As a 15-year-old in 1946, I attended the final home game of my fellow townsman from Joliet, Ill., DePaul University basketball great George Mikan. When Joliet mayor Art Janke was introduced before the game to present an award to Mikan, the more than 20,000 fans gathered at the old Chicago Stadium greeted His Honor with a lusty Bronx cheer.
“Dad, why are they booing the Mayor?” I asked my father.
“Because he’s a politician,” he responded.
No other justification was necessary. Politicians always get booed at sports events. President Herbert Hoover showed up at the 1930 World Series and got booed. President Bill Clinton stayed in the owner’s sky box when Cal Ripken set his baseball endurance record in 1995, but when his visage was flashed briefly on the stadium screen, the packed house reflexively booed. Consequently, political handlers tell their clients to resist the temptation to present themselves to such multitudes.
This is the disconnection between sports and politics. For all the sports analogies offered by politicians, these are two different worlds, and, for the most part, they attract quite different kinds of people. Political junkies are interested in what’s in it for them — money, personal advancement, ideological promotion. Sports junkies are disinterested.
Why would a self-respecting burgher of Green Bay, Wis., wear a huge imitation cheese on his head? To identify with something outside himself, devoid of self-interest or self-promotion. Such cheese-heads are engaged in the out-of-body experience common to sports fans.
They are also immune to the political illusion, the virus that has infected the 20th century. A person who loses himself in the joy of victory and/or the agony of defeat accomplished by strangers is not likely to be seduced into believing that the government and politicians can yield personal success, much less happiness.
Those politicians seldom are sports fans, though they may pretend to be. Bob Dole, a fine athlete before his near-fatal war service, could never waste his time watching sporting events. The same was true of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson (though he regularly attended University of Texas football games after leaving office), Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush (despite his recent interest in his son’s major-league baseball team).
Two possible exceptions are Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, though I suspected both of these non-stop politicians of looking for votes when they professed to be sports junkies. The first time I ever covered Nixon in person came in 1959 when the then-vice president took the train to Philadelphia to host a Republican fund-raiser at a Phillies game; I thought that Nixon’s spouting batting averages to the reporters present smacked more of a political trickster than a genuine fan. Clinton’s self-designation as an avid University of Arkansas basketball fan seemed to be valid only when the Razorbacks were playing for the national championship.
It is difficult for egomaniacal politicians who claim to be the salvation of mankind to lose themselves for a couple of hours in an activity whose outcome cannot help or hurt them. So it is rare that anybody sees a big-time politician at a big-time sports event in Washington.
The bevy of freeloading pols in the owner’s box at Washington Redskins games does not count. Indeed, claiming allegiance to Washington’s professional football team goes along with being part of the in crowd. But most Redskins fans who actually go to games are individuals who pay for their own tickets out of their own pockets, which means many of them are making a personal sacrifice. (This is in contrast to other professional sports venues in the Washington area, where corporations buy up loads of tickets to give away to employees and clients considerably less knowledgeable than Redskins supporters, but that is another story.)
I am one of the paying (non-tax-deductible) season-ticket fans at Redskins, Bullets (soon Wizards), Orioles, and University of Maryland football and basketball games. I spend a lot of time watching games as a diversion from the political scene that in my 40 years of Washington-based reporting I have found progressively more brutish and less elevated.
At the top of the list comes Maryland basketball. In the first week of January when Democrats and Republicans were locked in mortal combat over the fate of Newt Gingrich, I managed to slip away twice to “Tobacco Road” to watch the Maryland Terrapins defeat the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Now, my astonished friends and colleagues wonder, why would I make this effort to watch young men, representing a university I never attended, engage in athletic competition whose outcome has no impact on my life? Ah, that is the essence of being a fan: to be engaged in a pursuit totally divorced from everyday life — the opposite of the political illusion.
Filling arenas to cheer on these young gladiators seems a clear alternative to either nationalistic or revolutionary fervor tied to the political illusion and often resulting in bloodshed. William Hazlitt had it right on February 7, 1810, when he wrote on the death of John Cavanagh, the famous handball (“fives”) player:
It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall. There are things indeed that make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and throwing it away.
I think Hazlitt might be a basketball fan today.
Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist.
