PARTISAN REVIEW
331
as physically,
I
can't pretend that my character or patriotic sense now
benefits much from playing or watching.
I
hate to lose, personally or
vicariously; some of my meanest and socially least useful emotions
are aroused by games, to say nothing of the time lost for useful work
or decent sociability. As citizen, parent and workman,
I
would be better
off not liking sport at all. But while my life is a betrayal of what
Agnew and myoId P.E. teachers hoped for from me, it doesn't live
up to Meggysey's terms either- being a football fan doesn't really seem
to have made me a napalm fan, a racism fan, a law-and-order fan.
Meggysey's conversion to the counterculture began, he explains,
when he seriously injured an opponent, but it's a longer step between
physical fierceness and "racism and fraud" than he allows. Blocks and
tackles as such aren't racist or fraudulent, and the gentler sports are
no cleaner than football in these respects. Like other sports, football
is racist because the players, coaches and owners have the prejudices
of their class and background; it is fraudulent, in the sense Meggysey
intends, because the men who run it for profit are at best no more
altruistic and socially responsive than most businessmen; it is violent
and subjectively brutal because it is football.
Out of Their League
records an admirable growth of political
awareness and conscience in an unexpected place, but its metaphors
are too easy. The trouble with Nixon isn't that he watches football
but that he makes such an obvious and cheap political gesture of it,
companionably winking to the Silent Majority while the Peace Freaks
parade outside.
(If
only one could believe that he does like football,
that he can enjoy it or anything else innocently and directly, without
the nervous eyes searching about for the camera as the No. 3 Smile
clicks into position!
If
lawn bowling or ballet were as popular as foot–
ball, he'd watch.) As it is, the resemblances of football to war, which
polo, arm-wrestling and shuffleboard in their own ways have too, lure
Meggysey into a neat and conclusive connection-making that's the
mark of soft thinking. To see politics everywhere is one thing, probably
a salutary thing on the whole, but to see it there at the expense of the
particular and obvious qualities of the object observed - to treat ex–
perience merely as an allegory of one's political hopes or fears - is
dangerous, impoverishing nonsense, all the more so for not being con–
fined to ex-linebackers.
If
Dave Meggysey is a political moralist, a True Believer with
the enthusiastic flush of revelation still upon him, Jim Bouton is some–
thing else, something more recognizably in the American Grain of
sport and its myths. To be sure,
Ball
Four
operates as antimyth, with
