I went to the Army-Navy game m Philadelphia last December, and I won’t soon forget it. And not just the game, which Army won when a desperate drive by Navy fell short in the final seconds. What happened moments after the game was even more memorable. Veterans Stadium suddenly went silent. The heartbroken Navy team, having lost to Army for the fifth straight year, gathered itself in front of the full brigade of midshipmen, and together, football players and coaches and Middies sang the Naval Academy alma mater. Then, after a brief burst of noise, the crowd quieted again. Smoke from cannons fired to celebrate Army’s victory hung over the section of the stands where the entire corps of cadets was standing. Once the Army players collected in front, the West Point alma mater was sung.
The whole episode lasted two, maybe three minutes. It was one of the strangest and most exhilarating moments I’ve experienced in years of attending sports events. And I think it’s also fair to describe it as a conservative moment: a hard-hitting football game between traditional rivals, cadets and midshipmen (in uniform) standing throughout the game, the military brass in attendance, President Clinton seated for the first half on Navy’s side, the second half on Army’s. I loved it. Clinton, by the way, was politely but coolly received at the game.
Yes, there are conservative and liberal athletic events. Sports are either conservative (football, basketball, boxing) or liberal (soccer, jogging, baseball), and teams can be conservative (Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees) or liberal (Washington Redskins, Atlanta Braves) as well. The same is true for big games. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the Army-Navy game is a conservative event. And it’s no coincidence that Army and Navy are better teams now that we’re in a conservative era. In the liberal ’60s and ’70s, serious athletes boycotted the service academies. It got so bad that Sports Illustrated a few years back urged West Point and Annapolis to drop big- time football. Last fall, SI changed its mind.
What makes a sports event conservative or liberal? I’ve got four criteria. The first is the sport itself. Boxing, for instance, is conservative because it’s so violent, individualistic, and masculine. The second criterion is the crowd: You don’t find many liberals at football games. The third is the nature of the event. Does winning matter to the exclusion of practically everything else? Is it southern? Is it tradition-bound? If the answer is yes to these, it’s a conservative event. Thus, the Masters golf tournament at a stuffy country club in Augusta, Georgia, in April is very, very conservative. The fourth measure: How much commercialism is associated with the event? There’s nothing wrong, from the conservative standpoint, with commercialism in sports, mixing Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. What’s repugnant and definitely not conservative is glitz, such as when a half-naked Michael Jackson sang during halftime at the Super Bowl.
Still, the Super Bowl is the summit of conservative sports. It’s the biggest football game of the season. The crowd at the game consists of rich folks, high rollers, and moderately well-heeled fans of the two teams involved. It’s an event where winning is everything. The Buffalo Bills have played in four Super Bowls, yet they’re the laughingstock of football because they lost all four. The Super Bowl has become traditional. The game on January 26 is the 31st — sorry, I mean the XXXIst. Okay, it’s a relatively new tradition, but let’s not get picky. As for commercialism, it’s got plenty. The TV ads during the game are a media story all by themselves. The star of the Super Bowl used to be paid to declare he’s going to Disney World right after the game. I miss that. Anyway, it’s liberals who hate commerce. Conservatives loathe glitz, the Super Bowl’s chief drawback. Who’s performing at halftime this year? Siegfried and Roy?
There are other, lesser conservative sports events. The World Series is one. Baseball is a liberal sport, so boring it’s adored by liberals. But the series is steeped in tradition, and the crowd is a downscale version of the Super Bowl throng. Winning matters. After the Boston Red Sox lost ignominiously to the New York Mets in 1986, I was so crushed I lost interest in baseball for several years. Both the NBA championship and the NBA All-Star weekend are conservative. The emphasis is chiefly on individual players like Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon, the true entrepreneurs of the sporting world. Sometimes a sandlot hustler pulls himself up by his bootstraps, as Tim Legler of the Washington Bullets did by winning the 3-point shooting contest in 1996. Oh, yes, the World Cup is conservative, though soccer as a sport isn’t. The cup generates fervent nationalistic feelings, which is fine. Losing the World Cup is death. When Italy lost in 1994 on Roberto Baggio’s missed penalty kick, Baggio fell to the ground like a man who’d been shot. He understood what losing meant.
Now for the liberal sports events. The NCAA basketball Final Four is at the top of the list. Why? It’s a great event that I never miss (on TV), but winning the championship isn’t all that significant anymore. It’s getting to the Final Four itself that produces bragging rights. Notice how good college teams are often described as having been to the Final Four X number of times in the past decade or two. That’s not a conservative yardstick. It reminds me of the defense of affirmative action: Those rewarded are always said to be ” qualified,” but never the “most qualified” or the “best.” Winning doesn’t matter in the baseball All-Star game either. Who remembers who won last year, the AL or the NL? And who cares? Still, individual performances are important, which makes the All-Star game neo-liberal.
What’s sad to see is a conservative event that turns liberal. This has happened to the college football bowl games. They used to be very traditional (and very exciting): Big 10 versus Pac 10 in the Rose Bowl, the Big 8 champ in the Orange Bowl, etc. Now the major bowls have become part of a playoff system. It doesn’t matter which bowl you go to. Worse, there are dozens of bowls. Mediocre teams get invited. California, a 6-5 team, played in the Aloha Bowl. After losing to Navy, Cal wound up 6-6 for the year — but with bragging rights about having been a bowl team. Rewarding a mediocre or losing performance is a liberal practice. Liberal soccer parents in my neck of the woods, for example, think every player on every team should get a trophy, even if they lost every game. Good for self-esteem, you know. Conservatives see things differently. Rather than rewarded, losers should be spurred to play harder next time in hopes of winning a trophy. The Cal football team should have stayed home.
A few weeks after the Army-Navy game, I got a letter from an Army fan, the wife of a West Pointer and the mother of a cadet. (She’d seen me at the game.) “Wasn’t that a wonderful game?” she wrote. “At halftime [with Navy ahead] my spirits were very low and I was wet and miserable.” Her son came by to cheer her up. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he told her. “We’re always down at the half. That’s our strategy. We’ll come back.” Army did. It wasn’t like those ” shameful seasons” Army had in the early ’70s, she wrote. “Those were the days of Vietnam, Nixon, and silly hippie girls throwing flowers at the cadets and calling them ‘baby killers.'” Nope, it wasn’t like that at all.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
