Letter from Washington

Where else in the U.S.A. can you attend an important business meeting at nine o’clock in the morning and hear senior officials of a major national enterprise discussing a basketball game played the previous evening? A basketball game played in Seattle the previous evening? The answer, fellow sports fanatics, is Washington, D. of C., where the sports and political cultures are so frequently analogized that they seem in peril of surrendering their separate identities.

We first noticed the omnipresence of the sports metaphor during the days of Watergate. The political press was kicking Nixon around again, this time with decisive vigor. As a prominent editor put it to us at the time, “we’re putting on the full-court press.” And they did, with a sense of team play that Chinese acrobats would envy. What caught the eye from a journalistic viewpoint, however, was what was happening-baby on the sports pages. In most towns, as real Americans understand, the sports section is the toy department of the modern newspaper. A sports writer is respected for his capacity to consume beer, play cards, and otherwise entertain the players on long airplane trips. He makes it an article of professional faith to report only what happens on the field of play. All of the good stories are proscribed by the timeless jock commandment to “leave it in the locker room.”

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Where else in the U.S.A. can you attend an important business meeting at nine o’clock in the morning and hear senior officials of a major national enterprise discussing a basketball game played the previous evening? A basketball game played in Seattle the previous evening? The answer, fellow sports fanatics, is Washington, D. of C., where the sports and political cultures are so frequently analogized that they seem in peril of surrendering their separate identities.

We first noticed the omnipresence of the sports metaphor during the days of Watergate. The political press was kicking Nixon around again, this time with decisive vigor. As a prominent editor put it to us at the time, “we’re putting on the full-court press.” And they did, with a sense of team play that Chinese acrobats would envy. What caught the eye from a journalistic viewpoint, however, was what was happening-baby on the sports pages. In most towns, as real Americans understand, the sports section is the toy department of the modern newspaper. A sports writer is respected for his capacity to consume beer, play cards, and otherwise entertain the players on long airplane trips. He makes it an article of professional faith to report only what happens on the field of play. All of the good stories are proscribed by the timeless jock commandment to “leave it in the locker room.”