Through the Moral Looking Glass : Just what does sports say about society?

By the time the Winter Olympics began last week, many Americans said they were fed up--fed up to here!--with news about Tonya Harding and lawsuits and Tonya’s ex- husband and his band of goons. People said the media’s attention on Tonya was unfair to the “real athletes” gathered in Norway. Let the games begin.

On TV and the sports pages, there were faces of kids who were “good sports”--good losers and humble winners, with straight teeth and nice smiles. But who could watch the Olympics these days without thinking of Harding?

Whether or not she wins a medal, whether we will know in a year what has become of her, Harding has denied Americans a certain innocence about the way we regard athletes and athletics. Americans may not believe in very much any more, but Americans want to believe in sports. Who cares if the President is a Lothario or if the parish priest is a pederast? What troubles Americans is the guilt of Pete Rose.

It’s only a game, parents tell kids. But what a game! Mama goes berserk when the Little League umpire makes a bad call; Papa gives up his job to train his daughter to be a great tennis star.

And don’t we also believe that the game “builds character”? A century ago, the Duke of Wellington modestly proposed that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” He meant, I think, that boys become men playing rugby. Boys (upper-class British school boys, that is) become leaders, gain assurance, are schooled to excellence and gentlemanly rules of the game, by tossing around a ball in the mud.

The notion of “pure athletics” comes from the upper class. It is a notion that relies on leisure. The best footballer at Eton, after all, does not sign a contract after graduation to play for Manchester United before cheering skinheads on Saturday afternoons. The best footballer at Eton plays instead, we like to say, for the pure joy of playing.

Many middle-class Americans probably share this elitist romance about sports, the belief that money ruins sports. We liked baseball players more when they got little money and played before wooden bleachers where there were no “luxury boxes” or prowling sports agents. Isn’t that why we like a sport like the luge--because it is so removed from the grasp of agents and Nike endorsements?

Ask middle-class Americans (in private) and what many will tell you is sports are being ruined by too many poor kids, too many Tonyas who grew up in trailer courts, too many little black kids, too many kids with bad teeth who don’t know the rules.

Yet, there is something about the level playing field that moves us. We are, after all, people who believe in fair play. Where better to see it enacted than on a field under the reassuring scrutiny of instant replay? We are people who believe in equal opportunity. Individual talent, not Etonian heritage, rules on American Sunday afternoons.

One of the greatest achievements of our national life was the racial integration of baseball. Baseball may have been only a game, but Americans realized the exclusion of blacks was too damning an indictment of our real lives and a distortion of our ideals.

In recent years, feminists have rightly demanded their share of school athletic facilities. Feminists understand, too, as Americans must, the glamour that attaches to the athlete. The athlete is strong; the athlete is individual; the athlete is the best of America. Some feminists I know have gone positively giddy over the Evian ads showing sweaty lady joggers, and the running-shoe pronouncements--Your Time Has Come!

One could not help but hear the silence from middle-class feminists these last few weeks during the Harding controversy. Didn’t they have anything to say about the plucky girl who scraped and clawed to make it onto the ice? Or was the Evian ad only about nice girls with good teeth?

In the 19th Century, while the boys at Eton were playing rugby, slum kids who spoke a London Cockney were becoming prizefighters. What a violation of the ideal of pure sport, prizefighting. Not what the Duke of Wellington had in mind.

Tonya’s complaint is that the figure-skating Establishment is rigged--an upper-middle-class conspiracy of nice ladies and silver-haired gentleman. Poor kids will tell you--if you bother to ask--that sports are not pure, but are as real as the lady in the unemployment office or the cop. Kids will tell you that, beneath all the platitudes, “the game” in America is about winning. Al Davis expects you to win. Disney expects you to win. Adidas expects you to win.

For the last few weeks, the Campbell Soup Co. has been running an ad with Nancy Kerrigan that is meant to capitalize on her image as Snow White. There she is on TV with her dazzling smile, skating nonchalantly into a cluster of male hockey players. She ends up tossing a few guys off their feet.

The values of our society become the values of sports--not the other way around. If in real life we admire the winner, if in real life we admire the woman who pushes her way through a group of men, then in sports we will not remember the good loser.

In the age of Tonya, athletes take steroids. Athletes know how to play dirty to win. In the age of Tonya, America loves its athletes to be big and mean. Mothers trusted their sons to Woody Hayes. Or how about the basketball coach from Temple University who lunged at the opposing team’s coach last week, screaming, “I’ll kill you”?

Sissies never got picked in gym class. Or else we got picked at the end, and nobody paid us much mind when we got behind the gym and had a smoke. Sissies laughed at the coach, with his bark and bluster. Sissies rolled their eyes when the coach made one of his inspirational speeches. Sissies had thin legs and arms, but we always knew it was stupid--a neo-Platonic fallacy--to expect the playing field to be our moral teacher.

I am not saying athletics are morally useless. Children can learn dedication to a goal, a notion of excellence, discipline, camaraderie on the playing field. But sports do not make the adult. Parents, teachers, neighbors, coaches and entire communities’ values--shape the child, teach the child how to use athletic skills.

If our athletes are turning out to be moral cripples, it is because the real world beyond the playing field is morally crippled. On the other hand, there are athletes like Duncan Kennedy. Kennedy became famous for defending a black team mate against some German neo-Nazies a few months ago. If we regard him as a moral hero now, it is not because of his skill in the luge, but because of the kind of man he is off the playing field.

The Olympics are a neo-pagan celebration. The eternal flame. Young, strong bodies. The “best” of their generation, pursued by agents and TV correspondents with orange hair. The neo-Platonic myth is that the strong body is evidence of moral heroism.

But if we have nothing else to learn from Harding, then let it be this--she has reminded us that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being a brilliant athlete. And maybe, just maybe, the moral failures of our athletes should embarrass all of us watching at home.*