SportsWorld: An American Dreamland

Praise for SportsWorld

Mr. Lipsyte is a brilliant writer. He can turn a phrase as effortlessly as Earl the Pearl spinning, left, then right, to sink a fallaway jumper. He is as erudite in his references . . . as Bill Bradley. He is a phrase maker and a wit.

—Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

You will never look at a sports event in quite the same way again.

—Paul D. Zimmerman, Newsweek

An incisive, intelligent, beautifully written book. . . .

—Newsday

"SportsWorld . . . should be savored."

—Chicago Sun Times

SportsWorld

Also by Robert Lipsyte

Fiction

The Contender

Something Going (with Steve Cady)

Liberty Two

Non-Fiction

Nigger, the Autobiography of Dick Gregory

The Masculine Mystique

Assignment: Sports

SportsWorld

An American Dreamland

Robert Lipsyte

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lipsyte, Robert, author.

Title: SportsWorld : an American dreamland / Robert Lipsyte.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Originally published: New York : Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., c1975. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055081 (print) | LCCN 2018007816 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813593210 (E-pub) | ISBN 9780813593234 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780813593203 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813593197 (paperback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Sports—United States. | Professional sports—United States. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Essays. | SPORTS & RECREATION / History. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Sports. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Sociology of Sports. | SPORTS & RECREATION / Business Aspects.

Classification: LCC GV583 (ebook) | LCC GV583 .L56 2018 (print) | DDC 796.0973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055081

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Robert Lipsyte

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

This book is for Jim Roach, who gave me time and space to swing and miss and swing again when he was sports editor of The New York Times, and for his assistant and successor, Jim Tuite;

for friends in the sports department who helped me: Gay Talese in the beginning, later Steve Cady, Bill Wallace, Frank Litsky, Neil Amdur, and Pete Bonventre, now at Newsweek; for Sam Goldaper, then of the Herald Tribune, who walked me up to my very first press box in 1959;

for two teachers, now gone: James J. Keman of Forest Hills High School and George Nobbe Sr. of Columbia;

for Jonathan Segal, the Quadrangle editor who originally asked me to write this book, and rooted it in, and, of course, for Marjorie Rubin Lipsyte, my collaborator and best friend.

Contents

Introduction to the 2018 Edition

Introduction to the Original Edition

Chapter 1. Welcome to SportsWorld

Chapter 2. Please Rise for Our National Pastime

Chapter 3. Sport of the Sixties: Instant Replay . . . Replay . . . Replay . . .

Chapter 4. The Heavyweight Crown Prince of the World

Chapter 5. Sport of the Seventies: Sly, Midnight Moves

Chapter 6. The Back Page

Chapter 7. The Body Biz

Chapter 8. Designated Heroes, Ranking Gods, All-Star Holy Persons

Chapter 9. The Last American Dream

Index

About the Author

Introduction to the 2018 Edition

When I wrote this book more than forty years ago, I thought it would be my valedictory to sportswriting before I headed off to fiction. My role model was Paul Gallico, a New York Daily News columnist who published his own last licks, Farewell to Sport, in 1938, the year I was born. He went on to become better known as the author of The Snow Goose and The Poseidon Adventure.

Unlike Gallico, I kept coming back to sports through years of writing novels and working in television. In 1991, after a twenty-year hiatus, I returned to the New York Times as a columnist. In 2013, I was hired on as an ombudsman at ESPN, in the belly of the beast.

I’m not sure why I keep coming back. I’d always felt like a foreign correspondent in SportsWorld, and critics of this book tried to dismiss it and me as joyless. Sometimes I wondered if they were right, if the only appropriate way to cover sports was with an avid fan’s sensibility, grateful to be allowed into the glad place, as Jimmy Cannon called it. What can I say? I don’t love sports uncritically, but I’m drawn to it, fascinated by its drama and humanity, its combination of technical complexity and decisive simplicity. It’s fun, a pleasure of the flesh. And a vivid window to the rest of life.

