Sports
Sportsmen

The Opiate of the Artists (1979)

A century ago Karl Marx characterized religion as "the opiate of the masses," a phrase that later Marxists changed to "the opiate of the intellectuals," which is to say that religion, more than anything else, distracted them from their proper work. Had Marx lived a century longer and visited America, he might have noticed that not religion but something else—sports, spectator sports—has become a principal opiate of the intellectuals. Nothing, but nothing, keeps many of us from our proper business of writing poems or stories, or composing music, or doing criticism, as much as spectator sports.

I know, alas. As a single gent who is not formally employed, I work nearly all the time at writing, art, reading, or related activities. I see less than one Hollywood film a year, I never watch TV game shows or sitcoms, I rarely read newspapers, I scarcely gamble. I bought my first television set when I was 27, only to watch sports; nine years later, I bought a color set, primarily because it presents sports so much better. I live with several thousand books, some thirty of which have my name on their spines, in SoHo, a Manhattan factory district where only professional artists can legally live. In truth, there is one and only one entertainment, only one mass culture, that I share with almost everyone else—sports.

The paradox of my life is this: Whereas my art and writing are appreciated by an audience of at best a few hundred, who might think of themselves as an elite of sorts, there I sit several times a week, watching football, hockey, boxing, baseball, or soccer, along with millions of others who are an elite in other ways. When I hear the black radical lawyer Flo Kennedy speak contemptuously of the "jockocracy" that distracts America from social change, I wince, because I know damn well that she is speaking of me.

Why sports, rather than game shows, movies, or any of the other temptations that flood America? Well, obviously, I like them; I like them better than anything else. In general, I like them not as a partisan, although I do routinely root for certain local (New York) teams—the Jets (not the Giants), the Rangers (not the Islanders), the Yankees (not the Mets), and the Cosmos. However, I don't get upset for more than an hour if any of them lose, even in a playoff. Most of the time I can watch games between two non-New York teams, merely because I like to watch games. Once I start a game, I customarily watch it to the end, no matter who or what tries to interrupt me, not because I care who wins but because the pleasure of watching a sporting event includes seeing the entire show.

The sculptor Sol LeWitt, who recently had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, told me he likewise always watches to the end because, "I get caught up in the drama of it. I don't care who's playing, if the balance is fairly close. The game goes to a certain climax and then changes completely, just like a drama. Baseball is particularly good for that, because the balances are so even. Any team can beat any other team at any time. As a structure, baseball is very well designed."

One characteristic of Art, we say, is that it is not useful—it offers no rewards other than the pleasures of appreciation; and with this definition in mind, it seems to me that I appreciate sports much as I appreciate Art and thus that my feelings toward sports are more esthetic, in a pure sense, than anything else. However, sports are a popular art, like rock 'n' roll and movies, but unlike poetry (especially of the more experimental sort that I do). In that case, it can be said that sports are the pop I like best.

Just as I am inclined to discriminate among works of art, so I routinely make distinctions among games—distinctions based not upon who wins or loses but upon how interesting, or excellent, one game is in comparison to others. A better football game, to me, is not one in which my team wins but one in which many good things happen—good things, such as spectacular individual plays, efficient team effort, close competition in the scoring, generally exciting play. A bad game is one in which nothing happens: the players are sluggish, the strategy uninspired, the competition lopsided. Bad games are the only ones I fail to watch to their ends. Playoff games are usually better than common ones, in part because they are played harder. College games I find inferior simply because amateurs individually rarely play as well as professionals.

In certain games I enjoy the patterns of play—the arrangement of the players' energies on the field, especially as the vectors are recomposed from moment to moment. You can see this most clearly in soccer, as players move not to the ball but in response to its current location, each one covering a certain area of playing turf. You can also see similarly changing patterns in hockey, although everything on ice happens so much faster. The patterns of play are different in style in football, though no less interesting, because of the singular role that conscious strategy plays in this game. In no other sport known to me does every player know in advance exactly what he is supposed to do on offense—exactly to the level of how many steps to take, which way to turn, which direction to block, etc.; so that quality of execution can have an esthetic value, apart from practical success. Raymond Federman, a Frenchman teaching in Buffalo, who writes extremely avant-garde novels in both English and French (he is a literary switch-hitter, so to speak), tells me, "Both football and hockey are extremely intellectual in terms of how the space and time are controlled. It's like playing chess or writing a novel."

