THE SPORTS FAN : For Many, the Playing of Games Becomes Something Else Entirely

There are men to whom it is a delight to collect the Olympic dust of the course.

--HORACE

The world’s first sports fans probably were the fellows Horace, the lyric poet, wrote about more than 2,000 years ago. At the time, athletic festivals in Rome’s Colosseum and the Olympic Games in Greece were popular attractions, stirring the emotions of the natives and diverting their attention from wars, crime and taxes.

Sports, in fact, might have been too popular with the Romans. While they cheered their games and athletic heroes, their empire fell.

We know sports abounded in those days because Pindar, a Greek writer, composed victory songs for athletes as early as 475 BC.

“All societies, in all periods of history, have needed some kind of public entertainment, and it usually has been provided by sports,” novelist James A. Michener wrote in his book, “Sports in America.”

But Horace, Pindar and other early poets, scientists, historians, sociologists, psychologists and novelists who studied the effect of sports on humans, probably would be as astonished as a cynical sportswriter to see how Americans react to simple games today. H. L. Mencken’s average Boobus Americanus is a wild-eyed, cheering sports junkie. He is the 10th man at Dodger Stadium, the 12th at the Coliseum, the 6th at the Forum. He is the home-field advantage sports reporters write about.

Although millions of Americans play games, millions more are content to take their sports sitting down. Sedentary fans fill stadiums and arenas across the land, or sit for hours in front of television sets, watching anything that moves in a uniform.

They often wear hats, shirts and caps in the colors of their favorite teams. Some take the games so seriously that they get violent. Fights are as common in the stands as they are on the field.

Some seem to go to the stadium primarily to drink or use drugs, and others get involved vicariously with athletes and live out their fantasies through their heroes.

In pursuit of their pleasures, sports junkies spend billions of dollars on equipment, clothes, souvenirs, tickets and plane fares to follow their heroes.

More Americans--as many as 100 million--will watch a Super Bowl than a political convention. They may not know the name of their congressman, but they know who plays quarterback for the Rams. Their bible is The Sporting News, their weekly journal Sports Illustrated.

In Arkansas, they buy red toilet seats decorated with pictures of the university’s mascot, a razorback hog, and cheer their team with cries of “Whooo, pig, sooey!”

In Golden, Colo., a judge presides in an orange robe in honor of the Denver Broncos. He is said to attend every home game and take three-week vacations to watch the Broncos train.

Californians cheer for teams they once rooted for in the East or Midwest. One, a Minnesota Viking fan, even painted the trim of his house purple, the color of the team’s uniform.

The NFL’s Pro magazine reported that a Cleveland fan living in Los Angeles saw 14 of 17 games the Browns played one season, either flying to the game site or to a place where he could see the Browns on television. He often listened to radio broadcasts of Cleveland games on the telephone.

A Washington grandmother had such a crush on Redskin quarterback Joe Theismann that she decorated a room in her home in Redskin colors. She had lamps made of Redskin helmets.

A Greensburg, Pa., fan had his car painted white, black and gold, the colors of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and decorated it with the Steelers’ logo and autographs of players and coaches.

On a recent trip to Europe some USC graduates, mostly in their 60s, wore their school colors and sang “Fight On for Old SC” in Spanish and Portuguese restaurants.

A Whittier man who attended Ohio State wore Buckeye colors just to watch the team play on television.

Such intense loyalty on the part of fans for their alma maters seems to stem more from athletics than academics.

A Los Angeles man’s last request, two hours before he died in a hospital bed, was for his wife to go home and bring back a radio so he could listen to a broadcast of a Dodger game. Fernando Valenzuela was pitching.

A woman on Phil Donahue’s television show complained that her husband had told her that the happiest moment in his life was when the Phillies won the pennant. “I thought it should be the time he walked down the aisle to marry me,” she said.

More than 100,000 fans are members of a national organization, FANS, which stands for Fight to Advance the Nation’s Sports. Its goal: “To represent the paying public and relieve its suffering at the hands of teams and promoters.”

Virtually every professional and college team has a booster or fan club, and many college recruiting violations are the results of overzealous alumni breaking rules. Pressure from fans, in fact, often is cited as a reason that many colleges cheat and coaches are fired.

Once upon a time in America, adults worked and children played. Today, for whatever reason, most adult Americans have such an insatiable appetite for sports that their love of games overshadows all cultural activities.