I had fallen into sportswriting accidentally and at a lucky time for a feature writer who had never followed sports seriously. Early on, I was assigned two major stories, the birth of the New York Mets and the metamorphosis of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, and my pieces were credited with a fresh eye instead of cluelessness and with irreverence rather than a lack of sentiment. I had covered church services and crime the same way, just writing down what I saw, but athletes and their games, especially in the early sixties, were generally treated more worshipfully than the clergy and cops.

Would I do it the same way if I were starting out now? I hope so, despite the enormous changes in sports and in journalism. When I left daily sportswriting for the first time, in 1971, games were still portrayed as crucibles of character by journalists, who had easy access to their subjects as long as they never revealed examples of their lack of character. These days, both professional and college sports are seen as critical revenue streams in the entertainment and media industries, while athletes and coaches are protected from reporters—or thrown under TV trucks if they start losing—like any other celebrities. This isn’t all bad; the end of cozy access has created an adversarial relationship in which journalists have nothing to lose by writing and broadcasting the truth, although hot takes are more likely than meaningful investigations.

Meanwhile, the continuous news cycle and the internet’s speed of distribution make journalism more competitive, physically harder, and likely to be detrimental to everyone’s mental health. Sports journalism has devolved into too much provocation and/or boosterism, as has journalism in general, just when our lives depend on knowing what’s really going on. Meanwhile, leagues and teams have been taking over the news feed; even the former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, as humdrum an interview as he was thrilling a player, has become the publisher of a fanzine, the Players’ Tribune.

Since this book was originally published, the stealthy sneaker wars have become star wars, performance-enhancing drugs have become the breakfast of champions, ESPN was conceived and became the big window onto sports, and the NFL tried unsuccessfully to conceal its collateral brain damage.

While the controversial lives of two of the book’s heroes, Muhammad Ali and Billie Jean King, have been bleached into sainthood, we’ve become fascinated with such morally complex superstars as Lance Armstrong, Mike Tyson, Tiger Woods, Pete Rose, and Barry Bonds. Women athletes, particularly the Williams sisters and a bevy of exciting soccer and basketball players, have emerged to claim a share of the spotlight. LeBron James has taken charge of his professional life as no athlete has done before, and quarterback Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers refused to stand for the national anthem in a renewal of athletic protest against racism that was suppressed fifty years ago and channeled into hustling for endorsements. Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player and without argument the greatest pitchman.

A number of my favorite subjects from the book have had interesting second acts. Bill Bradley never became president as all his teammates predicted (and despite my own efforts in writing a health care speech for him), but he was an effective senator for three terms before becoming an investment banker. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who as a teenager named Lew Alcindor once showed interest in journalism, has become a respected author and commentator, and Harry Edwards, the organizer behind the 1968 Olympics demonstration, returned to tutor Kaepernick in kneeling for justice rather than raising a black-gloved fist.

As I write this in 2017, Edwards has convened the opening conference of his new Institute for the Study of Sport, Society and Social Change at San Jose State University, where his Olympic Project for Human Rights was created fifty years earlier. At that time, he was a young sociology professor who strode the campus—all six feet eight inches of him—with an open book of matches pinned to his denim jacket. That scared people. They asked him questions that he answered, as he still does, clearly, powerfully, and at great length.

His presence and the recent resurgence in athletic activism, a thread in SportsWorld, make it even easier to say, although not entirely correctly, that nothing really changes in journalism and sports. The pursuit of access and scoops, of box office bonanzas and championship rings, of excellence and domination—those same old stories—can explain such seemingly new phenomena as the Russians’ systemic steroid use (it goes back to the Soviet bloc in the 1950s if not the stimulants ancient Greek athletes used), the plague of brain trauma in football (we once called it being punch-drunk in boxing), the blackmailing of cities into building sports arenas with taxpayers’ money, and the uneasy dance between subject and storyteller.

Yet the latest versions of those same old stories have somehow made them seem fresh again. The internet, of course, has so altered the pace of journalism and shifted its dynamic that keeping up with the truth, much less finding it, often becomes impossible in the short term. As the Trump plague proves daily, truth will out, but by then the world will have spun on.