My own taste extends to directly competitive sports, such as track (which was my principal recreation in high school) and, more recently, boxing, which I have discovered is more interesting than track, because two men are using not only their bodies but their heads in outwitting one another. One quality that makes Muhammad Ali such an interesting fighter is that he makes you wonder what he is thinking and, more recently, whether he can act on his thoughts. Walter Abish, an experimental American novelist who was born in Vienna and raised in Shanghai, likes tennis (which I scarcely watch) not only for strategies but for "how emotional responses affect those strategies, resulting in improvisation. I link this to my writing."

I personally like to watch games I do not normally see, such as rugby, lacrosse, Irish football, curling, all of which occasionally appear on my local public television station. (Otherwise, never do I watch that channel. Its artistic offerings are too middlebrow and insipid for my highly discriminating cultural tastes.) The one major sport I cannot watch, except perhaps around playoff time, is basketball, I think because so much depends on being outrageously tall and because the movements of the players are so limited. The only basketball team I would watch tomorrow is the Harlem Globetrotters, because they play the dull game creatively; and the one reason why all of us root for them to win their "exhibitions" is that esthetically they are so superior to their flat-footed opponents. Otherwise, to me, basketball flunks as art. The one television sport I cannot watch at all is golf; how even the announcer can avoid falling asleep I cannot comprehend.

Sports, I said, is the opiate of the intellectuals, not just this intellectual. Sometimes they watch for the same reasons everyone else has; other times, for different reasons. Because they are people who make it their business, if not their life, to be articulate, their reasons are usually interesting, if not generally relevant. The late Randall Jarrell once wrote a poem for the quarterback Johnny Unitas the day after they met; and his widow has written, "On Sunday we had pastries with Lowenbrau and watched the National Football League on television. Besides quarterbacking plays, Randall was continually appreciating scenes of the crowd, half in light and half in shadow, or half stadium and half turf with the athletes in combat on the bright limed lines of the grid."

The late historian Richard Hofstadter saw in professional sports a quality of excellence that he did not see anywhere else in America. "Nothing in this country," he told me a dozen years ago, "is done as well as professional football. Compare it to our diplomacy." The literary critic Jerome Klinkowitz has a similar sense of sports as a kind of ideal activity. "Baseball is the ultimate elegant sport," he told me recently. "The movement of the ball is the only thing you need to watch. Football is too sloppy, too chaotic; it is too much like life. Baseball is also built upon the notion of possible (and sometimes attainable) perfection: perfect game, perfect day, each pitch a possible called strike or home run. Twenty-seven guys in a row can strike out, or they can get twenty-seven hits; each has happened."

Klinkowitz is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa and the author of the most advanced books I know on contemporary fiction. On the side, he joins "several other local rummies," as he puts it, on the board of directors of the Waterloo (Iowa) Indians, a Cleveland farm team. To Klinkowitz, as consistent as a literary critic should be, the only football team worth watching is the Green Bay Packers "for the memory of that one great moment when they made the game into the art of baseball."

Nicholas Acocella, a political columnist for Attenzione and the editor of the Diamondstein Book Digest, was watching the television to the side of his writing desk when I called him to comment upon Klinkowitz's theme: "What makes perfection achievable in baseball is that it is such a statistically oriented game—everyone's play has numbers, carved indelibly in the record books. Every play is part of some statistic." Acocella echoes LeWitt in finding professional baseball more attractive than other sports precisely because it is more consistently competitive. "Remember that if the best team has a winning percentage of .667 and the worst team .333, then the weaker team has a one in three chance of beating the stronger team. In football, it's harder for a last-place team to beat a first-place team. That's why we don't have so-called 'upsets' in baseball." Come to think of it, LeWitt's comment that "any team can beat any other team at any time" echoes, in principle, Yogi Berra's classic contribution to the new 1980 edition of Bartlett's Quotations: "The game ain't over until it's over."