Americans demand heroes, but today their idols are apt to be athletes, not scientists, teachers, statesmen or astronauts. Children, probably because they observe how their parents idolize athletes, often make football, baseball and basketball players their role models. The majority of these athletes are not qualified.

“(Athletes) can get wrapped up in the temptation to subordinate the fundamental human needs for being a person to fame, which is a glory that has only a short season.” That was a warning from Pope John Paul II, who also admonished Italians that “Sports has its purpose in man, not man in sports.”

Our games are no longer a diversion, they are an obsession. To humans of all ages and all levels of social classes, they are more a passion than a pastime. What was once play is now organized sports. Sometimes it seems that America is paved with AstroTurf.

What has produced this intense passion for sports in America? Is our preoccupation with games and violence a sign of decadence? Is it wrong to sit passively and watch others play instead of participating ourselves?

Most observers agree that a marked increase in television programming and leisure time have accounted for the increase in popularity of sports since the 1950s.

Of the two, television probably should get the most credit--or blame. It dramatically captures the excitement of the action and has helped create new fans as well as strengthening the interest of old ones. It has, more than anything else, created the sedentary sportsman.

The average sports fan is patient. To see a game in person he endures horrendous traffic and long lines. Often he gets lousy seats and dreadful food and is denied information the television viewer gets free. And, in truth, most games he sees, including the ones in sports glorified as macho and exciting, are boring. Fans sit for hours to see a few minutes of action.

They also don’t seem to care that sports are overexposed, that athletes are frequently exploited, that colleges cheat. They tirelessly watch hockey and basketball in May and June, and endure seven months of baseball, six months of football and thousands of hours of television programming.

If they have cable, California sports nuts are likely to watch a basketball game between J.C. Smith College and Cleveland State, simply because it’s there.

Outrageous ticket and concession prices, strikes, contract disputes and owner arrogance do not deter them. They willingly help enrich athletes who sometimes loaf, cheat, use drugs and market their services to the highest bidder every two or three years.

They support teams whose owners give them little comfort in stadiums as intimate and noisy as LAX, and which are usually financed by the taxpayers, not all of whom are fans. In fact, they no longer are sure their team will even return next year.

Still, few Americans escape the attraction of sports. There is in this land a great affection for games and for the men and women who play them, despite increasing evidence that sports are not a diversion, an illusion or America’s hope. Apparently, we prefer not to know too much about what we treasure.

“Sports do not build character; they reveal it,” Heywood Hale Broun once said of a myth espoused by the late Gen. Douglas MacArthur and virtually every coach since Knute Rockne.

Leadership and military brilliance, Michener found, have little to do with football. “Emerging evidence begins to erode the legend,” he said in his sports book. “Scholars make good generals and admirals, too.”

But Michener also said: “Sports have become a major force in American life.”

In his view, games distract us from our problems and release us from our tensions, much as they did in Horace’s day. It doesn’t matter, Michener said, whether we’re watching or playing them.

Noted fan Billy Graham said: “The pluses outweigh the minuses, because I’d rather we put our energies into sport. The only thing that bothers me is the drug problem and the fact that sports have become such a big business. This could cause a game to cease to be a sport, and so one can see danger signals.”

Not all sports fans are uncouth rowdies and beer drinkers, although sometimes it seems that way. Games appeal to every class and age, men, women and children, laborers, executives, kings, princes, lords and counts, the rich and poor.

Shakespeare wrote about sports. So did Hemingway. Pope John Paul II, once an avid skier and soccer player in Poland, is a fan. So are the Rev. Robert Schuller, Cary Grant, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Walter Matthau, Danny Kaye, Bob Hope and Alistair Cooke.

Pianist Vladimir Horowitz is a baseball fan. So were Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once said of the game, “It is so beautifully divided by white lines which define it, a place where every accomplishment is measured in comfortingly exact numbers.”

Kings play golf and princes polo. Plato was a wrestler. Sports such as yacht racing, wind surfing, skiing and motorcycling are the intense passion of Juan Carlos, the king of Spain.

Jean-Paul Sartre, the late French philosopher, playwright and novelist, wrote: “Only in games is man free, because only in games does he understand what is going on.”