Baseball’s steroid saga is a fine example. Late in the twentieth century, as baseball was being replaced by football as the National Pastime, baseball sold itself on the big bang theory—bigger, stronger players hitting more home runs would bring back the fans. It worked. Reporters pointed out the newly swollen sluggers amid mounting rumors of their drug use. But the unconfirmed reports were mostly dismissed before they could gain traction. It was off message. One of the earliest and most successful of the steroidal sluggers was Mark McGwire of the Oakland A’s and the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1998, he and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs, who also juiced, dueled all summer to break Roger Maris’s thirty-seven-year-old record of sixty-one homers in one season while the beloved ghost of Babe Ruth, who had hit sixty in 1927, looked on.

Sportswriters not only reveled in the friendly, multicultural rivalry between two popular players—a white Californian and a brown Dominican—but hyped it as a welcome respite from real life, in particular the revelation that stains on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress had come from President Bill Clinton. So when Steve Wilstein of the Associated Press wrote about spotting a bottle of androstenedione, a form of testosterone, in McGwire’s locker, he was assailed by many of his colleagues as a snoop. Don’t mess with a good story. The Summer of Swat was going to save both the pastime and the nation.

Even irreverent, joyless Lipsyte was swept along. I remember a night in an East Harlem restaurant with Latino friends, stomping and yelling at a big-screen TV as Sosa and McGwire each hit a homer in the same game to tie at forty-six. Both eventually broke the record, McGwire with seventy, Sosa with sixty-six. It was too good to be true.

Once McGwire and Sosa—and then Bonds, Roger Clemons, Alex Rodriguez, and other stars of the game—were under serious suspicion of using steroids, sportswriters turned on them. The cheaters had betrayed the fans’ trust. That was a good story, too. Less so that they had also made us look like fools.

Soon, the old web of synergistic alliances between subjects and scribes didn’t matter that much anymore. Anyone with minimal computer skills could be a sports columnist, and he—usually a young white man—didn’t even need access to press boxes and locker rooms. All he needed was an attitude. The most successful among the bloggers was Bill Simmons, a lively writer whose early work out of Boston set the standard. Simmons grasped the cozy cultishness of fandom and its basic narcissism. The athlete wasn’t as important as what he evoked for you. The game existed as a way to renew your relationship with Dad, to express how you felt about various members of the Friends cast, to remember the song on the car radio while you were in the back seat trying to get laid.

As fantasy leagues replaced real ones in the obsessions of bloggers and fans, the gap between the athlete and the spectator—it was already a physical and economic chasm—widened emotionally. Jocks might as well have been video game characters.

While modern fantasy leagues were presaged by such tabletop games as Strat-O-Matic Baseball (invented in 1961) and by Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., it was the 1979 creation of the Rotisserie League by Manhattan editor and baseball expert Dan Okrent (also a star talking head in Ken Burns’s epic Baseball) that opened the way to what is now a multibillion-dollar industry and the gateway to online sports gambling. It also had a lot to do with the rise of analytics in sports, the constant crunching of statistical performances that has also helped diminish the personal identification that fans once felt for players.

That identification had begun to erode in the seventies when I wrote this book, perhaps part of the post-Vietnam skepticism toward all institutions and the rise of investigative journalism, a la Woodward and Bernstein. We were already losing that long-held sense of games as a kind of secular religiosity that would bind families, communities, and nations. We were becoming comfortable with sports as commercialized entertainment. A cynicism set in. It became apparent in youth sports, the last bastion of purity.

Early in the new century, while I was intermittently covering NASCAR as a way of refreshing myself and my Times column, I decided to check out youth auto racing. It’s very big (especially in the South), family oriented, and the elementary school for almost all adult drivers.

