For the Love of the Game?
When you think about it, sports offers the perfect metaphor for a false morality. The intensity of a fan's attachment to a team can be as strong as that of any True Believer's to any religion, and the heart and mind of the diehard fan can easily mistake allegiance, which is as often as not an accident of birth but which for The Fan is the highest value, for a kind of moral code.
Sports taps into our tribal roots, something deep in our collective experience, that lights up the primitive brain. The spectator's experience no less than the player's is not a mere pastime, it's a ritual. There is in fact almost no aspect of sports that is not ritualized. It offers a sense of attachment to the tribe — personal transcendence — while at the same time promising personal catharsis.
It's not a stretch to say our sports are sacred. Sunday is for football.
And I'ma go out on a limb here and say it may be slightly more sacred to men. There are not many provinces in our culture where men can express the intensity and range of emotion they can on the pitch (or in the stands), especially not toward each other. This free pass on public displays of affection among men is an anomaly in our culture, and it's important to men to keep it that way.
(Where some would like to read homoeroticism into, say, a soccer kiss or a baseball butt-pat these expressions of spontaneous celebration among brothers-in-arms are "no homo" in context.)
This ritual realm of sport means a lot — like A LOT — to men. Sport is so central to the construction of masculinity, and the minefield of emotions attached so complex in our culture, that we should probably not be surprised when those of us who've not drunk the Gatorade experience the cognitive dissonance of sport morality clashing with, well, actual morality, no matter how cut and dry it seems to those of us on the outside.
And when I say "actual morality" I mean things we could all presumably agree on outside of a sport context, like, say, child rape. That one seems a no-brainer, doesn't it?
Which is why if we were able to be shocked by anything anymore, the Penn State riots would be it. The crime of serial child-rape by a college coach with a foundation dedicated to "providing children with help and hope" is heinous enough on its own, but the spectacle of thousands of people we would consider "mainstream" average joes taking to the streets, smashing store windows and overturning vehicles in protest of the firing of a man (twenty years past retirement age, by the way) for turning a blind eye for years after hearing of an incident to the serial rape of children recruited at football camps at Penn State facilities by his former Assistant Coach, seems utterly incomprehensible.
The crimes themselves are so heinous you'd think really anyone with any degree of complicity (much less those who essentially enabled the crimes over an inconceivable stretch of time by never following up on credible reports of wrongdoing) would be reviled and rejected by right-minded society. You'd think right-thinking folks would cheer — not jeer — the trustees for finally holding those who enabled the rape of children accountable.
But the outrageous truth is that this goes on on a smaller scale all the time. One of the more outrageous aspects of this whole outrageous affair is the rumbling underlying assumptions about victims of sexual assault. We know women have had to deal with the "blame the victim" culture for millennia. But male victims of rape face the same, are often isolated and ostracized afterward if they come forward.
Heaven help them if sports is involved.
You remember what happened at Mepham High School on Long Island a few years ago, when hazing at football camp got way out of hand.
The police call what happened at the Pirates’ five-day training camp a series of Abner Louima–style sex attacks.... They were carried out over several nights, with several victims, one of whom required surgery for his injuries. After the coaches went to sleep in their own cabin, at least three members of the team, ages 15, 16, and 17, allegedly rubbed heat-producing mineral ice on broomsticks, pinecones, and golf balls and used those items to penetrate at least three freshman players while the rest of the boys in the cabin all bore witness. The purported ringleader, according to police, was the lineman.And what came next was even more inconceivable.
When the victims came forward, the team closed ranks. Kids who were said to have witnessed the attacks refused to talk, even though the longtime coach of the Pirates warned them that the season would end if they didn’t come forward. Instead, the victims were laughed at in the halls, called “faggot” and “broomstick boy.” The superintendent shielded the school from inquiries at first. He told Pennsylvania police that he couldn’t release information about a student without a subpoena. Nor did he suspend the three alleged perpetrators, and as a result, they were allowed to walk the hallways of Mepham High for nearly two weeks.The victims had broomsticks thrown at them from cars in the school parking lot. When the football season was canceled, victims' families were threatened. Parents who spoke out received letters in the mail, warning that if they kept speaking out, they’d also get "the broomstick treatment."
The Penn State incident is really just another version of this story. There is no way you can rally behind enablers of child rape without expressing callousness and contempt for their victims.
And having seen the passion with which Fans took to the street in support of one of Sandusky's enablers can there be any doubt that were the victims' identities known, they would receive treatment similar to the innocents at Mepham High?
Thank goodness they didn't cancel a game on account of this, is all I can say.
Mike, if you go to my current blog entry, there are excerpts from and a link to a complete article written by a Jesuit in which he explores the psychological aspects of Catholic Church and Penn State pedophile scandals, and why the victims are often reviled and the perpetrators defended.
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Right on. This is one of your best.
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In 2009 the Drama Dept. at Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach CA decided to perform "Rent". Some students found the play disgusting because of its gay characters. Three football players created a Facebook video threatening to rape and kill a female member of the cast. The vid was posted on the account of a fourth student who reportedly threatened the girl in person at school. The principal first canceled the play, then reinstated it supposedly after reading it. The ACLU also filed a lawsuit, which I'm sure concentrated the minds of the high school and district administrators. Two of the four football players were suspended. The suit alleged that school officials did little either to discipline the players or to protect the female student. The particulars, and the resolutions, are available online; this matter is old news. It was rather shocking to me since I grew up there.
I read the link to "NYT Magazine" article. One of the comments suggested that the lineman who perpetrated the abuse was likely homosexual. Will's own blog post underscores the grandiosity of these abusers, which was eminently clear for the "privileged" football players at CDM High. Well, perhaps that comment wasn't so far from the truth- we boys know that the first one to say "faggot" is rather often the last one to have...ahem...filled in the blank.
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Sports and war exist so that straight men can touch one another.
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