Good News

By Crispin Sartwell

It is often said that there is not enough good news in the paper, and, indeed, every day's news brings with it an onslaught of terrorism, disaster, mayhem, and stupidity. And it is often said that the American heterosexual male is a loutish philistine, beery, boorish, unimaginative, insensible to the finer things in life.

Both of these ridiculous aspersions can be answered in a single word: sports. I myself greet each new day with the sports section and ESPN, and to tell you the truth, the average American man cares more about football than about his family, his country, his health, or his sacred honor.

This is precisely how it should be, because for us sports represents the aesthetic dimension of experience, what is valuable for its own sake as opposed to being instrumental to something else. Our devotion to sport shows our exquisite sensibility, our devotion to beauty and imagination in their most exalted forms.

The aesthetics of sport makes mere ballet or painting or opera seem rudimentary, and the people who appreciate them chumps. For though sport is a profoundly democratic and accessible art, it is capable of almost infinite sophistication, and understanding baseball is a far more subtle matter than understanding Rubens or Bach.

When Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons quarterback, dashed to paydirt a couple of weeks ago, we sports fans appreciated the fact that he scored. But the reason the play was repeated ad infinitum was because of how he ran: with power and grace, a kind of modern dance of total urgency and total artistry. No one else would have made that play in precisely that way: who Michael Vick most deeply is was expressed as he juked various linebackers and safeties out of their Adidas.

Perhaps the art form most comparable to sport is jazz, because though the art is the outcome of extreme practice and devotion, every situation that calls it out is unique, and hence every particular work is an improvisation. Vick's run was something he had prepared for us by a lifetime of devotion, but it was something that emerged with absolute spontaneity. Compared to that, Bach looks merely rigid. Bach achieves a laborious perfection, but Vick's is liquid, flowing: it crystallizes craft into a perfect instant.

In my hometown, Washington D.C., two geniuses of sport - Michael Jordan and Darrell Green - are winding down their brilliant careers. Jordan, the Baryshnikov of the hardwood, soars lower now, but with a knowledge and mastery that are still exalting. Jordan's body seems to be in a different relation to his mind than for the rest of us: he seems to exert a conscious control of every part of his body simultaneously, so that every movement is a kind of barrage of entirely personal expression.

One of the great plays in football history occurred when Redskins cornerback Darrell Green, in his rookie season twenty years ago, chased down Dallas Cowboy running back Tony Dorsett from behind after Dorsett, in his gorgeous way, had run the length of the field. That play showed Green's speed, and Green was at that time the fastest player in the NFL. But it wasn't just speed that made him great: he had the ability to anticipate as if telepathically where the play was flowing, and where the ball was flying. And then he'd be there, knocking the ball down, or taking it and flowing with it in the other direction.

Though I may be unhappy when I read the sports section, because my team lost, it all happened in the realm of art rather than down here in reality. It doesn't matter, really, that the Skins lost, and so even the pain brings with it a certain pleasure, as when, at the end of a Greek tragedy, the stage is littered with fictional corpses.

And the ecstasies, though real, also have the attenuation typical of art. So I certainly celebrated the victory of my alma mater, the University of Maryland, in the NCAA basketball tournament last spring, but I did it in a fairly restrained way, got a good night's sleep, and woke without a hangover.

In short, as the Italians have their Dante, their Michelangelo, their Fellini, we have our LaDainian Tomlinson, our Stevie Francis, our Jason Giambi. And if they want to trade - as I'm sure they do - they're going to have to throw in some future draft choices.