Why Sports Matter To Us

A couple weeks ago, Sports Illustrated reported that perennial baseball all-star Alex Rodriguez had used steroids earlier in this decade. Since then, the sports reporting establishment (especially the ESPN Hype Machine) has been going nuts, examining the story and every tiresomely conceivable repercussion of it, ad nauseum.

Why so much teeth-gnashing and garment-rending when most people take the availability and use of performance-enhancing drugs to be a matter of fact in the entertainment industry known as sports? I think that it has everything to do with how we Americans see sports in relation to ourselves and our own lives.

We are all familiar with the great American myth: Work hard, be honest, have a better idea (or realize an old idea in a better way), keep trying and everything will work out for you. The level playing field of America's marketplace will see that you rise to the top.

But, of course, that myth is nonsense, pure hokum. We have all seen cheaters prosper, have seen well-connected incompetents rewarded, have seen capable people discounted or discarded because they are from the wrong side of the tracks, are from the wrong family, are the wrong sex, or race, or age, or sexual orientation. That supposed "level playing field" is easily distorted by social prejudices and by the power that great accumulated wealth wields.

In harsh truth, you can strive all you want. Whether or not you succeed is, to a great degree, completely out of your hands.

But, in sport, we Americans like to believe that the great American myth still survives as an actuality. We want to believe that if you have done the hard work that enables you to hit a pitched ball consistently well, to adeptly shoot a basketball through a hoop, to throw a football with pinpoint accuracy, then your utility as a player will be obvious and you will be rewarded.

At its best, sport is an idealized version of America, in which the rules are the same for everyone once they step onto the playing field -- just as they are supposed to be (but never are) in our everyday lives.

And so when players (or coaches or officials) cheat, conspire with gamblers, take illicit performance-enhancing drugs, they are not merely breaking the rules of the game or the laws of the nation; they are betraying our own finely-constructed fantasy version of the nation. They are destroying our house-of-cards view of the United States of America.

Nothing can be so jolting as coming face-to-face with reality. No wonder we react so badly.