It is a question both essential and eternal in the pursuit of understanding the pull. Sports has that. Sports envelops us, has held on to us for as long as there have been scoreboards and grandstand seats and fans who keep their eyes lasered on the former and swarm the latter.
The question:
Why?
Why do we care the way we care?
Why do we invest so much of our souls in the outcomes of games contested by strangers?
We are consumed by movies and prestige television shows. Everyone likes a good night at the theater. We are obsessed with music. One weekend in 1969, 400,000 Americans gathered in upstate New York to listen to a cadre of rock ’n’ roll bands; 16 years later, they held separate yet simultaneous festivals in Philadelphia and London for even more bands, all in the name of the hopeful cause of feeding the hungry.
But sports is something else altogether. Sports is losing yourself in nine innings, or 15 rounds, or four quarters, or three periods or 10 furlongs. Sports is losing sleep when those games go badly for us, or for exulting and experiencing unparalleled euphoria when they go well. We get more of the bad than the good, every sports fan knows that, but we keep shaking that off. Keep coming back.
Why?
“A champion,” the great prizefighter Jack Dempsey once said, “is someone who gets up when he can’t.”
We are drawn to that, yes. We are drawn to life’s winners, always. But sports in America has also forever been the forum in which higher goals are met and broader accomplishments are pursued. Sports always seems to be the barometer forecasting change and the cudgel forcing it — often a few steps, or a few decades, before the rest of society.
In 1936, that was embodied by Jesse Owens, a 22-year-old black man born in the American South and educated in the country’s heartland, at Ohio State. And in a time when he couldn’t have shared a drinking fountain in his own hometown of Oakville, Ala., Owens united the entirety of a nation over the course of seven days during the Berlin Olympics, outsprinting and outjumping the world right under the watchful, rueful eye of Adolph Hitler.
Owens, Barack Obama would say 80 years later, “put a lie to notions of racial superiority — whooped ’em and taught them a thing or two about democracy and taught them a thing or two about the American character.”
Joe Louis would soon do likewise in the squared circle of the boxing ring, another son of Alabama who found opportunity in a different city — Detroit — and thanks to sports. Two months before Owens burned the Nazis, Louis lost a shocking bout to German Max Schmeling, but immediately consumed himself in getting revenge for himself and the US.
So it was that on June 22, 1938, in a rematch that this time featured Louis as the reigning heavyweight champion, he pummeled Schmeling from the start at Yankee Stadium. The fight lasted 2 minutes and 4 seconds and whipped the crowd of 70,043 into a frenzied froth. Louis did all of this with very little celebration, too dignified to exult, too proud gloat.
“He is a credit to his race,” Jimmy Cannon, one of history’s greatest sports columnists, would write in the pages of The Post. “The human race.”
Still, for all the advances Owens and Louis had made, all the moments when they’d inspired even hardcore racists to cheer on their behalf, they were merely the forerunners to Jackie Robinson. Major League Baseball had been lily-white for 62 years thanks to the “Gentleman’s Agreement” among its rulers. But on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson went 0-for-3 with a sacrifice and a run scored in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 5-3 win over the Boston Braves.
It was the first time a black man had played a major-league game since Moses Fleetwood Walker played 42 games for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association in 1884.
“Jackie never wanted to be known as a hero,” his teammate on those ’47 Dodgers, Ralph Branca, once said. “But he was my hero. He was a hero to all of us kids who used to play ball in neighborhoods and never saw race or religion in the kids we played sports with, just ability. Jackie brought that to the Dodgers. Jackie brought that to baseball. Jackie brought that to America.”
Slowly, those three men had proven, beyond rebuttal, that sports really was a place where anything could happen, even the deliberate progress of integration and acceptance. Some would call that miraculous and, societally, it was.
But we’d always seen hints of sports’ thaumaturgic wonder before, dating to Aug. 13, 1919, when, while running in the Sanford Memorial at Saratoga, the great thoroughbred Man O’ War lost by a neck — the only one of 21 races he wouldn’t win and to a horse named Upset (of course).
Fifty years later, the 1969 Mets would prove that all things really are possible on a field of friendly strife, winning 100 games (having never won more than 73 in their history) then blitzing through the Braves and Orioles for the most unlikely World Series championship ever.
How unlikely?
“The last miracle I did,” God (portrayed by George Burns) said in 1977, “was the ’69 Mets.”
That was mere prelude. In 1980 — with the country searching for its confidence and stuck, in President Jimmy Carter’s words, in a malaise — 20 college hockey players, kids mostly from Boston and Minnesota, had the audacity to believe they could beat the vaunted Soviet Red Army team at the Olympics in Lake Placid.
And then did.
“Do you believe in miracles?” Al Michaels asked his stunned audience on ABC-TV.
After that — after watching American sports as closely as we do, for as long as we have, with as much passion as we can — how could we not?
