No man indifferent to sports can keep this quirk hidden for long. Men are expected to share a certain obsessive interest, even expertise, on the subject. Invariably someone–often a complete stranger–asks the nonfan what he thinks about an upcoming game, how he assesses the local team’s performance, whether he thinks such-and-such a team was right in trading so-and-so.
But my lack of enthusiasm was nonetheless seen as a failure of masculinity; worse, many boys took it as a challenge. Being a brainy kid didn’t exactly help. And so they took their revenge on me in the cruel and direct ways boys have–they taunted me, harassed me, and on occasions too numerous to mention beat me up.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But my friends could see through my protestations: there is a part of me that looks down on the culture of sports, that sees the endless invocations of sports heroism as a kind of special pleading. I don’t see much in the way of nobility: I see groups of men knocking into each other; I see grunting, drunken fans; I see anxious yuppies trying to revitalize their sagging manhood vicariously. I see the bullies who picked on me as a child–and my current contempt serves as a kind of revenge. After all, I’ve learned to channel my aggression, using it to give my writing verve and passion, and they can only find release for their anger in the meaningless rituals of pickup basketball or the even more meaningless experience of fanhood.
I don’t hold out much hope for a nonviolent reformation of sports. Those who have attempted to give sports a “sensitive” veneer, keeping the physical excitement while removing the violence and competition, have not been notably successful. Indeed, noncompetitive sports seems a contradiction in terms.
This conflicted experience, I suspect, is what leads so many to the ritualized solution of sports. Sports are not, as Nelson and others argue, an outlet for unchecked male aggression: the whole point is that the violence is controlled. I suspect this is sports’ key appeal. Real-life aggression has consequences, from bloodied noses to broken relationships and much, much worse. Sports–for voyeurs and participants alike–promises the thrills of aggression without the consequences. It allows its fans to experience violence in what Campbell calls an “instrumental” way–to enjoy their own aggression as a positive force, without the guilt that would accompany its expression in the real world.
Different sports reflect different ways of dealing with aggression: there are degrees of sublimation to suit nearly every taste, from the ritualized warfare of football to the genteel competition of golf. In boxing, the brutality is so honestly and nakedly personal that the sport achieves a certain grandeur, a grandeur lacking when violence is more carefully disguised or surrounded by ritual. Perhaps this is why the sport has drawn the attention of so many fine writers, from novelist Joyce Carol Oates to journalist A.J. Liebling. “A boxer, like a writer, must stand alone,” Liebling wrote in The Sweet Science, a collection of essays on his favorite sport. “A fighter’s hostilities are not turned inward, like a Sunday tennis player’s. . . . They come out naturally with his sweat, and when his job is done he feels good because he has expressed himself.”
