PARTISAN REVIEW
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But in watching it one learns to value a physical life that's also a form
of intelligence, all the more impressive - at least to the clerkly and
sedentary - for operating prcverbally, preconceptually, in the trained
coincidence of strength, neural quickness, instinct, memory and will.
Easy metaphors for what athletes do are just silly. Consider what
might, and shouldn't, be made of this remark from
Instant Replay
by
Jerry Kramer, the great offensive guard of the Packers:
I must get some enjoyment out of the game, though I can't say
what it is. It isn't just the body contact.... Body contact gives
me only cuts and contusions, bruises and abrasions. I suppose I
enjoy doing something well. I enjoy springing a back loose, making
a good trap block, a good solid trap block, cutting down my man
the way I'm supposed to.
In that last phrase Meggysey, and Agnew too, may hear the voice of
Lt. Calley -like the soldier, the athlete enacts our subservience to social
and political systems, our substitution, for good or
ill,
of "authority" for
our own humanity. But even Jim Bouton, in his struggling persistence
even when the rewards were dwindling down, knew that there was some–
thing in sport for which teaching and social work, or, as it turned out,
TV sports reporting, could happily be postponed a little longer, some–
thing more than obeying "the system" which he himself never stopped
thumbing his nose at. In "the way I'm supposed to" I hear not just
Jerry Kramer's fear of Vince Lombardi, though Lombardi was indeed
an archetypal establishmentarian tyrant, but also his understanding
that his own performance, to be worth the effort expended, had to
be
intelligible to himself and others, and that such intelligibility requires
an idea of terribly difficult perfection that can't be named in words
but is recognizable, when achieved, by players and knowing spectators
alike.
American athletes do pay for their fame and fortune by being
subjected to economic and personal dependency of a very humiliating
kind. Few other grown men are told when to go to bed or given as
little say in how to do their work; it's like being in the army or in
prison, though the pay and hours are better and no one is there against
his will. But the subjective plight of the athlete is considerably less
painful, to him or to me, than that of migrant farm workers or the
urban poor; even the black athlete, of whom more is demanded (often
for less money), makes out better in sport than he would in other
American occupations, and he's seldom
more
militant, to say the least,
than his brothers outside. To make sport directly represent American
