In a pre-game ceremony, the school will, for the first time ever, retire a number–jersey 37, which was worn by Manuel Delvalle when he played defensive back and wide receiver for the Warriors in the mid-80s. Manny, a New York City fireman, was killed at the World Trade Center September 11th. At the brief ceremony, his number will be retired and the jersey presented to Delvalle’s mother, who still lives in Brookline. “It just seemed fitting to honor his memory,” said Bill McKeown, the school’s athletic director who coached the football teams on which Delvalle played.
All over the nation this holiday weekend, football teams, indeed all sports teams, will be recalling September 11th and honoring the victims in many small ways. But that is hardly surprising. Ever since the tragedies, it is in our sports stadiums and arenas where America has had its most public catharsis (the Braves-Mets hugfest comes to mind) and where a newly unified America has rallied around its flag and its country. From the flag-waving fans, to the countless renditions of “God Bless America” that replaced “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as the centerpiece of baseball’s 7th-inning stretch, to the flag decals that adorn team uniforms, patriotism has been the theme in which our most prized games are now cloaked. It is hardly a surprising choice for this nation. After all, how many venues are there where tens of thousands of Americans can gather to celebrate together. “In our society, sports is one of the few occasions with the mission being the coming together of community,” says Michael Malec, an associate professor of sociology at Boston College and president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. “It becomes an occasion for collective ritualistic expression of some or our most fundamental values and ideals.”
It is not a new phenomenon either. During the Gulf War, there were similar demonstrations of flag-waving and patriotic fervor exhibited by both teams and fans. The NFL actually considered canceling the Super Bowl because of the conflict. But instead then-commissioner Pete Rozelle decided to go ahead and make patriotism the centerpiece of the game. Almost every college basketball team adorned its uniforms with flags or yellow ribbons. Nor is a phenomenon one that is unique to our country. It is a time-honored faith, as one wise man (Sir William Fraser) once proclaimed, that “the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” The notion implicit in that sentiment is that sports imparts a value system that is integral to the values of a nation and is a training ground to steep young men and women in that faith.
Whatever values are imputed to sports, correctly or not, are the very ones that in the wake of this tragedy are particularly treasured. This crisis has provoked a strong sense of national unity and has given a primacy to the concept of teamwork in combating our enemy. Unity and teamwork are obviously values that are at the very core of sports. “There’s a sense that the way the country has reacted to this crisis is as a team,” says Richard Lapchick, the director emeritus of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sports in Society. Lapchick, who holds a new sports business chair at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, says: “There is no place in which that concept of team is more visible than in the world of sports.”
Lapchick’s prime concern in his long academic career has always been race relations. (He was a leader of the anti-apartheid forces in sports and the racial report card issued by the Northeastern Center has become the most important public yardstick for measuring progress in racial hiring by pro sports.) He says sports has for a long time now reflected, at least on the playing field, the best, if decidedly imperfect, model for racial harmony toward a collective goal. “For a society looking for ways to come together, there’s no place that concept is reflected better than in sports.” In fact, Lapchick is somewhat stunned by how successful America has been in this period in bridging that painful racial divide, even if it may be at the expense of other minority groups. “In the last two months we’ve moved across racial lines more than any time in my life,” he said.
Greg Kannerstein, athletic director at Haverford College, co-teaches a course on sports and society which examines “the interrelationship of sports and national identity.” It is the second time the course has been offered and one repeat assignment has been to attend and write about a sporting event. When the course was offered the first time two years ago, most of the students went to games and wrote about the quality of the play. “This time people were looking at the way sports unifies us and gets us together.” Even though most attended a Philadelphia Phillies-New York Mets game when both were in a heated pennant race, Kannerstein says his students got the sense that “people were not there primarily to watch baseball. It was a patriotic event, not a pennant race.”
In many ways, sports has become a vehicle through which an entire nation is being allowed to reclaim the flag. It is now waved in the stands by fans of all ages, races and political stripes, worn on the field or court by players of diverse backgrounds and different religious and political faiths. “Sports has provided a rally point, a way to rally around the flag,” Malec says. “It no longer belongs to the right wing or this group or that group. It belongs to everybody.”
Lapchick believes that one reason that this sports-patriotism connection has been so sustained throughout the fall is that the athletes themselves have risen to the occasion. “You see athletes being less distant from the fans,” he said. “And you see athletes doing significantly more things in a public way.” Whether that’s ground zero visits, charitable contributions, ceremonies like the New England Patriots honoring the NYC fireman brother of lineman Joe Andruzzi before one game, or small gestures like the Los Angeles Dodgers inviting a New York City fireman (and former minor league baseball player) to be their guest at a fantasy baseball camp, it has clearly resonated in a positive way with the public that had been turning off in many ways to this world of the pampered elite.
Moreover, there has been, at least through sportswriters’ musings, a public reevaluation of the concept of heroism. As a result, athletes have generally been stripped of that designation. To most that has proved a welcome relief from a lofty perch with which many were always uncomfortable. “Athletes themselves began very quickly to take the word ‘hero’ away from themselves,” says Lapchick. “They really recognized that there were people who won this appellation in much more meaningful ways.”
It is easy and very tempting to invest too much meaning in this whole intersection of sports, patriotism and community. But sporting contests also provide–even with the flag-waving and the God-blessing-of-America and stepped-up security–the best in escapism this country has to offer. “The events of September 11th and the ones that followed in the world are pretty overwhelming,” Kannerstein says. “You can’t really take them all in. People are just glad to get onto some safe, familiar ground somewhere and sports offers the perfect place to do just that.”
