Sit down and be counted

Jim Thorpe, the greatest American athlete ever, was born on this day in 1888.

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who loves sports hates common sense.” – H. L. Mencken.



Sports, according to the latest census, is now the third-largest religion in the world. And like all religions, it is based on a set of highly questionable premises, one of them being: Life is a game.

All of us are born with the instinct to play, along with the instincts to feed, talk, and pack crayons in our noses, but we’re taught not to let any particular instinct become an obsession – except play.

From the time you’re old enough to open your eyes, it seems, there’s always somebody shoving a ball in your face, expecting you to throw it or catch it or kick it – or at least look like you would if you could.

As you grow up and learn to walk and then run, the sports paraphernalia begins to pile up around the house, and pretty soon you can’t even sit down and read a comic book or pick your toenails without your old man wanting you to come outside and throw the old cantaloupe around.

In school they expect you to play, starting with recess. Teachers never let you just stand around on the playground enjoying the clouds and the trees and the smell you just made, but demand that you participate in their idiotic games of “Red Rover” or “Capture the Potato.”

As if this weren’t enough, you’ve got to cope with all those extracurricular activities: Little League, YMCA, Cub Scouts or Brownies, camp, soccer teams, swimming clubs, gymnastics, Fourth of July races, and so on, until you just want to crawl into a nice hot bath and drown yourself.

By the time you reach high school chances are you’ve already logged millions of hours in pools and gymnasiums, on gridirons and diamonds – and now the serious part starts. You’ve got to decide what sport to major in.

Let’s say you decide on one, because you like it more than any other – love it , even. What happens now is that the person in charge – your coach – takes something that started out as fun and turns it into something different.

A coach is usually a former athlete, and consequently bitter and bent on revenge. Most coaches pass along the things they’ve learned from their own coaches, things like the importance of teamwork and keeping your shirt tucked in.

The one useful function the coach may serve is to sour a youngster on sports for the rest of his or her life.

Athletes used to just play model roles

At what point, exactly, in our sports history as a nation did athletes come to be expected to be “role models?”

It couldn’t have been during the 1920s and ‘30s, when Babe Ruth was king. Everyone loved Ruth, but did every mom and dad wish for their little tyke to grow up to be just like him? Kids themselves adored the Babe and few of them, I’ll venture to guess, were scarred for life if they happened to hear that he loved women and beer and cigars. If they aspired to emulate him, it was in the hitting of home runs, not in the carousing that was, to them, incidental to his large appeal.

In the ‘40s there was Ted Williams, the paragon of hitting and the very picture of un-congeniality. Red Sox fans might have called Teddy Ballgame a bum when he struck out with two on, but they didn’t fret overlong that, when he threw his bat in disgust afterwards, he was providing a poor example for the kiddies.

Williams’ rival, Joe Dimaggio, of course, was the exception. Every boy in America wanted to play centerfield for the Yankees, and also marry Marilyn Monroe. Dimaggio may have been the first big star whose private life impinged on the consciousness of kids.

In the ‘fifties, when I was a kid, we had Mickey Mantle as an icon. I admired Mantle – growing up in Pittsburgh, my favorite was Roberto Clemente – and I tried switch-hitting in Little League in imitation of The Mick. When he hit .400 with three homers in the 1960 Series against the Pirates I couldn’t help but be in awe, and the next year, when he, not Maris, looked like he would break Ruth’s record of 60 home runs, I was even more spellbound. Almost everyone knew that Mantle was a drunk, but every man Jack dreamed of his son becoming the next Mickey Mantle.

So what gives, these days? Why do we demand that athletes not only tear the cover off a baseball or dunk a basketball or otherwise do something we could only dream of doing, while also being model – “role model,” that is – citizens?

Maybe it’s just that – that because athletes have skills that are so far beyond us, we expect them to have other superior qualities, as well. In the old days, we might have idolized a few extraordinary players whose abilities we recognized as transcendent, but as for the other, run-of-the-mill athletes, we thought we could one day be in their shoes. Now, in this the Age of Information, we know that something like hitting a baseball thrown by a Major League pitcher is unthinkable – we appreciate the incredibly specialized skill involved. We appreciate it, but we resent it – resent the outlandish salaries being handed out for something as trivial, after all, as hitting a baseball.

As far as we’re concerned, the athlete owes us something more.