11

Carnivalizing Sports

For most people in the world today, the experience of collective ecstasy is likely to be found, if it is found at all, not in a church or at a concert or rally but at a sports event. Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey in the United States; soccer worldwide: These games now provide what the sports sociologist Allen Guttmann calls “Saturnalia-like occasions for the uninhibited expression of emotions which are tightly controlled in our ordinary lives.”¹ In a stadium or at an arena, the audience has been expected for decades to leap up from their seats, shout, wave, and jump up and down with the vicissitudes of the game. This relative freedom of motion, combined with the crowding in the bleachers, creates what another sports scholar, drawing on the language Durkheim used to describe ecstatic religious rituals, considers “an in-group effervescence that generates a communal solidarity.”² A Mexican soccer fan reports on his own experience of self-loss in the crowd: “At some point you get the feeling that you don’t care what happens to you … If something were to trigger a riot, I would want to participate … Everyone is one unit, you don’t have any responsibility.”³ And on a Web site offering information on Korean tourism, the emotional transports of local fans are offered as one of the country’s selling points.

There is no denying the awe-inspiring chill of the solidarity reflected in the Korean street cheerers. Brought together by a game, the Koreans still show us what it’s like to want to be a part of something larger than yourself, even if you can’t quite put your finger on what the larger meaning of screaming and crying in front of a stadium screen with thousands of other people really means.⁴

Meaning may be the wrong thing to ask for in a setting where powerful collective emotions are controlled by the motions of a ball or puck. One reason sports events generate so much collective excitement is simply because we expect them to, and we know that the physical expression of this excitement—the shouting, jumping up and down, et cetera—is not only permitted but expected as well. Sports events can be thought of, quite apart from the game, as a medium for generating collective thrills—a not entirely reliable one, since some games are dull and one team must always lose anyway, but in at least one way more effective than many rock concerts. At a concert held in a theater, everyone faces toward the stage and sees little of the other concertgoers except for the backs of their heads. Sports stadiums, however, are round, so “the spectator confronts the emotion apparent on the faces of other spectators.”⁵ People may say they are going to see the Browns or the A’s or Manchester, but they are also going to see one another, and to become part of a mass in which excitement builds by bouncing across the playing field, from one part of the stadium to the other.

There were, in the early twentieth century, few other settings in which to find the communal elan offered by sports—only marginal ecstatic religious sects, at least in the industrialized countries, and little by way of exuberant public festivity to compete with the drama of the moving ball. As the century wore on, sports expanded and tightened their grip on the public imagination, calling forth elaborately organized networks of fans in the United Kingdom and South America, encroaching on and altering the celebration of traditional holidays, like Thanksgiving in the United States. As early as the 1920s, the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen could reasonably describe American sport as a national “obsession.”⁶

By the latter part of the century, the increasing commercialization of sports fueled another growth spurt, perhaps most dramatically in the United States: Televised sports moved into prime time and, beginning in the 1980s, required dozens of cable channels to carry twenty-four-hour coverage of games and commentary. At the same time, the possibility of viewing live games in person began to grow along with the nation’s stadium seating capacity. A hundred and one stadiums were built between the years 1980 and 2003,⁷ each with a capacity of about seventy thousand. The ancient Romans had centered their civic life on the arena, building one for every city they conquered or created; Americans seem determined to do no less, often giving a higher priority to stadium construction than to routine expenditures for public services such as education, including school sports.⁸

But a spectacle, even one at which a certain amount of rowdiness is tolerated, has its limits. In the 1950s, American commentators often rued the disappearance of neighborhood baseball games as more people came to the sport vicariously, as spectators rather than as players and “stars” themselves. Whether the fans eventually grew impatient with their relatively passive role is hard to say; we have few firsthand accounts of the fan experience other than those provided by sports journalists, whose profession places them squarely within the sports industry. But beginning in the 1960s in the United Kingdom and somewhat later in the United States, sports audiences were carving out new and often creative forms of participation—much as rock audiences were refusing to sit quietly through performances. Spectators began “carnivalizing” sports events, coming in costume, engaging in collective rhythmic activities that went well beyond chants, adding their own music, dance, and feasting to the game. The parallel to rock audiences is not incidental; part of what brought sports audiences to life in the late twentieth century was rock ‘n’ roll itself.

