Scripted Damage

A sports fan I'm not. Somehow I was absent when the gods implanted the resonators that start New York males vibrating at a victory of the city's Knicks, Yankees, Giants, Jets, or Rangers and reciting endless streams of information about past and present stars of basketball, baseball, football, and hockey. Yet during the baseball season I rarely resist a glance at the daily newspaper's sports pages to see whether the hapless Chicago Cubs are doing better than in the half century since they last won a National League pennant and the near century since they last won a World Series. Growing up in the Chicago area implanted one reed of a resonator – not enough to capture emanations from the Chicago Bulls, White Sox, Bears, or Black Hawks, but sufficient to sound a plaintive note of sports chauvinism when I least expect it.

Pursuing the classic question “Why is there no soccer in the United States?”, Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman remark that working-class males throughout the Western world generally grow up attached to the professional sports teams they followed as children. In that way, they acquire one of the few national cultural idioms that put them on easy speaking terms with fellow nationals from different classes, callings, and cultures. Nor is the attachment to teams politically innocent: