Tottering Icons

The truth hurts, as they say. After reading Professor Isaacs' obloquy on the pervasive influence of sports (can radioactivity be as bad?), I began to wish he hadn't written it. After all, when one's few remaining icons are caused to totter and crash because of another's very accurate perceptions and insights, you tend to blame the shaker and not the salt.

"The athlete is the high-priced whore of our society."

"Sports teach an ethic of ulterior motives, of ends justifying the means, of putting numbers (along with dollar signs) on everything."

"Corruption is found at every level of competition."

"Our system as a whole has become . . . (and) the U.S.A. is a jockacracy."

These are just a few examples from 211 pages of damning reactions to the deleterious effect of sports on you and me, and why we can't escape. Gambling, cheating, twisted values, misguided nationalism, false goals, greed, exploitation, subversion, violence, and crime - all in the good name of sport - fester our businesses, educational institutions, governing bodies, religions, and social structure, according to Professor Isaacs.

Sounds bad, doesn't it? What's more, the author backs up these ominous views with facts, not to mention excerpts from the classics (Chaucer is his specialty), ex-athletes (also a specialty), other authors, sportswriters, coaches, officials, and a plethora of black marks from history itself.

No, I wish you hadn't had the guts to put it all down in indelible ink, Professor. Having already had my palate excoriated by health-food hawkers, my conscience assailed by women's libbers and natural-energy pushers, and my soul threatened by Watergate politics, X-rated movies, and television, I hate to relinquish my last vestiges of faith to chthonic thinkers like you.

Sure, I knew it all along, that sports were expanding at such a furious pace that evil as well as goodness would get all mixed up in the crush. Agreed that the Olympics have gotten out of hand, that Little League long ago abandoned its concept of baseball as a game of fun, that professional sports are synonymous with Big Business, and that money has become the raison d'être of even amateur sports.

But conscionable sportswriters have been flogging those horses for years, even though they show little signs of dying (the horses, that is). If there was any disappointment with Professor Isaacs' philippic, it arose in the book's imbalance: too much vitriol and opprobrium and not enough exhortation or light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel counsel.

After all, the spectre of "jockacracy" didn't leap upon us overnight; neither will it vanish like a fog bank in the sun. If Professor Isaacs will write another well-documented book on just how he'd propose to stem and correct the cancerous aspects of sports in our society, I might even forgive him for calling the media "contemporary vehicles of myth."

JOCK CULTUREBy Neil D. Isaacs '53Norton, 1978. 221 pp. $9.95

Parton Keese, who earned a few Ds in his day,now toils as a sportswriter for the New York Times.