The crowd at the ball game by William Carlos Williams

The crowd at the ball game by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation: The crowd at the ball game / is moved uniformly / by a spirit of uselessness / which delights them--


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I don't know why, but these lines from New Jersey's greatest poet simply seemed appropriate today for a blog about the state university's sports teams. Click the link above to read the whole poem.

"...Rutgers in the Ivy League..." -- Malcolm X

I was surprised in my morning reading to come across this sentence on page 287 of the current Ballantine paperback edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

"I had spoken at well over fifty colleges and universities, like Brown, Harvard,
Yale, Columbia, and Rutgers, in the Ivy League..."

It would be one thing if this were a new book, or if it were the error of a single author, but the Autobiography has been consistently in print and selling in large quantities since 1965 and it was written by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, with professional editors, and there have been lots of opportunities for someone to correct the simple fact that Rutgers is not (and has never officially been) in the Ivy League.

For much of the nation, the name of the State University of New Jersey does not seem out of place in that list; as long as we don't get too successful in sports, the name will continue to look comfortable there.

(It was a decade before my time, but does anyone remember seeing Malcolm at Rutgers?)