SPORTS | Striving for excellence
25 March 2008
Favorite Games Showcase American Temperament
Sports seen as central to the nation’s self-image
Baseball, football and basketball, the three most popular American games, are uniquely reflective of the American character -- American dreams, ambitions, achievements and defeats -- and Americans often watch them as morality plays about their own conflicting natures, argues American writer and professor Roger Rosenblatt.
The following is an excerpt from the article “Reflections: Why We Play The Game” that appeared in the eJournal:USA “Sports in America.”
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Reflections: Why We Play the Game (Excerpt)
By Roger Rosenblatt
There probably are countries where the people are as crazy about sports as they are in America, but I doubt that there is any place where the meaning and design of the country is so evident in its games. In many odd ways, America is its sports. The free market is an analog of on-the-field competition, apparently wild and woolly yet contained by rules, dependent on the individual's initiative within a corporate (team) structure, at once open and governed.
There are no ministries of sports, as in other countries; every game is a free enterprise partially aided by government, but basically an independent entity that contributes to the national scene like any big business. The fields of play themselves simulate the wide-open spaces that eventually ran out of wide-open spaces, and so the fences came up. Now every baseball diamond, football field and basketball court is a version of the frontier, with spectators added, and every indoor domed stadium, a high-tech reminder of a time of life and dreams when the sky was the limit.
I focus on the three sports of baseball, football, and basketball because they are indigenous to us, invented in America (whatever vague debt baseball may owe the British cricket), and central to the country's enthusiasms. Golf and tennis have their moments; track and field as well. Boxing has fewer and fewer things to cheer about these days, yet even in its heyday, it was less an American sport than a darkly entertaining exercise in universal brutality. But baseball, football, and basketball are ours - derived in unspoken ways from our ambitions and inclinations, reflective of our achievement and our losses, and our souls.
They are as good and as bad as we are, and we watch them, consciously or not, as morality plays about our conflicting natures, about the best and worst of us. At heart they are our romances, our brief retrievals of national innocence. Yesterday's old score is tomorrow's illusion of rebirth. When a game is over, we are elated or defeated, and we reluctantly re-enter our less heightened lives, yet always driven by hope, waiting for the next game or for next year.
But from the beginning of a game to its end, America can see itself played out by representatives in cleats or shorts or shoulder pads. Not that such fancy thoughts occur during the action. Part of being an American is to live without too much introspection. It is in the undercurrents of the sports that one feels America, which may be why the attraction of sports is both clear-cut (you win or you lose) and mysterious (you win and you lose).
Read Roger Rosenblatt’s reflections on:
"Baseball Seen as the Game of Innocence and Growth"
"Basketball Was First to Breach Race Barriers"
"American Football Celebrates Sacrifice and Progress"
The author is a journalist, author, playwright, and professor. As an essayist for Time magazine, he has won numerous print journalism honors, including two George Polk Awards, as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club and the American Bar Association. The essays he presents on the public television network in the United States have gained him the prestigious Peabody and Emmy awards. He is the author, most recently, of the novel Beet (Ecco, 2008).
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