An artist and writer who also directs the Media Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, Brian O'Doherty, neatly refines this notion of sports as ideal activity. "There is a certain symmetry and a certain simplification of the complexities of life within a set of rules in which chance and skill still have a random dialogue." He declares himself “an absolute sports freak. One reason why I got cable television was that I could then watch ESPN—the sports network." However, as an Irishman educated in England before he came to America (and married the art historian Barbara Novak), O'Doherty is also a partisan. "I came from a small country that was totally oppressed, and one of our greatest moments came when our team beat the oppressors." He vividly remembers a rugby match in the early 1950s when Ireland beat England by a lopsided score (now, that sounds like a bad game to me), and he nowadays laments the sorry records of most New York teams.

To most artists and intellectuals, to repeat, a love for the game supercedes any partisan interests. "What do I watch?" the poet Donald Hall tells me. "Baseball, basketball, and football, in that order. When in England, I watch cricket. I love baseball the most. It seems the most interesting in character, and for characters. It is certainly the least twentieth-century. I like the game. I love minor league ball. I will stop by the side of the road to watch the married men play the single men, or, for a while, the eighth graders. I would see anybody play anywhere anytime. [Now that is real addiction.] I like the texture and the feel of it. I like all the intricacies. I don't even care so much about the outcome of the game, or staying to the last inning. There is no such thing as a bad game. People who don't care about baseball say that 'nothing happens.' I see things happen."

When I told Hall of my own frustrations with basketball, he replied, "The notion that 'the movements of the players seem so limited' is probably the most ludicrous observation yet made on basketball. [We also disagree vehemently about poetry.] The best athletes, in professional sports, are basketball players, and they have the most body control. Julius Erving makes Lynn Swann look like a quadriplegic. Basketball is a pattern-game that is best not seen on the tube but high in the balcony, that is as fast as hockey, but as precise as soccer." Making esthetic discriminations, he concludes, "It is best when it is played not by schoolyard types like Lloyd Free but by great passers, like the Boston Celtics.

"My ideal day begins at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, getting up and getting to work in the gorgeous early morning, and it ends with watching a game or part of a game on the television set. Everybody has to let the infant out, to talk, to air itself. Drinking is one way. Drugs obviously. T. S. Eliot read a murder mystery every night. I got sports." Hall's addiction to baseball even got him into writing a charming book, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball (1976). Hall recently wrote me, "I am about to become a baseball correspondent for the Times Literary Supplement," which is Great Britain's most august literary review. He will regularly cover not the game but books about the game. The latter, of course, provide their own kind of esthetic pleasure.

O'Doherty's double at the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts is David Wilk, a poet who admits to being a baseball addict. "It is pure love. It is the perfect sport, because of its incredible complexity and various levels of activity. It is a pastoral game that combines periods of contemplation with activity of incredible intensity. Baseball is a personal game; the players have individual character. The identification factor is extremely large. In both football and basketball, the players look inhuman. Baseball is one of those incredibly rich activities that reflect human activity. It is a vast and complex machine that contains enough to be pretty comprehensive."

"The diamond itself you can turn on its side or stand on its end," he speculated, sounding like he could give a course in "Baseball Appreciation": "It has a multitude of facets and characteristics. It is also prismatic, breaking light into its component parts that allow you to see it differently. I take baseball as a link to Jeffersonian democracy in the 19th century and of the country to the city. We call it 'a park'; it is a meadow even in the middle of an industrial complex. There is a swatch in which time has stopped. Hugh Duffy, who played in the 1890s, could walk into a stadium today and would have no trouble playing the game."

