PARTISAN REVIEW
333
An interest in sport undoubtedly involves an element of wish–
fulfillment - as fans we're surely trying to sustain connection with
childhood, after most other connections have worn pretty thin. But
the fantasy enacted has its own terms, various and sometimes fairly
complicated ones. Meggysey's equation of Nixon as football watcher
with Nixon as Cold War Commissar is less interesting and plausible
than (for example) William Phillips's idea that for intellectuals sport,
especially football, offers a "respectable" form of the primitive aggres–
siveness ("violence, patriotism, manhood") that even thinking men
remain secretly fascinated with.
2
(Phillips's emphasis on how team loyal–
ties reflect the fan's attachments to his city or community seems to me
excessive; John Lindsay may have picked up a few votes when the
Mets won the Series a few weeks before the 1969 election, but even
in New York the serious fan is less innocently chauvinistic than that.
Think by comparison of soccer fans in Italy, Latin America or Glasgow,
for whom winning or losing is sometimes quite literally a matter of
life or death.) Yet Phillips also shows the limitations of seeing sport
as war by going on to talk, not like a natural man appeasing his
blood-lust in Yankee Stadium, but like a would-be coach, for whom
the display of force leads to "professional" assessments of particular
players, plays and strategies. For the serious spectator, who knows what
he's watching, vicarious participation in the physical acts is subordinate
to imagined
direction
of the whole intricate show, a kind of fantasy
that's less embarrassing and more fun for grown-ups.
For the audience, even those who respond strongly to violence and
competition, sport is a form of art. We can't simply project ourselves
into the players - their experience is quite unimaginable verbally or
imagistically - hut we can feel something of what it would be like to
manage and conduct it all, determine the tactics and deploy the
personnel.
If
these are the terms of warfare, it's war refined and
formalized into the mood of campaign maps and military histories;
without actually
doing
anything one feels the intellectual and aesthetic
consequences of effective choices among the means available. At this
level of disinterest (for all its dangers) sport and war are indeed
related, but only through their affinities with other arts, which give
pleasure by allowing us imagined participation in the discovery and
disposition of means that made the work, the performance, be just
as it is.
Such a claim is pompous if it aims at dignifying sport by associating
2. William Phillips, "A Season in the Stands,"
Commentary,
July 1969, pp. 65-69.
