Skateboarding, Baseball, Springsteen in a Common Culture

For vacation this summer, me and the boys did skate parks and ballparks. Which means that on alternate days we collected bruises and autographs. And in between we learned a few things about what changes, and what endures, in sports, in families and in America.

The setting was California. The crew was me and two sons, 12 and 8. The plan was to visit the baseball stadiums in San Francisco, Oakland, Anaheim and San Diego (the Dodgers were on the road), and to stop off along the way at skate parks where the kids could practice their best X Games routines.

Skate parks and ballparks bounce to very different rhythms. Baseball is built on continuity: strands of comparisons and statistics that wind back a century. The skate world operates with the metabolism and attention span of a 15-year-old: It is forever young.

Baseball isn’t immune to change. At Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, you can get marinated jalapenos with your tacos and there’s a docking station where they will beam updated baseball trivia into your Palm Pilot. Along the lower decks, there are ads for brokerage firms, which may reflect the widening presence of the stock market in our society, and the narrowing funnel of who can afford a game at a time of $40 box seats.

But before the game, little boys are still squeezed against the side of the visiting team dugout pleading for autographs. “Sh-a-awn,” they wail, as Shawn Green, the Dodgers’ splendid splinter of a right fielder, comes by. (Shawn, quickly judged a good guy, stops to sign for kids on both sides of the dugout.) It’s a scene white-haired Bobby Thompson, there for a ceremony to memorialize his miracle 1951 New York Giants, would instantly recognize.

The stadium itself, with all its nooks and crannies, seems both new and old, out of time. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful place. Half an hour before game time on a Sunday afternoon, the grass is as green as hope, the sun is warm and the thermometer on the scoreboard says 67 degrees. Vintage blues pumps through the sound system. The players are stretching, or playing catch, and there’s the thwack-thwack-thwack of balls leaving the cage in batting practice.

At that moment, it is difficult to imagine anyplace else I would rather be. Leaning over the dugout, I look at the little one and say: “I love baseball.” He squints into the sun under his new Giants cap and looks back at me. “How could you not love baseball?” he says.

The pleasures of skate parks aren’t so placid. For one thing the soundtrack tends to the Strokes and Blink-182. Baseball is languid; skating is frenetic. It’s also slouchy and pierced and tattooed.

Yet I confess: I like the skate park culture. I like the way the big kids, no matter how grungy, are almost always respectful and protective toward the little kids. I like the way the skaters and skateboarders flop and fly and fall; and when they fall they laugh at each other, or themselves, and get up and do it again. At a skate park in Orange County, I saw one kid try the same trick for about two hours until he finally nailed it. (I wonder if he displays the same persistence at math, but that’s another story.) Failure doesn’t carry the same weight at the skate park as it does in baseball; it’s less a step back than a necessary crossing on the road to success. Which may accurately reflect the way today’s teens, raised in the affluence of the 1990s, view the world. We’ll be in good hands if they’re still as resilient when they’re running the country in a few years.

It’s the combination of continuity and change that makes America so unique. Many societies do tradition well. Some are good at change. We blend the two as effortlessly as the kids mixing Coke and root beer at the soda fountain.

Tradition’s greatest value here is to create a common identity in a nation formed from so many divergent parts. One night in Anaheim we screamed for the Boston Red Sox’s Pedro Martinez, who was impassive and invulnerable, as he alternately overpowered and baffled the Angels. Someday, sitting with their kids, watching a star pitcher now in grade school, my kids will tell their children about the great Pedro the way my father told me about seeing Sandy Koufax. One is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, the other a Jew from Brooklyn, yet for millions of fans they will forever define part of what it meant to be an American at a certain time and place. More than blood or religion, that is what holds this country together: common memories linking us in a chain that extends beyond our vision, forward and back.

Yet openness to the new has been equally important to America’s success. It wasn’t that long ago that skating was vaguely disreputable. Now kids skate at airplane hangar-size parks in shopping malls, which come complete with their own name-brand shoes, shirts and backpacks. Purists may complain about a loss of authenticity. But it is that capacity to mainstream cutting-edge ideas so quickly that makes American society and culture so innovative.

At our best, we cherish the past and seize the future and improvise new combinations as we go. By some strange generational convergence, the soundtrack for our trip was provided by new CDs released on the same day by Bruce Springsteen and Linkin Park (now the No. 1 and 2 albums in the country). The two couldn’t sound more different: Springsteen, the baby boom icon, belting out anthem rock; Linkin Park, the twentysomething art students, mixing metal and rap into an edgy hybrid.

Yet they share a commitment to expressing, and even crystallizing, the emotions of their audience. For all their clamor, Linkin Park sings with surprising tenderness about insecurity and the search for a place in the world--the emotions young people feel every day. On his rousing and haunting album, Springsteen’s post-9/11 message strikes closest for an audience a little older: Life is fragile and happiness fleeting, so grab it while you can.

Traveling 10 days with two growing boys isn’t all Martha Stewart moments; at various points, each member of the troupe wanted to throttle the other two. But there are also moments, many more--when we rise with the crowd as the batter steps in on a soft summer night, when the big brother tenderly helps up the little one after he wipes out on the half pipe--when I understand what Springsteen is singing about so clearly that it aches.

Thanks Bruce. Thanks boys.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site: www.latimes.com/brownstein.