There are so many things kids can take up today and many don't have the attention

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There are so many things kids can take up today and many don't have the attention span for baseball. Up here [Putnam lives near to the city of Albany in the state of New York] we lose a lot of them to a thriving soccer programme."Thus, baseball's Opening Day was seen to be a test of the game's resilience, its traditional loyalties. "Baseball remains the American game," he said, "but it has a generational problem. It was, thought Silvera, as though nothing in the world matters except this game."Times change, maybe for the worse, maybe for the better, and they have changed enough to put baseball's traditional popularity at serious risk from what a friend, Pat Putnam, calls "competition for the leisure dollar."Putnam, a decorated veteran of the Korean war who covered many big events for the American magazine Sports Illustrated and makes guest appearances for The Observer, coaches junior baseball in retirement. When Charles Silvera, a young catcher just brought up from the minor leagues, saw the streets outside the hotel jammed with excited Boston fans, he felt like a Christian on his way to the Coliseum [sic]. On Saturday morning the crowd gathered early, not only in Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox and the Yankees in their early work outs, but also outside the nearby Kenmore Hotel where the Yankees were known to be staying... I know about this from books and movies and conversations with people who speak about the game in reverential terms, rather like Burt Lancaster's ageing thief in Atlantic City saying: "You should have seen the ocean back then." For purposes of comparison, before the 1998 baseball season's opening- day ritual this week I read again David Halberstam's book The Summer Of '49, which is a vivid account of the 1949 pennant race, in which two legendary rivals, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, battled to a winner- take-all final game.The romance of baseball and what it meant then in the American psyche is made clear by this description "The fever was in the streets.

IN A time before blanket television coverage, player power and salaries to dwarf what some people get for running countries, baseball stood at the centre of American life. Now, presumably, if you want to get near Ken's royal presence, you have to pretend to admire his every move, and be prepared to lie like an eye- witness to his publicity machine.It's not very grown-up, is it?. He's said he only wants to be interviewed by people who liked the movie".Well, well. Once, you interviewed an actor or writer or director because you were interested in them. Your job was not that of critic, nor was theirs to gauge the level of your enthusiasm about them.

You met as conversationalists - one interrogative, one declarative - rather than as master and lickspittle. "I'll put in a request to Kenneth," said the Polygram babe, "but I'm afraid it's not very likely. "And by the way," she said, casually, "What did you think of it?" I said I thought it was old-fashioned, under- plotted, implausible and had far too many shots of out-of-focus car headlights, but that none of this mattered since one really wanted to see what Mr Branagh was like to meet, and to ask him about his love affair with Hollywood, and how he got along with the great Altman.Too late I'd already talked myself out of a job. A few days after the screening, the nice lady from Polygram rang to suggest interview dates. I was scheduled to talk to him this week about his new movie, The Gingerbread Man (released in August) and attended a screening. Story by John Grisham, directed by Robert Altman, starring Kenny B. with Robert Duvall, Tom Berenger and Darryl Hannah - how could it fail? Alas, it's an amazingly crass piece of work in which Branagh, as a playboy lawyer, affects a Deep South accent as thick as Louisiana molasses and finds himself pursued by a shoeless hobo who's been sprung from prison.