Bloodball

By J. G. Van Tine

In this revised and expanded edition of Bloodball, J. G. Van Tine probes the mind-set that dominates media sport. By uncovering covert games, tactics and payoffs, he redefines the hero worship that vaunts a tiny minority while luring the majority into conflicted passivity. As the sporting audience rarely glimpses those who run the corporations and own the teams, Bloodball attempts to ease this relation by revealing how and why the media disguise corporate control and power plays, among them the History Fob, Getting Wa-Wa, Branding, and Your Heart Belongs to Daddy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: My Seashell Books - Michele L. Hinton
• Release date: Sep 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310548130

Book preview

Bloodball

By

J. G. Van Tine

Bloodball

By: J. G. Van Tine

Copyright © 2015 J.G. Van Tine

Smashwords Edition

Published by: Seashell Books

All Rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in database or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher or the author.

http://www.myseashellbooks.com

Dedicated to

Kurt Van Tine

Preface to Second Edition

This book probes our passion for games. Likewise it explores the beliefs and values shaping that passion. In contemporary usage, game has two meanings that concern us: one athletic or sporting, one provocative or insidious. Hockey, basketball, baseball and football are games; Scaredy Cat and Moon-em are also games, as are Alcoholic and Let’s You and Him Fight as described by Eric Berne in Games People Play. A game in the second sense is not an athletic contest but a series of moves with a gimmick or snare. Such games are differentiated from pastimes and rituals by their covert payoffs. As defined by Berne, they are power plays: some are dangerous; others appear benign; Alcoholic and war games appear less benign; still others are too perverse to fit comfortably in media discourse; still others are too menacing to be acknowledged at all.

As we shall see, media sport addresses not simply contests and games but most issues of social order, transmitting ways of judging that most people are unaware of using. As various writers have demonstrated, media sport makes extensive use of gossip, nostalgia and legends, employing athletes to embody collective aspirations. In Media, Sports & Society, Lawrence A. Wenner cites standard structuring: In the broadcast booth, a play-by-play announcer plays the lead role as ‘master of ceremonies,’ and the supporting cast is largely made up of ex-jocks who serve as ‘color’ announcers. The color announcer fills in ‘dead spots’ with insider’s information. This insider’s information can be technical background about the rules or statistical information with a bearing on strategy, but just as often may be a humorous ‘historical’ story about the participants. Retold many times, these stories become part of the mythic structure of mediated sports culture. We shall see that what sport sociologists call the mythic structure of media coverage has been articulated for more than one hundred and thirty years, with each new generation mistaking this complex of fictions for modern because they are unaware of its source and purpose.

Other writers (Hargreaves 1986, Grant 1988, Gorn and Goldstein 1993, Quinn 2009) stress how sport is used for obedience training and ideological conformity, an international pattern with a long history in which sport propaganda, a cousin to war propaganda, promotes awe of authority, martial virtues and the conqueror’s viewpoint. In Sport, Power and Culture, John Hargreaves portrays the media working for ideological conformity and social control: Media sport often reads like a handbook of conventional wisdom on social order and control. There are homilies on good firm management, justice, the nature of law, duty and obligation, correct attitudes to authority, the handling of disputes, what constitutes reasonable and civilized behavior, on law and order and on the state of society generally. Media sport encodes an ideology of order and control in the way the conduct of participants in sports events and that of spectators is depicted.

What is valuable in stressing sport’s relation to political agendas? If the media work for greater control of the lower classes (the lower 95%?), what can we gain by scrutinizing those who control media presentation? Evidently we prefer myths over psychology for reasons that many cultures have found seductive: myths disguise transience; they soften our perception of necessity; they blur the outlines of economic barriers; they open spaces where courage and adventure appear to thrive. I call our primary myth Bloodball to denote a belief system, a complex of games (both kinds) complicated by legends. Bloodball is also a love story. Seen through conventional lenses, sports inhabit a space in which pleasure, enthusiasm and admiration appear to exist without colliding with political imperatives or business calculations; they also celebrate power in the paradoxical sense that the English, American, French and Russian Revolutions were driven by the promise to empower ordinary people. Bloodball, offering its own vision of how such contests are fought, puts us in touch with lost potentials, the stuff of dreams, the motives that feed myths.

