The recent ugly thrust of sports news had me talking with my brother about the last comparable sports-related outrage in the US, which was the steroids scandal in baseball. We were talking about how quaint that seemed compared to the rash of shocking violence from football players, but how (so far anyway) the steroid scandal wrought a greater financial consequence than the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson stories have for football. To explain it, I said that it boiled down to the way the sports are looked at. "Baseball is like a family film and football is like a horror movie, " I texted, "the former is more likely to prompt outrage because horrible things are supposed to happen in the latter."
       That's a flip way of putting it, but recent events have caused me to think more about this theory I've kicked around for a while about what sports have to say about America. Each of our three major team sports, baseball, basketball, and football, reflect our nation's character in distinct ways, like a dressing room mirror. Each reflection is equally accurate, but each is incomplete. Every sport shows something different about who we are, and if you want to push it a bit, one could say that an American's favorite sport reflects exactly which sort of American he or she is.
       Baseball represents our national philosophy and literature. The "nation of immigrants" narrative fits comfortably within baseball as its appeal stretches to the most countries, having significant followings in Central and South America and across Asia, particularly in Japan and South Korea. Baseball shoulders the responsibility of representing the US as a progressive nation, as it was the first of our sports to integrate. Further, it is the only sport whose figure of integration, Jackie Robinson, is a national icon, or even a known name to the American public.
       Baseball in its nature boils down that peculiar American worldview that combines existentialism and triumphalism, the idea that proclaims, "We are alone in a Godless universe; isn't that great?!?!" Our proud individualism is best represented by this game that, as Bill Simmons (our nation's contrarian sports journalism gatekeeper) put it, "is an individual sport masquerading as a team sport." America's fascination with both triumph and defeat is perfectly encapsulated by the at-bat. Can the pitcher outmaneuver, out-scheme, or overpower the hitter with his repertoire of throws and collection of fielders, or can the batter, armed only with a finely crafted piece of wood, his physical gifts and his wits, successfully anticipate the pitcher's plans and find success? The outcome (especially a true outcome of a strikeout or a home run) guarantees roughly half the viewers will be exhilarated and half crushed. Still, as the unheralded giant of American letters Barry Hannah once wrote from the perspective of a war veteran who has just seen a close game end in disappointment for the home crowd, "Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful." Still, that fluffy position makes baseball the most vulnerable to scandal and a lowering of estimation in the eyes of the nation, as with the steroid case or the Black Sox scandal.
      Basketball represents those most American art forms, the ones that take a format and challenge the artist to come up with something on the spot, something new and daring. It represents jazz, hip-hop, and street art, yes, and also comic books, Westerns, and improvisational acting. All these forms are noted as being uniquely American not just because our nation is their birthplace but because they are all structured around the idea of continuously inventing something new. Like baseball, basketball is a celebration of the individual, but not of his capacity to defeat or be defeated. Rather, basketball illustrates the ability to create.
       Basketball players, and specifically point guards, face many decisions of creation every time they bring the ball up court. They can run or set a deliberate pace. They can pass (i.e., collaborate), or not. They can shoot from deep, or dribble into more heavily defended areas. This last option is the most exciting, because it requires immediate, impulsive decision making, improvisation, and gusto. A guard slicing into the lane in basketball is like a rogue trumpet player or rapper making his way onto a stage near the end of a refrain in a jazz club or a battle, armed with knowledge of the tune and technique, but required in a matter of moments to come up with something new, compelling, and hopefully successful. Well-played defense in basketball is something to be appreciated, but we watch because we want to know what the men with the ball will come up with. On the flip side, just like with rock and roll and hip-hop, mostly black artists give the audience indelible memories of brilliance, but they ultimately serve to enrich often loathsome white businessmen, as Donald Sterling and Bruce Levenson recently reminded us.
       And then there's football. Football represents those other parts of America, the ones that make me feel kind of icky, the parts that our friends hate about us. Football is not about individuals. It's about the unchangeable, hierarchical relationship between thinkers and workers. There are those that plan and those that execute. Football, our most popular sport, is a microcosm of the sort of hyper-stratified, paternalistic capitalism that makes this country tragically self-defeating and sometimes seemingly impossible.
       Let's get at that by looking at the constant, creeping militarism that surrounds the sport. Football, as we all know, is extraordinarily violent and its repulsive, Neanderthalesque concepts of toughness have been flaunted for the public to see, first in the wake of the Jonathan Martin episode, then in the context of all these domestic violence cases. People often harp on the ludicrousness the parallels drawn by analysts, fans, and athletes are between participants in a game and participants in a war, and certainly the differences are many and essential. But in truth there are legitimate similarities to be drawn.
       Soldiers aren't supposed to think. They are supposed to follow orders. In that sense, when a football player says "I'm a soldier," he is correct; someone holding a clipboard with better job security and better health insurance has told him exactly what to do, and if he follows orders, he will be rewarded. If he decides to change the plan and do something he thinks will be beneficial to him or the team, he will most likely be reprimanded, especially if things don't work out as the player/soldier hoped.
      This extends to all players, even quarterbacks who are often mislabeled as "Field Generals." Within the parallel military structure of a professional football team, the generals are, fittingly, the general managers, head coaches are colonels, coordinators are majors, and position coaches are either captains or lieutenants depending on their perceived importance on a given team. Players can never hope to be anything more than NCO's. Peyton Manning is likely regarded as a Sergeant Major, but the most decorated enlisted man still has to answer to the lowliest officer. It is probably worth noting here that football players are the lowest paid athletes of any of the three major sports, despite the fact that football's profits run laps around both baseball and basketball.
      Granted, in every sport the players answer to the coaches, but in football they have the least autonomy over their actions. As compensation, they are credited with the "warrior mentality," wherein the willingness to do insane things that will cause permanent bodily harm because your coach/commanding officer told you to is a virtue. Not only that, but when left to their own devices, warriors are expected to be as aggressive and destructive as possible to one another in order to establish a hierarchy of toughness to be respected within the ranks of the enlisted. All the while, soldiers and football players are accumulating bodily damage that will last them the rest of their lives even though they won't have health insurance from the institution to which they've given absolute allegiance once their careers end, which is on the day they are deemed no longer useful.
These principles within football don't just reflect the military paradigm. They reflect an American economy where CEO's get paid 204 times more than their workers. They reflect an American political system where many poor people have been convinced that they want Medicaid slashed and lower taxes on the rich. They reflect a worldview that thinks bringing up any of that is crass and constitutes unspeakable and un-American principles like "socialism" and "class warfare."
      And yet, I am not completely immune to the sport or to what it represents. I cheer the Saints every Sunday and marvel at Sean Payton's technical innovation, just as a part of me cheered when a CIA drone strike killed Al-Shebaab leader Ahmed Godane a few weeks ago. I know that the radical form of capitalism that is on display in this country, while deeply troubling, has also been a driving force of making us the most powerful economic force in the world, a status of which I am proud in spite of myself. It feels good to belong to something, it's great to imagine we're tough, and it's comforting to think that things are the way they are for a good reason. I get it. These things are a part of what we are.
       But as we read the repulsive details of the actions of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson and Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald and Jonathan Dwyer, and as we recoil at the callousness of Roger Goodell, we cannot pretend to be shocked. This, unfortunately, has been here all the time, staring back at us from the mirror.