National pastime is long gone

By Phil Taylor, Sports Illustrated

In the self-examination that inevitably marks the end of every year, a question arises: What is our national pastime? As a country, our sporting obsessions have always provided a window into our collective psyche. In the simpler days of the 1950s and early ‘60s we elevated baseball above all other sports. It was pastoral and leisurely, innocent in a way, and so were we.

For the extreme-sports generation, a national pastime may be as unfamiliar a notion as Michael Jordan playing for the Bulls.  Manny Millan

By the ‘70s we were involved in Vietnam, and football, with its militaristic trappings, seemed more in keeping with our sensibility. Later, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, our lifestyles accelerated to MTV speed, and pro basketball, with its up-tempo pace, made a run at the top spot on our list of favorite sports.

But now, none of those sports seems to define us as a society as they once did, which is just as telling, in a way. Maybe the best indication of where we are as a nation in the 21st century is that for the first time in memory, we have no national pastime. Forget about the attendance numbers or the television ratings and go by what you feel. We may still follow the three major sports, but we don’t quite love them the way we once did.

Baseball has fallen the farthest in our hearts, so much so that it seems the sport is actively trying to drive people away from the game. Just consider this year, when commissioner Bud Selig angered fans by allowing the All-Star Game to end in a tie, when Ken Caminiti and Jose Canseco leveled steroid charges, when, as we do every few years, we spent most of the season wondering whether there would be a work stoppage. The concept of baseball and innocence is ancient history.

Pro basketball has lost ground as well. The up-tempo game that once attracted us has long since slowed to the pace of a funeral procession, and this year we witnessed the ultimate embarrassment of a U.S. team when a squad that included seven NBA All-Stars suffered a humiliating sixth-place finish at the World Basketball Championships, on American hardwood, no less. Once the masters of the basketball universe, our players were taken to school by their non-American counterparts, given a lesson in what team play is all about. After that, and after seeing many of our top NBA stars opt out of international play as if it were jury duty, we hardly have the right to call basketball the American pastime.

The NFL still holds our attention, but largely because we want to see if the team we laid money on can cover the spread. Pro football is not so much a national pastime as it is a national addiction, a place not to watch the action, but to get some action. What else about it is there to love, really? There are no teams to feel passionate about, since the league has become infected by parity. Half the teams have either lost three in a row or won three in a row, and next week they’ll all start streaks in the other direction.

But it’s not just the sports that have changed; we’ve changed, too. The culture is more fragmented, to the point where every sport is a niche sport. There is a whole X-Games subculture, a generation to whom those halfpipe heroes from the Winter Olympics are the kind of idols that Joe Montana and Michael Jordan were to the rest of us.

It could be that no single sport will ever grab the nation as it once did, not when some of us can splinter off and lose ourselves in the Golf Channel or the Tennis Channel, or watch nothing but European soccer on satellite, or subscribe to TV packages that allow us to view virtually every game played in virtually any sport on virtually any night. It’s hard to gather around the water cooler to talk about last night’s game when none of us watched the same one.

We can argue whether that is a good sign or a bad one. In fact, that may be the next great sports debate of our time. But there is no point arguing about what sport is the national pastime anymore. That concept is like the peace sign or the eight-track tape -- a relic from another era.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com.