From Ritual to Record

ALLEN GUTTMANN. From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. $12.95.

All Americans talk about sports (endlessly), but nobody does anything about analyzing them except for Allen Guttmann, head of American Studies at Amherst. Disillusioned by the galloping trivialism of the Popular Culture Association (their Big Deal of Summer 1978 was a Rollercoaster Symposium in Sandusky’s amusement park!), I am genuinely heartened by the intelligence of this 161 page essay, and impressed by the (largely unglossed) 22 pages of footnotes which display cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary research of Teutonic thoroughness (a happy spinoff of the author’s Fulbright stints in Europe).

In short, here is a study of popular culture as imaginatively serious as the best humanistic studies in literature and philosophy. And, special blessing, its style is graceful, demotic, witty. One doesn’t talk about not being able to put down a scholarly book, but except for a few rough miles of track between New York and Trenton, I didn’t. It’s that compelling.

Six chapters and a conclusion deal credibly with the following agenda: the distinctions among play, games, contests, and sports in which typology never becomes a Procrustean bed; the transformation of the play instinct from roots in the ritual of primitive cultures to commercialized industries characterized by secularism, equality of access, specialization of roles, rationalization, bureaucratization, quantification, and the quest for records; speculations centering on Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and Weberian models about the connections between capitalism, protestantism, and modern sport; an essay published elsewhere on why baseball was our national game; an attempt to explain the fascination of football; an intriguing series of reflections on why loner America prefers team sports to individual ones; and a short (and perhaps too modest) conclusion discussing the trade offs between freedom from and freedom to opportunities in modern societies.

His concluding sentence is worth quoting, suggesting as it does the easy mix of learning and liveliness which Guttmann achieves in this book: When we are surfeited with rules and regulations [of contemporary sport culture], when we are tired-like Robert Frost’s apple-picker-of the harvest we ourselves desired, we can always put away our stopwatch, abandon the cinder track, kick off our spiked shoes, and run as Roger Bannister did, barefoot, on firm dry sand, by the sea. This is the best of both worlds in many ways: the deft use of fiction to deepen understanding of the place of baseball and football in America, the firm but unpushy display of statistics to reveal differences in the way sports are experienced in diverse non-American cultures, the patient but noncondescending way idees fixes (such as Marcusean notions that sports are safety-valves that capitalism devises to fend off its own deserved Armageddons with the working classes; or the facile post hoc, ergo propter hoc equating of football’s new favor with Vietnam induced fascism) are defused intellectually.

I have only one quibble with this book. It’s almost a tour de force to talk in such detail about sports in America while barely mentioning media. Neither radio nor television makes the index although Mr. Monday Night Football does by virtue of his place in Guttmann’s opening line in the football chapter: Is there an American sportswriter or broadcaster, some mute, inglorious Howard Cosell or George Plimpton, who has failed to comment upon the football boom of the 1960s? (p. 117). No, surely.

But there is at least one reader ready to brandish Occam’s Razor: Instead of fertility rituals hyped up by the need to discharge aggression in routinized societies, television is not a necessary but certainly a sufficient condition to explain football’s eclipse of baseball. Football watches better, is more amenable to commercial insertions, and it’s over more or less on time. (Think of how extra inning ball games muck up the advertising schedules of the Johnny Carson Show.) Besides, summer is ebb time viewing. Even Guttmann’s ingenious use of Sports Illustrated covers is TV-tainted evidence.

For it is a truism in magazine promotion and newsstand sales circles that the cover of almost every general audience magazine below the middlebrow level has become telecentric. Empirical evidence in the form of returned, unsold magazines has led most mass magazines into a lemming-like line up of TV-related covers.

The logic Guttmann uses in explaining the diffusion of national sports like rugby and baseball to foreign cultures is sufficiently explained as a geo-political spinoff (Japan and Cuba admired America at the turn of the century-so they imported baseball) rather than through national character symmetries. I would explain baseball’s hegemony as the national pastime between 1920 and 1960 as a result of the media boom of the 1920’s. Tabloid journalism and radio played hard ball in competing for the newly enfranchised (culturally speaking) blue and dirty white colors. Babe Ruth is as much a media invention as the Tin Lizzie. The point is that just as Detroit has an inter- locking half-Nelson on the nation’s economy and culture, so the Madison Avenue/Radio City axis (and its Freddie Silverman lengthening fields of force) sets the frame of attention for the mass, non-Thoreau public-which is to say all of us at least some of the time.

It’s exhilarating and sometimes convincing to trace baseball and football back to mythic roots, but the bottom line so to speak is the attendance at next week’s game, the circulation of this month’s magazine, and the complex symbiosis that we now see develops in all modernized societies, where the media are, quite simply, the metabolism.

Freedom to change these conditions quickly or radically is, in my opinion, freedom from reality. But these are nit picks engendered by a splendid essay. It is immensely satisfying to know that so pervasive, yet paradoxically so neglected a topic, as sports now has a solid foundation for further research and speculation. A prime theme I’d propose to Guttmann’s followers: What is there about the ecology of imagination in America that sports talk can be as pervasive as the weather while sports analysis is as rare as snow in July. Perhaps a foundation ought to give Newsweek’s Pete Axthelm a sabbatical to look into the issue. (But even he, having done so brilliantly as a sports writer, appears to be aspiring to general punditry rather than to staying a mere prattler about punting.)

PATRICK D. HAZARD
Beaver College
Glenside
Pennsylvania