Introduction: Myth and Power

Every man is a master and also a servant, a vassal.

~Mark Twain

Social power, dividing us into masters and vassals, makes most of us uneasy. Power is far more than social advantage: it imposes, intimidates, overrules and deceives by turns. When we are pressed to account for power in ordinary language, we almost invariably use myth or ideology, a habit that stems from childhood when adult knowledge and accurate explanations were beyond reach. As a result, displays of power usually cause embarrassment followed by phony explanations.

Admittedly, most insiders describe the magnetism of sport without considering myth, embarrassment or phony explanations. A veteran athlete explains the appeal of violence in professional hockey: Being a physical man in the modern world is becoming obsolete. The machines have taken the place of that. We work in offices, we fight rules and corporations, but we hardly ever hit anybody. Not that hitting anybody is a solution. But to survive in the world at one time, one had to stand up and fight — fight the weather, fight the land, or fight the rocks. I think there is a real desire for man to do that. Today he has evolved into being more passive, conforming.... I think that is why the professional game, with its terrific physicality — men getting together on a cooperative basis — this is appealing to the middle-class man. He’s the one who supports professional sports.

Although I said that most Bloodballers ignore myth and ideology, we do not have to look under the surface to find their impact. A myth, i.e., survival of the fittest, appears here as the irrational faith of those who seem least fit, just as Man the fighter appears as a compensation fantasy for sedentary consumers. The ideological tenet, of course, is competition. According to Bloodball believers, competition provides identity, or as the same athlete says, This is one of the ways you are somebody — you beat somebody. (Laughs) You’re better than they are. Somebody has to be less than you in order for you to be somebody.

If we want to see the importance of myths, we need only look at their hold on children. Both myth and ideology rest on assumptions that we absorbed in childhood, a network that we use daily for understanding news and gossip. Winning and losing belong to this network: The whole object of a pro game is to win. That is what we sell. We sell it to a lot of people who don’t win at all in their regular lives. Like profit and loss, winning and losing work as assumptions behind our explanations. Some may say that the winning and losing of games are incontrovertible facts, and, of course, they would be correct. The facts, however, acquire their emotional charge through premises that have nothing to do with sport, that is, through the network of assumptions that underpin Bloodball as they underpin every myth and ideology from Plato’s ideal of government to Henry Ford’s ideal of corporate discipline.

Evidently we are dealing with an invention that masks its own operation. Who conceived it? Who set it in motion? Like the Industrial Revolution, Bloodball has no birthday. Its emergence as our dominant myth, however, is neither obscure nor subtle. Anyone can follow the growth of Bloodball as a culture-wide orientation with predictable ways of evaluating and judging from a decade after the Civil War to 1900, an epoch in which the concentration of wealth in the hands of bankers, industrialists and railway magnates was being mystified by apologists for Social Darwinism. Likewise Bloodball provides our vision of the good life, a life of play without stressful work and dubious status, as in our sense of the sport field, ballpark or athletic club as a liberating oasis or pleasure garden. We might like to forget who owns the franchise, but in American sport forgetting does not come easy. As Eliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein note, Fans experienced the ball park as an arena of play so long as owners quietly ran their businesses like paternalistic plantations or benign company towns. Men such as Albert Spalding could speak of baseball as a democratic game only if no one noticed the power of management to blacklist, buy, sell, fine, and suspend players, to dictate salary terms to them, to regulate their behavior with temperate pledges and private guards.