At a Florida track for quarter-midget cars, while I was watching a race for seven-year-olds, an official pointed out to me a crew chief, a dad, who was notorious for slipping banned additives into his kid’s fuel tank. The performance-enhancing chemical apparently worked because the car was a consistent winner. (Thankfully, in auto racing, the machines, not the humans, take most of the drugs.)

I asked the official why they didn’t bust the cheater. The official sighed. That would lead to a fuss, he said, maybe litigation, possibly the disruption of the race season. He said that even the other competitors preferred to let nature take its course; soon enough, the crew chief’s son would turn eight years old and move up to another race classification. Let someone else deal with the problem, he said.

But what about the other parents and children? I asked. What lessons were they learning? Wasn’t sports supposed to be that one fair place, that level playing field where the white lines defined the boundaries of what was right and what was wrong?

The beleaguered official, half my age, gave me one of those why don’t you grow up looks and said, Don’t blame us; blame society.

But this is where it starts, I said to his retreating back. A Little League pitcher claims to be younger than his real age. A teenaged basketball star lies about his address so he can join a high school team out of his district. Grades and test scores are altered for a promising college football recruit. Kids grow up knowing about such things, and they see grown-ups shrugging or winking, if not actually pulling the strings behind the scenes.

That revelatory quarter-midget race came during my second stint at the Times, from 1991 to 2003. Under a brilliant sports editor, Neil Amdur, and the all-time best of the Times’ executive editors, Joe Lelyveld, I was encouraged to roam SportsWorld as if it were a continent to be explored rather than a series of scheduled events to be annotated.

Amdur was relentlessly creative, the engine behind most of the stories I most enjoyed covering, including the NASCAR series; the public coming out of former big league outfielder, Billy Bean; the forty-year friendship of two Olympic women athletes, Pat Connolly and Willie White; a season with the New York Rangers, incidentally the one in which they won the 1994 Stanley Cup; a season with a championship New York City high school soccer team; and a full school year with all of Elizabeth (N.J.) High School’s men’s and women’s teams. A highlight was the day a sixteen-year-old defensive back brought me and his new girlfriend to the school’s daycare center to show off his baby by a previous girlfriend. He was establishing his macho authenticity to us both. It was an important professional moment for me, a justification that my way of covering sports wasn’t merely an indulgence or a cover-up for being weak on Xs and Os but a valid approach to connecting the games to the larger reality.

During my first stint at the Times, from 1957 to 1971, there had been frequent sniping from more traditional sportswriters and fans—stick to sports!—but this time around, there was support and company. These days, there are many more sports journalists that I like to read, watch, and learn from—the likes of Dave Zirin, Bryan Curtis, Howard Bryant, Alexander Wolff, Jemele Hill, and Jeremy Schaap. They tend to believe, as I do, that sports matters even if there is something the matter with sports.

At the end of SportsWorld, I offered a tongue-in-cheek version of a future in which sports is fragmented into nude polo and gay jousting, but I certainly didn’t predict the enormity of the boom and the rise of mixed martial arts, women’s soccer, and competitive video gaming, which looks promising—prepare for a nerd’s Super Bowl as misogynistic and easily corrupted as the original. My favorite prediction, via sociologist Jay Coakley, is future major league status for snowboarding and skateboarding, sports that he believes value sharing and self-expression over competition. For spectators, the legalizing of gambling will eventually lead to Facebookies obsessively betting via phone, pitch by pitch, basket by basket.

As of this writing, the future on both sides of the white lines is murky. President Donald J. Trump is an avatar of the worst aspects of jock culture (he had been a good high school athlete, although that’s not required). His boastful, bullying, blowfish persona is tolerated in locker rooms (also sales offices, barracks, trading floors, legislatures), and it’s no surprise that his close pals and business associates in SportsWorld include two other questionable hustlers, boxing’s Don King and wrestling’s Vince McMahon.

When I first talked to Trump in the mid-eighties, he had just bought the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League (USFL), which was beginning its second year of operation. The USFL played its games in the spring and summer to avoid directly competing with the NFL for fans and TV access, but it did bid successfully against the established league for several star players, including Herschel Walker, Steve Young, and Doug Flutie.

