Before we had sports

What was the world like without ballparks and bowl games?

May I assume that all of you awake this morning eschewed New Year's Eve revelry and are thus well rested, clear-headed and ready to attentively watch bowl games?

As we turn the page to a new year, this is also the time to pose that age-old question: What exactly did we do before we had sports?

Mostly, when we think about the past, we wonder how our forbears managed without cars and electricity and indoor plumbing, but I've always been more fascinated with what ordinary people thought about.

Now, I appreciate that many wise and sensitive citizens don't give a fig about sports, but many others, the world over, are devoted to them. The latter is the type of individual I wonder about. Without sports, without bowl games and the NBA and the NHL, what exactly were these sorts of people doing with their time back, say, 200 years ago, on Jan. 1, 1803, when Thomas Jefferson sat in the White House?

Not only were there no sports to speak of then, but the President was mighty glad of it. "Games played with the ball," Mr. Jefferson declared, "are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind."

Of course, I am not really talking about playing games, which every culture has done, with pleasure. "A man should spend his whole life at play," Plato himself opined. I'm talking about spectator sports. Oh, there have always been the occasional sports festivals, such as the Olympics, or the fair at Nottingham, where Robin Hood split the arrow. But only in the latter part of the 19th century did spectator games take on a quotidian aspect, did they begin to assume an everyday place in our lives. And now, since the advent of television, sports have become, simply, ubiquitous.

I remember, as a child, learning, with wonder, that, at every moment of every day, a Tarzan movie was playing somewhere in the world. Now, literally, any fan, anywhere, who wanted to could watch a sporting event every waking moment of every day. And sports talk is constant on the radio. Sports articles, statistics, betting odds, fill more and more newspaper columns and periodical pages and Web sites.

What did all the people who devour this stuff do before there was sports? What did they think about? What did they talk about with their buddies? They couldn't have talked about sex all the time, could they?

Am I crazy to wonder about a thing like this?

After all, it is not just sports themselves. Sports has spilled over to infect so much of the rest of our lives. Wins and losses -- standings -- matter so much more now. Why, as quaint as this sounds, once upon a time people used to just evaluate a movie on the basis of whether they liked it or not. Now, as soon as it comes out, a movie is assessed by ticket sales. Everything is ratings and polls. This is the sportification of the world.

Maybe it isn't just because of sports, but there seems to be less subtlety in the world today. We demand finality, results, just like on the field of play. Thumbs up, thumbs down. That awful word: closure. The games are always on, always around us.

What was it like, Gramps, before sports? There, 200 New Year's days ago, was President Jefferson, sitting in the White House, fulminating about ball games, while outside men and women were meeting each other and none of them -- none -- were talking about the Fiesta Bowl or if the Lakers will get straightened out or who they like in the wild-card games. What were they talking about? What did involve them? What in the world filled that vacuum before sports came along?

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebookswww.google.com w Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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