One Game at a Time. Matt Hern
IT 110%
It’s pretty common to condescend to sports as territory really only fit for hormone-addled teens, Neanderthals, and developmentally-delayed retrogrades. Sort of strangely, this attitude shows up in a whole variety of guises, constantly embedded, reiterated, and repercussed by sports fans, casual observers, and antagonists alike, and amounts to an assumptive abandonment of the sporting world as worthy of serious engagement.
Sophisticated “thinking” people of all ideological persuasions have seemingly always held condescending attitudes towards sports—and that’s for lots of obvious reasons, and subtler ones that dovetail with a generalized disdain (from the left as much as the right) for working-class, everyday culture. Aside from the occasional Plimpton-esque (or Mailer/Oates/Remnick-esque) quasi-anthropological foray, intellectuals (and I’m using that term as loosely as imaginable) overwhelmingly dismiss the sporting world.
No less than Noam Chomsky articulated a cheap (but super common) line when he suggested that if people paid as much attention to politics as they do to sports we’d have a much better world.1 It’s the frequent default stance of leftists, progressives, and liberals everywhere, even those who love sports: this tired old position that sports are the contemporary opiate of the masses. But Noam never would have said that about music, dance, theater, painting, or poetry, and that contradiction is what I’m after here. I want us to consider sports as seriously as we take other “high” art forms, to understand sports as sitting squarely within a spectrum of creative expression, and just as worthy of our serious attention, engagement, reflection, love, and respect. Sports and art are not the same thing, but those delineations are arbitrary ones, and they largely exist to stabilize class pretensions and social positions. I suggest we eviscerate those definitions entirely. 2
Chomsky’s generalized position is echoed by all kinds of people—whether they spend much time thinking about sports or not—who tend to defer to this analytical refuge; it’s an easy and clichéd place to wander off to. And to be sure, sports consistently give us every reason to revile them. Whether it’s the a-hole football players from your high school, the idiot jock homophobe culture, the sexual assaults so endemic to athletics, the crazed militarism at pro events, or the fucking Washington Redskins, it ain’t like sports aren’t doing their honest best to drive good people away. In the face of all the mouth-breathing scorn jock culture heaps on others, it’s hardly surprising that thoughtful people of every predilection aren’t terribly impressed with the possibilities of the sports world, and refuse to return the respect that sports has denied them.
The presumption of the essential triviality of sports is visible (in a weirdly self-flagellating twitch) even among sports-nerds. Many of us are simultaneously obsessed and chagrined—as if sports aren’t worthy of our legitimate attention. It’s something we hide like the porn history on our computers, something that stains whatever fantasies we might have of being serious adults. Even on rabid sports talk radio, whenever a tragedy occurs commentators trot out an inevitably reflexive cliché: “Makes you think about what really matters….” As if sports don’t really matter—when they clearly, absolutely do.
Across the ideological, class, cultural, and sporting spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that sports are, at best, distractingly vapid. This retreat by folks who love sports, and folks who revile them, and everyone in-between, has turned the sports world into easy prey for hyper-consumptive, violent, militaristic, sexist, and homophobic politics—and, ultimately, handed over the immense power of sports to some of the worst elements of our society. It’s a retreat that has concretized a self-fulfilling prophecy and self-regulating narrative that tells us just how fucked sports really are. When the sporting world reinforces its own triviality, whether purposefully or not, it gives permission for its own consistently idiotic behavior, because, well, it just “doesn’t matter” much. Hardly. My argument here is precisely the opposite: we should all—whether we watch, obsess, cheer, play, or not at all—take sports seriously, as worthy of real respect, because if we don’t, we will continue to allow them to be dominated by some of the most regrettable politics imaginable.
Sports Illustrated estimates that 62% of American males and 47% of females regularly play competitive sports. Even more than playing, though, we like to watch: in the U.S., twenty-one of the forty-five most-watched TV shows in history are Super Bowls; in India, the most watched program of all time is the 2011 Cricket World Cup Final; in China, it is the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games which (not coincidentally) remains the most watched global broadcast in history. In Germany, ten of the top eleven most watched broadcasts of all time are soccer games; in Canada, the most watched television broadcast in history is the men’s gold-medal hockey game of 2010 Winter Olympics with 16.6 million viewers watching the entire game, roughly one-half of the country’s population. These kinds of stats are repeated across the globe, whether we’re talking TV or live events, numbers that will surprise approximately no one. Now, I don’t want to equate television audiences with inherent value, but it sure as hell means something.
Big sporting events dominate cities, incite riots, and fill entire newspaper sections with relentless coverage of minutiae and gossip. Sports are the default topic of conversation at parties and bars the world over. Sports keep many families together, gives buddies something to talk about, and provide narrative shape for many of our days. Teams and players inspire devotion vastly beyond reason. There is something very deep here that even the ungodly amounts of garish marketing, ultra-nationalist tendencies, hyper-corporatism, and dislikable athletes with their tricked-out Hummers can’t extinguish: so many of us love sports, both participating and spectating, for lots of very good and very valuable reasons.
I am obviously not defending the entire breadth of the sporting world as it exists now (!): what I am doing is arguing for what sports could be. To my mind it’s not a great leap to think of a time when sports are a force for good in our culture and we condescend to those possibilities at our peril. That’s what this book is after: I’m arguing that sports can, should, and do really matter.
RUNNING IT RIGHT UP THE GUT
That said, even for me, sometimes it seems totally fucking absurd to be making this argument. Sitting here watching a tepid mid-season Canucks game surrounded by a-holes in Affliction gear shouting grotesquely sexist/anti-queer shit at the ice while getting hammered on $8.50 plastic cups of Coors Light is hardly the place to feel comfortable about the transformative potential of sports.
Between periods I stroll around the concourse, dodging the Red Bull kiosks, the Pepsi girls, and the Stella stalls. I’m looking to milk a little extra value for the $127.50 mid-bowl tickets I’ve lucked into when a pal left town unexpectedly. It’s a roiling river of people, and 87% of them are geared right up in team apparel.
Daunted, I duck into one of the metastasized merch stores inside the arena and scope out the $299 authentic jerseys, $45 pennants, $50 branded garden gnomes (!), $115 baseball hat display cases (!!), $79 ticket frames and the hundreds of other Canucks-themed ephemera.3 I buy a pair of shot glasses for my mom’s birthday. I’m not sure she’s ever gunned a shot in her life, but it seems the right thing to do. I see a vintage Brendan Morrison signed and framed player card propped up by the counter so I snag that too. Mom’s worth that for sure. She’ll love it. The clerk wraps it for me expertly in Canucks-colored paper and slides it all into a lovely, tastefully-branded little Canucks-themed bag. Very nice.
Post-game, we slip into the sports bar at the corner, watch the highlights of the game we’ve just come from, and I then review the situation on espn.com before bed. There’s scarcely been a moment over the last six hours when I haven’t been a zombie-bug wandering in a manically-consumptive formicarium.
Most decent people instinctively act with revulsion in the face of this insane, corporatized, spectacular shit-show. And totally justifiably. The micro and macro-economic logics of the pro sports world are crazed and infuriating. Triple-figure tickets, billion-dollar franchises, $3 million Super Bowl ads, $13 million a year for middling pitchers, a quarter billion for A-Rod