WILLIAM J. BENNETT
I penned this essay in February 1976 at a time when a number of writers and cultural commentators were questioning the integrity of competitive sports. Below is my defense of my belief that athletics has a valuable impact in a man’s life that reverberates through society as a whole. The examples are dated—recall the cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies—but some of the issues discussed here are still pertinent.
Competitive athletics, currently under scrutiny, is being subjected to a method of investigation that assumes the most significant aspects of anything are those concealed from the eye. Jack Scott, friend of Bill Walton and allegedly connected with Patty Hearst and the SLA, is the would-be chief muckraker and reformer of this loved part of American life. In the New York Times recently, Scott “revealed” that American sports is really just an instrument of monopoly capitalism whose primary purpose is to force upon men an obsession with masculinity. Scott is not alone in his efforts to tell the whole truth about our games.
A flurry of books—Scott’s own The Athletic Revolution, Paul Hoch’s Rip Off the Big Game, Joseph Durso’s The Sports Factory, George Leonard’s The Ultimate Athlete—have hit this and related themes. These books, written mostly by nonathletes, have come in the wake of books by the players themselves—Out of Their League by Dave Meggyesy, They Call It a Game by Bernie Parrish, High for the Game by Chip Oliver, and the early and popular Ball Four by Jim Bouton. Mixed in have been some works of fiction that simultaneously apotheosize and make fun of sports and athletes—the sybaritic Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins and the interesting but maudlin North Dallas Forty by former Dallas receiver Pete Gent.
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The lessons these books teach are that sports and sportsmen are exploited by a power elite; that college football players are members of a “frenzied slave market” and victims of torture and drills that resemble concentration-camp musters; that drugs and amphetamines are part of the professional athlete’s steady diet; that organized athletics systematically emphasizes “cool” over character; and that athletes offer a particularly offensive and dangerous misrepresentation of the sporting life to children. Sports in America are alleged to be sexist, racist, and male-chauvinistic. America’s gods of the playing field are made of clay, or lesser stuff, their strengths chemically derived, and their power and charms media-created; these drugged beasts are used and abused once a week for the pleasure and gain of corporate-boardroom masters; our adulation of these heroes leads to a national celebration of violence, causing fans to become savage in the stands, in parking lots, and at home in front of the TV.
Russell Baker wrote a few years ago that sports in America is the opiate of the people. The charge is repeated by Paul Hoch, who also denounced “industrial workers . . . so radically involved with the fates of their sports heroes that they are perfectly oblivious to the exploitative conditions in their own factories.” The values of the young are distorted by our overemphasis on winning, according to these authors. Mystical insights and transcendental visions lose out in a “system” of sports instruction that puts the emphasis on “wars” of competition. The war connection is one repeatedly emphasized: interest in sports and athletics has the same roots as interest in military battle: “[We] play our games, or watch them contested, with the same ferocious tenacity with which we fight a war in Vietnam and with as little reason or sense” (Leonard Schechter, former sports editor of Look, quoted in Rip Off the Big Game). The politics of sports are “reactionary,” said Jack Scott, pointing to “the conservative militaristic nature of intercollegiate athletics.” Football comes close to “political fascism . . . in its cultivation of mass hysteria,” according to John McMurtry, a former Canadian-league player, and “enthusiasm for sports events brings to mind the decadence of the Roman Empire,” according to a “scholar” of soccer (Alex Natan, Sport and Society).
