Sports
Sportsmen

The Millrose Games: I Saw John Cage at Madison Square Garden (1992)

Perhaps the greatest index of the influence of the composer/writer John Cage (1912-92) is that he made me appreciate certain ways of the world in Cagean ways. For many fans of competitive running and jumping, the annual Millrose Games is the apex of the New York City indoor track season; for me, it is the epitome of non-hierarchic, non-centered Cagean performance. The floor of Madison Square Garden, essentially a basketball court and hockey rink some sixty yards by twenty, is covered with a four-lane wooden track that runs circularly along the edge and is drastically sloped ("banked") at its narrow ends (to compensate for a sharp turn-to-reversal). Whereas the standard outdoor circular track has 440 yards, requiring four laps to a mile, this one is approximately 160 yards long, requiring eleven laps to the mile. Inside the track is paraphernalia for the pole vault, the high jump, and the long jump, as well as another straightaway track for the 60-yard dashes and hurdles. The events begin promptly at 5:45 p.m. with a series of relays, and continue past 10:30 p.m, with no clear break in the activities for roughly five continuous hours. Five hours was incidentally the length of Cage's greatest theatrical creation, HPSCHD (1969), which likewise took place in an indoor sports arena (Assembly Hall at the University of Illinois).

What first of all marks the Millrose Games as Cagean performance is that two and often three events occur simultaneously. While runners are going around the main track, pole vaulters and jumpers are flinging themselves to various heights and distances. This means that spectators must constantly choose where to look. More than once I heard some members of the audience cheering something that had completely escaped my attention. Curiously, the announcer describing the running is not the same man identifying the pole vaulters, which means that the voices sometimes interrupt each other. More than once I saw a pole vaulter in mid-air, about to execute his concluding moves over the crossbar just as the starter's gun resounded coincidentally. In its diffusion of spectator attention, the Millrose Games resembles the traditional American three-ring circus, which incidentally also takes place in Madison Square Garden later in the spring; such a circus was always an esthetic ideal for Cage (exploited and compromised though it was by the Rolyholyover exhibition, which was subtitled "A Circus," though it scarcely was).

What also makes the Millrose Games Cagean is an abundance of participants within an absence of hierarchy. On the same indoor track were run several 1,600-meter relays separately for men and women, with each runner doing 400 meters, within a wide variety of team classifications: local universities, Ivy League universities, public high schools within the five boroughs, suburban high schools, Catholic high schools, local club teams, and "masters" teams (which are limited to runners forty years in age and older). One of the more curious races, "Chemical Bank Women's 4 X 400 Meters Indoor Challenge," had the Board of Education team pitted against Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Citibank, IBM, and the FBI. (IBM won, while the FBI finished fifth, apparently amicably. The parallel men's race was won by the Board of Education!)

This is the same track on which some of the meets' stars run—Marcus O'Sullivan in the Wanamaker Mile, Hassiba Boulmerka (an Olympic champion) in the Women's Mile, Reuben Reina in the 3,000 meters, Maria Mutola in the 800 meters, Mark Everett in the 800 meters. Also here, before the same audience, is the High School Boy's solo One-Mile Run, the women's equivalent, a 400-meter race, a 500-meter race, 3,200-meter relays, etc., all of them staged with roughly an equal amount of fanfare. One could identify with the thrill for a young person (or even a master) running on the same boards as a world-class star only a few minutes before or after. (Some barely negotiated the sloped banking, for which they lacked experience; it was both sad and amusing to see amateur runners losing their balance around the turns, while one man fell flat on his stomach, his forward force propelling him up all the way to the track's outer edge.)

I've written elsewhere that the common mark of Cagean masterpieces, as distinct from his lesser pieces, is an abundance of unassociated activities. There is no doubt that the Millrose Games by most measures ranks among the most populous sports shows, with so many events within such a small space, and that such an abundance is a key to its esthetic quality. Though the newspapers and the network 60-minute television program feature only competitions starring celebrities (most of whom do not win), I found the whole games superior to any of its parts.

The first time I saw the Millrose Games I sat in expensive seats, perhaps several rows from the edge of the track, but could not see the runners directly in front of me. Essentially, the slope of the Garden's seats is designed to make the center stage visible to all, while the space beyond the sidelines of, say, a basketball court can be seen only from seats on the other side of the Garden. Since this design hides so much of the track directly below, spectators in front of us began to stand in order to see better, obscuring the entire scene. The surprise this time was that the cheapest seats, at the very top of the house, provided the best view, precisely because the greater slope angle up there enabled one to see more of the entire scene. No one up top ever stood up (except of course to move out of or into his seat). An anti-snob anarchist to his guts, Cage would have liked the notion of the cheapest seats as best.

What I mean to say is that the Millrose Games has John Cage's theatrical signature, even though, in fact, he had nothing to do with it.