Boys and Sports

The first image is a young boy on a Sunday morning. Sprawled on the living room floor, the boy pores over pages of newsprint. Numbers. Statistics. All the arcane lore contained in the sports section. It is a group ritual. The boy looks up occasionally to share a dramatically improved ERA with his father. The father, lolling on the couch with the Business section, responds with animation. "That reminds me of the 1955 Dodgers. What a season..."

The picture shifts to a large lecture hall on a Tuesday morning. The professor drones on about the reification of post-Kantian theories of kitsch. A student sinks back in his seat. The Globe sports section has replaced notetaking. His pen traces patterns around the box scores. The numbers recall the sensational double play in the bottom of the fifth of last night's Padres-Mariners game.

The final scene is an early-morning meeting at one of those places that caters to the new "power breakfast" crowd. Several businessmen, just off the 6 a.m. shuttle, gather around a table. Before they get started, one man says, "could you believe the game last night. That Winfield homer was about a mile outside the park." The other men look up from their coffee, the edge of caffeine and sports giving an automatic adrenelin rush. An hour later they leave the restaurant, the deal unclosed, but secure in the knowledge that the Yankees have tied up the pennant.

A common thread binds these three images. Sports, as many women have observed, is the secret language of men. It binds--and bonds--men together in ways that most women don't understand. Certainly there are some women who read The Sporting News, and some men who can't live without a copy of Women's Wear Daily. But for the most part sports plays a uniquely male role in our society; it teaches men competition and camaraderie, team play and individual excellence.

The hackneyed television beer commercial--Bob Uecker, Billy Martin and John Madden for Miller Lite--demonstrates the appeal of men sitting around in a bar, watching football and baseball, just being "one of the guys." Beer companies have fully recognized the selling power of the sports-as-male-bonding phenomenon.

The process of indoctrination is gradual. Boys start out under their fathers' tutelage, going to the ball-park on Bat Day and Hat Day. They play Little League and start collecting baseball cards. And they start reading the sports pages.

It is the sports pages--particularly The Globe's--that unite men across generational boundaries. The little boy sprawled on the floor Sunday morning and the business executive share a common passion--the arcania of baseball, the trivia of football, the violence of hockey.

In a sense, the reading of the sports section is a tribal rite of passage for men, indicating that they, too, will take their place among the armchair major leaguers and couch potato/homerun hitters. Grownup men never seem to lose their fantasy of major league status, even if the closest they ever came was a hit with the bases loaded in second grade Little League.

Politicians regularly employ sports metaphors to get their points across, to ensure the voters that they are just "regular" guys. Even George Bush, vice president and candidate with the wimp factor, was captain of Yale's baseball team. And after his 1984 debate with Geraldine Ferraro, he indulged in some spontaneous male bonding with a group of dockworkers. "We kicked some ass," he said. The sports allusion, as well as the sexist content, of his remark is clear.

The same is true of Ronald Reagan's "win one for the Gipper" appeal. Voting has become the extension of a sporting event. And after all, the political news is in the same paper as the sports section.

Susan is an editor in the News Department. She has very little intention of covering any athletics for the Sports Cube.