334
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
with something better, "art." To be worth the time of intelligent people
sport doesn't need that kind of validation - as a fan, I can only sneer
at someone who wants to turn a great football or basketball game into
listening to Mozart or looking at Cezannes. Besides its obvious pre–
ciousness and confusion of realms, that impulse would spoil another
powerful strain of fantasy in American sports-watching, one's feeling
that it's a "classless" diversion whose appeal isn't restricted by how one
has defined oneself in the terms of taste, background, occupation
or intelligence. (This may
be
peculiarly American, or at least colonial.
In England and some Continental countries an attachment to a par–
ticular sport - cricket or tennis vs. soccer or cycling, Rugby vs. Rugby
League, etc. - usually reflects class identity or pretensions thereto. But
this is surely a historical phenomenon, not evidence that the formal or
stylistic nature of a given sport has social significance - compare the
radically different class appeal and atmosphere of "structurally" similar
games like baseball and cricket.) A baseball game isn't "classical,"
"popular," "folk" or "rock," it's just baseball, good or bad; though to
think too much about it is to turn into Nixon, I do somehow suppose
that by going to Madison Square Garden or turning on the TV I
enlarge my "social" identity as I can't with most other kinds of art.
But the difficulty is in the word "art," with its lingering elitist
resonances, not in any absurdity about attaching to sport some of the
interest and value we attach to literature, music, painting or drama.
Those who are already comfortable with an idea of art that takes in
good journalism, pop music, film, commercial design, advertising and
S0
forth, should have no trouble here. (Here I'm drawing on Richard
Poirier's instructive view of "popular" art as advanced in "Learning from
the Beatles" and elsewhere in his book
The Performing Self.)
Serious
- as opposed to "ignorant," not to "pleasurable and unpretentious"–
observation of sport is an exercise of imagination, a participation in a
formal "life" outside the limiting predispositions of class and taste.
And by allowing a fantasy content to it I don't suggest that its effects
are trivial or unsubstantial. In watching sport our powers of attention
and affection are enlarged and made more generous by being attached
to actions that are admirably beyond our own performing abilities.
No doubt the self as sports fan is narrower and more static than
the selves other arts invite us to experience.
If
sport doesn't turn us
all into bullies, sadists and warmongers, neither does it often lead to
the very finest possibilities of feeling and judgment. (In fact it can lead
to, or at least objectify, obsession and madness, as in Robert Coover's
The Universal Baseball Association
and Frederick Exley's
A Fan's Notes.)
