Softball: Field of disappearing dreams

On the stroke of noon at the Fengtai Softball Field in the south west of Beijing today, Cat Osterman stepped up to pitch the first ball in game six of the Olympic softball tournament, a re-run of the Athens final between the United States and Australia. Within a flash, it seemed, Tairia Flowers had got out the first Aussie batter at her station at first base. Not long afterwards, she accounted for the second hitter with a whiplash throw to second base.

It was starting to dawn why Sports Illustrated had dubbed Flowers and her colleagues “the new Dream Team,” the original epithet having been bestowed upon Michael Jordan and the rest of the all-conquering, all-star US basketballers in Barcelona in 1992. For the US softballers of 2008, though, Fengtai is their field of disappearing dreams.

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Flowers, a 27-year-old from Tuscon, featured in a video clip on Monday at a press conference promoting the benefits of specialist vision training for Olympians. The guest speakers were Michael Johnson and Sir Clive Woodward. “Wow, I didn’t know that,” Flowers confessed later, when the ball game was over. Not that the name of the British Olympic Association’s director of elite performance seemed to mean all that much to her - or that of Kelly Sotherton, the other Olympian shown on screen as an illustration of the success of the venture.

An optometrist explained that perfect vision was not 20/20 but 20/8 and said that most softball and baseball players have 20/12. “I have 20/12 in my left eye,” Flowers said. Not that she happens to be blessed with Olympic 2012 vision. Softball, played only by women at Olympic level, is to be dropped from the schedule of sports for the London Games four years hence, together with its old country cousin, baseball.

“The door was officially closed on us for 2012 at the International Olympic Committee session in Turin in 2006,” Bruce Wawrzyniak, director of communications for the International Softball Federation, said. “Since then we have launched our Back Softball campaign, which is a worldwide effort that will run to the October 2009 IOC vote with the hope of getting back on the Olympic schedule for 2016.”

The most popular theory about the sealing of softball’s fate for 2012 is that the sport has become a victim of the Americans’ steamrollering success; since softball was introduced in the Atlanta Games in 1996 all three Olympic crowns have been lifted by the United States. Another theory is that the IOC were fearful of the spread of drugs in baseball and decided to drop both it and its close relation as one job lot. Others say it was as much a vote against US foreign policy in Iraq.

At times yesterday, the Fengtai Field was like a home from home for Flowers and her compatriots, with blue grass playing over the public address system. To those of us foreign to the sport, it was all entertaining stuff - this game that was born at the Farragut Boat Club in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day 1887, when George Hancock rolled up a boxing glove, picked up a broomstick and shouted, “Let’s play ball.”

It was originally known as “indoor baseball” and it differs only slightly from America’s treasured national game, with the ball pitched underarm rather than overarm, with a ball larger in circumference but significantly lighter, and with six innings instead of nine. For the first four innings yesterday, the Australian underdogs succeeded in holding the Goliaths in check. But then, at the bottom of the fifth - as, apparently they say - Lovieanne Jung (home town: Honolulu) slid into fourth base, courtesy of a strike from Natasha Watley (hobby: collecting Starbucks tumblers).

Still, the outcome was in doubt until the 16st Crystl Bustos (home town: Westminster - Westminster, California) took bat in hand in the final inning. “Come on Crystl, slug it,” an American journalist implored from his seat on the media benches. Crystl must have heard him crystal clear. She slugged the ball with a vengeance for the game’s only home run.

It was another win for the US softballers, 3-0, but the loss for their sport still looms. Theirs would not be the first event to disappear from the Olympics without a trace. Indeed, the United States are still waiting to defend the rugby union title they snatched in a roughhouse of a final against France in Paris in 1924 - when fighting broke out in the stands, the Star Spangled Banner was drowned out by boos at the medal ceremony, and the American XV needed police protection to escape from the field.

Then there is cricket, which has been off the Olympic radar since the earlier Paris Games of 1900, when a Great Britain team, otherwise known as the Devon and Somerset Wanderers, beat a “French” XI comprising workers from the British Embassy in Paris. “Cricket is a sport which appears monotonous and without colour to the uninitiated,” a contemporary French magazine sniffed.

To the uninitiated at Fengtai Field yesterday, the softball could not be dismissed quite so disdainfully. As Tairia Flowers reflected: “It’s quick-paced. It’s exciting. It’s shorter than baseball. It’s fun to play and to watch. We don’t make millions of dollars doing this sport. We play it for the love of the game.” Which is roughly what that de Coubertin chap said his Olympic Games should all be about.