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"It is played everywhere: in parks and playgrounds, prison yards, in back alleys and farmers’ fields; by small boys and old men, raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed; the only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years; while they conquered a continent, warred with each other and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights, and with the meaning of freedom.At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating, and has excluded as many as it has included. A profoundly conservative game that often manages to be years ahead of its time. It is an American Odyssey that links sons and daughters to fathers and grandfathers, and it reflects a host of age-old American tensions; between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.It is a haunted game in which every player is measured with the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.The game’s greatest figures have come from everywhere: coal mines and college campuses, city slums and country crossroads. A brawling Irish immigrant’s son [John McGraw] who for more than half a century preached a rough and scrambling brand of baseball in which anything went so as long victory was achieved; and his favorite player, a college-educated right-hander [Christy Mathewson] so uniformly virtuous that millions of schoolboys worshipped him as 'The Christian Gentleman'.A mill hand [Shoeless Joe Jackson] who could neither read nor write who might have been one of the game's greatest heroes if temptation had not proved too great. A flamboyant federal judge [Kenesaw Mountain Landis] who at first saved baseball from a scandal that threatened to destroy it, but later became an implacable enemy of reform.A miner’s son from Commerce, Oklahoma [Mickey Mantle], who made himself the game’s most powerful switch-hitter despite 17 seasons of ceaseless pain. A tight-fisted Methodist [Branch Rickey], "a cross", one sportswriter said, "between a statistician and an Evangelist", who profoundly changed the game twice. And there were those whose true greatness was never fully measured because of the stubborn prejudice that permeated the nation and its favorite game.Two of baseball's best began life in rural Georgia: A swift and savage competitor who may have been the greatest player of all time [Ty Cobb], but whose uncontrollable rage in the end made him more enemies than friends; and another no less fierce competitor [Jackie Robinson] who, because he managed to hold his temper, made professional baseball a truly national pastime more than a century after it was born.And then there was the Baltimore saloonkeeper’s turbulent son [Babe Ruth], who became the best-known and best-loved athlete in American history."

- Baseball (TV series)

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"I’m one of the few who didn’t get into a boarding school system till I was sixteen. I grew up with a lot of the older people, listened to the stories. And those stories were inside of me. And I went into a boarding school system, and they killed those stories in that system. I came out of there totally ashamed of who I am, what I am. In the late sixties, I went back to the culture, on my own. I let my hair grow, I started speaking my language. And one of those times, I fasted. I did the vision quest, for five years.And one of those years -- it was a beautiful night, the stars were out, and it was calm, just beautiful. And it was around midnight, and I got up and I prayed. And I sat down, sat there for a while, and then all of a sudden I had these like flashbacks, of Sand Creek, Wounded Knee. And every policy, every law that was imposed on us by the government and the churches hit me one at a time. One at a time. And how it affected my life.And as I sat there I got angrier and angrier, until it turned to hatred. And I looked at the whole situation, the whole picture, and there was nothing I could do. It was too much. The only thing I could do was, when I come off that hill, I’m going to grab a gun and I’m going to start shooting. And go that way. Maybe then my grandfathers will honor me, if I go that route.I got up, and I came around, and I faced the east, and it was beautiful, I mean, it was dawn, light, enough light to see the rolling hills out there, and right above that blue light in that darkness was the sliver of the moon and the morning star. And I wanted to live. I want to live, I want to be happy. I feel I deserve that. But the only way that I was going to do that was if I forgive. And I cried that morning, because I had to forgive.Since then, everyday I work on that commitment. And I don’t know how many people have felt it, but every one of us, if you’re Lakota, you have to deal with that. At some point in your life, you have to address that, you have to make a decision. If you don’t, you’re going to die on a road someplace, either from being too drunk, or you might take a gun to your head. If you don’t handle those situations.So this isn’t history, I mean it’s still with us. What has happened in the past will never leave us. The next hundred, two hundred years, it will be with us. And we have to deal with that every day."

- The West (film)

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