Museum-Grogged Youngsters Persuade Their Father to Be a Good Sport : He wants culture on the level of Socrates. The boys want soccer. No contest.

For 10 years now, summer has been the occasion for the same debate in our family--culture vs. camp. I always come down on the side of culture; my wife favors camp, and high camp at that.

Before I describe how this debate turned last summer into a baroque form of torture, I’d better be precise about my terms. By “culture” I mean the some of the best that has been thought, written, printed and otherwise produced over the centuries in the Northern Hemisphere. I mean museums, ballet, concerts, cathedrals; also cafes and restaurants where one can sit and muse about the aforementioned. I mean Europe! By “camp,” my wife, Linda, has something different in mind than did Susan Sontag when she penned her provocative essay, “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” When my mate speaks of high camp, she doesn’t mean kitschy art that’s so self-consciously bad it’s good. She means some expensive penal colony in the mountains where we can send our two sons to waste their time playing games while she and I sashay around Europe alone.

This I won’t abide. I want the boys with us, drinking from the font of culture, not exiled to a brainless “Field of Screams” with the delinquent children of deposed dictators and nerve-damaged rich parents. Of course, kids need physical activity. Mens sana in corpore sano, I always say when I have “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” close at hand. But there’s got to be balance; there’s got to be beauty, art and truth to go along with running, jumping and throwing. As I argued last summer, our family vacation could accommodate both the athletic and the aesthetic. If we planned our itinerary carefully and rationed our time wisely, there was no reason why we couldn’t enjoy the best of Western civilization; then, in our spare time, get a little exercise.

Reluctantly, my wife agreed to give it another try. The boys grumbled, but really had no choice. Or so I assumed, having forgotten how much a 16-year old and an 11-year-old know intuitively about guerrilla warfare and passive resistance. Three days after our arrival in London, I was convinced that I had won and things were working out better than I had hoped. We had toured Westminster Abbey and the House of Commons, watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, visited the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and except for a bit of grousing about the lukewarm temperature of the Cokes at McDonald’s, there hadn’t been any remarkable unpleasantness.

But then, as if by magic, a soccer ball appeared. It accompanied us everywhere we went. Each time we passed through a park--and there are many of them in London--the boys insisted on kicking the ball around, or bouncing it from head to head like a couple of circus seals. Sometimes other kids scrambled over, and they played impromptu games that cut a serious swath in our touring schedule.

Then the soccer ball spawned a basketball, and my 16-year-old son, Sean, announced that he had signed up for a weeklong basketball clinic at the American School in St. John’s Wood in northern London. Since the clinic lasted only three hours a day, he said there’d be plenty of time to join the rest of the family at the theater or concert or gallery of our choice.

As soon as the basketball clinic ended, I insisted we depart for the Continent, where I figured the language barrier and our frenzied travels would curtail my sons’ sporting life. We headed for the Netherlands, since from what I remembered of Amsterdam it represented the antithesis of Outward Bound. “Just Do It” might be one of the city’s mottoes, but “It” had more to do with drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll than anything Bo Jackson meant when he said it in the Nike ad. Any metropolis that boasted 1,400 bars and cafes, not to mention the Sex Museum and the Torture Museum, sounded ideal to me.

Because it sounded so literary, looked so lovely and seemed so unlikely to have anything like a workout room, we stayed at the Pulitzer Hotel, which consisted of 24 antique canal houses that had been meticulously restored and cleverly combined into an establishment overlooking Prinsengracht Canal. Once we had registered and were about to start off for the Rijksmuseum and its collection of Rembrandts, Van Dycks and El Grecos, my sons pointed out that we could reach it with no wasted time by renting a pedal boat and chugging a beautiful course through the canals.

I accepted the suggestion, feeling certain that, in a sense of fair play, the boys would show the same openness to art as I had to exercise. Wrong! At the Rijksmuseum, as we walked from room to room, from marvel to marvel, you would have thought from their miserable mugs that they were being subjected to dental surgery without anesthetic. While there were no actual cries of pain, there were plenty of groans and sighs, and no small amount of derisive eyeball-rolling.

The soul of patience, I assured them they would enjoy our next stop--the Stedelijk Museum and its collection of modern art. Then we’d push on to the Van Gogh Museum. I found myself trying to whip up their enthusiasm with hackneyed stories about the mad painter hacking off his ear. But they weren’t listening to me. They weren’t even looking my way. They were gazing off at. . . .”

It didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t mentioned in any guidebook, but in an open space between the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum there was a basketball court, and frolicking on it were half a dozen of the tallest Dutchmen in history. Sean is 6-foot-4 and he was a shrimp next to these guys. He bolted out onto the court and commenced playing, and Marc cavorted on the sidelines, his greatest critic and fan.

When for the next two days, nothing short of the Sex Museum or the Torture Museum could have tempted them to abandon that improbable place, I admitted defeat, leased a car and fled Amsterdam. I had a business meeting in Kitzbuhel, Austria, and knew better than to expect aesthetic-athletic equilibrium in a Tyrolean mountain resort. Clearly, this would be a variant on Linda’s definition of high camp and, I decided, so be it. For a few days the kids could hike and swim and play tennis, indulging in an orgy of physical activity fueled by apfelstrudel mit schlag before we drove south into Italy.

It didn’t work out that way. Instead of sating themselves, my sons seemed to stoke up an ever-growing hunger for new sports. The hiking, swimming and tennis whet their appetite for afternoons on the archery range, evenings of Ping-Pong and pool, and mornings of summer tobogganing. (The sled went sluicing down a zigzag concrete trench like an oversize slot car.) Showing initiative that would have delighted the National Rifle Assn., they located a shooting gallery where highly professional instructors led them in target practice. Displaying unsuspected talent--to my knowledge he had never touched a weapon before--my 11-year-old qualified as something more than a marksman and just short of a combat sniper. They even became experts at a local game called pit-pat, a kind of cross between miniature golf and billiards played on a series of table tops with pool cues. But I drew the line when they wanted to go sky-diving and hang gliding.

After Kitzbuhel, our pilgrimage to points of interest in Italy did little to curb their boisterousness or increase their appreciation of the good, the true and the beautiful. They seemed to regard Roman ruins as little more than race courses, and they treated the steeply banked steps in Tuscan hill towns as substitutes for a Stairmaster. At inland hotels, they insisted on pools where they could swim laps; along the coast, they wanted to snorkel.

By the time we reached Rome, a city where they had lived a major portion of their lives (we lived there for 10 years), they were eager to call old friends and get on with the games. While the older boy participated in a volleyball tournament out on the Via Cassia, his younger brother joined a swim club on the Appia Antica, on the other side of the city. On weekends, they both went to a field on the Via Aurelia to play softball. As my wife and I chauffeured them from event to event, I tried to draw their attention to the fact that the Cassia, the Appia and the Aurelia followed the same course as ancient roads that led out of the capital toward the far-flung provinces of the empire. The Romans, I rumbled on, had been prolific road builders who blah, blah, blah. . . .

It was futile. As my wife finally pointed out with the utmost diplomacy, culture had failed and camp had won. Okay, we were in Europe, but we had carted the equivalent of an American camp around the Continent. If I didn’t believe her, just look in the trunk. It was full of swim fins, balls of all shapes and sizes, bats and racquets and gloves, sweatshirts and shorts, jocks and socks.

Her voice remained quiet, but she sounded resolute as she informed me, “Next summer, we’re going to Paris.”

“Great idea. This would never have happened there. The kids will love the Louvre.”

“The kids,” she said, “are going to Parris Island for Marine Corps boot camp.”