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Is there anything good to be said for sports? These critics argue that athletics does have a purer side, a redemptive side, that needs to be rediscovered and reaffirmed. Yet the recovery of this side of the game depends upon overcoming our fixation on “winning” and on competition. Thus George Leonard in The Ultimate Athlete wrote of striving for a new unity in a “Game of Games that joins the limited human body with the limitless possibilities of consciousness and being”; for this “we need balance and harmony, sensitivity and the art of reconciliation—not ego, the test of manhood, the clash of force against force, the battle of God against the Devil.” (Specifically, Leonard recommends such noncompetitive games as Infinity Volleyball, Mating, and Environmental Tag.) Will Hetzel, University of Maryland basketball star, was quoted by both Hoch and Scott: “Athletics can be such a beautiful thing. It’s a shame to have to keep score. In fact it’s a shame to have to keep score on anything in life.” Meggyesy speaks of “the death culture versus the life culture” where “the life culture is trying to say something else. It’s saying instead of competition let’s think about cooperation.” Then there is Chip Oliver’s ideal:
I have a vision of a team without coaches, without silly restrictions or rules. It would be a communal team where the players would live together, eat only the finest natural foods and practice yoga and transcendental meditation. The entire element of control from coaches would be gone. Each man would control himself so as to be his best. Each man would strive toward the goal of being good, but there would be no punishment for failure except the natural punishment of not being as good as you could be. Success would exclude failure and punishment, and winning and losing would be seen in only a relative sense. The outcome, the decision, of the game would be unimportant. The game itself, in fact, would all but disappear. The members of the team would do the Dance of Football . . . I firmly believe in a team living together like that, as brothers sharing brown rice and doing everything in the spirit of meditation, including football practice . . .
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It should be enough simply to quote as I have been doing from the critics’ abundant stores of transcendent silliness, dime-store Marxism, and countercultural blather to expose the deficiencies of their critique, but they appear to be striking a note that many are all too ready to hear. To those who are drawn to the simple-minded culture of opposition, games as games are easy targets, and the effect of a hyperbolic statement like, “we play games while children are dying,” is obviously extremely arresting (even though few would consider it an effective argument against personal cleanliness to say that “while bombs are being dropped we are brushing our teeth and shampooing our hair,” not to mention blowing dope or eating brown rice).
But it is one thing to attack human greed or to grieve over the fact that man is often a wolf to other men; it is another thing to contend, as these critics do, that any activity in which unattractive human qualities may appear is therefore the producer of those qualities. Grant the presence of stupidity, narrowness, exploitation, cruelty, and weakness in sports—why should it be immune to the normal afflictions of the human condition? And grant, too, that many things go on at and in games that should not be seen by children and do not deserve to be imitated by anyone. None of this, however, is consistent with the nature of sports. The eruption into violence on the field or in the stands is in fact a degradation, not a perfection, of the game. It is the opposite of the game. If sports, in George Orwell’s phrase, is “war minus the shooting,” as these critics seem to be saying, it comes out remarkably well in the comparison. Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe has written accurately of the “pure insanity and hatred inside the Boston Garden” when the game of ice hockey “is overshadowed by the primal example of blood on ice.” In Boston, too, in Fenway Park, a fan had his throat slashed in the stands last season. That this is senseless is of course obvious, but how is it that the game, and not the man who wields the knife, is held responsible? Who endorses bloodletting and the glorification of violence? Who justifies excess? (Or who, for that matter, justifies the gratuitous slaughter of civilians in war?) To ask such questions is to see the self-serving hollowness of this sort of reductive thinking. Sheer uncontrolled violence in sports, often called unnecessary roughness, unsportsmanlike conduct, is not a part of the game. On the contrary, it stops the game, nullifies the play.
No matter what else it is, sports has always been an arena in which children can grow in light of unambiguous, tangible universal standards and measures. With proper supervision and coaching, the only limits are those of an individual’s abilities and the abilities of the best players of the game. Sports is still an activity in which excellence can be seen and reached for and approximated each day; sports has been relatively unaffected by the general erosion of standards in the culture at large.
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Critics charge that competitive sports are not conducive to the development of character. Is this true? My own high school coach, a Marine, taught “toughness without callousness,” as William James put the ideal. He taught us the difference between real strength and the mere show of strength, a lesson ignored by Scott, Leonard, Hoch, and Durso. He talked to his big linemen about not throwing their weight around in the street or in cars, about how strength was to be shown on the field against someone your own size in a fair match in pads. For coaches like that, the main issue is one of consistency of performance, which is an issue of character. The coaches who dot the pages of Scott’s The Athletic Revolution only encourage boys to beat up hippies.