A different image of baseball comes to me from P. Adams Sitney, the co-director of the Anthology Film Archives, which is the principal New York (and American) showcase for avant-garde film in America. He also wrote the principal book on the subject, Visionary Film (1974), and teaches it at Princeton University. Notwithstanding the facts that he wears the same three-piece suit (or its duplicates) every day and lives alone in Manhattan's Chinatown without a television or even a telephone, he is a baseball maven who even brings his portable radio to summertime art functions. "Baseball, of all sports, alone thrills me," he told me in his Anthology office cluttered with bookshelves and film tins. "I mean daily professional baseball—not Opening Day, the All-Star Game, the Playoffs, the World Series, or the New York Yankees. They are inessential—for politicians and brokers.

"First of all, there is the field. Even glimpsed from the Evanston subway on an off-day, Wrigley Field is a hallowed sanctum. The sight of the manicured infield or a natural grass ballpark is the finest argument for city life. Then there is the rhythm of the game: the secret communications between the pitcher and the catcher, climaxed by the windup, sharpen the attention to the spectacular sounds when the ball is actually in play. I know no art or religion that so gracefully consecrates its repetitions of awareness." No question about it—this is an avant-garde art critic speaking.

"The temporality extends through and beyond the game. The greater the peg Dewey Evans or Dave Parker makes, the more vividly Roberto Clemente reappears in the mind. Every hit, play or error is triangulated with the history of the game as we have lived it. The individual stands before us in clarity and vigor. So many of the greatest days are wonderful because a minor player proves his worth. I will long remember Lenny Randle's first night as a Met; it was an allegory of redemption."

So why don't you have a television, I asked? "The strength of the imaginative function is so great for the baseballist," he replied without pause, "that radio retains its power only in the broadcasting of games." Now, I thought to myself, only a true addict, a true "baseballist," could come to that imaginative conclusion.

Not all of us artists and writers are baseball nuts. I can miss games without suffering and would never pause to watch amateurs and kiddies. So can the novelist Ralph Ellison, who prefers football and boxing. "I was a high school football player," he reminisced in his Manhattan apartment. "I like to observe the general development of skill and agility—to see one generation go beyond its predecessors. The grace and economy with which great athletes execute is esthetic. It is the difference between Willie Mays, the fast hands of Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson and the people who depend upon courage and ruggedness. I think sports are an integral part of society. In the unruliness of modern life, sports teaches us how to win, how to lose, how to be graceful; all that is part of being civilized." Ellison was the first writer I ever knew to have a large-screen color television, and it wasn't for watching Shakespeare.

Ted Striggles has been, at various times, a high school letterman in running, swimming, and football; a lawyer; a modern dancer; and executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts. He likewise prefers football and boxing. "Both are complex theatrical experiences. Like good theater, they give you moments of complicated action and then time to reflect about them. It is only on reflection that you can appreciate the complexity. Good sporting events must be paced, just like good theater.

"Football and boxing are the only sports in which form and function are appropriately correlated; you cannot separate one from the other. If you do unnecessary movements, someone will hit you, and you'll either stop or lose. A good crisp efficient punch is really the way to do it; the bolo punch doesn't work. It's inherent in the sport that the best way is the most efficient way. Football is an extension of the functionalism of boxing.

"Instant replays I don't mind at all, because they enrich your experience of what just went by. If you can look at it a second time and it looks the same, then you're watching a boring sport that doesn't interest me. That is baseball and chess. I also dislike all those sports in which judges give out numbered grades, like gymnastics and figure-skating. All those invented sports, like target diving, are just silly—the equivalent of game shows."

The Conant Professor of Music at Princeton University, Milton Babbitt, composes music so complex and untraditional that it scarcely bothers him that only a few hundred people in the entire world fully understand it. Nonetheless, in the middle of his Princeton studio is not a piano or another musical instrument but a television set. "Baseball has become diluted with weaker players," he declared in the provocative style familiar to the musical world, "because other sports have become more remunerative, stealing many of the greatest athletes who might have otherwise gone into baseball. I can hardly look at baseball anymore; it is so inept. Soccer is too repetitious and improvisational. The football pros have basically only two plays: the run and the pass. They execute better than the collegians, but in my opinion, the best football, the game with the greatest variety of plays, is college football. It is better coached, better scouted; they take risks with their quarterbacks. The game is more strategic, more intricate and more truly cumulative—the momentary play can have its referent effect several plays later."