Wise men disagree on the value of sports to the human race. Juan Antonio Samaranch, Spain’s former ambassador to the Soviet Union and now the president of the International Olympic Committee, said recently: “Sport is, without a doubt, the most important social force at the end of 20th Century.”

Mortimer Adler, the author of “Six Great Ideas,” had another one about sports. “The enjoyment of beauty is not confined to the lives of those who have the habit of visiting museums, attending concerts or ballets, going to the theater, or reading poetry,” he said. “It occurs also in the lives of those who are baseball, basketball, or football fans, those who go to the bull fights, those who watch tennis matches, and so on.

“The sports spectator who, beholding an extraordinary play or action, cries out, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful,’ is experiencing the same enjoyment or disinterested pleasure that is experienced by the auditor of an extraordinary performance of a Beethoven quartet . . . or a person witnessing an extraordinary twist of the fan by an actor in a Kabuki drama or an extraordinary pas de deux by ballet dancers.

“The sports enthusiast or fan is an expert judge of the intrinsic excellence or admirable beauty of a stunning triple play, or of a completed forward pass that scores a goal . . . “

The beauty of the triple play, he said, is no less than that of a Zen garden, Michelangelo’s Pieta, a Beethoven sonata or a display of fireworks.

On the other hand, author Paul Theroux writes in “Sunrise with Seamonsters,” that the manly attitude toward sports “is little more than a recipe for creating degenerates, sadists, latent rapists and just plain louts. I regard high school sports as a drug far worse than marijuana, and it is the reason that the average tennis champion, say, is a pathetic oaf.”

Mike Royko, the popular Chicago columnist who often writes about sports, once said: “I get a little tired of a society that is more interested in statistics for passing in the National Football League than in knowing something about what positions your congressman takes on issues. Even who your congressmen is.

“I’m a very casual sports fan. I used to be a very ardent sports fan. I used to waste my time on it. I really don’t care about those guys . . . whether they win or lose. . . . I really look back with great regret on any hours I spent sitting in front of the television set, watching a sports event. . . . I think about the incredible amount of time you really waste. You sacrifice so many important things.”

In his book, “Jock Culture U.S.A.,” Neil D. Isaacs wrote: “We have lost track of the essential value of sports and the inherent gratification of physical excellence and team play.” Instead of dissipating destructive forces, he said, “sports often breeds them.”

Michener also sees a problem with our obsession with games. “Eighteenth Century Europe produced musicians because society at that time prized creative talent,” he said. “Twentieth Century America produces athletes because our society obviously treasures sports more highly than creativity.”

So, instead of Beethoven and Bach, Americans get McEnroe and Abdul-Jabbar. That’s all right with America’s sports fans, who prefer aces and dunks to sonatas and symphonies. They start their day stimulated at the breakfast table by the sports section of their daily newspaper, which in many cases devotes more space to games than it does to the arts, business, politics, education and religion.

Politicians and editorial writers often use the language of the sports pages. The Senate tax bill was said not to have a chance short of a “full-court press” from the White House.

A Times editorial said: “Now Ronald Reagan is playing football, political style . . . trying to throw Democrats for a loss. It is heads-up play . . . he has left a crucial element out of his playbook. He wants to gain ground without a blocking back.”

Reagan, rejecting the Senate’s budget bill, declared angrily: “The ballgame is over.”

In a recent sermon, the Rev. Kerry Reed of Whittier First Christian Church, pictured Jesus as a coach and preached on “the little scrimmages we face that help prepare us for life’s big game.”

What does all this idolatry of sports stem from? Why do men and women wave team pennants, wear school colors, sit for hours in front of TV screens or endure the discomfort of visits to stadiums to watch paid mercenaries perform?

“Pleasure is not enough to explain the dedication of loyal rooters, and enjoyment is not enough to account for Americans’ frenzied interest in sport,” Dr. Arnold R. Beisser wrote in “Madness in Sport.”

“One must look deeper than casual amusement to understand the fans’ loyalty, commitment and willingness to sacrifice. In a melting pot like Los Angeles, citizens seek, sometimes desperately, groups with which they can identify, so as to feel that they belong. Sports appear to have that social function.”

The Dodgers, Beisser said, became something concrete around which to rally, something to provide identity, something to take pride in.

