The Violent Religion of Team Sports

Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) proposes a primal form of religion, the supposed armature on which more elaborate rites are wound. He calls it totemism. A totem is a sacred symbol or, more specifically, an object representing that symbol. Totems derive power from group consensus. Absent a group's esteem, an object is "profane" or ordinary.

Daily life is profane (etymologically, outside the temple), but sacred times are infused with meaning through rituals centered around totems that stand for the group itself. In these rituals, individuals lose themselves in a collective identity: a nationality, denomination, clan, party, or fan base. Trump rallies--with red caps as totems--are recent examples. In the totemic gatherings of the Australian aboriginal clans on which Durkheim based his theory, participants experience a "collective effervescence" that transports them into an ideal realm. Participants are lifted out of their individuality into a field of shared energy, the kind of transcendent power associated with the supernatural.

There are many applications of Durkheim's theory outside of what we normally call religion, particularly the creation of political unity around a totemic flag or king. But I'm especially interested in the theory's power to explain otherwise nonsensical behaviors associated with sports. 

Consider the intense passions and aggressions aroused by otherwise inconsequential activities such a twenty-two men, any one of whom could perfectly well afford to buy his own leather ball, ritually fighting over a single ball by dashing about a field in accordance with arbitrary rules under totems such as Ravens, Cowboys, Panthers, or Rams. This generates numbers called "scores" that obsess ritual participants who identify with one or the other of the contesting clans. Higher numbers are desired. I was a child in Auburn, Alabama, born into a clan with two totems, the Tiger and the War Eagle, but I lost faith and have become apostate.

My curiosity stems from the fact that I am indifferent to team sports and sometimes find them painful to watch, with PTSD-like flashbacks. I seldom played unless forced to in high school PE, and these were pickup teams chosen freshly each day. The most consistent thing about the teams was my being chosen last by whichever captain lost the coin toss. Basketball was tolerable because it was chaotic and I had practiced on a goal in the backyard. Also players weren't singled out and yelled at. Touch football was relatively painless because I could hide in the line. But softball was fifty minutes of hell, the tedium of waiting to strike out or miss a catch and get yelled at. I wanted my team to lose because that slowed the batting rotation and might spare me the humiliation of striking out again. I heard that Abner Doubleday invented the torture instrument and imagined returning in a time machine to murder him in his cradle.

I attended high school football games because Friday night was a social event with leggy majorettes. I enjoyed halftime but ignored the game. Our team usually lost anyway, and the jocks weren't my buddies. My friends dug literature, art, music, and bike riding. 

When I moved on to college--Auburn University, a big football school--I had free tickets to the stadium where strangers cheered strangers banging into each other, but I never attended. Home-game afternoons in Auburn were like a zombie apocalypse, parked cars everywhere, the streets empty. I rode my bike through neighborhoods, hearing broadcasts of the game through open windows (before air conditioning or television) and roars from the stadium a mile away. The city was fixated on an oblong ball. The whole thing puzzled and amused me, a town gone mad.

William Carlos Williams captures this in his poem, "The crowd at the ball game." He notes the practical inconsequence of a sports competition, a ritual meaningful only because its arbitrary rules are accepted. The crowd is "moved uniformly / by a spirit of uselessness / which delights them." This purity of purpose is "all to no end save beauty." But then Williams turns to the dark side of such a pure--thus irrational--collective will. It is "to be warned against / saluted and deified." The crowd is subhuman as well as superhuman and understood as "deadly, terrifying" by persecuted minorities and women subject to catcalls. It has no mercy for those who are different. "It is the Inquisition, the / Revolution." Caught up in a crowd, people commit cruelties they never would as individuals, seeing clan-outsiders as justified targets for violence. 

 Eventually, I taught at a small Alabama college where I enjoyed the basketball games--knowing the people again--but never have understood the link between sports and school spirit. A poet friend joked: Auburn isn't going to the Sugar Bowl this year. The buildings weigh too much, so they're just sending the team. What sane person could conflate the antics of a few jocks on athletic scholarship--not even academically competitive--with the value of a university? Hell, bring out the physics professors. It's a different bunch of athletes every year anyway, but let them don the totemic helmets, the school colors, and fans transfer loyalty.

I'm obviously missing something here that the howling stadium understands instinctively, an absorption of individuality into the mana of the totem. Standing outside, I feel threatened. If I were inside, I'd feel empowered. I think of hip-hop videos of young black men making synchronized power moves as they yell into a camera. If I met such a group on a city sidewalk, I would be threatened. Who's the market for this? It seems the stuff of nightmares. But, obviously, that's only because I'm an old white man. The audience for such a video is marginalized youth who identify with the ritual power of the defiant young men, their totemic clothing, and imaginatively join in the line, energized by solidarity with friends. I am looking through the wrong end of the camera.

At the heart of ancient religions and even Christianity today is ritual blood letting, the sacrifice reenacted every Sunday in the mass. Sports secularize this. So do, of course, ceremonies honoring the flag, for which it is said that soldiers died. 

Sports violence is hedged in by rules and protective equipment designed to render it non-lethal, but only halfheartedly. Injuries are required. What if the NFL switched to flag football? The IBF required thickly padded gloves and helmets, scoring on points? Or NASCAR limited speeds to 50mph? Eliminating injuries, would end the blood-sport appeal. Popular sports ritualize violence against enemies--mock battles between us and them--with a chance of real physical hurt. Nonviolent sports such as golf and curling don't draw arenas of screaming fans.