There is something to be said for the clarity that comes with altitude and irritation. Thirty thousand feet above the American heartland, nursing an overpriced bourbon and the kind of existential crankiness that only delayed flights can provide, I find myself pondering the state of our athletic entertainments. A woman at the hotel bar last evening—with the directness that only strangers in airport lounges possess—called me a profane name that rhymes with “whole.” I responded with such enthusiasm that the entire establishment broke into spontaneous celebration. She departed at dawn, absconding with both my morning coffee and my recreational pharmaceuticals, leaving me in precisely the mood to dissect what passes for sport in our modern age.
Consider basketball, that peculiar American invention that has somehow evolved into a theater of orchestrated surrender. Watching the Boston Celtics capitulate the other evening was like witnessing a Shakespearean tragedy performed by community college drama students—all the gravitas of great literature reduced to melodramatic posturing. The NBA has become our contemporary pop music: manufactured drama, synthetic passion, and conflicts as choreographed as a Broadway musical. Where once we had gladiators, we now have performers who wouldn’t recognize genuine intensity if it arrived wearing a name tag.
I propose revolution. Let us expand those hoops to carnival proportions—great gaping maws that would swallow basketballs like hungry hippos consuming marshmallows. Institute a merciful scoring limit: first to ten wins, and the victors receive not merely trophies, but stuffed representations of that blue Disney alien wearing Arsenal jerseys, because in our globalized world, even our rewards must be multicultural nonsense. And please, for the love of all that is athletic, allow checking. Without physical consequence, basketball becomes merely tall people playing keep-away, which is about as riveting as watching paint dry in a humidity-controlled environment.
Baseball—ah, baseball—persists as our national pastime through the sheer narrative power of its chroniclers. The sport itself moves with the urgency of continental drift, but its storytellers weave tales that transform three hours of standing around into epic poetry. That these same bards occasionally reveal themselves to be harboring attitudes that would make a 1950s country club blush is merely the price we pay for folklore. Still, one must admire a game that has conquered Latin America more thoroughly than any conquistador ever dreamed.
Football, now there lies our true colosseum. It requires genuine artistry to score in a sport where failure is measured in inches and success is celebrated for precisely thirteen minutes over three and a half hours. I realize this while consuming another brewery’s attempt at craftsmanship—a beverage that costs more than my first car payment and tastes like it was filtered through gym socks—while my digestive system rebels against the nachos and spinach dip that constitute modern stadium cuisine.
The collegiate game presents us with perhaps the most honest dishonesty in American culture. We gather each Saturday to watch unpaid laborers perform for the benefit of institutions that exist primarily because brilliant minds once gathered there to advance human knowledge. Yet somehow, the donors who could fund cancer research instead choose to finance better locker rooms. These young athletes, destined for careers selling insurance in strip malls, sacrifice their Saturday afternoons so that alumni can relive their glory days vicariously. It’s performance art, really—a commentary on American priorities that would make Banksy weep.
I recently encountered a Notre Dame graduate—himself an atheist with an inexplicable fondness for precious metals and all things Scottish—who embodied this contradiction perfectly. His alma mater fields a mascot who looks like he should be guarding a bridge and demanding riddles, representing a city whose former mayor, I’m told, never owned so much as a toy train set. Such is the beautiful absurdity of college athletics.
But hockey—ah, hockey!—there lies sport in its purest, most economically elitist form. To produce a professional hockey player requires the kind of generational wealth typically associated with horse breeding or yacht collecting. Ice time costs more than most people’s mortgages, and have you priced a Zamboni lately? These magnificent ice-grooming machines cost more than most suburban homes, which explains why hockey remains the exclusive province of the financially fortunate.
Yet hockey’s playoffs achieve something approaching perfection: seven periods of genuine warfare where blood flows as freely as wine at a Roman feast, where players expire from exhaustion like marathon runners in the Athens heat. It’s the closest thing to actual combat that civilized society permits, and infinitely more honest than the theatrical productions that pass for competition in other arenas.
As I write this, anticipating the Lakers and Nuggets engaging in their elaborate ballet of manufactured drama, I’m already feeling the soporific effects of predictable entertainment. Soon, hundreds of commenters will question my parentage and intellectual capacity, which I shall accept as validation that truth remains uncomfortable.
In the meantime, I’ll be watching the Panthers, because sometimes the only honest response to dishonest entertainment is arbitrary loyalty to teams named after large cats.
