Being a sports fan is getting up a repertoire of vocabulary, rules, tactics, and familiarity with teams and players, so that you can talk about what's happening, what might happen next, and why. There are conversational conventions about what counts most, about how to disagree, about how to agree but suggest additional refinements, and so forth. It all takes place within the understanding that no one knows what will happen or exactly why, and it's quite normal to be wrong. One obvious goal of being a sports fan is simply to be able to engage in these discussions and enjoy the emotions they facilitate - the pleasure of sounding authoritative, pleased, or indignant, and of having others encourage you - without having to worry much about whether you're right or wrong. It might not be the only goal, but it's certainly one of the main ones.
Non-specialist fans of business and politics talk in much the same ways, for the same reasons, and using similar conventions. It's obvious in newspaper stories. Some of them simply report what's happened most recently. Clem Jenkins Signs Two-Year Deal with Longlegs; Tariff Slapped on Beaver Milk Products; New Prison Planned for Dollar's Hollow. Other stories provide background for developments that stay in the news, allowing readers new to the story to catch up. Quite a lot of the items either make predictions or say what ought to be done if we want a certain result. The Longlegs will need to play better defensively if they hope to even the series; the new tax on circles will put Canadian donut makers in the hole.
Private discussions of sports, business and politics are much the same as discussions in the newspapers and on television, and it isn't surprising. Audiences are mostly interested generalists who, with modest effort, could learn to follow every section of the news with some understanding. No one wants or expects specialist standards of thoroughness or testable accuracy. Readers and listeners typically want to hear some speculation, some fitting of events into larger narratives. Not so long ago that would have been called interpretation, and distinguished sharply from reporting of the facts. But people now think of the line as blurred - it's hard to say anything perfectly neutral - and since they want something more than the facts anyway, it doesn't matter to them. And then, of course, when the stories become source material for informal discussions, there is even more speculation and less attention to accuracy. The main difference between reporters and their audiences is that the reporters tend their repertoires more carefully. It isn't that they've mastered any specialist science, it's that they develop more comprehensive backgrounds.
I suspect most people think of the sports beat as somehow "lower" than business or politics. Maybe they think covering sporting events is something like covering crime. It's gritty. People don't dress as well. It's a world of unpolished men chomping cheap cigars and hanging around smelly locker rooms, perpetually stuck somewhere in the 1930s or 1940s. Images of that sort last a long time after they're no longer accurate. In fact, sports telecasters now dress better than business or political reporters, or even than important business and political figures. Women feature prominently, locker rooms are luxurious, everyone uses the latest technology, and there's no smoking, especially of cigars. It's just as polite and gentle as business or politics.
But political and business reporting somehow seem more like professions than sports writing is. A profession, in the English-speaking world at least, was originally something that a gentleman could go in for without bringing disgrace on himself and his family. "The profession of arms" - that is, military service as an officer - was one of the first. Law got in quite early, and so did taking holy orders. Medicine came a little later for various reasons. Bloodletting used to be done by barbers, and doctoring was for a long time associated with quick-and-dirty emergency treatment - hence the doctor as a necessarily muscular "sawbones." But medicine made it safely in by the end of the nineteenth century, and has been fully respectable for many years now. Other science-backed callings came along - engineering and architecture, for example. And the people we call professors got in as well, from chemists to classicists. Classicists who were only schoolmasters, of course, remained on the outside; merely knowing some Latin and Greek was much too common. Accountants weren't in yet, either - they were only a special sort of clerk, hardly the station for someone of polite breeding. Again, notions of this sort long outlasted the practices that earlier supported them, and these notions float around today and work their magic here and there. Business and political writing somehow pass as closer to professions than sports writing does.
Or is it that political and business reporting require more knowledge than sports reporting? If you're a keenly critical philosopher, as I am, it might be hard to make out how there could be "more to know" about one thing than about another thing. Which do you think there is more to be known about - plutonium, or the Peloponnesian War? I don't know how to answer that. I find it impossible to imagine anything like a comprehensive ordering that would give one subject that sort of priority over another. How much is there to know about hockey? Could hockey turn out to be smack-dab between Anselm of Canterbury and the reform bill of 1837? I don't know a philosopher who could tell you for sure. It seems to me that two people might work with equal concentration, diligence, and ingenuity, one studying football and the other studying Ontario politics, and I don't know how to say that one would be constructing a world richer in knowledge than the other. I admit, though, that I have special trouble with this sort of idea. It always bothers me, for example, when someone talks about a child's "little friends," or about what's in a child's "little mind." I've never seen how minds or friendships, per se, could differ in terms of size.
Business and politics are considered more important than sports. I suppose we do think that what happens in Parliament, or in the stock market, matters more than who wins tonight's game.
But for most of us, this greater importance isn't reflected in any reallocation of time and effort; we follow sports, business and politics according to our easiest inclinations. Some follow one, some another, some all three, and although we commonly admit that they have different degrees of importance, we don't adjust our concentration levels. Maybe it's that we're individually wired with different requirements for variety or recreation. Our working lives take a lot of our energy, and in our leisure time we need to let our interests play more freely. So, we're content with the same level of understanding in each pursuit; we accept all kinds of platitudes and doubtful facts without digging behind them much. But if we're really not willing to devote more time to what we insist is more important, what can "more important" really mean?
I think it's a question of what becomes a subject for history. Sports, of course, do have histories, but they're the province of devoted hobbyists rather than of recognized historians, who concentrate on political matters. Yes, there are specialist histories of any number of practices that aren't, by themselves, political, but we still see these as auxiliary to core history. We observe a certain deference to what "gets into the history books." We think it is correct that our most learned historians care more about national and international affairs than about sports; the Cuban missile crisis was more important than how the Dodgers did in 1962. And there is some objective basis for this.
Political history involves connected change in a way that sports history doesn't. Maury Wills stole second base in the fifth inning and Frank Howard doubled him home. Then something else happened in the next inning and in the next game. The events are sequential without any obvious relations among them. But the progress and resolution of the Cuban missile crisis present all sorts of interconnected events and lasting effects. We still feel them today in a way that the Dodgers' 1962 season just doesn't touch us, and we know this is true even if we don't spend much time checking into it. By extrapolation, we suppose that today's political events will continue to be studied tomorrow, but tonight's game will be understandably forgotten. Knowing this isn't incompatible with continuing to discuss today's political events as if their importance were on a par with tonight's game. Conversational conventions can prevail across very different subject matters. What's worth noticing is that, for most of us, political discussions follow much the same rules, and nourish the same needs, as sports discussions.
Business seems intermediate between sports and politics in terms of importance. Partly it's just a matter of scope. A sport is itself, among other things, a species of business; business is the genus. If we think of individual businesses and individual teams, there isn't much difference - some are bigger, some are smaller. When a business goes bankrupt, is that worse than when a sports team folds? It depends. If we think of sports and businesses collectively, it's the species and the genus - a general business slump has larger effects than a decline in sports attendance. And businesses taken collectively have greater auxiliary importance to politics than sports do. But the history of businesses, just as businesses, isn't much if any more coherent than the history of sports. It's of interest mainly to fans. It's a canvas of idiosyncrasies, accidents, fads, colourful characters, virtues and vices. Management gurus are mostly like sports pundits - if you get critical about it, they're both more like astrologers than like scientists. But you have to admit, they talk a great game, and it's fun to join in.
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