Should Americans feel guilty for wishing to admire their sports heroes? Is the very idea of "sports hero" a barbarism, a sign of shallow values and a rebuke to our intelligence?
You might think so after reading and listening to much of the commentary of the past few days regarding the saga of O.J. Simpson. Critics have lamented, sometimes bitterly, the fact that perhaps nowhere in the world has the elevation of organized sports reached such prominence as in the United States. Even mediocre professionals command million-dollar salaries, while the faces of true sports stars such as Michael Jordan are far better known than the torchbearers of science, commerce, religion or the arts.Most of us sympathize with such complaints, of course, and perhaps never more acutely than when enduring the latest commercial featuring Charles Barkley in equestrian garb. Nevertheless, we should try to maintain a little perspective. In historical terms, American sports mania does not make us the most tawdry and degenerate of nations. It merely makes us the most modern.
As the historian Paul Johnson points out in "The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830," "In no respect did the modern age proclaim its arrival more significantly than in the rise of competitive, organized, regulated and mass-directed sports. In the past, sports usually had been regarded as the resort of the idle, frivolous, dissolute and even the disaffected." All that changed in the 19th century.
To be sure, various forms of what we might call soccer and other team sports had flourished informally for centuries. But in Europe, these games rarely received official blessing. Instead, they were associated with lower-class pillaging and drunken riots.
What Johnson describes as the "first modern football match" (he uses "football" in the British sense) took place on Dec. 5, 1815, before a crowd of 2,000 that included Sir Walter Scott, who even wrote a ballad for the occasion that is marked by the distinctively modern notion that sports are a metaphor for life:
"Then strip lads and to it, though sharp be the weather
"And if by mischance you should happen to fall,
"There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather
"And life is itself but a game of football."
American football can trace its origins to scrimmages at Princeton, Harvard and Yale during the 1820s. A host of other sports, from horse racing to rowing (1827 marking the first Oxford-Cambridge race), also came into their own at about this time.
What critics of our sports mania usually fail to appreciate is how, in the words of writer Cullen Murphy, the growth of sports has "mirrored growing U.S. affluence." This was particularly obvious after the Civil War when "the professionalization of the players was encouraged by numerous wealthy backers. A growing middle class with more leisure time and disposable income made sales of sporting equipment - such as the fashionable tricycle, which cost as much as $300 - a significant item in the economy."
It wasn't until the 1920s that many factory workers could find the free time and necessary pocket change to attend organized ball games. Was society somehow more virtuous when laborers dropped into bed exhausted after 14 hours of grind, without a penny to spare and no time or energy to take in a game?
If one good thing - prosperity - was the principal cause of sports popularity, then another good thing - mass literacy - was its lubricant. By the time William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal invented the newspaper sports section in the 1890s, even working-class families had become daily readers. The fact that the United States may be more sports obsessed than most countries is surely related to the fact that the penetration of the mass media - by which we now mainly mean TV - has progressed here farther than anywhere else. Brazilian reverence for soccer is second to none, but the Brazilian media cannot yet match the U.S. media's pervasive prowess.
It is easy to exaggerate the personal flaws of today's athletes. A roll call of early professional boxers, for example, suggests a majority died at a young age of drink or syphilis. Yet despite such evidence of clay feet, commentators from the outset of the modern era have sworn by sports as a tool to build character. Some, such as Walter Scott, mainly viewed sports as a small-scale reflection of the human condition, but others insisted that games instill actual virtue.
If we wish to tune out sports, we can, with a flick of a button. We can even choose to ignore the murder trial of the despicable O.J. Simpson. Not many of us will, of course, but that is hardly a cause for shame. Good drama never lacks an audience, and the trial of a celebrity athlete is at least as civilized as the organized torture of a bear.