The Joy of Deprogramming Sport

By Roger Kahn

Byplay

On a warm August night in a southern Ontario town called Guelph, a dozen Americans are playing hockey. There are no commercial interruptions. There is no crowd.

Don Rife, 41, a child psychiatrist from Vermont, reacts quickly at one end of the Victoria Road Arena and makes a save with his gloved hand. Jon Reiff, 38, a law professor from Ohio, spins twice chasing a puck but does not fall. George Wolbert, 56, an attorney for Shell Oil, narrowly misses a body check. These men have made their way to the Can/Am Hockey School in Guelph to play for the unvarnished joy of sport. They earn no money playing. Indeed, they pay tuition to hone their skills.

The Guelph sky has been a high, clean blue, the way boyhood skies appear in memory, and at the rink one feels a sense of boyhood. Of course, the men have me mix it with them. In full hockey gear --was any errant knight more burdened? --I skate till my back smarts and my thighs are lead. It is good to leave customary places and remember. This is how sport ought to be: play some, watch some, give pain, take pain, exult.

Most days for most Americans, sport is a narrower experience. Sit in the living room. Tug the TV button. Heralded by an announcer-salesman, canned sport pops up on the color screen.

This is an era of sophisticated canned goods. Old-fashioned lemonade arrives canned. Presidential memoirs come canned. American sport is canned and packaged, produced and directed until naturalism and spontaneity are fled. Sport appears in the living room marketed as fun and games. More deeply, big-time sport is profit and loss. It is a lode for the television industry.

The American Broadcasting Co., probably the most cynical of networks, regularly brings us something called The Wide World of Sports, which includes Demolition Derby. I cannot follow the rules of Demolition Derby. The idea seems to be to drive automobiles into each other until all but one are broken. The apostle of this glorious venture, Roone Arledge, has lately been elevated to direct ABC news.

The Columbia Broadcasting System offers endless, some would say interminable, hours of football and basketball, without either a sense of humor or a sense of proportion. The last is just as well for CBS. Football players have been fed and exercised into gargantuan size. Basketball players have been crossbred with giraffes. CBS announcers suggest we identify with football and basketball stars. I identify more easily with King Kong (in the original black-and-white version).

Baseball once held a lovely sway. There were 16 major league teams, eight to a league. Below that, hundreds of minor league teams and town teams were flourishing. In Oklahoma, you could root for the Ponca City Eagles. In Brooklyn, you could pull for the Dodgers or, more parochially, for the Nine representing the Union Gas Co. Now, assisted by favorable tax laws and network money from NBC, the major leagues have carved the country into 26 franchises. No one can follow the casts of 26 separate teams, scattered from Seattle to Atlanta, but the networks focus on the teams that win. Everywhere, town baseball is dead.

Lest we doze through a $75,000 commercial, television addresses us in a chronic forte. One team is best. One man is No. 1. One sport is better than it has ever been before. The salesmanship is skillful, and I am always finding myself persuaded.

I admire Chris Evert's consistency and dedication. She makes a perfect cross-court smash. The picture flickers. Evert reappears selling a brand of sneakers. Damn, I think, why do they have to package Evert? But the truth is that the package and person are one.

In Guelph, George Wolbert, the Shell Oil lawyer, has spent four hours on ice. He is white-haired and balding. "What do you get here?" I say.

"Complete relaxation. An absolute change in my life. A chance to work off hostilities. Discipline." Wolbert puffs and smiles. "At my age, I'm not going to get faster, so I'd better try and get better."

George Wolbert is not No. 1, or the best or even as good as he used to be. He just wants to play hockey as long and as well as he can. We sit alone in a dressing room within an empty arena. The networks are not here. It is fine to savor sport this way, without packages, cans and nonsense.

"I'm 56," Wolbert says, "but there is no reason why I can't play competitive hockey until I'm 60 years old." We begin, George and I, to define sport.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.