THE 'WONDERFUL" WORLD OF SPORTS

...Moreover, the financial chaos in sport today is so greatwwith franchises collapsing, star players being shifted from team to team, and colleges being forced to drastically cut their athletic programs---4hat it is impossible to pretend that everything is all right and return to" the "pure" sports reporting of 20 years ago...

...By the early 1970s sports had become an attractive field of havestigation for historians, sociologists and psychologists, and an important topic of discussion in liberal and leftwing journals and magazines...

...hospital...

...Everybody would be much better off," Michener writes, "if Congress recognized that sports are a major American industry, faced up to its responsibilities, and passed sensible laws regulating them...

...Novak views the brutality of our games (as well as our industrial and communal life) as products of universal laws of human history rather than specific social circumstances and values...

...In particular, her portrait of Wesley Fishel, who headed the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University, a strutring, pompous little martinet bragging of his close friendship with Diem, and regarded on campus as a "symbol of the collusion between the universi~ties and the war, the technology and the sicknesses in the American society...

...It is an excellent sourcebook for anyone trying to get an overview of the major issues in American sport and a powerful brief in favor of federal legislation in this area...

...in this vale of tears, in this world of struggle and strife, football is an almost revelatory liturgy...

...Such people, he claims, are guilty of a "narrow politicizing of everything they touched" and "left greasy whatever their fingers rested upon...

...The book is hilariously funny because Roberts maintains a deadpan tone and allows his characters to mock themselves with statements made in utter seriousness...

...His book is a summary of much of the critical literature written on sport in the last ten years, including sections on the financing of college and professional sports, discrimination against women in the allocation of sports resources, the impact of various sports programs on the health of participants, the failure of little leagues and physical education programs, the role of sport in minority communities and the recruiting abuses of college athletic departments...

...To my fellow activists, I was a pet jock, someone who brought the group a little prestige, but who was a bit misguided for doing something so conventional...

...Certain he would take her meaning, Emerson tells him "People will always be kind...

...The spectator sports which America loves, he argues, serve a quasi-religious function, making a far stronger claim on the emotions of observers than most of the cultural forms which intellectuals have defined as "high art...

...But he is sincerely distressed by the brutality, waste, and corruption he sees in the American sports industry, and, like the muckrakers of an earlier time, feels that exposure and reasoned argument will inspire the public to take action...

...Michener calls upon politicians and educators to construct more public athletic facilities, sponsor more sports programs for adults, and reorganize sports programs from the little leagues to the pros to minimize physical damage to those who participate...

...Roberts's book, a product of the new sports journalism, is a collection of sardonic essays on the emotional excesses of sports fans and the exploitation of sport for commercial and political purposes...

...When you finish Roberts's book, you come away with the feeling that you just got out of a madhouse and breathe a sigh of relief...

...When he's a hundred years old, he says, he'll tell his children :that what he remembers best "is the countryside, how beautiful the women looked and the food...

...Equally sig18 February 1977:118 nificantly, some athletes began applying the movement's critique of American society to sports, producing books which denounced racism, violence and corruption in college and professional athletics...

...I wanted very much to get there...

...The symbols of the counter-culture m long hair, rock music and drugs---affected both groups simultaneously and the anti-war and civil rights movements reached far beyond their original base to include many athletes...

...During my years at Columbia College in the early 1960s, I found that my aspirations to be a scholar and my desire to play varsity sports were regarded by most people as incompatible objectives...

...Michener, by his own account, was deeply shaken by the new left critique of sports, and became convinced that major changes would have to be made in the organization of sport on a collegiate, professional and cornCommonweal: 119 munity level to eliminate the evils that were exposed...

...Don't hold this against me" he asks...

...With a loving touch, Novak depicts the disciplinary artistry in games like baseball, football and basketball, their ability to inspire both individual self-expression and strong collective feeling...

...Unfortunately, Novak makes grossly exaggerated claims for the validity and universality of the experiences he describes...

...It is the tradition that has produced--and is today most singularly represented by --John C. Bennett...

...He is particularly resentful toward new left activists who have used sport as a vehicle to dramatize injustice and exploitation and of sportswriters who find economic and political relationships within the sports industry as interesting as the games themselves...

...Their work outraged many coaches and athletic directors, but helped awaken a more self-reflective attitude among sportswriters and stimulated a new interest in sports in the intellectual community...

...MICHAEL ROBERTS New Republic Books, $8.95 The Joy of Sports MICHAEL NOVAK Basic Books, $10.95 Sports in America JAMES MICHENER Random House, $12.50 "Sports are an almost universal language, binding our diverse nation, especially its rn~n, together . . . . Our sports need to be reformed . . . . But what they do so superbly needs our thanks, our watchfulness, our intellect, and our acerbic love...

...Novak's evocative descriptions of sports events, and of his own experiences in sport, have an almost hypnotic effect on the reader...

...To place an in18 February 1977:120 stitution "above" political criticism and activity is to insulate it from change...

