Happiness is A Sports Fan Whose Team Wins It All!

Geaux, Equipe, Geaux!

Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal evokes what most of us inarticulate supporters of teams, baseball, football, basketball, soccer, or even cricket only feel deep within---the incredible rush that accompanies the victory of MY team in the championships.

Somewhere deep down inside, there has got to be a specific gene, not just parceled out to males, that is activated by a sporting or other competitive activity. And the untrammeled joy of victory is balanced withthe agony of defeat, as Bill Simmons categorized the fifteen most officially "tortured" franchises in major sports---[interesting footnote, with Cleveland owning three and Buffalo with the Bills and Sabres two, Lake Erie generates five tortured teams, with Detroit just a very short drive away to reach the Lions]. Like any New York pseudo-sophisticate, however, Dan cites Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" about the sadness of supporting the '50s Giants, but the flip side is the joy of seeing my own personal hero, Alan Ameche, score the Gigantic Touchdown in The Game in 1958, so one man's poison is another man's joyous choicest cuts of meat!

In 1966, the loathsome Cowboys froze in the Ice Bowl, surely one of the greatest entertainment spectacles of the twentieth century, in a small company town north of the Arctic Circle which gained the sobriquet, sorry, of TITLETOWN and immortalized Vince Lombardi as UeberCoach and Patron Saint of the NFL. I just found out one of my sister-in-law's sisters was at that fabled frozen tundra event, on a field that symbolized the NFL past and future so well, the day Bart Starr plunged that short yard into the end zone and into the Canton Hall of Fame and football immortality.

The reason the Super Bowl regenerates the Immortal Moments of the '58 "The Game" and the '66 "Ice Bowl" onto a yearly basis lies in the genius of Pete Rozelle, the long-ago NFL commissioner who shoehorned the AFC into the NFL with the NFC, making a replication of the Baseball World Series possible. But much more importantly, Pete discovered that equal monies present equal opportunity, which rather than complete equality, is the basis for the American Dream.

Long ago, then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle figured out this greatest of all human truths, that the only value most people have in common, other than life itself, is the desire for a competitive home team. Family members who would sink a dinner fork into each other over Barack Obama's health-care plan will do high fives in the living room later if the Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.Rozelle got the league's teams to distribute TV-broadcast revenue equally, so that no team would be permanently in the dumpster. Basketball and hockey did the same thing. Baseball has not, and it is well established that Chicago Cubs fans do not believe happiness exists.

Happiness has always fascinated thinkers, including America's Founding Fathers. But were the Founders to revisit us, it's not beyond imagining they would upgrade the Creator's inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of fan happiness.

Reading a book on the Revolutionary war by Thomas Fleming last year, i was struck by a vignette from Valley Forge. On March 1, 1778, the Marquis de Lafayette brought George Washington the startling much-hoped-for glorious news that France would put all her resources behind the tiny frozen remnants of the Continental Army. It was the very first day of warm weather after a legendarily tough winter and a bunch of the soldiers were out playing a precursor of baseball called wickets, with sticks for bases, but otherwise more like our National Pastime than cricket. An overjoyed George Washington, the stern immutable leader suddenly took up a stickbat and asked to join. For a few minutes, GW played ball with the guys. Washington was a renowned horseman and, just like his famous successor Abe Lincoln who was a champion wrestler-boxer with forearms as thick as adult men's thighs, anecdotally held to be exceptional in throwing or lifting objects. [This always doesn't work out for the best, as in his youth, Oliver Cromwell was held to be the best "football" player in both Anglia and Cambridgeshire]. But Dwight D. Eisenhower was an All-American in his sophomore year at Army before a crushing knee injury ended his playing days. Gerald Ford was a two-time All American center at U. of Michigan and JFK, RMN, and Ronald Reagan all played on their college football teams. George H.W. Bush was captain of Yale's baseball team. Recently, only LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and GWB didn't play on a college team, but Bush Jr. was famously a cheerleader! Obama played high school basketball in Hawaii.

I digress, but the point is that competitive sports are deep in the bone of the American project, if you will, and watching Obama do play-by-play at the Georgetown-Duke game last weekend reminded me that even if his policies are lame, his analysis of the two teams right then and there was excellent.

Similarly, when soccer-fanatic Henry Kissinger learned of RMN's obsessive interest in college and NFL football, Henry the K applied his superanalytical skills in dissecting the game and would sit next to Nixon during the Sunday games and predict three out of every four plays called by the coach or QB of whatever team in whichever game they were watching. And Kissinger became so impressed with Nixon's own analytical prowess, he credits Tricky Dick with imagining the famous trip to China where Kissinger arranged the tortuous logistics through Pakistan's good offices and Nixon finally shocked the world by going to Beijing in '72.

The extensive digression above is to underline one of the true strengths of American ability to be flexible and suspend disbelief in the impossibility of a given project. The comeraderie which athletic competition builds and sustains are a bedrock to much of the inherent stability of the American way of life.

As Wellington said long afterward "Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."

Now it is up to the Cubs whose last world championship [1908] was nearer in time to Waterloo than to today to figure out how to wing another World Series!