A Brief History of Western Sports

It is this little-noted “revolt” of sports fans that concerns us in this chapter, but first we need a bit of historical perspective on just whose sports we are talking about. For activities with no intrinsic meaning beyond the prowess of the players—no obvious ideology or transcendent vision—sports have a history of surprisingly intense conflict over who can play, who can watch, and whether there will even be a game at all. In recent decades, the most visible clashes have had to do with race and gender: whether blacks could play American Major League Baseball, for example, or whether women can be allowed to compete with men at golf. But for centuries the tensions over sports ran along lines of class. The upper classes had their sports, such as hunting; the lower classes had archery competitions and various “folk sports” in which there was little distinction between players and spectators. Early football, for example, often pitted whole villages against each other—men, women, and children battling over the pig’s bladder that served as a ball. There were footraces for women as well as men and, in some cases, competitions pitting one sex against the other, with a dance or a kiss as a prize.

Early modern European sports typically occurred in the context of festivities like carnival or, in England, at parish holidays and fairs, and when those festivities came under fire from “reformers” from the sixteenth century on, so did the sports. Disorderly folk sports, like the original form of football, particularly outraged the authorities, who repeatedly tried to ban them. The court records of Middlesex, England, in 1576 mention the prosecution of seven men who “with unknown malefactors to the number of one hundred assembled themselves unlawfully and played a certain unlawful game called football, by means of which there was amongst them a great affray, likely to result in homicides and serious accident.”⁹ When industrialization left working-class people with only Sunday for sports, the strict Sabbatarians moved quickly to ban any activity other than worship on that day. Sports were condemned as a waste of time better spent at work or in contemplation of the status of one’s soul. In the puritan New England colonies, sports were never legal, with the law banning even “unnecessary and unseasonable walking” on the Lord’s Day.¹⁰

Like so many of the festivities that they had once been a part of, sports were, by the late nineteenth century, transformed into spectacles. These were not, originally, spectacles organized from on high, but rather grudgingly permitted by elites. Baseball, for example, which began as a thoroughly working-class sport in the United States, met elite opposition ostensibly directed at “the crowd behavior: the drunks, the gamblers, the pickpockets, the mashers who bothered the women; the fans who yelled obscenities and threatened the umpire,” according to the sports historian Ted Vincent. As he goes on to comment, the real source of the opposition to baseball was the middle-class fear of working-class crowds: “It seemed that certain people didn’t like certain other people gathering in big crowds, a situation that gave those attending late-nineteenth-century spectator sports something in common with the defiant long-haired youth at rock concerts of the late 1960s.”¹¹

Soccer, which ultimately derived from folk football, had been reformulated in mid-nineteenth-century England as an elite sport meant to inculcate “the virtues of hard work, discipline, and self-control.” ¹² Within a couple of decades, the ball, so to speak, passed once again to the working class, who learned the game from clergymen and factory owners interested in instilling the same virtues in the workforce. The professionalization of soccer from the 1880s on drove out the upper-class amateurs, who were replaced by professional players drawn from the working class, eventually leaving both the playing field and the bleachers to blue-collar men and, in much smaller numbers, women. In South America, local people learned the sport by watching amateur English players—sailors and the officials of British-owned businesses. Brazilian soccer had passed through three constituencies by 1915: from the British to the local elite and finally to the working class. “The fashionable ladies in the stands went home when the working class took over the game,” the sportswriter Janet Lever reports of the game in Brazil.¹³ Spectator sports became, by the early twentieth century, what Eric Hobsbawm called “a mass proletarian cult.”¹⁴

What finally made spectator sports acceptable to the elites who at first disdained these unruly gatherings was the use of sports events, in Hobsbawm’s words, as “a medium for national identification and factitious community.”¹⁵ If the upper classes could not be present in person, at least sporting events could feature the flags and anthems that symbolized the supposed harmony of rich and poor under the aegis of the nation. With encouragement from teams’ businessmen backers, sporting events in the United States came to involve, by World War I, “elaborate pageantry, ceremony, politicians, military bands, and national anthems.”¹⁶ The bands and—in the United States—precision drill teams performing during halftime or other breaks gave sporting events a resemblance to the military reviews that had delighted nineteenth-century British crowds; the flags, ceremonies, and anthem singing foreshadowed the nationalist rallies staged by Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and ’30s. One might say that Hitier’s big mistake, in the design of events like the Nuremberg rallies, was to leave out the game.

