Politics trumps sports
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Politics Trumps Sports john podhoretz Four years ago, just weeks before the baseball playoffs, it occurred to me that I had no idea which teams were playing. Football season had started as well,...
...Because for years, Ted Kennedy had been the target of columnist Howie Carr in the Boston Herald, who regularly called him, among other epithets, "Fat Boy...
...Finally, the "intellectual" approaches politics by concentrating on hard, raw data...
...Issues are debated in a manner derived from principles of behavior first systematized about 2,500 years ago...
...I had ceased to be a sports fan—an unthinkable thought only a few years earlier, when I would routinely make a 10-hour drive from Washington to New York and back to attend games at Shea Stadium featuring my beloved baseball team, the New York Mets...
...The third—the intellectual—brings a scholastic approach to the subject...
...If he emerges from this lowbrow version of social science, he is not content to take sports for what it could be (like the first) or what it is (like the second...
...What happened to turn me away from sports...
...He overanalyzes, draws ludicrous analogies, and inflates team rivalries to Homeric proportions— the purpose of which, I think, is to alleviate his own fears that these matters are actually beneath him...
...it was later ruled unconstitutional...
...like chess, it is a parody of war in which two guys' running over to the left side of the field is described with a straight face as a "flanking maneuver...
...The "aesthete" is fascinated by the art of politics— the way its masters really know how, as they say in schools of government, to "game" the system...
...Football is not equivalent to a war...
...He studies congressional vote tallies the way a baseball fan studies box scores...
...Instead, the intellectual attempts to apply a universal field theory to a bunch of games...
...My interests shifted in such a way that the satisfaction I derived from following sports I now get from another subject entirely...
...I watched Monday Night Football every week for 15 years, and spent most Sundays in the winter happily sunk in a chair for six hours of Giants and Jets games...
...It soon emerged that Kennedy's Senate colleague Ernest Hollings had sneaked the provision into the bill a week before in his capacity as a senior member of the conference committee...
...The explanation has nothing to do with players' salaries or overexposed endorsers: The games have not changed...
...There is a brilliant portrait of one such fan in John Sayles's movie Lone Star...
...Greetings, Roger Angell...
...That is myth made flesh, six blocks from my office, and no more than five hours by plane for anybody else in America...
...Football season had started as well, and I could not name the quarterback, the star running back, the star wide receiver, or the star linebacker of any of the four teams that played in cities I have lived in—the Jets and Giants in New York, the Bears in Chicago, and the Redskins in Washington...
...The best example I know has to do with Ted Kennedy and Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns The Weekly Standard...
...And every politics fan knows exactly what he means...
...Some lean more to one than the others: I used to share an office with a 40-year-old graduate of the University of Nebraska who wept for a week at odd hours of the day when his football team lost the 1984 Orange Bowl to Miami because of an infamous, last-second play dubbed, for the ages, the "fumble-rooski...
...And politics matters (though fortunately, it doesn't matter nearly as much as it could...
...Our president really does have the weaponry to destroy the world, and what legislators do affects all our lives...
...That subject is American politics, the real nuts and bolts of it...
...Aesthetes know enough, and are cynical enough, about politics to put aside such moral considerations and concentrate on the beauty...
...Where he lives, Abraham Lincoln lived...
...It was a shocking and disgraceful use of legislative power (and I don't say that because of corporate allegiance...
...Most fans have some of each archetype in them...
...And from 1969 to 1975, I handed all my allowance and birthday money to Madison Square Garden so that I could take in a dozen Knicks games a year...
...And only because of the memory of a recent tabloid headline did I know that Patrick Ewing was the center on the New York Knicks basketball team...
...The intellectual sports fan, as we have seen, attempts to place the games he likes into a mythic context where they do not belong...
...Games for him are secondary to the statistics they generate, stats he memorizes and throws back at people during arguments like darts...
...He remembers 30-sec-ond commercials for losing Senate races from two decades ago and brings them up when he wants to criticize or praise a new ad...
...The second—call him the aesthete—takes an almost artistic pleasure in watching athletes accomplishing things with their bodies the rest of us can only dream about...
...The aesthete may have been something of an athlete himself, and may have a more thorough sense of these games than the average couch potato...
...But you can appreciate it only if you overlook the horrible fact that a measure intended as an act of revenge on which nobody specifically voted and about which the president and his staff never knew before he signed the bill containing it became the law of the land...
...Nobody had voted on it...
...And baseball is not a timeless pastorale that evokes the cornfields of our youth, as most stomach-churningly lyrical sports-writers claim...
...In 1987, a major appropriations bill finally got through Congress after weeks of haggling between the House and Senate, arrived on the president's desk, and was immediately signed...
...When Bill Clinton sits in the White House, he is, like it or not, following in a line that began with Washington, Adams, and Jefferson...
...He loves those who lead, feels rage toward those who don't seem to be giving it their all or seem uninterested in the overall fortunes of the party and the cause...
...He examines maps of congressional districts the way a golf fan studies the breaks and mowing patterns of a Robert Trent Jones course...
...He roots for every conceivable victory and feels a sting at every conceivable defeat...
...It is at this very point that politics fans and sports fans diverge, and the divergence helps explain why I became a politics fan and have left sports behind, at least for now...
...I have...
...John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Only in my late twenties did I become engrossed in its inner workings, the day-to-day shifts of power, and the strategies and maneuvers used to bluff, outfox, and outwit opponents...
...All this is true of the politics fan as well...
...But politics is mythic, even if the people in it don't quite seem deserving of mythic stature...
...And yet, at the same time, it was— what other word can you use?—beautiful, a cunning legislative trick that left almost no fingerprints...
...But the real joy in following sports comes from combining passionate partisanship, an objective sense of the games themselves, and an effort to bring the lessons and truths of sports to bear in other parts of one's life...
...nobody even knew precisely how it had got in...
...There are, I think, three sports-fan archetypes...
...Thus did Kennedy get revenge on Carr and Murdoch...
...The first—call him the lover—experiences an emotional merger with a team comparable to intimacy: He loves the players beyond simple reason and gets furious with them in the manner of a disappointed lover, a disapproving parent, or a deserted child...
...But its meaning and purpose were entirely clear: In Boston and New York, Rupert Murdoch would have to sell his newspapers...
...actually, it's an inner-city street game with rules whose very peculiarity (quick, explain the rationale for the infield-fly rule) makes baseball a singular phenomenon that defies analogy...
...The "lover" throws in his hand with one side or the other—Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative...
...I am now a politics fan, and it is remarkable how closely the experiences of the politics fan track those of the sports fan...
...Kind of like the "fumble-rooski," actually...
...Now, why would such a matter interest legislators at the last minute on a crucial bill...
...Grover Norquist, the conservative activist nonpareil, doesn't talk about liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats: He talks about "our team" and "their team...
...Only later was it discovered that somebody on the conference committee empaneled to reconcile the Senate and House versions of the bill had stuck in a little provision about waivers to a rule forbidding common ownership of a television station and a newspaper in the same city...
Vol. 2 • January 1997 • No. 19
