But, you see, in a niche world, it is taken as an article of faith that sports is one of the few things that appeal broadly. As Bartlett Giamatti, then the president of Yale, on his way to becoming baseball commissioner, said: ““Because no single formal religion can embrace a people who hold so many faiths, sports and politics are the civil surrogates . . . for [an America] ever in quest of a covenant.’’ It binds us, sports does. Cuts across class lines, sports does. Brings a city together. Oh, yeah. Brings fathers and sons together. Mothers and daughters now, too. Uh-huh. Alas, as we pause to help P. J. Carlesimo up off the floor, it is time to recognize the truth, that sports in the United States has, in fact, never been so divisive.
Uniquely today, sports has come to pit race against race, men against women, city against city, class against class and coach against player. I don’t think I left anything out, except the one competition that is supposed to matter. The games themselves are more tedious than ever. But ’tis so. Most painful of all, surely, is what has happened to race, for sports is supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy, where stuff like color should go unnoticed. Unfortunately, more and more, sports are being defined and divided along racial lines; we have even come to think naturally now of whole ““black sports’’ and ““white sports.’’ If Latrell Sprewell’s assault upon Carlesimo was not ipso facto racially inspired, it is naive of anyone to think that the aftermath is not largely about race.
To a large number of African-Americans, the black athlete–especially the black basketball player–has taken on some of the mythic qualities of the cowboy. He is not to be messed with. So, if white men technically happen to own the teams in the NBA, blacks have a purer sense of the ownership of this sport that is so utterly dominated in number and spirit by their race. Yet if a black American boy is, in fact, 40 times more likely to grow up to make the NBA than is a white boy, it’s surely also the case that a white American boy is 40 times more likely to get a ticket to an NBA game. There’s something terribly . . . well, terribly un-American about the situation we find ourselves in, where the stands are filled with white spectators, while the courts and fields below are jammed with black athletes. Perhaps, then, we should not be surprised that a great many blacks perceive an injustice done to Sprewell by the league authority–Rush to Judgment!–that comprises a more compelling assault upon his well-being than was the physical beating he dished out to the white coach.
The problem is compounded because what used to be quaintly prized as ““sportsmanship’’ has been replaced by machomanship. The curious taste we have developed for the bad boys of sport makes us celebrate normal nice people like Grant Hill or Barry Sanders or David Robinson as if they were some kind of freaks–merely because they act rather like ordinary, everyday human beings would in the world at large. Certainly it is instructive that, after Jordan, the one athlete in the ’90s who has most dominated his sport is Pete Sampras, but inasmuch as Sampras is without a rap sheet or madcap shtik, he is blithely dismissed as boring.
Mere excellence now palls. After a while, one even hears the ghost of H. L. Mencken snarling from the press box he never deigned to enter. One time, presciently, did the sage of Baltimore declaim thusly: ““I hate sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.’’ But not even a cynic such as Mencken could ever deny the essential democracy that was always the most magical–and defensible–element of popular sport. The arena made for a grand public convocation, a 20th-century village green where we could all come together in common excitement. Of most recent vintage, though, luxury boxes–often as not enclosed behind glass–have so insulated the swells from hoi polloi that it is fair to say that the American sports palace has come to boast the most stratified seating arrangement in entertainment.
Not only that, but the economics of major-league sport have come to depend on luxury-box tribute in very much the same fashion that our politics must rely on fat-cat contributors. It was, anyway, always a dubious proposition that taxpayers should fund the building of these vulgar modern cathedrals, but now that the stadiums have become, in effect, incidental attachments to the royal suites, it is even more difficult to justify publicly financed stadiums. Essentially, rich spectators are spending so that rich owners and rich players might profit. No wonder so many fans have grown resentful of the athletes. Certainly it is instructive that in November, voters in metropolitan Pittsburgh roundly defeated a proposal for two new stadiums, as legislators in Minnesota have been just as reluctant to approve any funding for a new Twins ballpark.
So, without enough luxury boxes in their current pleasure dome, the Twins have won league approval to relocate to Charlotte. Since the fertile fields of California and Florida have been played out, sports entrepreneurs have discovered Carolina and Tennessee as the new bottom land. Call it municipal machomanship.
Meanwhile, college athletic directors have learned to play off the sexes against one another, much as owners use cities. Since universities must, by order of Title IX, provide equality in sport for women, the ADs commonly sacrifice a ““minor’’ men’s sport (rather than cut back on some football opulence), then blame those female ““interlopers’’ for causing the problem for us sports guys.
The irony to all this disgruntlement is that, as teams proliferate and move, as players jump about and identities are blurred, the real rivalries upon the field are diminishing. Our emotions are engaged by all the wrong competition, and the ratings continue to go down.