So either way—whether through the proletarianization of formerly elite sports or the increasing respectability of proletarian ones—sporting events evolved into a socially acceptable gathering space for working-class people, especially working-class men.. They gathered also in factories and other workplaces, but the stadium or arena was uniquely theirs—a place to meet with friends, drink, and cheer, all with minimal interference from representatives of the elites. The working class, or at least the male half of it, had reclaimed a vestige of the lost tradition of carnival. Very soon, they would want the whole thing.

The Carnivalization of Sports

The first sign of a new assertiveness on the part of sports fans—and the only one ever noticed by most sports sociologists and journalists—was the emergence of hooliganism among English spectators in the early 1960s. Young male soccer “supporters,” as the fans are known in the United Kingdom, seemed to be taking the game too seriously—instigating riots in the stadiums and, more commonly, engaging in postgame street battles with the supporters of the “enemy” team. Many observers recognized that the violence had something to do with class and class resentment, since the hooligans were typically to be found occupying the cheapest seats or standing, seatless, throughout the game in the “terraces,” as they are called in Britain, of a stadium. About a decade later, hooliganism began showing up on the Continent, probably spread by traveling English fans following their teams as well as by television reports on English hooliganism at home. Noting the geographic distribution of soccer violence, a Belgian psychologist suggested that

the violence is a symptom of societal problems, not soccer problems. In Belgium and France, there are relatively few problems. But in much of Latin America, in Britain and Italy, where the gaps between rich and poor are growing, there are more problems. Soccer is a poor-man’s game as much as any sport, and a lot of unhappy people are rebelling against their surroundings.¹⁷

Whatever the hooligans’ motivations, they succeeded, in many instances, in stealing the show. Just as reports of rock and roll “riots” often eclipsed reviews of the music in the early 1960s, news stories on fan violence could easily overshadow accounts of the game.

Engrossed by the violence, few observers noted a far more widespread and appealing change in fan behavior. Beginning in the 1970s, or at least first reported at that time, fans of soccer worldwide and various sports (football, basketball, baseball, and hockey) in the United States were unmistakably treating sports events as occasions for traditional carnival-like activities: costuming, masking, singing, and indulging in rhythmically synchronous behavior, if not actually dancing.

Writing in 1983, when the trend was well under way, the sociologist Louis Kutcher observed that American sports “have long had some elements of carnival—feasting, masquerading, merrymaking and rule and role suspension.”¹⁸ Masquerading, at an American game, traditionally meant wearing team colors.^p The sports version of carnival’s king of fools was the team mascot—a person dressed as something like a chicken or a pirate and displaying a comic lack of athletic skill or even basic coordination. As for feasting, it involved, at the very least, peanuts, hot dogs, and Cracker Jacks, washed down with the requisite quantities of beer. More elaborately, American fans had, by the 1950s, started the day hours before the game with tailgate parties in the arena parking lots, usually featuring grilled meats or regional specialties. Although each group or family brought its own picnic meal, sharing with strangers, especially those with a beer to exchange for some food, was common, as in the feasts that so often accompanied traditional festivities.

But by the last three decades of the twentieth century, the carnivalization of sports events was moving well beyond the hot dog and team colors stage. In one of the very few studies of festive fan behavior, the anthropologist Desmond Morris found English soccer fans in the 1970s wearing huge top hats or giant Afro wigs, as well as scarves and trouser bows in team colors. “Many of the costumes are obviously home-made,” he observed, making it clear that”many days of planning and preparation have gone into the build-up to the great event.”¹⁹ In the United States, a single exhibitionist fan—Rollen (“Rock ‘n’ Rollen”) Stewart—probably deserves some of the credit for popularizing the wearing of outlandish outfits to games. He traveled from game to game—football, baseball, and even golf matches—trying to attract the TV cameras to his outsized rainbowcolored Afro wig, which he abandoned only after a “born again” religious experience in 1980.²⁰

