Intercollegiate Sports in America, 1900-2019
 

Spring 2019


War, Religion, Youth, and the Movies

The long history of college sports in America demonstrates the close relationship between a wide range of American values and their expression through college sports. Issues of fairness, cultural norms, and entertainment all focus on what Americans believe or want to believe about themselves and their country. In addition to all the critiques, analysis, and discussion of college sports, we also need to look at the connection between sports and war, religion, and youth, as well as consider the fictional representation of sports in television dramas and the movies.

War

Sports have always been about war, about training for war, about the critical elements for success in war. Many sports have explicit and clear connections to the skills of combat, to the organizational requirements of battle, and to the ideologies of violent conflict. These games are contests of physical skill matched to enterprises focused on tactics and strategy where the purpose is to conquer. Victory can involve demonstrating the greatest physical prowess, illustrating the value of careful planning and imaginative tactics and strategy. Winning teaches the importance of preparation and training, constant and intense focus on specific measurable goals, and above all, on vanquishing the opposition.

Some sports are more warlike than others. Football, of course, is the quintessential war game. It is conducted as a territorial battle with clear lines of engagement, rules to govern conflict, and a key emphasis on violence and destruction. The game offers a reality play of warlike behavior, carefully contained within limits to reduce the actual physical damage inflicted on players, but never hiding the importance of violence whether in offense or defense. As the game has developed it has evolved from the simple brutal contest of strength and violence in a ground game, reminiscent of America's civil war and perhaps World War I, to a sophisticated version of war closer to World War II and subsequent military innovations with highly specialized skills, careful and sophisticated strategies, high technology innovations, and an emphasis on air attacks.

Other sports are somewhat less warlike, although we only need look at Lacrosse to witness a native American war game domesticated to modern athletic standards. Track and field events highlight a wide range of skills, valuable in war and especially in earlier versions of war. Running, jumping, throwing all are key skills in warfare dominated by individual effort on the ground rather than technological skills, often delivered by air.

Some would say that football in particular but most of our competitive sports serve to substitute for the real thing in an America where only a very small proportion of the population is actually involved in war but the nation finds itself constantly engaged in conflict or in preparation for conflict. We perhaps love our games because they offer us the emotions and vicarious experience of war without the personal danger, and they provide us with a morality play that may help us justify our constant engagement in violent conflict around the world.

Religion

Religion of course has also always been a part of sports, as it has been a part of war. We pray before combat in hopes of divine support that will protect us personally and ensure our eventual triumph. We invoke religion because it is a fundamental human emotion and helps us recognize that success in combat or competition often depends on forces beyond our control. We cannot know if we will be injured, if the game will go our way, if the opposing team will by accident gain a victory, so we invoke a higher power in recognition of our inability, in spite of training and talent, to guarantee a victory. We also invoke religious expression to reinforce our belief that these contests are of significance, that they speak to fundamental values, and that we are engaged in a risky but nonetheless significant conflict.

Americans have various attitudes towards the religion that appears in college sports. Because many of the participants are in public institutions that must follow the dictates of law that requires that the government not support religion, any display of religious sentiment around public sporting events now occasions protest and opposition. Nonetheless, athletics and religion are closely intertwined, and so even when religious activities are prohibited when it appears it is state sponsored (a public prayer before a game in the stadium for example), the players and coaches often evade these rules through a variety of strategies. One is to pray on the field in a voluntary assembly before the game starts. Another to pray on the field in a voluntary assembly after the game concludes. If this activity is not official, is not clearly endorsed by the institution, it can usually take place.

This behavior is enhanced by the drive of many Christian groups to bear witness to their faith in public, a requirement of their mission. The difficulty comes when a coach or other authority figure holds prayer activities of any kind in a locker room or elsewhere in which the players feel obligated to participate. The efforts to eliminate this kind of practice have been consistent in modern times, but not entirely successful.

Youth

Given the overwhelming importance of sports in the media and in college, youth sports has also become a major enterprise. Children from early ages of 5-7 begin participating in organized competitive sports. Although little league baseball and Pop Warner football have been active for many generations, the proliferation of youth sports leagues and training programs tailored to children and teenagers of all ages has become a middle class phenomenon. These sports leagues are independent in most cases of the primary and secondary schools although in preparatory academies for secondary school children of the upper middle class and above, sports is a major activity. The youth leagues require significant parental participation and expense.