“Everyone needs to feel that he has ties with others,” he wrote. “With the dispersal of the traditional extended family . . . the sports fan has a readily available group to satisfy this need. He has a meeting place, the stadium, where he is needed to support the team. He can gather with others, don his Dodger cap . . . and yell at the top of his lungs for his team.

“Everyone needs to be able to share strong feelings with others. The fan can share intense feelings in victory and defeat. . . . He can complain about umpires’ and managers’ decisions and errors and the other tribesmen understand. Fans unite in hatred of rival teams. They are aggressive without threat of injury either to their body or pride.”

Fans are fulfilling fantasies, sports psychologist Bruce Olgivie believes. “It’s an escape into fiction,” he said. “They try to live vicariously through the lives of athletes. It’s a grave danger, a tragic pattern. It’s like women watching soap operas.”

Athletes have extraordinary physical ability, Olgivie said: “But they are questionable heroes for youngsters. Why would we hold these men as heroes? They are not geniuses.”

Olgivie believes that people would be better off if they participated more in sports, rather than watching them on television all the time. In fact, many adults who get their kicks out of watching sports instead of participating in one probably did play some kind of game at some point in their lives. Their presence in a grandstand or in front of a TV set as a cheering fan is a consolation prize for athletic failure.

Poet Donald Hall has had a love affair with baseball all his life. At 10 he listened to radio broadcasts of games from Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds and grew up to write two books on his favorite sport, “Playing Around” and “In the Country of Baseball.”

Evangelist Graham, who wrestled and played baseball and basketball at Wheaton College, once earned $5 a game playing semipro baseball in Sharon, N.C.--”I think that was if we won.”--and today still follows the sport “as best I can. I have favorite teams in both leagues.”

He likes to watch football on television, at least the last quarter, “because the game is so long and it takes so much time.” The sports section sometimes is the first one he turns to in his newspaper, he said.

Political adviser Larry O’Brien was a sports fan long before he became commissioner of the National Basketball Assn., acquiring a keen interest in games as a Boston Celtic rooter during his boyhood in Springfield, Mass. He never lost his love for sports while he was in Washington, he said, and often relaxed in the White House talking about them with President Kennedy, an avid sports fan.

Presidents, in fact, have long been such ardent fans, one wonders if a man could get elected if his interests were solely in, say, music, science or literature.

They have thrown out the first pitch of virtually every baseball season this century and, starting with Dwight Eisenhower, have invited athletes to the White House and phoned their congratulations to winners. Losers never get a call.

According to one scorekeeper, Ronald Reagan has surpassed all his predecessors, having met with or phoned more than 400 athletes.

Sports have a pervasive influence on the lives of all Americans, not just the sports nuts. Three-fourths of the public watches sports on television at least once a week, and almost 70% watch, read about or discuss sports at least once a day, a survey sponsored by Miller beer found in 1983. Nineteen percent of the public, about 35 million people, are avid fans, according to the survey.

“It has been widely believed that a hard-core group of sports enthusiasts in America are the only ones really interested or involved in sports,” said Bud Wilkinson, a former football coach who was an adviser for the Miller study. “However, this study shows that the impact of sports can reach into virtually every household, school and business organization, and affects the outlook and the relationships of a major portion of the population.”

It is easy to see why sports have become the opium of the masses. Sport is a shortened form of disport, which means to indulge in amusement or play. Games have drama, heroes, villains and sometimes comedy. And although few fans will admit it, the prospect of violence is an attraction for many.

There are rituals in sports that we have come to know and love: The second-guessing--the thing about sports fans is, they think they know more than the manager or coach, and they are sure they know more than sportswriters--the screams to kill the umpire, the booing, the anticipation of an exciting confrontation.

Who is to say that one kind of skill or art is more important than another? Some humans are stirred more by the sound of a bat hitting a ball, the sight of a golf ball soaring over a lake toward a well-trapped green, or the graceful skill of giant, agile men on a basketball court or football field, than by the sound of a symphony by Beethoven or a concerto by Mozart, the grace of ballerinas or the beauty of a painting by Rembrandt or Monet.

Women, mostly single and not necessarily young, flock to car races such as the Long Beach Grand Prix. They are attracted, apparently, by the jet-set atmosphere, the exotic cars and the drivers, who are sometimes foreign and mostly rich.

A Whittier housewife, asked if she thought sports were sensual, replied: “Maybe they would be if I were younger. I enjoy looking at a healthy body.”

