Bring On the Gladiators

The Joy of Sports By Michael Novak Basic Books, 357 pp., $10.95 This book is revolting. Here, in this Bicentennial year, when Americans should at last be coming to grips with Serious Matters, with the racism and sexism and violence that pervade our national life; here, in this epoch of burning moral challenge, when the flames of fascism lick—no longer directly, from fiery crosses in the Southern night, but insidiously, from beneath the dark robes of a reactionary Republican Court—ever closer to the sacred palladia of the First Amendment and the Garrity Plan, threatening even the freedom of expression, the liberal golden gorges, of John Gardner and Linda Lovelace; at this time of terrible extremity, Michael Novak has fiddled, and Basic has published, in a garish red and yellow sports jacket, a book which responds, in effect: Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Let us pray for Notre Dame. Let us worship at a shrine of sports. Let us reject the “constituency of conscience,” the responsible citizen ship of the adult—which requires us to keep up, and participate, and protest in the real world—and return to the crushes and fantasies of childhood, the church and the stadium, synthesized and somehow convergent in a vaporous new transcendence: athletic glimpses of divine grace.

Novak is a Catholic thinker, a former columnist for Commonweal, the author of sundry books on religion and politics; his increasingly conservative views come with a lingering fragrance of liberal nostalgia. Like many lapsing leftists, he is in the process of discovering that the moralistic abstractions of his lifelong creed have nothing to do with the life he must lead, its real interests, institutions, and relationships. He has discovered in conceiving the book, for example, that he is more deeply and ardently engaged in the dramas of sports than in the ostensibly more “important” realms of public life. He finds himself caring more profoundly about the fortunes of the Notre Dame football team than about the inspirational concerns and preachments of Notre Dame President Theodore Hesburgh, a chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Novak even entertains the idea that the football team is more important than the Hesburgh team. Novak also prefers Monday Night Football to Meet the Press, the World Series to the UN. He is bored with suppressing these priorities, tired of being a peeping fan; he begrudges his feelings of guilt and self-deprecation about his addiction the Dodgers.

About the Author

George Gilder

Mr. Gilder is a founder of the Discovery Institute, a venture capitalist, and the author of 15 books, including The Israel Test.

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The Joy of Sports By Michael Novak Basic Books, 357 pp., $10.95 This book is revolting. Here, in this Bicentennial year, when Americans should at last be coming to grips with Serious Matters, with the racism and sexism and violence that pervade our national life; here, in this epoch of burning moral challenge, when the flames of fascism lick—no longer directly, from fiery crosses in the Southern night, but insidiously, from beneath the dark robes of a reactionary Republican Court—ever closer to the sacred palladia of the First Amendment and the Garrity Plan, threatening even the freedom of expression, the liberal golden gorges, of John Gardner and Linda Lovelace; at this time of terrible extremity, Michael Novak has fiddled, and Basic has published, in a garish red and yellow sports jacket, a book which responds, in effect: Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Let us pray for Notre Dame. Let us worship at a shrine of sports. Let us reject the “constituency of conscience,” the responsible citizen ship of the adult—which requires us to keep up, and participate, and protest in the real world—and return to the crushes and fantasies of childhood, the church and the stadium, synthesized and somehow convergent in a vaporous new transcendence: athletic glimpses of divine grace.

Novak is a Catholic thinker, a former columnist for Commonweal, the author of sundry books on religion and politics; his increasingly conservative views come with a lingering fragrance of liberal nostalgia. Like many lapsing leftists, he is in the process of discovering that the moralistic abstractions of his lifelong creed have nothing to do with the life he must lead, its real interests, institutions, and relationships. He has discovered in conceiving the book, for example, that he is more deeply and ardently engaged in the dramas of sports than in the ostensibly more “important” realms of public life. He finds himself caring more profoundly about the fortunes of the Notre Dame football team than about the inspirational concerns and preachments of Notre Dame President Theodore Hesburgh, a chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Novak even entertains the idea that the football team is more important than the Hesburgh team. Novak also prefers Monday Night Football to Meet the Press, the World Series to the UN. He is bored with suppressing these priorities, tired of being a peeping fan; he begrudges his feelings of guilt and self-deprecation about his addiction the Dodgers.