Doing Violence to Sport

By Stefan Kanfer

The knuckleball comedy The Bad News Bears does not play all its scenes for laughs. In one gritty confrontation, a coach stomps out to the mound and strikes a twelve-year-old to the ground. The moment seems pure fake-believe; in fact it is a Little League echo of Major propensities. Since the start of this year's baseball season, aggression has been the order of the day.

Last week New York Yankee Lou Piniella slid into Boston Red Sox Catcher Carlton Fisk with enough force to trigger a wild on-field brawl--and bloody fights in the stands. One result: Pitcher Bill Lee was so severely hurt that he may be out for the rest of the season. At an Atlanta Braves-Houston Astros game, a controversial first-base call brought the entire Braves bench storming onto the field. The men in blue were forced to leave the stadium with other men in blue--a police escort. In perhaps the ugliest confrontation of this strange young season, Cardinal Pitcher Lynn McGlothen readily forgave himself after hitting two New York Met batters. Proclaimed McGlothen: "If a pitcher feels he has been intimidated by a hitter, he has the right to throw at him."

The same sort of "right" is being exercised in basketball. Boston Celtic Coach Tom Heinsohn rushed onto the court recently in an effort to attack an opposing player. During the N.B.A. play-offs between the Phoenix Suns and Golden State Warriors, Ricky Sobers and Rick Barry momentarily gave up basketball for boxing. Last month hockey suffered a serious disgrace when four Philadelphia Flyer players were arraigned in Toronto on charges of assault and carrying "dangerous weapons" --hockey sticks--during games that resulted in blood on the ice, disorder in the stands and players in the infirmary. Similar Flyer scrimmages have elicited McGlothen-like statements from the opposition of that fight-prone team: "I never have trouble getting up for games against Philadelphia," says Montreal Canadien Defenseman Larry Robinson. "When you play the Flyers, there are more opportunities to hit people."

Perusing these declarations, gazing at these confrontations, the spectator has every right to conclude that anarchy has been loosed in the world of sport, that the center cannot hold--nor can the guard, the forward, the pitcher or the referee. Naked aggression seems on the surface to underline the statement of Political Scientist James Q. Wilson: "People actually get hurt in televised sports programs, and the hurt cannot even be justified by a higher cause. By some standards, it is the most shocking form of violence, done merely for sport or fun."

Is sport becoming a series of organized assaults? Is the new violence an indicator of a lawless epoch, a broken mirror-image of the country at large? The conclusions are not as obvious as they seem. Professional sport is in fact no more violent than it used to be. The beanball has been with us since baseball began. Back in 1920, Cleveland Indian Ray Chapman was killed by Yankee Carl Mays' fastball. Twenty years ago Giant Pitcher Sal Maglie was given the sobriquet "the Barber" because of the close shaves his fastball gave the faces of hitters. Don Drysdale, a Dodger star of the '60s, was famed as a fastballing headhunter. Basketball, theoretically a noncontact sport and one pleasantly peopled with college types, long had its "hit" men, players like Boston's Jungle Jim Loscutoff, whose primary role was to intimidate opponents.

Even the eruptions of hockey can be misperceived. Says New York Islander Official Hawley Chester: "Hockey is actually not as tough as it used to be years ago when there were only six professional teams. The competition was very tough." Then why does the sport seem so bloody? "There's more coverage of isolated incidents. Television and the press have accentuated the violence."

Chester's rationale cannot be dismissed as mere puck passing. Only 22,000 saw the Chapman tragedy; today a man kicking dirt on the shoes of an umpire is seen by millions of viewers. University of California Sociologist Harry Edwards, a former college track star, finds that "the violence in sport is magnified by television. The fan can identify with violence in terms of what he would like to do with the forces he cannot control." And in a recent paper in the medical journal Pediatrics, three physicians reported an "Evel Knievel syndrome" --imitation of exhibitionism in sport. "Televised violence," explains the paper, "especially during sporting events and news reporting, is increasingly implicated in imitative and aggressive behavior exhibited by children."

Those children have had plenty of opportunities to view crunches from closeup angles. Replaying highlights of games that viewers had not seen, ABC Monday Night Baseball showed at length the on-field fracas of the Chicago Cubs-San Francisco Giants game nine days after it occurred. Football cheap shots and beanball brawls, hockey fistfights and basketball square-offs -- exercises of passion that transgress the rules -- are a minor part of any sports event. Yet they are given long and detailed attention, instant and incessant replay.

Therein lie the true hazards of contemporary athletic violence. The debunking of the athlete-as-hero is hardly new. Such disaffected jocks as Dave Meggyesy and Jim Bouton have uncovered more clay feet than there are statues. The facile comparison of football and the Viet Nam War was one of the shibboleths of the '60s. Even the littlest leaguers know that professional sport is hard, fast and punishing. But now there is something more than imagery at stake: a danger that the whole perception of games is being altered.

In his classic study of man at play, Homo Ludens, Historian Johan Huizinga described it as "a free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary life,' " animated by "the impulse to create orderly form." Once the idea of order goes, so goes the game itself-- and its fans. A report commissioned by the Ontario provincial government on hockey violence in Canada concluded: "When the evidence strongly indicates that there is a conscious effort to sell the violence in hockey to enrich a small group of show business entrepreneurs at the expense of a great sport (not to mention the corruption of an entire generation's concept of sport) then one's concern grows to outrage."

The outrage is well placed. Few fans weep for the professional athlete, even when he is hospitalized. He is young, heavily muscled and even more heavily compensated. A six-figure income does much to assuage pain and indignity. The essential concern is with that "entire generation's concept of sport." A fan, an owner or a player who comes to be lieve a pitcher has the right to injure a batter may as well believe that Bobby Fischer has a right to kick over the chessboard when he is threatened, or that order itself is an outmoded idea.

When moral rules are bent, more than sport is mangled. In the end, it is not the players who are cheapened and injured, nor even the event itself. It is the children and adults who watch and then repeat what they see on the playground and in the stands -- and perhaps in their lives. The Bad News Bears is not yet a sports documentary. But what if it be comes one? Would any title be more fitting than that of another movie: End of the Game? Stefan Kanfer

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