Everyone knows where the truth lies in these matters, really. It is not for nothing that the attempts to de-athleticize athletics and to deflate the country’s interest in sports have met with uniform failure. Countercultural sports programs have dried up: Scott’s own efforts as director of athletics at Oberlin College ended in his being forced to resign, and if trustworthy reports are to be believed, his “reforms” at Oberlin not only did not replace bad values with good ones, but themselves provided instruction in decanal authoritarianism. Dave Meggyesy “explains” such failures by saying that “the revolution” is in a period of gestation, but the fact is that the revolution has not done and cannot do what its progenitors argued it must do—replace the values of winning and competition with other and better noncompetitive values. As a nation, Americans have expressed more, not less, interest in competitive athletics since the “revolution” began, and, if anything, seem to be resisting the tendencies toward leveling in sports. More people are playing sports, going to sporting events, and watching games on TV; baseball set attendance records last year. There is more interest on the part of women in competitive sports; “new” sports—tennis and soccer—are gaining prominence, Pelé joins Namath in broad TV coverage. Even box lacrosse might make it; Hollywood’s “Rollerball,” with no rules, will not.
The team I now play on, a team of former athletes, is a slow-pitch softball team called the Boston Flamingos. We have pickup games with other organized nonleague teams, the Road House (because they drink there), the Boston Company (because they work there), or somebody’s law-school or business-school section. Our team members threw in five dollars each and had shirts made, a dumb-looking bird standing on one leg with a bat in his teeth against a green background. The Flamingo team is made up of friends. We’re not great—no semi-pro or ex-minor leaguers—but we’re not bad. We catch about 80 percent of what’s hit to us and hit the ball very well. We win most of the games we play and are proud when we win.
One of our occasional “competitors” is a team with no name that we have dubbed the Cambridge Persons. The reason we named them the Persons is not only that they are the kind of people who always say “person” instead of whatever is called for, but because the name suggests accurately enough their own concern to display a trendy, hip quality. The Persons cannot put away their desire for ideological purity at game time, and they make “politics” an obvious feature of their game, seeing so-called political issues in everything they do. Scott, Oliver, Hoch, even Charles Reich would be pleased with their attitude.
The team is coed; they have no “discrimination” and no “roles,” and as a result, positions and batting orders are not established. Occasionally they let one of their dogs (with a name like Che or Mao) “play” a position, and as the Flamingos wait, the game is delayed while Che runs out of left field and the Persons laugh and try to look loose and noncompetitive. Some of their players are not bad—ability and good reflexes are hard to hide—but what’s missing is a sense of organization born of the desire to compete and to take one’s ability seriously. There simply is no team here, no coherence. Each Person does his own thing; they don’t throw relays or watch the other players to adjust their movements accordingly.
The Persons are halfhearted about winning and they make little jokes and laugh and skip when a ball is hit over their head. Compared to them, the Flamingos are a winning machine; 28–3, 21–0, are common scores in our games with them. In the end the Persons must be judged, in their own terms, to be insensitive, both to the game and to one another as “players”—the cost, no doubt, of each one’s being sensitive to himself exclusively as a Person. What’s more interesting, I believe, is the fact that we have more fun than the Persons. We invest more in the game and the game is more of a release for us.
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Playing sports and watching sports seriously as a fan possess a quality shared by only a very few activities; they are at once a doing and a relief from doing. Sports in this sense do not constitute either an exaggeration or a distortion of our lives but a willing departure from our usual sorts of responsibility with the aim of an eventual return. Charles Reich’s ideal in The Greening of America—a laughing generation playing football in bell-bottom trousers—is one of sheer aimlessness, of distraction pure and simple, doing nothing. Serious playing and watching, on the other hand, are part of what one may do with one’s time while in the business of trying to make sense of things. They are rarely if ever doing nothing, for sports is a way to scorn indifference, and occasionally, indeed, one can even discern in competition those elements of grace, skill, beauty, and courage that mirror the greatest affirmations of human spirit and passion.