...Roberts amassed some two hundred pages of anecdotes to document his point that "sport has been the source of more shameless propaganda _9 . . nonsense beliefs, and the instrument of more disreputable purposes than any institution but government or religion...

...At the end of my junior year, my favorite history professor very solemnly told me that I would have to quit the tennis team (of which I had just been elected captain) if I wanted to get into a good history graduate school...

...numerous books and articles have documented extensive drug use in professional sports...

...His book is a tremendously effective polemic against intellectuals who regard sports as an "opiate of the people," and view those who follow them as brutalized and degraded...

...Although he disagrees with new left critics who call for the abolition of big-time sports, he does feel that physical education programs should be revamped to emphasize lifetime sports and that the balance betweeen "winning" and physical fitness should be shifted in favor of the latter...

...With considerable eloquence, Novak describes how playing and watching sports provides Iens of millions of people (mostly male) with transcendent experiences, feeding "deep human hungers" and placing them in touch with "dimly perceived features of human life within this cosmos...

...Sadly, this approach to sport is most popular among the educated middle class, who have the time and energy to pursue it when they get home from work...

...More chilling, more sinister, because less obviously so, is Cyrus Sulzberger's son, David, who left Harvard to serve not, heaven forfend, as a soldier but as "one of the bright young men working in the pacification program," motivated, he says by a "certain amount of competitive desire to blow my father's mind...

...Doc Melofski, the psychiatrist, "had a saying for me," Gorman tells Ms...

...If HE would play for the Dolphins," Roberts quotes Miami tackle Norm Evans as saying, "I guarantee you Christ would be the roughest guy who ever played this game . . . . Jesus was a real man all right...

...Sports are m o r e . . , serious than the ~amatic arts," Novak claims, "much closer to primal symbols, metaphors and acts, much more ancient and more frightening...

...To Novak, corruption and violence in sport are neither surprising or upsetting...

...On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, many American households are the scene of bitter conflicts over the division of leisure time, with men being drawn to the TV or the local bar, while women are left alone with the kids or are forced to join in activities in which they have little interest...

...He is more interested in celebrating and defending what we have than seeking something better...

...The importance of sport as a focus of social criticism and a metaphor for the American experience is dramatized by the appearance of three new books: Fans...

...they were, and remain, pandemic...

...Michael Novak, The Joy o/Sports There was a time, not too long ago, when it was considered unusual for an intellectual or political activist to have an interest in competitive sports...

...You know," he says, "if people say to me 'Did you have a good time in Vietnam?' I'll answer 'Yes.'" Best of all was the food, ah, the food...

...by Michael Roberts, Sports in A.merica by James Michener, and The loy o/Sports by Michael Novak...

...Throughout this country, more and more people are seeking new ways of participating in sport that veill lengthen, rather than shorten their lives and enable them to feel a greater sense of harmony with themselves and nature...

...W, hat people love in football, Novak declares: is what the soft part of the liberal world will not admit to consciousness, that human life, in Hegel's phrase, is a butcher's bench . . . . Football is an attempt to harness violence, to formalize it, to confine it within certain canonical limits and then to release it in order to wrest from it a measure of wit, beauty and redemption...

...They are jogging, hiking and swimming, learning sports like tennis which can be played into old age, and adjusting their diets to increase the possibility of long and healthy lives...

...In the late 1960s the division between jocks and intellectuals on college campuses began to slowly break down...

...and several TV documentaries have been produced questioning the value of little league sports...

...That is unfortunate, for it refers to the tradition that has largely shaped the religious understanding of American culture, that has exercised persistent care and responsibility for this social experiment, that has resisted myriad temptations to despair, and that has, for the most part, sustained a moral discourse marked by a sense of fairness and style of civility...

...It is hard to reconcile this scenario with Novak's claim that "Sports tutor us in the basic lived experiences of the humanist tradRion...

...A Canadian physician estimated tha~ the average professional footbaU player can expect to live 58 years, 12 less than an average American male...

...The underlying assumptions that guide Michener's arguments are not radical: he never questions the profit motive as a basis for allocating sports resources and setting priorities for their use...

...Many Americans disagree with him...

...rather, what he finds striking is how much ,pleasure and meaning people find in sport...

...One of the most devastating revelations of the new sports journalism has been the toll that big-time sportsmfootball in particular-take on the bodies and psyches of those who play them...

...While they continue to attend sports events and watch sports on television, their primary sense of satisfaction comes from their own activity, the physical creativity they experience rather than observe...

...Sports are mysteries of youth and aging, perfect action and deeds, fortunes and misfortune, shadow and comingency...

...BOOKS THE 'WONDERFUL' WORLD OF SPORTS MARK NAISON Fans...

...The sports cuRure which Novak exalts is an aggressively male world in which women are usually assigned the role of cheerleaders or prizes of the competRion...

...Jack Scott, Harry Edwards, Dave Megysey, and Paul Hoch, along with sportswriters Robert Lipsyte and Leonard Schechter, emphasized the significance of sports in legitimizing some of the most oppressive features of American life...

...The joys of a lifetime of athletic activity are too precious to be confined to an elite...

...They had as much contempt for the civil rights workers as the latter had for them...

...If he were alive today, I would picture him as a six-foot, six-inch defensive tackle who would be hard to keep out of the backfield for an oftensive lineman like myself...

...Novak also fails to examine the impact of the American approach to sports in the health of participants...

...It was exhilarating, and he admits it freely, gladly, proudly...

...they wanted to know...

...But Roberts doesn't accompany his vignettes with any specific suggestions for reform_9 Since he sees nothing of value in bigtime sports, and has little real faith in the intelligence of those who follow them, he has little confidence that sports can ever be reformed and seems content to mock them while they become ever more absurd...

...Anytime you were up against him, you would know you were in for a long afternoon...

...He understood exactly...

...Despite the undeniable power of this imagery, the argument that underlies it is not persuasive...

...While he fails to fully explore why most women are excluded from the sports world, both as participants and followers of the "religion," he does effectively convey what it means to many men...

...In turn, the football players and wrestlers with whom I was friendly would ask, "Why is a guy like you hanging around with those people...

...This book, subtitled "From Theology to Social Ethics," is offered as a kind of summing up of a distinguished career spanning more than forty years...

...On the bed next to his, his friend, a young psychiatrist, lay dying of encephalitis...

...Had Novak's logic been applied retroactively, blacks would have never entered major professional and collegiate sports, women would have never gotten their still limited access to community and school facilities, and sportwriters would still live in fear of raising political issues on the sports page...

...This position has enormously conservative implications...

...James Michener's book, in contrast, is motivated by a deep respect for the life-affirming potentialities of sport and for the good sense of the American public...

...Novak sensitizes us to the humanistic dimensions of sport, its ability to dramatize fundamental human dilemmas and to provide people with a sense of personal competence and an opportunity to be creative...

...Novak is aware of this information, but refuses to take it seriously...

...The untrained ward-workers hounded Gorman mercilessly, were always on him, accusing him of malingering...

...People who are passionately involved in sport, Novak correctly insists, show as much care, sensitivity and subtlety in dealing with their sphere of concern as those who follow politics and the arts...

...In liberal and radical circles, sports symbolized everything crude and barbarous about American life, an aspect of national culture which would, they hoped, be replaced by more civilized pastimes --art, music, theatermas society "matured...

...Things were not much better in the civil rights movement circles in which I was involved...

...Because Novak views sport as a sphere in which existential dramas should be played out in pure form, he regards those who seek to politicize it as guilty of a kind of sacrilege...

...He didn't mind so much when young people asked him how he got that way-they were simply curious...

...Besides, what is youth for if not adventure, excitement, experience...

...We know the Fishels of our academies...

...But in a more equitable and humane society, it would be open to the secretary as well as the hwyer, the factory worker as well as the teacher, and the truck driver as well as the engineer...

...Our preoccupation with competitive games rather than health," Michener complains, "has produced American young people who are deficient in physical condition compared with students in other nations...

...another study estimated that 86 percent of high school football players suffered a serious injury each year...

...One sincerely hopes that, as a last testament, it is very premature...

...Doc Melofski would say, 'Everybody knows how to be a paraplegic, don't they.'" One thing drove German nuts...

...it was for him "a situation which couldn't be anything but interesting, which would open wide, new waves of spectra to look at...

...It's time to show them you're serious," he said...

...Novak's insensitivity to some of the nuances of his subject is also displayed in his contemptuous treatment of critics of American sport...

...But sometimes when older people wanted to know his story "they didn't let it go, sometimes they began acting very chummy," which German hated...

...The Radical Imperative JOHN C. BENNETT Westminster, $4.50 RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS The phrase "mainstream Protestant liberal" is seldom used today except as a put-down...

...Anyone who Commonweal: 121...

...Novak would have us accept violence and suffering as a given, something immune to human effort that can be only exorcised through ritual...

...Michael J. P. Gorman is a paraplegic in a V.A...

...To him, the violence in sport is no worse than the violence many people experience in the workplaces, neighborhoods and homes, and is therefore hardly a cause for indignation...

...So among many others did the "experts," the complicit universities handsomely funded to conduct such scholarly research projects as creating, training and arming police forces for the Saigon regime...

...Michener also presents a powerful critique of the "spectator psychology" that dominates American sports and exposes the destructive impact of many sports programs on the collective health of the nation...

...Michael Novak's book, in contrast, is both grimly realistic about power arrangements in the United States, and deeply suspicious of most efforts to reform American sport...

...But not all societies, or all sports, are equally violent...

...To make them available to all people is the major objective of sports activists and an important component of the socialist dream...

...To refer to it as our "chief civilizing agent," and "our most universal art form" is to legitimize the exclusion of women from the processes of value formation and aesthetic creativity, Novak also fails to consider how sports divides "our diverse natior as well as binds it together...

...Among advanced industrial societies, the Urrited States has a peculiarly high level of violent crime, a high incidence of industrial accidents, and a relatively short life expectancy (34th in the world for men...