In the course of a long interview for television, Trump told me that he really wasn’t all that consumed with the USFL (If the league isn’t successful, then, you know, it’s off to the next thing) as he also bragged that his involvement gave the new league a little bit more warlike posture toward the establishment and that the magic of Trump Tower enhanced the image of the league.

When I asked Trump about reports that the USFL’s hidden agenda was to eventually merge with the NFL or at least pressure it into admitting some USFL franchises, he genially said, I hadn’t thought of it to be perfectly honest. And then, I don’t think it’s in the cards for many years.

Of course, it soon turned out that Trump was the leader of a group of owners pushing the new league to shift its games to the fall and challenge the NFL. There was an antitrust lawsuit that ended in Pyrrhic victory—the USFL won it, received a judgment of $3 million, and collapsed, having lost tens of millions.

I wish I hadn’t treated Trump as an entertaining if unreliable subject—he was expressing many of the political opinions then that he espouses now. We gave him air and space for our own ratings and circulations then as we did during the election campaign. We didn’t take him seriously enough because we stayed in the press box interviewing each other instead of wandering through the bleachers talking to the fans.

Trump, of course, put down Colin Kaepernick’s demonstration against racism and police brutality, suggesting the quarterback find himself another country.

The first signs of what I hoped was a Jock Spring, a renewed athletic activism since the Olympic days of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, actually predated Kaepernick’s protest. In July 2016, New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony posted on his Instagram page a half-century-old, black-and-white photograph of a dozen young black athletes in suits and ties posed at a summit meeting of stars. The front row was a SportsWorld Mt. Rushmore—Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Muhammad Ali, whose banishment from boxing they had come to protest.

Anthony’s message called on all my fellow ATHLETES to step up and take charge. Go to your local officials, leaders, congressman, assemblymen/assemblywoman and demand change. There’s NO more sitting back and being afraid of tackling and addressing political issues anymore. Those days are long gone. We have to step up and take charge. We can’t worry about what endorsements we gonna lose or who is going to look at us crazy. I need your voices to be heard. We can demand change.

This was a revolutionary statement from a player best known for not passing the ball. A few days later, he joined fellow NBA stars Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, and LeBron James onstage at ESPN’s annual awards show. LeBron declared, Let’s use this moment as a call to action for all professional athletes to educate ourselves, explore these issues, speak up, use our influence and renounce all violence.

That and Kaepernick’s demonstration inspired other NFL players, WNBA players, and hundreds of high school athletes and their coaches to protest. Hardly had the champagne dried in the New England Patriots’ locker room before members of the 2017 Super Bowl championship team were announcing that they would not attend the White House victory celebration, even though team owner Robert Kraft, coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady were on record as Trump boosters.

How will all this play out? I fear that unless Trump is carried out of the arena and his team comes apart against #TheResistance, athletic activism will be subverted and co-opted as it was fifty years ago. But SportsWorld, that sweaty Oz where so many of our values and definitions are born, will endure.

Shelter Island, N.Y.

February 2017

Introduction to the Original Edition

For the past one hundred years most Americans have believed that playing and watching competitive games are not only healthful activities, but represent a positive force on our national psyche. In sports, they believe, children will learn courage and self-control, old people will find blissful nostalgia, and families will discover new ways to communicate among themselves. Immigrants will find shortcuts to recognition as Americans. Rich and poor, black and white, educated and unskilled, we will all find a unifying language. The melting pot may be a myth, but we will all come together in the ballpark.

This faith in sports has been vigorously promoted by industry, the military, government, the media. The values of the arena and the locker room have been imposed upon our national life. Coaches and sportswriters are speaking for generals and businessmen, too, when they tell us that a man must be physically and psychologically tough to succeed, that he must be clean and punctual and honest, that he must bear pain, bad luck, and defeat without whimpering or making excuses. A man must prove his faith in sports and the American Way by whipping himself into shape, playing by the rules, being part of the team, and putting out all the way. If his faith is strong enough, he will triumph. It’s his own fault if he loses, fails, remains poor.