Another American innovator, a particularly fervent Cleveland Browns fan nicknamed “Big Dawg,” found a dog costume in a store in 1984, started wearing it to games, and thus helped set the trend toward team-related gear such as the foam-rubber Cheeseheads now routinely worn by Green Bay Packers fans, the Viking helmets of Minnesota Vikings fans, and the pig snouts assumed by Washington Redskins fans. By the late 1980s, as commercial enterprises moved in on the growing demand for team-related costumes, far less innovation was required on the part of individual fans. They could simply buy ready-made team T-shirts, sweatshirts, characteristic head gear, and, for the ever-growing number of female fans, earrings and dresses.^q

Costuming serves different, even opposite, functions for different people. For most, the wearing of team colors allows a fan to blend in with the mass of other similarly clad fans; it would be unwise to flout the color coding by inadvertently wearing the opponent’s colors while sitting in a section of the bleachers occupied by home team fans. But for others, costuming—and in some cases, uncostuming, as with the Yalies who run naked through the stadium at the annual Harvard-Yale game—is a vivid, some might say exhibitionist, bid for attention, as in the case of an unnamed Oakland A’s fan observed by a local journalist.

There’s something poetic and beautiful about watching a middleaged fan dressed from head-to-toe in A’s garb, brandishing a baseball glove, proudly sporting an American flag fanny pack, waving a giant Bob Marley flag in the air, punctuating his bursts of obscenities by pounding on a conga drum, and loudly commanding visiting Yankees fans of Japanese descent to go back to Iraq.²¹

Sports fans seldom wear masks to accompany their costumes; instead, they paint their faces in team colors. The origins of this practice are as murky as those of costuming. The British soccer journalist Simon Kuper referred to it as a European custom, Morris noted it among English fans in the 1970s, and some Americans insist it began in their country outside of the sports context, at hippie gatherings and rock concerts in the 1960s. Another theory is that it began among the habitually more expressive South American fans and spread northward as North Americans gained a taste for soccer. An account of the 1994 World Cup held in Palo Alto, California, for example, describes the carnivalistic, and no doubt contagious, behavior of fans who had followed their team from Brazil.

It was a party. A horde of Brazilians marched down El Camino to the stadium, dancing as a band played “Brazil.” Countless Brazilian flags were waved from cars and worn as capes or shawls or wraparound skirts. Fans painted their faces to resemble the Brazilian flag, including a blue nose signifying the night sky and Southern Cross that is at the center of the flag.²²

Wherever face painting began, though, television quickly spread the fad worldwide. Mentions of face painting in the United States go back at least to the 1980 Super Bowl, but not until the mid-1990s did the custom become firmly enough entrenched to merit commercial exploitation within the United States. As late as 1996, American fans were using Magic Markers or even house paint to give their allegiances epidermal expression. Now there are at least a half dozen (and possibly many more) purveyors of skin-compatible colored makeup, and spokespersons for these companies, interviewed in 2000, described the business as “really surprising”²³ and “huge.”²⁴ A similar industry has sprung up in South Korea, where “the popularity of the World Cup has created a secondary craze in the form of face painting. The popularity of game day face paint continues to grow producing long lines at shopping centers in Myeong-dong where the face painters ply their trade.”²⁵

But a sports event is hardly a party without some sort of rhythmic participation by the fans. The earliest form was chanting, often of derisive lines directed at the opponents, such as, in the United States, “Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, go-ood-bye.” As in the case of costuming and face painting, more elaborate songs arose spontaneously from within the ranks of fans themselves, most strikingly in the case of soccer. The Washington Post observed in 1994 that “soccer songs are traditionally born in the cheap-ticket sections … of league club stadiums, where working-class fans, often forced to stand throughout the game, compose sarcastic, musical epithets directed at their opponents.”²⁶ One of the rare academic studies of nonviolent fan behavior found Germans fairly quiet and “unimaginative” in the 1960s, except to celebrate victory with the traditional carnival song “What a Day, What a Wonderful Day Today.” By the mid-1990s, however, German fans had created and memorized thirty to fifty songs of their own devising, some blending rock and roll with familiar soccer chants—the traditional “Olé,” for example, sung to the tune of a Pet Shop Boys song.²⁷

