Last Thursday, I had a difficult decision to make: stay home and watch the Pens take on the arch-rival Capitals (long-time Pens fans will tell you that the Flyers are the Pens' real archrivals, but I think enough hate has built up in the Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin era between the two teams to call this rivalry "arch"), or go out to see Dave Zirin screen and then talk about his documentary, Not Just a Game: Power Politics, and American Sports. This was a genuine dilemma for me: do I go hear a man talk about the benefits and drawbacks of sports--a topic that, as this blog attests, I've been thinking a lot about lately--or do I watch the sport itself, and analysis be damned? I'll admit too that part of my reluctance came from the fact that Zirin doesn't tend to say much about hockey. But my husband, who knows how to provide perspective in these situations, reminded me that the Pens will play the Caps at least twice more this season, whereas Zirin doesn't give talks here that often. So out the door we went.
Zirin's basic point in the documentary is that, despite people's general hostility to the notion of "politicizing" sports, sports are already deeply political in this country. In particular, professional sports are used as a platform for selling the U.S. military. Anyone who has ever watched a football (or, though Zirin did not mention this, hockey) game will have seen some kind of military presence, whether it's a "military appreciation night," prominent sponsorship, or Air Force jets doing a fly-over before the game begins. The most damning evidence of how the military politicizes sports in the documentary was the case of Pat Tillman, the NFL athlete who, after 9/11, enlisted and was later killed in Afghanistan. Zirin's film shows how the military, in concert with the NFL, used Tillman's status as a professional athlete to mythologize his "hero" status, to the point where Tillman's real heroism--his outspoken opposition to the war he had come to believe was illegal and immoral--was covered up with a bogus story about his death (Tillman was killed by "friendly fire," but the story told about his death initially was very different). Going back at least to Jackie Robinson, our goverment has had a long history of using athletes to promote a particular political agenda. But the ability to use sport politically cuts both ways; if the government and leagues can do it, so can the athletes themselves. The rest of the film went on to look at how athletes have (and have not) used sports as a platform for various forms of political action, ranging from John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their fists during the American anthem in the 1968 Olympics, to Billie Jean King and the "Battle of the Sexes," to Scott Fujita's advocacy of gay rights.The point is that sports have political significance whether we like it or not; the only question is what political position they are serving.
Back in my first post, I mentioned that part of the guilt of watching hockey for me grows out of the way that hockey, like all professional sports, is used to promote military agendas. What I enjoyed about the documentary was that it demonstrated how these sports can also have a positive political impact--that is, how professional sports have become a platform for people to stand up for the rights of the oppressed. But the question that remained in the air, and that was brought up more than once in the Q&A that followed the screening, was whether the potential benefit of professional sports outweighs the costs. Aren't professional sports better at promoting militaristic ideologies--which seem to go hand in hand with the sacrifice-the-body, take-one-for-the-team, for-the-greater-glory mentality that is part of allure of team sports--than they are at speaking out for minorities and against war? Can't we get the community-building benefits of sports fanship out of watching our local high school team play, while losing the militaristic nationalism and the outrageous fiscal burdens? Do we really need sports--or at least professional sports--at all?
Zirin's answer to this line of questioning was to reference the claim that sports are the new "opiate of the masses" and to say, "Who doesn't need a little opiate from time to time?" His point is that watching professional sports makes people happy, and, in a world that's already pretty tough for the average Joe, we shouldn't deny ourselves that happiness. I thought this was a weak answer--not just because it seemed contradictory (how can you work so hard to pull back the curtain on sports ideology and then tell us to enjoy its opiate-effect?), but because it seemed to speak so poorly to Zirin's obvious passion for sports. This reminded me of a Radio Lab episode, "Games," my husband had played for me. In the first segment, the hosts spoke with Stephen Dubner about his childhood love of sports. Late in the interview, he makes the claim that sports have "almost immeasurable value." The hosts press him on this, asking for clarification, and Dubner's answer is that sports are a "proxy for all our emotions and desires and hopes" and give us "war where nobody dies." My husband and I debated what this really meant for a while, but ultimately I think Dubner's answer is somewhere between Zirin's answer and the claim that sports are a form of sublimation: in sports we have an outlet for both our hopes and our aggression that comes without consequences. Certainly, we might say that such sublimation is useful--better to get out our animal aggression yelling at the refs or playing a game than by hitting random passers-by in the face. But it takes, I think, a fairly poor, Johnsonian estimation of human nature to call sublimation of this sort "immeasurably valuable." Dubner, like Zirin, speaks lovingly of sports. I do not believe that they are for him merely a receptacle for hopes and dreams, somewhere our emotions can be placed to keep them out of trouble, just as I don't believe that Zirin watches sports because they drug him into contented complacency.
I don't mean this as a critique of either Zirin or Dubner. Both are, I think, trying to deal with the question of the value of sports in the terms that remain in our culture the dominant determiner of value: use. What political purposes does sport serve, or can it serve? Of what emotional use is fanship? These aren't bad questions--not by a long shot--but what they'll always miss is that sports, like art, also contain an element within them that is not "useful," that is not about "use" at all. Take, for instance, the following:
Scoring a goal is "useful" for your team; it makes you more likely to win the game. But, if you're just talking about use, it doesn't matter how you score--it can bounce off your butt or an opponent's face, and it's still useful as a goal. The reason these are the top goals of 2010-11 is because they're more than useful: they're beautiful. When someone scores like this, it really doesn't matter what team you follow--even if you're a fan of the opposing side, you get excited by goals like these, because they're just so damned amazing. If one of your own players scores a goal like this, for a moment it doesn't matter if your team is still down by 3 goals with 5 minutes left in the final period: what you've just seen isn't about winning or losing the game. In this sense, moments like this in sport perhaps transcend all that makes it political, or at least those aspects that make it badly political: us versus them, winning versus losing become meaningless distinctions in these moments, and are replaced by a new community comprised of all people who love the game. But precisely because such moments go beyond use, they are hard to explain as "valuable." These are the moments that make us love the game, that we hope to see every time we watch; what value they have consists in the extent to which we are drawn to them in the absence of any specific purpose.
Artists and philosophers have been trying to account for what makes art compelling at least since Aristotle. What the millenia of discussion and disagreement have demonstrated is that it is not an easy matter to pin down. I think something similar compels us to watch sports, at least in part, and so this aspect of the game--the aspect that makes people not just analysts but fans, that makes us love what we analyze--is similarly difficult to do. None of this is to deny Zirin's thesis that sports are political--they clearly are, just as much art is political. But what is most compelling about it, the reason we watch, is not the political purpose its serves. Politics are useful, about promoting a particular vision of social order, about trying to make things happen for specific purposes: this is the value of politics. Sports are not only useful, and therein lies their value.
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