And You Thought It Was Just a Ballgame
By PETE HAMILL

Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football and Basketball and What They
See When They Do
By Michael Mandelbaum
332 pages. PublicAffairs. $26.

Michael Mandelbaum has written extensively on foreign policy, but
here his subject is possibly far more important: the role of team sports
— baseball, football and basketball — in American lives. Along the way,
we learn many things about ourselves.

He is certainly correct, for example, when he says that in a frequently
chaotic world, team sports provide structure to millions of Americans.

“While the news sections of the daily newspaper may report the baffling
and the unintelligible,” Mr. Mandelbaum writes, “the sports section features
succinct histories that everyone can understand, with a clear-cut beginning,
middle and end.”

Unlike politics, love or foreign policy, every sport has clear-cut
rules. In that sense, sport resembles religion, and Mr. Mandelbaum is
superb in drawing the parallels. “These games,” he writes, “respond to
human needs that can be traced back to the earliest human communities, needs
to which the dominant responses for most of human history came from organized
religion.” As religion did before the modern age, sports offer us many
consolations: “a welcome diversion from the routines of daily life, a model
of coherence and clarity, and heroic examples to admire and emulate.”

Mr. Mandelbaum’s focus is on the fans, not the players or the owners of teams. He wants to understand what draws so many of us to these games,
why they often enlist us as fans for life. The reasons are often as mysterious
as religion. On one level the games are simply entertainment, leisure-time
diversions in a prosperous country. Each is driven by a sense of drama,
whose essence is conflict. Nobody dies in these dramas, except in rare accidents,
but the conflict is always resolved by victory or defeat. Most important,
these dramas do not have scripts. When the curtain rises, nobody knows
with absolute certainty who will win. When there is a script — as in the
infamous 1919 “Black Sox” World Series — there is a sense of national calamity,
accompanied by fevered sermons and excommunications. This is serious stuff.

In his own serious (but not solemn) way, Mr. Mandelbaum traces the
way these games entered American lives. His thesis is that each comes
from a unique era in the evolution of American society: the agrarian era
(baseball), the industrial (football), the postindustrial (basketball).
The form of baseball was set in the late 19th century before most Americans
succumbed to the tyranny of the clock. Once the rules of baseball were
set, they were seldom changed. Tradition was everything, the present always
measured against the past. Statistics became essential to that tradition.
Around 1920, Babe Ruth changed the leisurely spirit of the game, establishing
the home run as its most dramatic accomplishment. But the game itself seldom
changed.

As Mr. Mandelbaum reminds us, football and basketball are ruled by
the clock, as were the fans who worked in those factories and mills of
the early 20th century. Americans don’t like games that end in draws (an
acceptable ending in soccer, the world’s most played game), so the concept
of overtime was added, a word itself drawn from the industrial world.
Both sports started as college games, with limited audiences through the
1920’s and 30’s. History intervened. Millions of American men served in
World War II, and back home they embraced professional football, which
Mr. Mandelbaum calls “the war game.”

“War involves the organized, deliberate use of force to attain a
goal, often the control of territory,” Mr. Mandelbaum writes. “So does
football.”

Warlike, nonlethal brutality is the essence of football. The line
is the infantry, Mr. Mandelbaum says. The running backs are the cavalry.
The backfield, especially the quarterback, is the artillery, “hurling
deadly objects over the adversary’s first line of defense.” The quarterback
throws the “long bomb” or is “blitzed” by the opposing defenders. Coaches
(the models are Bear Bryant and Vince Lombardi) rule their teams as if they
were George S. Patton-style generals.

Professional basketball began to flourish around the time that American
factories were closing. The triumph of television in the mid-1950’s was
essential to the game’s spreading popularity, showing millions of city kids
how the game was supposed to be played. The kids took their televised lessons
to thousands of playgrounds, where, free of the authority of coaches, they
invented their own moves. A sport of grace and style began to evolve, punctuated
by dramatic explosiveness.

Younger fans, all those baby boomers who briefly celebrated sex,
drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, had found their sport, one that indirectly expressed
the way they wanted to live. “Many of them,” Mr. Mandelbaum notes, “were
accustomed to working in cooperative rather than hierarchical fashion.”

Basketball was a cooperative sport, fluid and spontaneous. The players
were trained to see the opening, to react instantly, pass the ball to
set up unexpected opportunities to score. Mr. Mandelbaum calls this “spontaneous
coordination.” It’s impossible to imagine Michael Jordan in his prime
wearing a headset, taking a play from a coach, the way most quarterbacks
do. Basketball coaches are never generals. In the end, the game is in
the hands of the players, and what they do together. This is also true of
the modern workplace.

Mr. Mandelbaum treats these generational and aesthetic differences
with clarity, in prose mercifully free of academic jargon. He explains
why Americans are usually absorbed by all three sports, almost always rooting
for the home teams. He examines the crucial power of our nostalgias, the
ways sports help erase ethnic and religious differences, the corruptions
of money and the use of performance-enhancing drugs, which form a hidden
script in our scriptless dramas.

In its way, Mr. Mandelbaum’s book can help explain America to Americans,
but it is also a subtle extension of his own expertise in foreign policy.
It can help explain the United States to the rest of the often-baffled
world.