There are more energetic forms of rhythmic participation. South American fans often dance in the bleachers to the beat of drums they carry to the stadium. The Hawks of the Faithful, an organization of fans of São Paulo’s Corinthians soccer team, sing a song called “Fly, Hawk” while stretching out their arms and turning from side to side to imitate the bird in flight.²⁸ In England in the 1970s, Morris observed soccer fans “Pogo jumping,” or jumping vertically “until a whole section of the crowd appears to be heaving and swelling like a rough sea”²⁹—a practice that may have originated at punk rock concerts. English fans also invented “synchroclapping,” in which they clap rhythmically with their hands held over their heads. A psychologist who studied this activity marveled at the degree of synchrony a soccer crowd could achieve without the slightest central coordination: “How this remarkable precision is achieved, within what most people would see as a disorderly rabble, is a mystery … it is orderly to an almost absurd extent.”³⁰

But by far the most widespread form of rhythmic participation is “the wave,” in which fans in one section of the stadium stand and raise their arms, then sit down while fans in an adjacent section follow suit, so that the motion appears to roll around the bleachers, “creating what many fans consider an exhilarating and visually stunning experience.”³¹ Who invented it is, again, unclear. The Europeans call it “the Mexican wave,” but Americans are sure it was an American who invented it in 1981; they’re just not sure who or where: “Crazy George” Henderson, a professional cheerleader for the Oakland A’s games, claims to be the wave’s inventor; others insist it was first performed by the fans at a University of Washington, or possibly at a University of Michigan, football game.

Although fans may think exuberant behavior like the wave somehow aids their team, coaches and players initially objected to it as distracting, with the New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey going so far as to condemn it as a “plague”: “like acid rain defoliating the countryside or a new strain of virus or killer bees mercilessly working their way up the Americas.”³² But the wave proved to be unstoppable, spreading to baseball in 1984 and to soccer by 1992 and sweeping up such notable soccer spectators as Fidel Castro, King Juan Carlos of Spain, and François Mitterrand. As the sociologist Michael Givant observed in 1984: “It’s a way of not being passive … They want to participate. If everybody is a celebrity these days, they ask, ‘Why can’t I be involved?’”³³

So by the close of the twentieth century, the clash of the athletes on the field was only one part, and for many only a minor part, of the activities and events that made up a game. People went to the stadium for the opportunity to dress up and paint their faces, to see and be seen, to eat and drink immoderately, to shout and sing and engage in the sports fan’s equivalent of dancing. The games on the playing field had changed very little since the early part of the century; it was the behavior of the fans that would have seemed ludicrous and disruptive by the standards of, say, the 1920s. Why this global carnivalization of sports in the final decades of the last century?. Or, given what is perhaps a natural human tendency to liven up spectacles with drink and fancy dress and dance, we might ask why the carnivalization of sports has accelerated so spectacularly since the 1970s.

The Revolt of the Fans

The British sociologist Ernest Cashmore suggests that the festive behavior was encouraged by elites—stadium and team owners—as a peaceable alternative to hooliganism. “They were pacified,” he says of the hooligans, “by replica shirts, videos, logo-plastered bedsheets, face painting and a miscellany of commodities derived from a sport that realized that the only way to prosper was to re-invent itself.”³⁴ Whether they did so to “pacify” the fans or not, the stadium owners quickly seized on and amplified many of the new forms of fan behavior: In the United States, they installed “Cheer Meters” in the stadiums so that the fans could measure the noise they contributed, along with message boards on video screens to exhort the fans to cheer louder or commence the wave. They added fireworks, sexily clad cheerleaders, more kinds of mascots, loud recorded music, and live music from pipe organs.³⁵ They encouraged costuming, “often asking the fans to wear a certain color. Indeed, the sale of such items is an important part of total revenue.”³⁶ A woman attending a 1999 game reported, with some relief, that American football had at last become entertaining.

