Welcome to Lesson 4, where we will discuss the Big Three in American sports: Baseball, Football, and Basketball. Our text for this week is Michael Mandelbaum's The Meaning of Sports. Each lecture will focus on a chapter from this text. Today's focus is on Chapter 1: "A Variety of Religious Experience."
Although Mandelbaum's chapter title points to religion as the central focus, his text is much more generally applicable. His primary goal throughout the text is to explore three major questions that we will discuss in a moment. As you read through each chapter, you should hear echoes from the first two weeks of class in which we discussed the definition and history of sport and modernity. For today, our objectives are fairly simple. I want you to: understand the basic structure of Mandelbaum's text/argument, be able to offer some basic answers Mandelbaum's three questions.
I asked you to read Mandelbaum's first and second chapters last week (and I never asked you to read his introduction), so let me draw your attention to three of his primary questions: 1. What human purposes are served by organized athletic competitions? You might note that the phrase "organized athletic competitions" jibes well with our own definition of sport from Lesson 1. 2. What accounts for the rise of organized team sports in the late 19th century? You might note that we studied some of the contexts for this shift when we studied the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modernity. Mandelbaum's final question is: 3. Why did the U.S. develop its own distinctive set of team sports (baseball, football, basketball)? We have addressed this question in passing when we discussed some of the ideologies behind American sports. You might also note that these three questions speak to several of the sociological theories we discussed last week. How and why do we create meaning as individuals and as a society? As Mandelbaum explains early on in his book, he is using both a functionalist and a critical perspective.
So, let's take a look at each question and the answers Mandelbaum provides in Chapter 1. First, "what human purposes are served by organized athletic competitions"? Mandelbaum's reply is two-fold: organized athletic competitions provide "diversion and clarity" and "shining examples." He argues tha - as we have already seen - modern life lacks some of the ritual and stability of pre-modern life. Whereas religion and religious rituals used to structure life, modern society is much less predictable. Think back to some of the changes we have already studied: the rise of urban centers (cities), the explosion of transportation and mobility (both social and geographical), the rise of public schools, and increased leisure time. In this time of great upheaval, people looked for new routines, ways to create stability and order. Sports helped to fill those needs by providing a diversion and by providing some clarity.
Sports provide both diversion and clarity in numerous ways: they provide a diversion from the everyday much like religion used to provide a diversion from the daily grind of survival. Sports have all the properties of a drama (including characters, a narrative story, a building plot, a climax, a resolution, and catharsis - aka an emotional release - for the audience); but sports are even better than drama because they are not scripted. Each game is a new experience with an unknown outcome. Sports are exciting! They take your whole attention away from everyday life and allow you to focus on something else; they provide an escape. At the same time, modern sports provide clarity - in an unstable world - because they are transparent: there are specific rules, established positions, recognized teams, and each game has a definitive end - especially in American sports where a tie game is rarely an option. Plus, one need not be an American or understand all of the ideologies at stake to watch a game. Sports are available as diversions to anyone.
Aside from diversion and clarity, sports provide what Mandelbaum calls "shining examples." Because Mandelbaum is interested in explaining how sports are the newest religious experience, he likens sport heroes to religious figures. But we can read Mandelbaum in terms of modernity and not simply religion. For example, nearly all of the terms on this slide could be aligned with ideologies of modernity - maybe even Guttmann's seven characteristics that we studied in Lessons 1 and 2. In any case, Mandelbaum wants us to understand that sports - and sports heroes - provide these shining examples for us. Modern sports are authentic in that they are unscripted events with unknown outcomes. What you are watching is the real competition, not a scripted drama. And Mandelbaum notes that one of the worst things a sport hero or a sport team could do is purposefully lose a game. The shining examples of modern sports are virtuous because they embody all of the character traits we want to encourage in our American society. Here, Mandelbaum assumes a functionalist perspective wherein sports can illustrate and help teach viewers how to act and be productive members of society. Sports teach us about hard work, team work, determination, individual achievement, etc. The shining examples of modern sports also illustrate physical skills that are a rarity in modern society. In an era of desk jobs and CGI, viewers like to watch people who actually possess physical prowess and are capable of great feats of physical strength and speed. Finally, the shining examples of modern sports are consumable, public, transparent, and measurable. We examined transparency (via clarity) in the last slides and in the past Lessons we have discussed sports as measurable and consumable. Check back on your older notes for those explanations or look to Mandelbaum between pages 15 and 16.
I want to spend a little less time on Mandelbaum's second and third questions because we have covered them in more detail. But I will highlight a few important terms and ideas from Chapter 1 of The Meaning of Sports. Mandelbaum asks: What accounts for the rise of organized team sports in late 19th century America? He answers this question by pointing to the uniqueness of American culture. Unlike many of the other cultural moments we have studied (including the Greeks, the Romans and the British), America represents social democracy. There is not a long-standing American aristocracy, one is not born into a vocation, some social mobility is possible. American team sports represent this cultural ideal. While the origins of many American sports can be traced back historically, there have been several innovations that have led to the rise of American team sports, most notably the principle of the games. Modern British sports and modern sports in many other cultures share several features, including uniforms (uniformity), the division of labor (akin to factory work), and even the rules of some games (rugby is kind of like football; cricket is kind of like baseball). But modern American sports also highlight the values you see listed on this slide: social leveling, upward mobility, merit, and the recognition of deeds.
These features can be summed up under two rubrics: "specialization and interdependence" and "cooperation and competition." Modern sports require that players have particular positions, that they divide the burden of play on the field and then work together to accomplish a winning game As a result, modern sports depend on cooperation within a team and a sense of competition between teams. Both are necessary features of team sports, but not the individual sports of a pre-modern society. Finally, and as we have already seen, modern sports follow codes: rules or laws that make their games universal, transparent, legitimate and objective. Mandelbaum used the example of subjective versus objective scoring. In individual sports, like ice skating, the results are up to a panel of judges who offer subjective scores. In a team competition, like football, the results are based on established rules and the very clear (well, usually clear) scoring system that does not depend on aesthetic judgment.
Mandelbaum's final question is: Why did the U.S. develop its own distinctive set of team sports (baseball, football, and basketball)? His answer jibes with much of what we have seen in the past weeks: sports vary by time, place, and culture. Or, in his words: "sports follow the flag" or the nation. American sports have distinguished themselves because they follow American ideologies. As with Guttmann's seven characteristics, we see equality cropping up again here. Remember: ideologies are not perfect and they do not have to be perfectly implemented to exist. America certainly has some aspects of equality and not others. In any case, equality is an American ideology that shows up over and over again. Here too, Mandelbaum points to American sports as representative of larger cultural ideals: America as a melting pot, as a unified nation in which individuals have social and geographic mobility. As we have seen throughout this lecture and Chapter 1 of Mandelbaum's text, American sports have a particular profile, one that we will talk more about in the next few lectures as we go on to discuss the big three in American sports: baseball, football, and basketball. Until next time . . .
