Athletic Life: Real, Imagined

In the world of professional sports, everyone’s a winner but Joe the fan in the bleachers. Isn’t that the lesson we were supposed to take from the agreement by National Basketball Assn. players and owners to end their 191-day lockout?

The deeper truth is that everybody--the fans, the millionaire players and even richer owners--belongs to a culture too individuated to allow for the traditional uses of sport.

In ancient societies, where athletic games had religious significance, the spectator was part of the meaning of the ritual. You couldn’t have a true game without fans in attendance.

Even today, in traditional, highly communal societies, spectators assume deep solidarity with their teams and the game. Thus are there Latin American soccer wars between real countries, and English lower-class thugs who will die, literally, for Manchester United.

In postmodern, secular America, the athletic event reveals our own dreams: not communal so much as individualistic. Our highest marks of success, after all, are not the Homeric lyric or green laurels, but bucks and fame, the babes and the BMW.

We like to pretend, watching an NFL game, that we belong to a city, and that we don’t, in fact, fight the city to get ahead on the freeway. We like to pretend, every four years, that America’s deepest motive is more than individualistic. After all, our countrymen at the Olympics, in their stadium seats, chant mindlessly: U-S-A-U-S-A.

But for good and bad reasons, our real lives are singular now. What really matters to us at the end of the competition is: What cute little gymnast or Super Bowl quarterback or home-run hitter will end up the sole winner, on the Wheaties box?

Well, Michael Jordan is on the Wheaties box because he is better at basketball than anyone else. So we Americans eat at Jordan’s restaurants to share in his grace. We wear shoes and jackets and shirts emblazoned with his name.

This year, according to Gallup, Americans placed Jordan near the very top of those men we most admire in the world, along with President Bill Clinton and the pope and Billy Graham.

It’s because we don’t want to face something about our own ambitions and sad dreams that we bemoan the disloyalty of the college fullback or point guard for “abandoning the team” and signing early with some franchise somewhere and making a deal with Nike.

Every time the team strikes, we sound like kids, yearning for Christmas lost. We complain about the sports lawyers and agents, what “they have done to the game.” Each time some owner moves a team or holds a city ransom to stay, every time some star player abandons the hometown crowd, there sounds the wail.

The only poignant remark I heard last week, after the NBA announced its plans to resume play, was from a kid who plays basketball at 2 in the morning. He’s very much a kid of the new American city: alone at 12 years of age (mama’s on crack, daddy’s in jail). This kid with a giant’s gait said, without any irony apparent, that he regards Jordan as a “role model.”

Otherwise, in TV interviews with Joe the guy on the street, you could hear it again, the hurt become a defiance. “I’ll boycott their damn season: Who needs it?”

Very middle-age sportswriters pulled out and dusted off their essays about the day the Dodgers left Brooklyn and how different professional athletes seemed to them, long ago, when they were kids, before their parents moved to Long Island. Of course, L.A. sportswriters have their own version of the tedious Brooklyn elegy. It’s about the day the Rams left Los Angeles and ended up somewhere far away with a different logo on their jerseys.

Nothing about the nostalgia for old sport heroes is wise, because it doesn’t get to the point. We keep expecting athletes to have different, better values than the spectators in the superdome.

But our athletes are us. The NBA story in last week’s paper ended on the business page. Our athletes are businessmen. Our athletes are also our politicians.

Far more interesting last week than the NBA settlement was the news that the ex-pro wrestler, Jesse Ventura, was sworn in as governor of Minnesota. Ventura’s election, according to pollsters, was due to young voters. The man who had exchanged his role as “dirty rassler” for the role of Libertarian sounded appealingly modern to many Minnesotans.

Ventura’s political fame, not coincidentally, comes at a time when pro wrestling has become the biggest thing on cable TV. If pro basketball owes its spectacular ascendancy to television’s intimacy, pro wrestling today belongs to a computer-age cartoon sensibility.

Today’s wrestlers are huge with steroids and full of bombast: They speak in balloons. They seem the invention of some Silicon Valley 20-year-old. For, as with the computer video game, here are warriors battling in frantic fantasy. One warrior gets killed: Nobody gets hurt. The audience cheers and boos. (In postmodern pro wrestling, boos are cheering.)

Welcome to the world of brave new American athletics! A world (only Dennis Rodman dares imagine) where nothing is so important as glitter and where the spectators, teenage boys and grown men, dress up, like Halloween, to look like their favorite villains. And the cheer of the crowd, like a child’s finger on a computer, determines who finally “wins.”

We are, truly, many decades away from the day the Dodgers left Brooklyn. We are also years away from when mom and pop moved to Long Island, to get away from black Brooklyn.

Only now, their grandchildren, white kids from the suburbs, the loneliest and most modern kids in the world, show noninterest in the traditional trinity: baseball, football, basketball. More and more of them are moving toward athletic events on the far edge of sport.

They call them “extreme sports.” The playing field is the sky or the snow or concrete. The game is less a contest between opposing players. Instead, the teenager pits himself against an unseen rival, death.

I know a kid who goes out to the forest, each weekend, and swings silently, alone, from limb to limb. He calls his sport “tree hopping.” For him, there are no spectators. There is no Homeric lyric. There is nothing but solitary risk: the postmodern contest.

But, already, the big boys with orange hair and blue blazers are onto the game. ESPN and ABC Sports are planning to televise nearly 40 hours of the X Games this summer.

Kid, phone your agent!