game would be over, the World Series would be over, the Red Sox would win the championship.

I remember the silence on the phone with my sister, and then as soon as he got the last guy out, we just spent the next ten minutes

screaming at each other on the phone, not even anything verbal, just yelling. That same sense of expectation is palpable, a kind of tense, anxious and excited

feeling, all at the same time.