Said another female fan, a young Beverly Hills executive: “All women enjoy watching a good male physique. Some uniforms show it off better than others, and some sports are more sensual than others.”

Eddie Mathews, a baseball Hall of Famer, was a favorite of Elizabeth Chapman of West Covina, she said, “because he had a handsome build.”

Chapman got hooked on sports when she competed in them as a girl. Today, she is more of a fan than her husband, she said. She enjoys football, baseball--”I am a baseball fan, not a Dodger or Angel fan.”--basketball for “relaxation, excitement and sociability.”

Suzanne Hovdey of North Hollywood is hooked on competition. “Running and exercise don’t thrill me,” she said. “I like suspense. I like watching stars, people who are really good at what they do.”

Perhaps expressing the thoughts of many fans, Hovdey said she is turned off by boring games. “Even in a sport I love,” she said. “A sport is also boring if I don’t understand it. That’s my problem with soccer and hockey.”

Added Hovdey: “Sports are a common denominator that put everyone on the same level, from the chairman of the board to a secretary.” They are also important to her, she said, and rank with movies and reading as her favorite interests.

“I wouldn’t have married someone who wasn’t a sports fan,” she said. “We need a common interest or life would be boring.”

Luckily her husband, Jay, is a sports fan, too, an award-winning writer on horse racing, in fact. They share a common interest in their love of the sport.

The enthusiasm of some fans seemingly has no limits. Robert A. Huttenback, chancellor at UC Santa Barbara, once said:

“I am an unreconstructed jock who has involved himself in almost every known sport with enthusiasm, if little skill. I will travel many miles to see a good football game, or even a bad one, and my wife claims that I will watch even the most bizarre athletic event on television to the exclusion of more culturally laudable programs.”

Sal Bando, a former major league infielder said: “I’ll watch just about any sport. I scream and yell at the TV set.”

He listens to Milwaukee Buck basketball games on radio and said, “When you listen to basketball on radio you’ve got to be a real fan.”

Sports to George Alexander of Los Angeles offer “some sort of adolescence release. I get emotional.” A “long-suffering New York Giants’ fan--that’s what they call us”--he feels better at the office on Monday if the team wins.

“I am living out a fantasy,” he said. He reads the small print in The Times every day to keep track of the Giants’ draft choices and transactions.

Some people’s lives are profoundly affected by their emotional attachments to teams and games. There is such an intense concern and involvement on the part of some that their health suffers. Two months after a 54-year-old Boston Celtic fan had suffered a heart attack, he watched a game on television while being monitored by Dr. Thomas B. Graboys, a heart specialist.

The anticipation of the game was enough to touch off irregular heartbeats an hour before the tip-off, Dr. Graboys wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. By the end of the first half, the patient’s heart rate was 120 and at one point soared to 150. The Celtics won, but it took almost two hours for the man’s heart rate to return to a safe level.

“There was a direct correlation between his sense of dread that the Celtics would lose and the emergence of irregular heartbeats,” Dr. Graboys reported.

Dr. Charles Harrison, team physician for the Atlanta Falcons, said: “It is certainly plausible that the strain on the heart caused by a close game could lead to cardiac death.”

After observing the behavior of fans who are so unreasonably enthusiastic and overly zealous that they scream at officials and talk about “we” and “us” when they mean the team, one is not surprised that doctors have warned people who have had recent heart attacks not to watch or listen to a broadcast of a game involving their favorite teams.

A Harvard professor told the New York Times that a 50-yard touchdown run and a brilliant paper please him equally, “but only the touchdown makes me smash my hat.”

Too many fans are attracted by violence in the games they watch, psychologist Olgivie believes. “They are attracted by the damage and destruction in pro football, not the skill and artistry,” he said. “Auto racing fans hope for casualties. Such sports as hockey, pro football and racing wouldn’t survive without violence.”

Competition that gets out of hand sometimes begets an uglier kind of violence that is often initiated by drunken fans. Maybe U.S. fans aren’t as bad as a Leeds soccer rooter who was described by a London sportswriter as “a foul-mouthed drunken, intolerable oaf, bereft of reason, poisoned by prejudice, grotesque with self-invested arrogance, bent on the destruction of property,” but a few oafs are found, too, at Dodger Stadium, the Forum, Anaheim Stadium, the Coliseum and other arenas across the land.