I came prepared to hate the game—but turns out it was really just a flashy, well-staged show. Football was kinda the extra added attraction. There were fantastic scoreboards at each end of the field with slick video productions, rock music, and a light screen that told the crowd when to do the wave—football fans not being smart enough to figure it out on their own.³⁷

But the commercial exploitation of various forms of fan behavior—by face paint purveyors or by team owners trying to attract demographic groups, like women, who had not previously been fans—tells us nothing about the initial urge to paint and costume and sing and do the wave. “These ritual displays are impressive,” Morris observed of English soccer-fan behavior in the 1970s, “because they have grown naturally from within the ranks of the fans themselves.”³⁸ A few individual innovators deserve some credit: There is Claudio Ribeiro, or “Cotton Bud,” in São Paulo, a veteran of brutal poverty, who made a name for himself as “the hyperactive, drumming lunatic with the ever-expanding Afro that TV pictures always hone in on during Brazil’s World Cup games.”³⁹ There is Edward Anzalone, a New York City firefighter, who rides into games on his brother’s shoulders, wearing a green and white fire helmet and leading a Jets chant.⁴⁰ Or we might consider Josh Rosenberg, the founder of the Oakland A’s Drummers, a group of five young men who drum loudly, if somewhat chaotically, from their favorite spot in the left-field bleachers.⁴¹

One might, rather innocently, hypothesize that festive forms of fan behavior simply represent an intensified loyalty to the sports teams, but it is hard to see why such loyalty should have been increasing at a time when the teams were showing less and less loyalty to their fans. In the United States anyway, the late twentieth century saw a fairly heartless degree of commercialization, with whole teams being sold off to distant cities at their owners’ whims. As Sports Illustrated observed, with some perplexity, in 1992:

Sports have become so desentimentalized that it’s hard to believe anyone can even root for the same team from one year to the next. Neither players nor owners seem to acknowledge the fans’ loyalty, much less repay it. And yet every time you walk into a ballpark or flip on ESPN, there seem to be more and more superfans, megafans, uberfans: fans who yell louder, dress louder, spend more, suffer more, exult more and even seem to care more.⁴²

Besides, fan loyalty could be expressed in many less festive ways—with closer attention to the game itself, for example, rather than with actions like the wave that are known to annoy the players.

Whatever their degree of team loyalty, the fact is that the fans were choosing to express it in ways that drew attention away from the game and to themselves. As Susan Faludi observes of the Cleveland Browns’ blue-collar fans, the “Dawgs”: “Rabid fans increasingly became focused not on helping the players perform but on cultivating their own performances. The show in the stands began to conflict with, even undermine, the drama on the gridiron.”⁴³ Or as the reporter—and ardent soccer fan—Alex Bellos reflects on the São Paulo fan organization called the Hawks of the Faithful: “It strikes me that the football experience has come full circle. With the Hawks, the football [soccer] fan is no longer a spectator. He is the spectacle. The Hawks are the football fans that have their own fans.”⁴⁴

At least part of the explanation for the fans’ new insistence on being part of the show must be television. Sports had been televised almost since the invention of the medium, but in the United States it was only in the 1970s that they broke into prime time—with ABC’s Monday Night Football leading the way. One of the immediate effects of television, as Guttmann notes, was to change the demographics of the crowd in the stadium. Since older fans could now enjoy the game at home, without the discomforts of hard seats and inclement weather, the stadium crowds got younger.⁴⁵ We might generalize, and speculate that television allowed the elimination, from the stadium, of any fan who did not seek the stadium experience; if it was only the game that interested you, you could watch it at home or in a bar. So by a process of natural selection, the people who actually attended the games tended to be those who sought the thrill of the crowd.

There is no doubt that television encourages exhibitionist fan behavior, in at least two ways. First, it offers some of the more exuberant fans—those willing, for example, to dress and paint themselves outlandishly or strip to the waist in freezing weather—the chance to achieve a tiny measure of fame. “Rock ‘n’ Rollen” Stewart, for example, eagerly sought the cameras’ attention and was finally rewarded with a part in a Budweiser commercial. In her analysis of Cleveland Browns fans, Faludi observes: “The battle now, the one that fans and players alike were caught up in, was really for the camera’s attention. The show of hard hats, of dog suits, of toughing it out in the rain and the snow, in the end, became exactly that—a show, a beauty contest of sorts, where the object was to attract the camera with bizarre caricatures of working stiffs.”⁴⁶ The second, and more significant, effect of television is of course to spread exhibitionist—or perhaps we should say, less judgmentally, spectacular—forms of fan behavior from country to country and sport to sport. If it’s almost impossible to pin down the origins of particular kinds of behavior, like face painting or doing the wave, this is because they are picked up by fans in other places almost as soon as they are invented.

