Sports Anthropology

For pretty much every decade (except I couldn't think of one for the 1970s) there has always been a sports star that just personifies the decade they were in. This won't be lost on future historians. Fifty or 100 years from now social anthropologists will look at our popular culture to try to understand the zeitgeist of the time. Much in the way that people look at Muhammad Ali to help explain the turbulent 1960s. Here are a few examples:

1)1920s-George Herman "Babe" Ruth--Babe Ruth was the Roaring 20s. When the nation was achieving staggering feats economically and socially, the Babe was doing the same thing on the ballfield. The nation was making money hand over fist and Ruth was smashing home runs the likes of which hadn't been seen before (when Ruth set his record of 60 home runs in a season the player in second had 9, 9!). Eventually, Ruth (and the country) became fat and corrupt until they both reached a point where they just collapsed.


2)1940s-Ted Williams--Teddy Ballgame was perfect for the 40s. The nation was pulling themselves out of the Depression and started to enjoy themselves again, and he provided the show. The prototypical blue collar player played pretty much everyday (even the famous time he played the 2nd leg of a double header when he didn't have to and he was risking his chances at baseball's Triple Crown). He did all this while missing years of his prime to fly fighter planes in WWII and Korea.

3)1980s-Magic Johnson & Larry Bird--The NBA's golden age reflected the prosperity of the nation under the Reagan administration. The Lakers coached by Pat Riley embodied the speed that the country was moving at, while the Celtics was a model of the politics. Bird and the Celtics were a conservative body, while Magic and the Lakers were liberal and tightly controlled.


This brings me to our era. I'm not sure want it'll be called (somehow I see vh1 running a special "I Love the '00s" in about 5 years), but before I've called it the Era of Predictable Disillsionment,a decade in which many long-standing fears about how America works (and what America has come to represent) were gradually -- and then suddenly -- hammered into the collective consciousness of just about everyone, including all the people who hadn't been paying attention to begin with. As these future historians try to explain what was wrong with the world in the early 21st century, I suspect they will use Barry Bonds. Here was a man accomplishing unbelievable things -- things so unbelievable that they literally should not have been believed, even as they were happening. But we did not really believe or disbelieve. We just sort of watched it happen, and then we watched it get out of control, and then we expressed shock without feeling a grain of surprise, and then we tried to figure out how we were supposed to reconcile an alien reality we unconsciously understood all along. Perfect examples of this outside the realm of sports are probably the Enron scandal and possibly the Iraq War.

David Grann's 2002 profile of Bonds in The New York Times Magazine was titled "Baseball Without Metaphor." It ended with a rhetorical query. "But for the moment, as the crowd settled back into its seats, there were no heroes or demons."

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