«Everyone has the same percentage of salt in their veins as there is in the ocean. And we also have salt in our sweat and tears. We are connected to the ocean. And when we return to the sea, to compete or even just to watch a regatta, we return to the place we come from.”
The words that John Fitzgerald Kennedy chose to pronounce at the ribbon cutting of a distant edition of the America’s Cup testify to his visceral love for sailing and the deep connection he had with this sport. After all, he was only 15 years old when he received his first boat as a gift from his parents, an 8 meter hull which he named Victura (destined to win) almost as if he wanted to mortgage in that way the successes he would later achieve in politics and in private life.
It was certainly not a banal gift, sailing is not a proletarian sport, but the old Senator Kennedy – through legal and illegal means – had by now made a lot of money, and it was normal for his children to grow up with all the comforts intended for the ruling classes . Wealth, in any case, had not completely erased the past of this family of humble Irish origins, and therefore the scions still had free access even to the most popular sports, such as American football and baseball, a plebeian sport for antonomasia.
In fact, the passion that the future president of the United States had for the oval ball in his youth was overwhelming: he played football with some success in every school level, including Harvard University. And the extremely annoying and disabling back pain that tormented him until the end of his short life was the result of a spinal injury suffered during a match played during his academic years.
A damage which, moreover, combined with the after-effects of the wounds received in the war when his motor torpedo boat was sunk by the Japanese, forced him to give up contact sports in bourgeois life, inevitably ending up favoring more aristocratic disciplines such as tennis, water skiing and golf, another sport in which he excelled at Harvard: several times he was in fact captain of the team that engaged in fierce duels against rivals from Yale, another very prestigious New England university.
In fact, it seems that on the morning of the Bay of Pigs invasion he was honing his swing on the greens of the Burning Tree Club, an exclusive club based in Bethesda, a stone’s throw from Washington, frequented by many senators and former presidents. To show himself close to the people, therefore to his potential voters, JFK relied above all on baseball, the authentic American national pastime. Being originally from Massachusetts, he was always a fan of the Boston Red Sox, whose games he regularly attended at the beginning of his political career, when he aspired first to the House of Representatives and then to the Senate: he knew, like many of his colleagues of all times, that stadiums are inexhaustible mines of votes. Later, when he became president, he instead approached the Senators, the capital team for which he used to symbolically throw the first ball at the start of the new competitive season.
Kennedy, however, did not use sport only as an advertising vehicle for his career interests: he truly believed – as well as in the benefits of a healthy life – in the hygienic and social usefulness of practicing sport, which he considered essential as the basis of a strong nation. When at the beginning of the 1950s he learned of the worrying increase in those unfit for service recorded during the recruitment campaign for the Korean War – the result of an increasingly consuming and lazy society – he decided that in his political programs he would always give ample space to support and dissemination of physical activities, and he always kept his promises: the widespread diffusion of sports facilities even in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods of the entire country occurred precisely under his impulse.
Kennedy also knew that the Cold War against the Soviets was also being fought in gyms, in swimming pools, on athletics tracks, and therefore he made sure to allocate ever greater resources to the training of technicians capable of raising generations of Americans capable of competing with best athletes of the Communist Bloc.
What also worried him was a dangerous drift of which his compatriots were becoming victims, namely the tendency to become – instead of athletes themselves – passive spectators of sporting events, initially on the radio and later especially in front of the TV screen, and therefore he never failed to advise everyone to go to the stadium to watch the matches, perhaps by bike or on foot, instead of doing it from home, sprawled on the sofa. The president even wrote from time to time about the qualities that sport and outdoor games bring with him: and he did so, to reach the widest possible audience, none other than in the columns of ‘Sports Illustrated’, an authentic Bible for Americans passionate about every competitive discipline.
At the basis of the sporting passions of the 35th Potus, beyond political gain, there was the education received since childhood, spent in a young nation that had made a sort of dogma, and within a family that fully shared these ideas: values that he himself later managed to pass on to subsequent generations of the vast Kennedy clan, made up of innumerable brothers, brothers-in-law, cousins and therefore of an even greater number endless number of grandchildren.
The journalists who had the privilege of visiting the family residences – and then reporting on the experience to their readers – were impressed by the variety of sporting activities that were practiced there, and by the intensity with which everyone dedicated themselves to them. And, not infrequently, the reporters themselves were involved in the challenges, and often emerged from those endless tournaments – essentially the Kennedys’ private Olympics – visibly bruised. Most of these competitions at the helm of sailboats, in flag football, in volleyball, in swimming, in croquet, in softball and of course in tennis took place on the 24 thousand square meters of the park of the summer palace of Hyannis Port: the activity muscle down there was so intense that the regulars ended up calling it – by moving a single letter – Hyanni Sport.
2023-11-22 12:02:18
#JFK #champion #president #laRegione.ch