Another outside force affecting fan behavior starting in the 1970s was rock ‘n’ roll. South Americans had long enjoyed danceable music at their soccer matches, generally provided by drumming fans and accompanied by dancing in the bleachers. In the United States, games had traditionally been fairly music-free except for the singing of the national anthem and the marching music provided by drill teams during halftime or other breaks. The exception, until the 1950s, were the games of segregated, all-black sports leagues, which were enlivened by blues or jazz bands and much dancing in the stands. Only in the 1970s did rock’n’ roll find a place in the pageantry of major league American sports, bringing with it some of rock’s rebellious spirit, or at least a desire to get up out of the seats and become part of the show.

American sports and rock music did not at first seem to be likely partners. “The ’60s were about youth culture, and sports weren’t peddled as part of that culture,” according to a Rolling Stone editor in 1999. “Rock-and-roll sort of defined itself in opposition to the NFL.”⁴⁷ Or as Bob Weir, who had played football in high school before becoming a member of the Grateful Dead, put it: “In the ’60s, music and sports were worlds apart. People who were into sports were generally a little more accepting of a regimented life and basically lived like soldiers … Musicians—if something didn’t suit us, we’d make a little stink or just not obey orders.”⁴⁸

But by the early 1970s, some of the college marching bands that played at breaks were abandoning military music for rock tunes, perhaps in response to the antiwar mood on campuses. Recorded rock music began showing up at professional games in the latter part of the decade, a development that Time attributes to the emergence of a newly hip mood among America’s corporate executives, the group that supplies most team owners: “Corporate America shed its square image and began incorporating antiestablishment themes into advertising,”⁴⁹ and from that it was apparently a short step to incorporating rock into sports events. But the innovation would never have survived if the fans had rejected it, and, increasingly, sports fans themselves were likely to be veterans of rock concerts, perhaps held in the same stadium as the game, and brought with them a certain impatience with the spectator’s appointed role as a seat warmer. Besides, if rock could be found in commercials, in elevator Muzac, at weddings—why not at the big game?

However unlikely their original union, rock and American sports were soon as tightly mated as baseball and beer. By 1994, commentators were even talking about a potential merger of sports and rock music: “The distinctions between the two industries [sports and music] are fading, becoming just another facet of the mammoth entertainment industry.”⁵⁰ Stadium managers now employ music staffs of up to ten people to determine the playlist that will go with the game; music companies have come to view professional sports franchises as an outlet on the same scale as radio stations.⁵¹

The result is a kind of event that a blind person, wandering into the stadium, would have difficulty distinguishing from a rock concert, with music at breaks, after significant plays, when a new player comes up to bat, and to celebrate victory at the end. Not any song will do; a special genre of rock—“jock rock”—has been adapted to service the sports industry, including generally well-known hits such as Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” as well as songs, like the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out,” made famous largely through sports venues. Jock rock, collections of which can be purchased on CDs, leans heavily toward anthemic, pump-it-up tunes like Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and the Village People’s “YMCA,” but stadiums’ playlists include more varied fare too, including songs by Santana, Eminem, the Clash, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Halftime at the 2006 Super Bowl featured the Rolling Stones, with the fans swaying and holding up lighters, exactly as they would do at a concert.