In addition, high schools and middle schools sponsor sports programs with an emphasis on football and basketball, track, and depending on the wealth of the school, tennis, soccer, swimming, and other sports. The intensity of youth sports derives in part from the belief that stellar participation in these programs will bring improved access to prestige higher education and perhaps even a scholarship. Parents, in search of ways to differentiate their children from others who might be competing for a place in a selective higher education institution, see in sports success an added achievement that may help their child enter their college of choice. In addition, sports success provides an organized, structured, and parent-intensive engagement for families. It is, however, a class differentiated activity since youth sports requires an investment of time and money to sustain. Those sports sponsored by public schools, football, basketball, and track for example, require much less parental involvement, and the costs are mostly carried by the institution.

Nonetheless, there is considerable controversy over the intensity of these activities at such young ages, the expense, and the class context of the activity. There is also considerable concern over the health impact of contact sports for children of all ages.

Movies

Finally, we come to the movies. It is clear that in America, sports is of such fundamental importance that it requires a fictional representation through the movies. Sports movies idealize various aspects of the games, particularly football, basketball, and some track events, to highlight the values of the moment. Competition, sacrifice, love and disappointment, corruption and heroism, all find their place in the movies, and each movie reflects the sports and society's concerns of the day. If our problems are seen through the lens of racial and class conflict, then the sports movies will focus on this theme within the sports context.

Often, of course, sports in the movies simply provides a vehicle to carry a story about love, or social conflict, or personality development. But the use of sports as the frame for these universal stories and themes recognizes a clear public understanding about the sporting enterprise. No one has to explain to the movie audience why high school football is a key mirror reflecting the development of adolescent attitudes, groups, and stereotypes. We know about football, so our fiction can focus on the human conflicts and issues that are the point of the story.

Sports movies also reinforce another element of sports in our society. We have in sports an entertainment product that is like a play, in that there is a story line, a frame like a stage, and a number of participants. The game covers an orderly progression from introduction of the story line, a flow of action and activity that engages the participants, and a required defined closure that produces a clear result. Like a play, the story is repeated over and over again, with the same structure, the same activities, and the same result (a winner). But unlike a play, the actors are not actors, they are real. The players, who put on the show for us, are actual real people, not individuals pretending to be real people. While the story structure is set and repetitive like a play, unlike a play, the outcome is unknown, we do not know who will win. And unlike the play, where the actors are injured and die only to revive for the next performance, the players on the sports field are truly injured and if they die, cannot be returned to play again. The sports play has its power in part from the real people who suffer or triumph as individuals through their action in the drama. While, like the actors, they may be celebrities, unlike the actors, what happens on the field in the entertainment venue is real life with real consequences. America's values are often seen more clearly in such imagined contests than in the sophisticated talk of scholarly reports or the chattering of experts in the media.

Challenges to Sports in American Culture

Yet while college sports remain a key element in American popular culture, as reflected in the movies, other issues influence the image and marketability of college sports such as drug or alcohol abuse or gambling. The NCAA, to protect the commercial viability of their franchise, legislates a wide range of rules, regulations, and remedies that guide colleges and universities in drug testing, alcohol and tobacco education, and the prevention of gambling. Drug use, of course, is not only dangerous for individual student-athletes but creates a significant competitive advantage for those teams whose players use certain performance enhancing substances, particularly steroids.

Gambling, however, is a truly franchise destroying activity, for the mere suspicion that a player, coach, or team may not compete at the highest level they can because of a gambling obligation takes all the joy and enthusiasm from the spectator's appreciation of the game. Gambling is particularly difficult to control since the amount of gambling by the general public and fans on college sports is high, and if we include illegal betting, internet off-shore gambling, and similar activities, the amount wagered on high profile college games is exceptional. Insulating coaches, players, and others involved in the athletic enterprise from gambling is difficult, but the major scandals involving college sports gambling or fixed games so threaten the enterprise that when they happen, most people are prepared to tolerate very stringent punishment and additional regulations.

Because students often bet on college and professional games and some students serve as bookmakers, the gambling culture surrounds the student-athletes and their programs. Even referees sometimes fall victim to the gambling compulsion. For the NCAA, issues of gambling and drugs fall under the category of ethical behavior.

Sports is everywhere in American life, and whether individuals admire the enterprise in all its facets or find the emphasis and values of sports destructive of what they might regard as true values, there is no escaping the power of this activity to engage the public.


©2019