Games
Though modern times witnessed dramas on monumental scales—the turning back of Hitler and the fall of European communism, to mention two—the steadiest drama of modern times lay in the adventures of a ball (or puck). Mere games were not mere. A soccer match sparked a war between El Salvador and Honduras. Generalissimo Franco claimed that the Church and soccer were the pillars of his regime. Once players from the rest of the world began playing for European football teams, racist riots were not uncommon. But the thrill of watching sports in modern times was personal not political. Franco knew that. So did the Romans with their bread and circuses. The circuses change over time but they don’t change—distractions from the humdrum and occasions for permissible passion.
An accomplished athlete performing even a modest feat exhibits a marvelous purity and grace. At the same time, sport is rough and ready—both the physical tumult and the eagerness to bet on any outcome. The putative purity ascribed to amateurism—playing for the sake of playing—takes an uncommon dedication. Given the amounts of money that have come to revolve around sport, no surprise lay in professionals coming to be paid as professionals. Until that money began to reach stratospheric amounts, few begrudged them. The stresses that went with the money led to the search for an advantage over other athletes. In face of the abundance of drugs that offered some enhancement (or simply numbed pain), numerous less-than-pure practices were bound to appear. Idealists about sport were easily called out as hypocrites: what did they expect? Too easily, realists became contemptuous: without any codes of conduct sport became meaningless.
Everyone who played a competitive sport played to win but sportsmanship, how a person played the game came to seem beside the point, gentlemanly manners that were little more than a social accoutrement. Only those who could afford them cared about niceties. The rest of humankind was busy trying to get by. The honor of imperialists and colonialists and their fabled playing fields did not impress the natives working in the diamond mines. Yet the blunt notion that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” had nothing to say to how the game was played, only its outcome. Another version of social Darwinism made for a poor excuse for athletic effort. A game was not a battle. You played a game.
The ancient Greeks feted their athletes but modern times took praise and scrutiny to an unprecedented level. Newspapers and magazines related at length the struggles athletes faced. Since sport was sport—a matter of chance as well as skill—these struggles were potent and sometimes heartrending. Mostly things went as they should but then someone fell down, on or off the field. The beauty of the game subsumed the players playing it but the players’ lives—a perpetual stock of hope, inspiration, dedication, and failure—pushed back. The players were manifestly not automatons. Background and foreground kept moving imperceptibly: the more the spectators knew about the players, the more riveting this movement became.
The comfort, convenience, and efficiency of modern times made life for many blessedly predictable, if also dull. Sport offered the spectacle of the simple drama of what may or may not happen next: swing or miss, goal or save, rally or no rally. This drama reminded the spectator of the contingent nature of being human but under auspices that were not life-and-death dire. The drama was bounded—athletes age and come to a time when they no longer can perform as they once did—but the drama was on-going. Sport made for a festival of moments, innings, periods, games, matches, seasons, careers—different time frames occurring at once.
For the listener and viewer, who with the advent of radio and television did not have to be at the actual event in order to participate, sport offered great vicarious pleasure. Vistas opened that were distant yet practicable. The feeling invested in such events could have gone to other places in the human psyche—spiritual, political, and aesthetic, to name three—but didn’t. Sport offered an easy peg for the fan to hang an emotional cap on. Sport didn’t demand anything beyond a willingness to pay some degree of attention along with the assumption of an identity that could be picked up and put down at will. Winners attracted more fans; losers didn’t. Yet childhood attachments mattered, too—once a certain team’s fan, always a fan.
The surfeit of events that came to be available to fans and the surrounding talk filled a modest void. No one in sport was proposing a better world or salvation or some life-changing inner experience. The games offered a chance to get out of one’s life and into something more vivid. Any sporting match rarefied life into a construct of a few hours. There would be intensity and there would be an outcome. Sport was a poem coming to life, as William Carlos Williams noted in “At the Ball Game”: “the exciting detail / of the chase / and the escape, the error / the flash of genius— / all to no end save beauty / the eternal—“
Fans rarely lacked for opinions. Arguments could be settled by actualities: someone won or lost. The subjective nature of any game, however, was infinite. So much might have been and could have been. The ball might have bounced differently, the shot might have gone in, the umpire could have called the play differently: within the confines of rules and actions, sport remained a maze of possibility. Sport, to hearken to Generalissimo Franco, provided a freedom that was otherwise lacking. For anyone following along, the drama was for free: a quickening of the pulse and the imagination, a reminder of taut humanity. Grace did not occur without exertion.