As many as 63 fans have been arrested at one game in the New England Patriots’ stadium in Foxboro, Mass.

In Philadelphia, mounted police and dogs ringed the Phillies’ stadium at the 1980 World Series. In fact, when the Phillies won the series, Manager Dallas Green came out for a bow before screaming fans and was hit in the head by a roll of toilet paper.

When Bob Watson played first base for the Houston Astros, he once ran into the fence in Cincinnati and fell, barely conscious. While he lay on the ground, some Red fans poured beer on him.

Some fans have a sense of humor. When SMU’s football team was losing more than it was winning, some rooters put up signs that read “Highway 66, SMU 0” and “Temperature 88, SMU 0.”

Pitcher Jim Bouton of the Yankees once said of Boston Red Sox fans: “There’s nothing like being heckled in a foreign tongue.”

Dr. H.L. Newbold, a New York physician, reported that about 60% of the fans attending an event have altered moods that can cause them to start fights, abuse officials and litter stadiums. When there is a dispute on the field, Professor John Cheffers of Boston University found in a 1970s study of fan violence, fans fight fans 65% of the time in soccer, 49% in football and 34% in baseball.

The enormous salaries athletes make today have reportedly increased the fans’ abusive behavior. A person paid such a sum is no longer identified as a fellow worker prone to err, the reasoning goes.

Many of the fans who scream “Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!” or “USA! USA! USA!” are no longer casual observers. They are involved, and that can be dangerous.

Dr. Irving Goldaber, a Miami sociologist and a consultant to the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, long ago warned: “America is a candidate for a new kind of violence--the fans’ desire to achieve power vicariously. You justify winning at any price. You build in violence to justify winning, violence having been accepted by society. Then you act it out.”

In truth, many fans defend cheating and boorish behavior in the name of winning. The exaggerated importance of winning seems to have infected Americans--from Little League to the big leagues. To most fans today, losing is the great American sin.

Such intensity of feelings about sports embarrass some people, who think our priorities are out of whack. There is nothing wrong with playing for fun and finishing second, Evangelist Graham said. “Or finishing last, as I often did when I played sports.”

But there are positive benefits to be had from watching sports events, even on television. Charles Shaughnessy, a furniture company executive from Morristown, Tenn., will watch anything, he said, “even the roller derby. It’s therapy, a good way to relax.”

His son, Steve, a sales manager from Clearwater, Fla., who is on the road from Monday through Friday, is also an avid television fan. It beats spending your evenings in a bar, he said.

“I can’t imagine our society without sports,” said Jack Smith, who often writes about them in his column in The Times’ View section. “I like sports because I like the idea of people playing games. Philosophers are always asking what is the purpose of life. I believe it is to enjoy it. If our games were taken away, the consequences would be depressing. It’s a wonderful way to spend life, even as a spectator. I feel very strongly that play is important to humans.”

Too many people are contemptuous of games, saying that they are for little boys, Smith said. “A stockbroker in his Mercedes is playing another type of game. He is of no more value than Steve Garvey or Fernando Valenzuela.”

Once, after returning from a vacation and finding that the Dodgers had made up nine games on Atlanta, Smith wrote: “Reading the news made me realize how important games are to our morale.”

Smith also sees sports as a great common denominator. “You can argue with a Supreme Court justice over who should be playing first base or quarterback,” he said. “It goes either way up or down the social and intellectual ladder.”

And, in his view, there is nothing wrong with being a spectator. “There is contempt for spectators,” he said. “People ask, ‘Why don’t you play?’ There’s nothing wrong with being a spectator. Feeling guilty about being one is nonsense. Aren’t people who go to the ballet or the symphony spectators? Why aren’t they playing?”

Martin Bernheimer, The Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic and a former Boston Red Sox fan, rediscovered baseball when his children coaxed him to Dodger Stadium to see Fernando Valenzuela pitch a few years ago.

“I got hooked,” he said. “I forgot how terrific it is to let go of everything and allow yourself to be wafted by mass hysteria. I get pleasure out of the game because nobody sings and dances. It’s very exciting, very hypnotic.”

In his two favorite sports, baseball and horse racing, he sees art and drama, he said. “It’s real virtuoso stuff. What I see there also is a ballet and symphony.” He roots but not wildly, he said. “It’s hard to get up and cheer with a beer in your hand.”