The unnatural additives produce record-breaking profit margins for teams in a league with major media, but what shows up on the field is the weight of money as opposed to the lightness of spirit that is "superfluous, and therefore absolutely necessary." During the three-hour broadcast of an NFL football game, the ball is in play for maybe eleven minutes. The rest of the program is advertising, replays and video segments, shots of the players standing around in a huddle or gathering at the line of scrimmage, shots of coaches defending the sidelines, of celebrities decorating the mezzanine, of broadcasters in the booth generating the honeyed flows of artisanal nostalgia. NBC deploys seven production trucks, hires as many as 100 or 200 stagehands to prepare the graphic equivalent of hypodermic needles to resuscitate the dead airtime. How else is heaven made if not with artificial sweeteners?
The NFL makes the most flagrant use of the substitutions that send in the buzz to bat for the bee, but the same modus operandi controls the televised presentation of every other sport competing for market share. I don't know how or why it could be otherwise. Tickets to the game now come at a price that most people can't afford. The fans aren't in the park with the afternoon sun; they're at home with the dog, the kids, their boredom, and the remote, and what the camera gets paid to deliver is spectacle.
The American Republic on a Losing Streak
The steadily rising cost of the production values (Alex Rodriguez paid $33 million for the season, $2.8 million for a 30-second commercial in attendance at the Super Bowl) speaks to the steadily mounting fear of imminent defeat -- if not for the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys, then for the home-team American promise of a democratic republic, which, for the last 40 years, has been on a losing streak. The freedoms of movement and thought don't fit the game plan of a national-security state. What is wanted is a statue of liberty, not the fooling around with it. To keep up appearances, the sports industry fields increasingly precious objects, heraldic and finely carved, that stand and serve as totem poles at the increasingly elaborate and expensive rituals designed to demonstrate the truth of a political hypothesis, prove that Uncle Sam hasn't gone weak in the knees, that the flag is still there.
To the degree that sports and games become a product of Homo economicus as distinct from the pleasure of Homo ludens, they lose the coherence of a world set apart from nature. Not irretrievably lost, as was evident to Eric Nesterenko during his career with the Chicago Blackhawks, but "harder," for the player if not for the fan, to rejoice in.
Roger Federer is a wonder to behold no matter how often the game is interrupted with a word from the sponsor. The same can be said of every other sport in which a brilliant performance brings joy to Mudville -- the dancing on ice at last winter's Olympics, the fooling around with a soccer ball at this summer's World Cup -- but the glory of it isn't the winning or losing, the bombastic Rooseveltian beating of the others; it is Einstein's equation made flesh, the unity of energy and mass seen in a movement of light.
Huizinga expresses something of the same thought. Play as the making of civilization, which becomes possible only when "an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos," not serious and yet entirely serious, brimming with possibility and tending to become beautiful. The proposition is backed up by Norman Maclean telling the story of his encounter in 1928 with Albert Michelson in the billiard room in the University of Chicago's Quadrangle Club.
The physicist who first took the measurement of Betelgeuse (a star 640 light years from the earth, 1,000 times the diameter of the sun), Michelson at age 75 was the best billiard player that Maclean had ever seen. One day when Michelson was returning his cue to the rack, Maclean told him so. Michelson acknowledged the beauty of the game to which Mozart was addicted, but then, rolling down his sleeves, putting on his coat, and walking toward the door, he proposed amendments, each of them after a moment of further reflection.
Yes, billiards was a good game, but not as good a game as painting, which in turn was not as good a game as music which, when one had a chance to think about it, was not as good a game as physics. Einstein derived his theory of special relativity from Michelson's observations, and I see no reason to dispute their setting the boundaries and laying out the chalk lines on the field of dreams.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor ofLapham's Quarterly. Formerly editor ofHarper's Magazine , he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America ,Theater of War ,Gag Rule , and, most recently,Pretensions to Empire.The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken;Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay introduces "Sports & Games," the Summer 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly .
Copyright 2010 Lewis Lapham
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