The Meaning Of Sports

One way to begin to answer these questions is to note that baseball, basketball, and football are distinctly modern creations. It is the modern era of world history, the era created by the vast political changes inspired by the French Revolution and the even more sweeping alterations triggered by the industrial revolution, that made them possible.

An essential feature of modern life, and a prerequisite for the rise of team sports, is longer childhoods. For almost all of human history, children joined the workforce as soon as they were physically able to do so. Only in the nineteenth century did the period between birth and work stretch beyond a few years. In the time that became available to them, children learned, among many other things, to play baseball, football, and basketball. Often they associated childhood—for many people the happiest, most carefree years of their lives—with the games they played then. This nostalgia for childhood often sustained their interest in these games into their adult lives. Watching others play these games became a way of recapturing their own past.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, a great part of American childhoods came to be spent in another modern innovation—public school. The industrial revolution created a world in which the skills needed for productive work could no longer all be acquired within the family or in guilds. School provided the setting not only in which skills were learned but also in which games were organized. The majority of the spaces for baseball, football, and basketball, including many of the largest ones, belong to institutions of education. The association between sports and school began in the private English academies that trained the leaders of English society and the British empire. From them sports spread to institutions open to all children, first in Britain and then in North America.⁵

One of the most striking nineteenth-century developments in America was the growth of cities, which were also crucial to the rise of team sports. By bringing large numbers of people together in one place, cities created the pools from which both players and spectators could be drawn. In the twentieth century baseball, football, and basketball became commercially viable enterprises that filled large arenas with paying spectators. These spectators live mainly in cities and their suburbs.

The industrial revolution brought to the United States and to the world modern methods of transportation, and on these, too, the emergence of team sports depended. Beginning with the railroad, the revolution in transportation had the same effect on sports as on American business: It provided both with the means to become national in scope. Teams from one section of the country could travel to compete in other regions. Local rail transport, including urban subways, also made it easier for spectators to travel to games in their home areas. Baseball teams in the early part of the century built their arenas on street car lines. In Brooklyn, the need to avoid these cars while walking to the games gave the local team its name: the Dodgers.

Dramatically increased mobility led to the need for uniform standards. Just as customers in New York expected the same quality of automobile as those in Texas or California, so baseball games played in New York had to have the same format as baseball in Texas.

While team sports could not have come into existence without the sweeping changes that the modern age produced, the meaning of sports, the source of their powerful grip on the imaginations of Americans, has deeper roots. These games respond to human needs that can be traced back to the earliest human communities, needs to which the dominant responses for most of human history came from organized religion .⁶ Sports and organized religion share several important features. Both address the needs of the spirit⁷ and the psyche rather than those of the flesh. Neither bears directly on what is necessary for physical survival: food and shelter. Both stand outside the working world.⁸ And team sports provide three satisfactions of life to twenty-first-century Americans that, before the modern age, only religion offered: a welcome diversion from the routines of daily life; a model of coherence and clarity; and heroic examples to admire and emulate.

The need for diversion became, if anything, more acute in the modern era. More people came to have more time to fill and in the confusions and traumas of a world of large cities and world wars they encountered new and different troubles from which to be diverted. Along with religion (and sometimes as part of religion), human beings have sought diversion in staged drama. Baseball, football, and basketball possess the defining property of drama, which is tension and release—that is, uncertainty ultimately relieved by a definitive conclusion. The prominence of the word "play" in team sports reveals their affinity with drama, the oldest form of which is, in English, the play, and the participants in which—the actors—are by tradition, like participants in games, called players.

Team sports offer a particularly compelling form of drama. The outcome of a game, unlike that of a scripted drama, is unknown. Few people watch the same play or motion picture repeatedly because after they have seen it once they know the ending. The tension is gone. But tension suffuses each and every game of baseball, football, and basketball. Moreover, in organized sports the tension carries beyond each individual game and tends to increase over time. Each game is part of a designated sequence—a season—the goal of which is to produce a champion. Both individual games and the season as a whole attract interest and attention. Spectators follow the first to find out which of the two contesting teams will win, and the second to learn which one will emerge as the ultimate champion. Suspense mounts because, as the end of the season approaches, games tend to become more important to the determination of the champion.

In this way baseball, football, and basketball resemble the oldest of literary forms, the epic. Like the greatest of them, the Odyssey, the protagonist—in the case of sports, the team—encounters a series of challenges that it must meet to achieve its ultimate goal.

Baseball, football, and basketball are powerfully attractive forms of entertainment because of another feature: coherence. It is easy to underestimate the importance in human affairs of coherence, which is the property of making sense, of hanging together. Coherence is not necessary to sustain life, as are food and shelter. It is not a cause for which people have fought and died, like liberty. But it is evidently a basic human need. All cultures have methods for making life intelligible to those who are living it.^b For most of history this was a manageable task. In the premodern—traditional—world, life was, for most people, simple and predictable. It closely resembled the one their forbears had led. It contained little variety. A person lived his or her entire life in the same place, interacted with the same narrow circle, worked in an easily learned way—almost invariably in agriculture—and died at what by modern standards qualifies as an early age. The answers to the questions to which this simple pattern gave rise—what comes before and after life, and how should it be lived?—were supplied by religious teachings.

The industrial revolution changed all that. Human existence became far less routinized and predictable. People began to move about, change jobs, encounter others with whom they had not grown up, and find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. Life for the average person became much more confusing. Indeed, almost the only thing about which a person could be certain was that his or her life would not duplicate the one his or her parents had led.

At the same time, powerful forces such as wars, revolutions, and convulsive swings in economic activity affected people's lives even more than they had in the past. Human beings found themselves at the mercy of social and political hurricanes that had not been predicted and that they could not understand, control, or escape. The modern era has been a time of disorientation, in which religion could not account for the vicissitudes of life as it once had.

Nor did art, traditionally an alternative, or at least supplementary, source of coherence, offer what was needed. The modern age brought incoherence to the traditional forms of artistic expression. The twentieth century was the era of free verse in poetry, stream-of-consciousness writing in literature, atonal music in place of traditional harmony and melody, and abstract rather than figurative art. James Joyce succeeded Charles Dickens, Jackson Pollack filled the place Rembrandt had occupied. The highest value of a work of art came to be regarded as originality; but what was original was also often obscure. For most people modernity in art served to mirror, even to compound, rather than to clarify, the confusion rampant in the world.