Even for ballgames, these values, with their implicit definitions of manhood, courage, and success, are not necessarily in the individual’s best interests. But for daily life they tend to create a dangerous and grotesque web of ethics and attitudes, an amorphous infrastructure that acts to contain our energies, divert our passions, and socialize us for work or war or depression.

I call this infrastructure SportsWorld. For most of my adult life, as a professional observer, I’ve explored SportsWorld and marveled at its incredible power and pervasiveness. SportsWorld touches everyone and everything. We elect our politicians, judge our children, fight our wars, plan our vacations, oppress our minorities by SportsWorld standards that somehow justify our foulest and freakiest deeds, or at least camouflage them with jargon. We get stoned on such SportsWorld spectaculars as the Super Bowl, the space shots, the Kentucky Derby, the presidential conventions, the Indianapolis 500, all of whose absurd excesses reassure us that we’re okay.

SportsWorld is a sweaty Oz you’ll never find in a geography book, but since the end of the Civil War it has been promoted and sold to us like Rancho real estate, an ultimate sanctuary, a university for the body, a community for the spirit, a place to hide that glows with that time of innocence when we believed that rules and boundaries were honored, that good triumphed over evil, and that the loose ends of experience could be caught and bound and delivered in an explanation as final and as comforting as a goodnight kiss.

Sometime in the last fifty years the sports experience was perverted into a SportsWorld state of mind in which the winner was good because he won; the loser, if not actually bad, was at least reduced, and had to prove himself over again, through competition. As each new immigrant crop was milled through the American system, a pick of the harvest was displayed in the SportsWorld showcase, a male preserve of national athletic entertainment traditionally enacted by the working class for the middle class, much as the performing arts are played by the middle class for the amusement of the upper class.

By the 1950s, when SportsWorld was dominated by what are now called white ethnics, the black American was perceived as a challenging force and was encouraged to find outlets in the national sports arena. Although most specific laws against black participation had already been erased, it took cautious, humiliating experiments with such superstars as Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby to prove that spectator prejudice could be deconditioned by a winning team. Within a few years, pools of cheap, eager black and dark Latin labor were channeled into mainstream clubs.

So pervasive are the myths of SportsWorld that the recruitment of blacks has been regarded as a gift of true citizenship bestowed upon the Negro when he was ready. It has been conventional wisdom for twenty years that the black exposure in sports has speeded the integration of American society, that white Americans, having seen that blacks are beautiful and strong, became liberalized.

This is one of the crueler hoaxes of SportsWorld. Sports success probably has been detrimental to black progress. By publicizing the material success of a few hundred athletes, thousands, perhaps millions, of bright young blacks have been swept toward sports when they should have been guided toward careers in medicine or engineering or business. For every black star celebrated in SportsWorld, a thousand of his little brothers were neutralized, kept busy shooting baskets until it was too late for them to qualify beyond marginal work.

The white male spectator who knew few ordinary black men to measure himself against may have had his awareness raised by watching such superior human beings as Frank Robinson, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, O. J. Simpson, and other highly merchandised SportsWorld heroes, but it also doubled his worst fears about blacks: added to the black junkie who would rip out his throat was the black superstud who could replace him as a man—in bed, on the job, as a model for his children.

By the middle of the 1970s it seemed as though the black experience in SportsWorld might be recapitulated by women. SportsWorld seemed on the verge of becoming the arena in which women would discover and exploit their new equality. It would be a complex test of adaptability for SportsWorld. The major sports were created by men for the superior muscles, size, and endurance of the male body. Those sports in which balance, flexibility, and dexterity are the crucial elements have never been mass-promoted in America. When a woman beats a man at a man’s game, she has to play like a man.

There were signs, however, that women may not embrace SportsWorld as eagerly as did the blacks, profiting from that sorry lesson as well as from their own greater leverage in American society. It is no accident that Billie Jean King, while still an active player, became an entrepreneur and an important voice in American cultural consciousness while Jackie Robinson was a Rockefeller courtier almost to the end of his life.