Always as much of a critic as an enthusiast, Babbitt would like to see TV coverage improved, "so that we could see the whole team. I would also like to see football become a possession game rather than a time game, to have, say, twelve possessions in a game. That would give you the kinds of options you have in cricket. Now most football games are over before they end in time. If you had possession, you could score and score before losing the ball, much as a baseball team does in the bottom of the ninth." (Then football would be a Yogi Berra game that "ain't over until it's over.")

When do you watch television, I asked. "Not when I'm composing," he replied, scotching one professional rumor, "but when I'm copying or doing all that other dirty manual work that a composer needs to do. It provides me with the only real relaxation I get." A few years ago, he joined others at a university conference on the music of Arnold Schoenberg in postponing an afternoon session. It was Superbowl Sunday, you see, and Minnesota and Pittsburgh were playing. Once the game was over, the conferees resumed.

A high school guidance counselor by day, Irvin Faust authors remarkable New York City novels by night. In between he is a sports nut who can write fiction while listening to a radio game or watch one game on television while listening to another on radio. His favorite is indoor track, live, especially in Madison Square Garden. "It is very intimate, very personal," he testifies. "The pole vaulter appears to jump into your lap. I find it a cornucopia of color and action—not a three-ring circus but a six-ring circus. It's a fascinating kaleidoscope of bodies in motion and bodies in flight. I identify with the smart little New York kid who has to know how to elbow his way, how not to get pocketed, how to be tough or he'll be blasted off the track. I love indoor relay races. They are the epitome of intelligent New York know-how—not only of the runners but of the coaches in selecting the runners for each position."

Faust prefers college basketball to professional, not because it is more enthusiastic—the conventional reason for this preference—but because the absence of a 24-second rule allows more space for intelligence. Thus he likes the point guards who control the game and the coaches who get the most out of their players, such as Pete Carril of Princeton, whose players pass and pass until the opponents drop their guard. In Faust's most recent novel, Newsreel (1980), the trackmen Jim Ryun and Ron Delany appear; a new story, scheduled to appear in the Atlantic Monthly, is, he says, about a "sports-nut who is addicted to everything."

The choreographer Merce Cunningham would like people to think that the patterns of his dances are wholly abstract. However, sometimes their structures reveal the influence of a certain opiate. In Field Dances (1963), performers repeatedly come to the middle of the stage, make contact in various ways for several seconds, and then go off stage. When a British critic confronted Cunningham with the suspicion of a formal resemblance to American football, the choreographer acknowledged the truth.

In the writing not of a male writer but a female is an especially bizarre passage about American football. Though Gertrude Stein lived in Paris most of her adult life, she was not immune to its seductive powers:

There are two things about football that anybody can like. They live by numbers, numbers are everything to them and their preparation is like any savage dancing, they do what red Indians do when they are dancing and their movement is angular like the red Indians move. When they lean over and when they are on their hands and feet and when they are squatting they are like an Indian dance.

When I read this to Ted Striggles, he exclaimed, "That's marvelous, but she missed the ways in which the football players resemble dancing Indians the most—they put on costumes and wear war paint under their eyes."

Another woman who wrote appreciatively of American sports was Marianne Moore, a poet who lived most of her life in Brooklyn. Her "Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese" lauds the entire team (later memorialized by Roger Kahn in The Boys of Summer, whose title, incidentally, comes from a poem by Dylan Thomas). Another poem of Marianne Moore's, "Baseball and Writing," opens with these lines:

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing
you can never tell with either how it will go
and what you will do;

her lines resembling Walter Abish's point about the anxiety between intention and effect in both sport and imaginative writing.

It has been observed that for many older writers alcohol is the opiate of choice and then for other, largely younger artists and intellectuals an opium of some kind was their favorite opiate. As far as I am concerned, the juicers can have their juice, the heads their dope, and the dopes their mysteries. For some of us there is no opium like sports—good sports—for reasons that I think are ultimately esthetic. If not for my love for sports I'd be writing and reading and perhaps making social change all the time—or perhaps finding another opiate.