Missing in action

Where has the U.S. individual-sport athlete gone?

In the sports pages these past few days, mostly buried beneath the football, basketball and hockey spreads and results, we find: Lennox Lewis signs to fight Vitali Klitschko for the heavyweight title. Russia beats France to win the Davis Cup. Steve Scott, the American mile record-holder, goes into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame. Annika Sorenstam finishes the finest LPGA year ever with another tournament title.

Four very disparate events, but all part of a national trend. Let us add a fairly recent fifth piece, and maybe the puzzle will grow clearer. Europe beats the U.S. in the Ryder Cup. See a pattern yet?

Well, traditionally, the four most popular individual sports in the United States have been boxing, tennis, track and golf.

My fellow Americans, us rugged individualists, us from the land of bold loners, of cowboys and test pilots -- me out there alone against the world -- it seems we don't do very well on our own anymore. Our children, our best young athletes, are all migrating to the safer haven of team games.

Oh, to be sure, we're so big and rich, that there will always be a few Americans achieving by themselves. Tiger Woods, of course. Bernard Hopkins. The speedy lovers, Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones. Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi are still breathing rarified championship air . . . barely. And the Williams sisters -- although, perhaps perversely, they prove the point inside-out. Venus and Serena grew up as champions in an individual sport, but did so by lending each other the very support Americans seek on teams.

The fact is that we simply are not producing the champions in individual sports in the numbers we used to. Some of this has to do with the improved health and prosperity of the rest of the world. But ironically, it's also apparent that the very wide-open freedom of the United States restricts sports choices.

The countries that now produce individual-sport standouts invariably have programs run by the likes of the national ministry of sport that seeks out special talents, then nurtures them. We don't have any such centralized planning. U.S. children pretty much find their own way, and since almost all the funding -- and the subsequent attention -- is directed to high school and college team sports, that's where our kids land.

Two developments further advance this process. Spurred on by Title IX, there are more girls' team sports being offered than ever before. And, especially in the suburbs, soccer is an increasingly popular participatory activity for both sexes at the carpool level. Pointedly, we have soccer moms. We don't have tennis moms or track moms, do we?

Steve Scott, the track Hall of Fame inductee, set the American record for the mile more than 20 years ago. That's an eternity for any athletic record, but what's the likelihood it will fall soon? For that matter, will there be any young American who can break it in the next 20 years?

It takes a special kind of guts to choose to play an individual sport. You lose, the failure is all yours. Has our culture changed so much that the nature of our young people is different today? Are we producing fewer risktakers? Does sports tell us that the intrepid American is out of style? Or is it simply more prosaic -- that so much of our emphasis is on team sports that our athletes, male and female, simply follow the lines of least resistance and go team up with their buddies?

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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