A great deal of the angry energy generated in America through the coming apart of the 1960s was absorbed by SportsWorld in its various roles as socializer, pacifier, safety valve; as a concentration camp for adolescents and an emotional Disneyland for their parents; as a laboratory for human engineering and a reflector of current moral postures; and as a running commercial for Our Way of Life. SportsWorld is a buffer, a DMZ, between people and the economic and political systems that direct their lives; women, so long denied this particular playland, may just avoid this trap altogether.

But SportsWorld’s greatest power has always been its flexibility. Even as we are told of SportsWorld’s proud traditions, immutable laws, ultimate security from the capriciousness of real life, SportsWorld is busy changing its rules, readjusting its alliances, checking the trends. SportsWorld is nothing if not responsive. Hockey interest lagging, how about a little more blood on the ice? Speed up baseball with a designated hitter. Move the football goal posts. A three-point shot in basketball. Women agitating at the college arena gates? Let ‘em in. Give ’em athletic scholarships, jock dorms, and Minnie Mouse courses. How about a Professional Women’s Power Volleyball League?

Stars, teams, leagues, even entire sports may rise or fall or never get off the ground, but SportsWorld as a force in American life orbits on.

Ah, baseball. Our National Pastime. An incredibly complex contrivance that seems to have been created by a chauvinistic mathematician intent upon giving America a game so idiosyncratic that it would be at least a century before any other country could beat us at it. And indeed it was. After a century in which baseball was celebrated as a unique product of the American character, Chinese boys began winning Little League championships, and young men from Latin America and the Caribbean began making a significant impact upon the major leagues. The highly organized Japanese, who had taken up the game during the postwar occupation of their country (perhaps as penance for yelling To Hell with Babe Ruth during banzai charges) were almost ready to attack again.

But SportsWorld had spun on. That other peculiarly American game, football, declared itself the New National Pastime. Baseball and God were announced dead at about the same time, but the decision against baseball apparendy is taking longer to reverse, thanks in the main to pro football’s colossal public relations machine. The National Football League played its scheduled games on Sunday, November 24, 1963, because its historic television deal was pending and Commissioner Pete Rozelle was determined to prove that nothing, nothing, could cancel the show. But that winter, NFL sportscasters infiltrated the banquet circuit with the engaging theory—quintessential SportsWorld—that America had been at the brink of a nervous breakdown after President Kennedy’s assassination and that only The Sport of the Sixties’ business-as-usual attitude had held the country together until Monday’s National Day of Mourning unified us all in public grief.

Ten years later, though hopefully still grateful, America had grown bored with the cartoon brutality of pro football. America was boogieing to the magic moves and hip, sly rhythms of basketball, The Sport of the Seventies. We’ve had enough of pure violence, simulated or otherwise, went the SportsWorld wisdom, now we need something smoooooooth.

There is no end to SportsWorld theories—of the past, the present, the future—especially now that a new generation of commentators, athletes, coaches, and fans feels free to reform and recast sports, to knock it off the pedestal and slide it under the microscope, giving it more importance than ever. SportsWorld newspapermen dare to describe to us action that we have seen more clearly on television than they have from the press box, and SportsWorld telecasters, isolated from the world in their glass booths, dare to explain to us what the players are really thinking. SportsWorld analysts were once merely pigskin prognosticators predicting the weekend football scores; now they may be as heavy as any RAND Corporation futurist. Is hockey an art form or is it a paradigm of anarchy, in which case are we obligated as concerned citizens to watch it? Is tennis more than just a convenient new market for clothes and building materials and nondurable goods? What will be The Sport of the Eighties? Will no sport ever again have its own decade? Will cable television and government-regulated sports gambling and the institutionalized fragmenting of society balkanize us into dozens of jealous Fandoms?

SportsWorld, once determinedly anti-intellectual, has become a hotbed of psychologists, physicians,