I said that we can see the importance of myth in its hold on children. Few children resist lures to bond with the conqueror in stories that build on inherited images: Hercules, Samson, Achilles, Aeneas, Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Charlemagne, El Cid, Genghis Khan. As we shall see, justifications of the conqueror take many forms, some ingenious, some dubious, some fabulous, some inspired, some criminal, some brilliant. Our reigning myth uses them all. We will call our myth Bloodball because, in addition to exciting games and the good life, it insists on disaster and mass sacrifice. Historians touch the core of this myth when they link war with the imagination of sport. When Gorn and Goldstein consider the impact of the Civil War on American sport, they stress men killing men on orders from above as a master metaphor, the key memory in the national mind: War initiated new concentrations of corporate wealth and bureaucratic power, and it deepened the division between those who owned the nation’s means of production and those who labored for wages.... The war not only transformed American society; it provided a well of memory, a master metaphor for the belief that conflict between individuals, classes, and nations lay at the heart of human existence.

There is no shortcut to summarizing this well of memory. War as actuality or imagination confronts us with propositions that Bloodball both embraces and censors: regimentation is productive; hierarchy is essential to repression and exploitation; despotism pays; cheating and duping are always legitimate; confused or broken people make the most useful citizens. For many of us, these propositions range from offensive to insufferable, but as sporting tales remind us, these propositions are embedded in our myths and no horde of speech writers, media promoters or advertising slicksters will get them out.

The chief wonder of education, notes Henry Adams, is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. Despite the diversity of society, despite massive propaganda for education, despite feuding factions, protest movements and a two-party system, nearly everyone displays the same mythic bind because everyone learns the same assumptions regarding disproportionate wealth and corporate rule. Few are disgusted by the fusion of big business and organized sport. Instead this marriage is often the object of contradictory celebrations, as in the following account of how wealthy Texans do business: ‘We combined baseball with a cocktail party,’ says Fred Hofheinz, 56, the Judge’s younger son, himself a former mayor of Houston and his father’s right-hand man in the first years of the Astrodome. ‘You can wander around your box with a drink in your hand and sell some guy some insurance. And I promise you, there are people all over sports now who never look at the sports event. The whole time, they’re selling. I was at a Rockets game last Saturday, and I don’t even remember who won.’

As we have all been through the same indoctrination, we have learned to expect the contempt for sport in such celebrations of corporate omnipresence. Those who made Bloodball the creed of the twentieth century are committed to ensuring its dominance in the twenty-first. By a common estimate, an American watches 350,000 commercials before reaching age twenty. According to those behind this barrage, the twenty-first century should endlessly reproduce familiar habits and slogans, the old modes of dominance and the standard power plays. In the following chapter, we will see that the Bloodball hero is an idealized conqueror who is part of our self-image, yet works against our interests.

~1~

Myths and Social Games

Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

~Mark Twain

In one of the pivotal autobiographies of Western culture, Henry Adams writes of seeing contradictions, that is, of visualizing the barriers that block clear thinking: Images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof, but the mind craves them, and, of late more than ever, the keenest experimenters find twenty images better than one, especially if contradictory, since the human mind has already learned to deal in contradictions. As we shall see, this immersion in contradictions with its surrender to contradictory images defines myth just as surely as it defines the autobiographer’s assessment of his own life. Mythic images in one’s life repeat the contradictions of the culture in condensed form.

Adams, the grandson of one U.S. president and the great-grandson of another, saw his contradictions throughout the subordinate classes of a society that his class was expected to rule. One contradiction that Adams laments is that education weakens whomever it tries to empower. Another is lack of vital knowledge amidst an abundance of information. Yet another is lack of control over his life while he continues to make himself responsible for all that he does. The eagerness with which Adams and his contemporaries embraced myths did much to multiply these contradictions, e.g., the myth of Social Darwinism, of meritocracy, of the elite’s superior competence. On the latter legend the elitist Adams, believer in strong government and a robust United States, was seldom prone to charity. On the contrary, when viewing the corporate dominance that had replaced what passed for agrarian democracy, he reflected the contempt of most free men for machine-bound slaves: "The work of domestic progress is done by masses of mechanical power — steam, electric, furnace, or other — which have to be controlled by a score or two of individuals who have shown capacity to manage it. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling these men, who are socially as remote as heathen gods, alone worth knowing, but never known, and who could tell nothing of political value if one skinned