Body Politic : The Great American Sports Machine

by David Shields

• ISBN13: 9780743247740
• ISBN10: 0743247744
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-27
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

In Body Politic, David Shields looks at contemporary America through the lens of professional and college sports; the result is an unusually insightful and provocative book about Empire in denial.

The sporting arena is effectively our national

Author Biography

David Shields is the author of seven previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the Governor's Writers Award of the State of Washington.

Table of Contents

Contents

The Wound and the Bow: A Long Prologue

On the Need to Connect with Something Larger than Yourself

Fairy Tale of Reinvention and Escape

Words Can't Begin to Describe What I'm Feeling

Heaven Is a Playground

Fandom

History of America, #34

How It Feels to Be a Problem

Myths of Place

A Little Euro Trash-Talk

Being Ichiro

Matsui Among the Americans

Bring the Pain

Being Random Is the Key to Life

42 Tattoos: An Epilogue

Excerpts

The Wound and the Bow: A Long Prologue I know that Howard Cosell was childishly self-absorbed and petulant ("It's hard to describe the rage and frustration you feel, both personally and professionally, when you are vilified in a manner that would make Richard Nixon look like a beloved humanitarian. You can't imagine what it does to a person until you've experienced it yourself, especially when you know that the criticism is essentially unfair"); that he would obsess upon, say, the Des Moines Register's critique of his performance; that too soon after he achieved prominence, the beautiful balance between righteous anger and comic self-importance got lost and he was left only with anger and self-importance; that he once said that he, along with Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson, was one of the three great men in the history of American television; that he mercilessly teased his fellow Monday Night Football announcers, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith, but pouted whenever they teased him; that he was certain he should have been a network anchor and/or a U.S. senator; that the very thing he thought needed deflating -- the "importance of sports" -- he was crucially responsible for inflating; that after hitching a ride on boxing and football for decades, he turned around and dismissed them when he no longer needed them ("The NFL has become a stagnant bore"; "I'm disgusted with the brutality of boxing"); that, in an attempt to assert his (nonexistent) expertise, he would frequently excoriate any rookie who had the temerity to commit an egregious error on Monday Night Football (dig the Cosellian diction); that he was a shameless name-dropper of people he barely knew; that he said about a black football player, "That little monkey gets loose," then, regarding the brouhaha that ensued, said, "They're conducting a literary pogrom against me"; that the New York Times sports columnist Red Smith once said, "I have tried hard to like Howard Cosell, and I have failed"; that the legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon said about him, "This is a guy who changed his name [from Cohane to Cosell], put on a toupee, and tried to convince the world he tells it like it is"; that David Halberstam said that Cosell bullied anyone who disagreed with him; that he frequently boasted about Monday Night Football, "We're bigger than the game"; that he once told a Senate subcommittee, "I'm a unique personality who has had more impact upon sports broadcasting in America than any person who has yet lived"; that he once wrote, "Who the hell made Monday Night Football unlike any other sports program on the air? If you want the plain truth, I did"; that at the height of his fame, when fans would come up to him on the street to kibitz or get an autograph, he liked to turn to whomever he was with and say (seriously? semiseriously?), "Witness the adulation"; that when Gene Upshaw, the head of the NFL Players Association, said about Cosell, "His footprints are in the sand," Cosell corrected the compliment: "My footprints are cast in stone."I know all that and don't really care, because during its first four years (1970-1973), when I was in high school, Monday Night Football mattered deeply to me and it mattered because of Cosell. I haven't watched more than a few minutes of any MNF game since then, and at the time, I had no very coherent sense of its significance, but looking back, I would say it's not an exaggeration to claim that Howard Cosell changed my life, maybe even -- in at least one sense -- saved it. MNF was "Mother Love's traveling freak show" (Meredith's weirdly perfect description), a "happening" (Cosell's revealingly unhip attempt to be hip); it was the first sports broadcast to feature three sportscasters, nine cameras, shotgun mics in the stands and up and down and around the field. Celebrities showed up in the booth: Nixon told Gifford that he wished h