No one, to my knowledge, has studied the impact of rock on any aspect of sports, from ticket sales to the athletes’ performance. It is unlikely to improve the latter, judging from players’ complaints about the noise, which can reach a decibel level approaching that of rock concerts.⁵² But for the fans, the effect of rock music at sporting events is probably much the same as its effect at concerts: It makes people want to jump up and dance. No doubt this exuberance is carefully contained at stadiums, just as it is limited to scheduled times—halftime and other kinds of breaks—but the experience of dancing in the bleachers with fifty thousand other people has to be compelling. One fan describes outbreaks of dancing at Yankee Stadium, “where male members of the grounds crew lip-synch and dance to ‘YMCA’ as they sweep the infield during the fifth inning break, and are joined in performance by the ballpark crowd en masse.”⁵³ A commentator writes of the effect of Gary Glitter’s song “Rock and Roll Part 2,” to which the fans shout “Hey!”: “I first heard it in Denver at a Steelers-Broncos game, and the faithful there, who are as committed a group of fans as any I’ve ever seen, literally would rock Mile High Stadium. The stands would actually shake and sway when they bounced up and down and reached a Rocky Mountain ‘Hey!’”⁵⁴ Rock ramps up the party atmosphere—the mood of excess and self-abandonment—which in turn encourages the more extravagant forms of costuming, face painting, and stadium-wide synchronized motions. Decades earlier, in the middle of the century, sports events in America had been fairly disciplined, thoroughly masculine gatherings, heavy on the marching music and other militaristic flourishes. Rock entered this unlikely setting and carved out a space for Dionysian pleasure.

While Americans were acquiring the habit of dancing at games, global soccer culture was encouraging the notion of the game as an occasion for festivity, regardless of its outcome. An American reporter observed in 1994 that

some Americans like to party before games. Some like to party afterward. Some do both. Brazil and Holland say: Why let the game interrupt a good party? … At World Cup, which is held every four years, the fans feel they are part of the game. And your team doesn’t even have to be here. Take those five guys dressed in green and gold, including one dressed as a banana. They’re from Tokyo. Spent about $4,000 each to jet in for the Brazil game.⁵⁵

Nationalism remains a potent force motivating soccer fans at international matches, but some fans transcend it to celebrate any team’s performance. At the England-Denmark game at the 2002 World Cup, for example, the Japanese spectators, who made up half of the stadium crowd, wore red and white in support of England, even though there was still a possibility that Japan might face England in the semifinals.⁵⁶ Most fans, of course, retain an intense loyalty to their teams and interest in the technical aspect of the games, but there seems to be a kind of hollowing out of sports events going on, as the game diminishes in comparison to the pageantry and the collective high induced by tens of thousands of people singing, chanting, and dancing in unison.

But if the carnivalization of sports represents a kind of victory for the fans—a chance to party and break free of the traditional passivity of the spectator role—it was not a victory for the same kind of fans who created modern spectator sports in the first place. Obviously, few working-class fans can afford to travel to soccer matches in distant countries, and the price of a ticket to a home game rose precipitously in the 1990s, thanks to fancy new stadiums and skyrocketing salaries for the players. In 1996, a sports sociologist noted that, with the price of a ticket for American hockey, football, and basketball games approaching fifty dollars, “the high cost of going to sporting events has denied the underclass and even the lower-middle class from attending them.”⁵⁷ In the United Kingdom, new “all seater” stadiums not only inflated the price of tickets but eliminated the terraces in which working-class fans once stood as a mass to sing and clap in synchrony. Working-class fans have been “cut out of the loop,” according to Faludi: “Fans of value were the rich and corporate who could afford the luxury boxes and personal seat licenses, the latter costing as much as $5,000 in some cities. Watching a football game in person … was like buying a car now; it required a down payment.”⁵⁸

Whether the festive atmosphere of the games will survive this demographic change remains to be seen. In the last few years, the wealthiest fans have signaled their distaste for the ongoing carnival by withdrawing into their own closed-in skyboxes or luxury suites built into the stadium, where executives can pursue business deals over cocktails and buffet meals while keeping an eye on the game. An article in American Way magazine explains the need for the growing separation of the classes.

If a CEO is forking over a cool million a year [in fees for his luxury suite at the stadium] to wheel and deal new clients, he or she isn’t the least bit interested in bumping elbows with bleacher-seat fans. The last person these people would want in their private room is a fanatic who paints his face and hollers obscenities at the officials. (Ironically, a team’s most loyal fans are often those least likely to be able to afford such luxurious accommodations.)⁵⁹

As for the working-class fans who have been priced out of their erstwhile gathering place: Maybe they will be able to keep the tradition of festive fandom alive within the sports bars, which have proliferated within the United States to the point where it is hard to find a bar without team paraphernalia and multiple large-screen TVs permanently tuned to the sports channels. Or maybe, like the folk football and footraces of centuries ago, the colorful traditions of late-twentieth-century sports fandom will be lost forever—at least to the class of people who invented them.