In Defense of the Fullback

In the folklore of American liberalism, the only figures more maligned than the Rotary president and the real estate salesman are the fullback and the first baseman. There are certain unreasonable reasons why this should be; but because no one has challenged them since the days of “The Male Animal,” when Thurber’s All-American Joe Ferguson was tossing china cups in forward passes while the hero-professor looked on in anguish, the myth has stood and been reinforced. In the 1930s James Wechsler entitled his book complaining against all that was bad in Ameri can life King Football. The present principal defender of the faith is Robert Hutchins, who booted the pigskin out of Chicago University and has since been acclaimed over countless courses of chicken a la king as the man who prevented America from turning into a giant stadium. The dimensions of the athletic menace to society can be found in the fact that our leading professional liberal has faithfully battled to hold the line against the likes of those two fighting Irishmen, Joe McCarthy and Terry Brennan.

What the liberal-intellectual team has failed to realize is that to knock out Terry Brennan—or rather the symbol and substance of bigtime football at Notre Dame that he heads at the present—is to knock out the last refuge of glory from the lives of countless Americans. To eliminate the annual Rose Bowl game from Pasadena with all its outlandish and wonderful pageantry, would be comparable to barring the bullfight from Madrid, or the jousting tournaments from medieval Europe. It may be, of course, that the Hutchins followers would be in favor of eliminating those things too; of eliminating, in other words, the rituals that men so stubbornly conceive to graft an element of glory onto the deadly drudgery of everyday life. It would also eliminate a profession whose members act out in their work many of the basic values preached by their intellectual critics. Both the value to society provided by bigtime sports and the social values that bigtime sports maintain are completely overlooked by the Hutchins-type detractors. From a strictly financial standpoint, the sports de-emphasizers fail to acknowledge that in many universities the stadium pays for the library and the laboratory. But that is far from its most important contribution. An excellent discussion in Liberation entitled “The Glory of Baseball” (which editor Dave Dellinger said was read by few of his intellectual friends because they told him “they saw it was about sports”) opened with this commentary:

A few years ago a man was found hanging in a hotel room in Montpelier, Vermont. Beside his swinging legs, on a nearby table, was a note which read: “Goodbye to the New York. Yankees.” The note was unsigned; the only name found in the room was on a social security card. This incident, not without parallels, dramatizes the role which baseball plays in the lives of many ...