My sports right or left
BARNES, FRED
My Sports Right or Left fred barnes Iwent to the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia last December, and I won't soon forget it. And not just the game, which Army won when a desperate drive by Navy...
...The crowd at the game consists of rich folks, high rollers, and moderately well-heeled fans of the two teams involved...
...Boxing, for instance, is conservative because it's so violent, individualistic, and masculine...
...She'd seen me at the game...
...At halftime [with Navy ahead] my spirits were very low and I was wet and miserable...
...He understood what losing meant...
...The NCAA basketball Final Four is at the top of the list...
...Oh, yes, the World Cup is conservative, though soccer as a sport isn't...
...It got so bad that Sports Illustrated a few years back urged West Point and Annapolis to drop big-time football...
...What makes a sports event conservative or liberal...
...Anyway, it's liberals who hate commerce...
...I've got four criteria...
...And who cares...
...Mediocre teams get invited...
...What's repugnant and definitely not conservative is glitz, such as when a half-naked Michael Jackson sang during halftime at the Super Bowl...
...It reminds me of the defense of affirmative action: Those rewarded are always said to be "qualified," but never the "most qualified" or the "best...
...I don't think anyone would dispute that the Army-Navy game is a conservative event...
...Good for self-esteem, you know...
...Rather than rewarded, losers should be spurred to play harder next time in hopes of winning a trophy...
...Okay, it's a relatively new tradition, but let's not get picky...
...Now for the liberal sports events...
...Now the major bowls have become part of a playoff system...
...Is it southern...
...Both the NBA championship and the NBA All-Star weekend are conservative...
...And it's no coincidence that Army and Navy are better teams now that we're in a conservative era...
...Thus, the Masters golf tournament at a stuffy country club in Augusta, Georgia, in April is very, very conservative...
...Still, the Super Bowl is the summit of conservative sports...
...It's a great event that I never miss (on TV), but winning the championship isn't all that significant anymore...
...In the liberal '60s and '70s, serious athletes boycotted the service academies...
...Don't worry, Mom," he told her...
...The World Series is one...
...Last fall, SI changed its mind...
...It's getting to the Final Four itself that produces bragging rights...
...Her son came by to cheer her up...
...This has happened to the college football bowl games...
...Who remembers who won last year, the AL or the NL...
...Still, individual performances are important, which makes the All-Star game neo-liberal...
...And I think it's also fair to describe it as a conservative moment: a hard-hitting football game between traditional rivals, cadets and midshipmen (in uniform) standing throughout the game, the military brass in attendance, President Clinton seated for the first half on Navy's side, the second half on Army's...
...Conservatives loathe glitz, the Super Bowl's chief drawback...
...If the answer is yes to these, it's a conservative event...
...Yes, there are conservative and liberal athletic events...
...Smoke from cannons fired to celebrate Army's victory hung over the section of the stands where the entire corps of cadets was standing...
...It was one of the strangest and most exhilarating moments I've experienced in years of attending sports events...
...Baseball is a liberal sport, so boring it's adored by liberals...
...Worse, there are dozens of bowls...
...Losing the World Cup is death...
...Does winning matter to the exclusion of practically everything else...
...After the Boston Red Sox lost ignominiously to the New York Mets in 1986, I was so crushed I lost interest in baseball for several years...
...It's an event where winning is everything...
...California, a 6-5 team, played in the Aloha Bowl...
...The whole episode lasted two, maybe three minutes...
...There's nothing wrong, from the conservative standpoint, with commercialism in sports, mixing Adam Smith and Edmund Burke...
...Notice how good college teams are often described as having been to the Final Four x number of times in the past decade or two...
...The third is the nature of the event...
...And not just the game, which Army won when a desperate drive by Navy fell short in the final seconds...
...Who's performing at halftime this year...
...That's our strategy...
...We're always down at the half...
...The same is true for big games...
...But the series is steeped in tradition, and the crowd is a downscale version of the Super Bowl throng...
...Is it tradition-bound...
...Winning doesn't matter in the baseball All-Star game either...
...Then, after a brief burst of noise, the crowd quieted again...
...A few weeks after the Army-Navy game, I got a letter from an Army fan, the wife of a West Pointer and the mother of a cadet...
...There are other, lesser conservative sports events...
...As for commercialism, it's got plenty...
...The fourth measure: How much commercialism is associated with the event...
...The Cal football team should have stayed home...
...It wasn't like those "shameful seasons" Army had in the early '70s, she wrote...
...Army did...
...The first is the sport itself...
...I loved it...
...Wasn't that a wonderful game...
...That's not a conservative yardstick...
...We'll come back...
...Once the Army players collected in front, the West Point alma mater was sung...
...The heartbroken Navy team, having lost to Army for the fifth straight year, gathered itself in front of the full brigade of midshipmen, and together, football players and coaches and Middies sang the Naval Academy alma mater...
...Rewarding a mediocre or losing performance is a liberal practice...
...Siegfried and Roy...
...The star of the Super Bowl used to be paid to declare he's going to Disney World right after the game...
...she wrote...
...Sometimes a sandlot hustler pulls himself up by his bootstraps, as Tim Legler of the Washington Bullets did by winning the 3-point shooting contest in 1996...
...Clinton, by the way, was politely but coolly received at the game...
...Sports are either conservative (football, basketball, boxing) or liberal (soccer, jogging, baseball), and teams can be conservative (Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees) or liberal (Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves) as well...
...The TV ads during the game are a media story all by themselves...
...The Buffalo Bills have played in four Super Bowls, yet they're the laughingstock of football because they lost all four...
...Those were the days of Vietnam, Nixon, and silly hippie girls throwing flowers at the cadets and calling them 'baby killers.'" Nope, it wasn't like that at all...
...They used to be very traditional (and very exciting): Big 10 versus Pac 10 in the Rose Bowl, the Big 8 champ in the Orange Bowl, etc...
...What's sad to see is a conservative event that turns liberal...
...After losing to Navy, Cal wound up 6-6 for the year— but with bragging rights about having been a bowl team...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard...
...It's the biggest football game of the season...
...When Italy lost in 1994 on Roberto Baggio's missed penalty kick, Baggio fell to the ground like a man who'd been shot...
...Conservatives see things differently...
...The game on January 26 is the 31st—sorry, I mean the XXXIst...
...Winning matters...
...Liberal soccer parents in my neck of the woods, for example, think every player on every team should get a trophy, even if they lost every game...
...The cup generates fervent nationalistic feelings, which is fine...
...What happened moments after the game was even more memorable...
...The second criterion is the crowd: You don't find many liberals at football games...
...I miss that...
...The Super Bowl has become traditional...
...It doesn't matter which bowl you go to...
...The emphasis is chiefly on individual players like Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon, the true entrepreneurs of the sporting world...
...Veterans Stadium suddenly went silent...
Vol. 2 • January 1997 • No. 19
