'you Know You're Not Getting Maudie Frickert'

It came as consummate glad tidings not long ago for the National Football League to learn that it was rated No. 1 in appeal to beer drinkers, high-mileage drivers, men over 18 years of age and people earning above $10,000 a year. What's more, the NFL was truly gratified to discover that it also has particular appeal as a television offering to people who are categorized as light viewers (as opposed to heavy viewers, who habitually undergo a catatonic immersion of 52 hours a week and must ultimately grow eyes like welder's goggles).

Once upon a time professional football would have been mighty pleased simply to rank No. 1 in football fans who paid for their tickets, and never mind their private lives and drinking habits. But these are years of profound complexity and remarkable risks. Without a solid consensus of beer drinkers and high-mileage drivers as support, the structure of the sport could turn soft indeed. Thus, Commissioner Pete Rozelle is sincerely pleased when he assesses the fortunes of pro football in this manner: "Our demographics are such that an advertiser who pays a higher cost-per-1,000 for sponsoring pro football really has a better buy than if he paid much less for another program. We have the advantage of being both news and entertainment, so our word-of-mouth profile is excellent. You don't find people telling their parking attendant, 'Wasn't Lassie magnificent putting out that forest fire last night?' "

In the age of Super Spectator the success of sports is properly discussed in this kind of swollen Newspeak, the gabble of the market researcher, advertising director, media specialist, cost efficiency consultant, etc., not to mention demographics...cost-per-1,000...word-of-mouth profile...keen merchandising potential. One can almost hear the tap, tap of pointers against sales charts. Will the Masters really increase Cadillac sales? Is the NBA too blue-collar to sell Chryslers? What is the outlook for peddling antileak antifreeze with the Stanley Cup playoffs? Can the Rose Bowl truly sell more deodorant than a John Wayne movie? Is the World Series honestly a best-buy vehicle for shaving cream?

Yes, the sale is the thing, and televised sports are essentially an adjunct of commerce. Yet in the tangled web of cause and effect generated by the age of Super Spectator, there are influences loosed upon the land that do not quite fit definition or justification in terms of dollar return or sales production or profit margin or the damned demographics. Televised sports are creating changes in the patterns of our lives. No one bothers to really look—aside from the inspection of sales figures—at what is happening out there on the other end of the tube. It is time to look.

Some points of true value and some hours of profound enjoyment have been brought by televised sports to the environs of Rice County Highway 16, which is the major road through Morristown, Minn., now that State Highway 60 bypasses the village. Ask Irv Schumacher, for one. He is 46, towering tall, bald as a pullet's egg and owner of Irv's Bar, which is just across Highway 16 from Babe Nordmeier's Chevy agency. Irv has quite a good business. Even in the bright mornings of this past October the screen door slammed frequently as farmers stopped by for a shot or a beer to clear up an early cough or throw off a lingering chill. After a pause for thought, Irv Schumacher pronounces TV sports to be of a slightly higher order than the average program. "I'd say the kids around here have higher goals and ideals and stuff because of what they watch on TV," he says. "They ain't going to go out and be the next President of the U.S. necessarily because of it, but they do learn that you have to put out before you can expect to win. They see the superstars, you know, and they see that those fellows put out all the time and that's why they're great. It's the kind of lesson you can tell a kid and tell a kid, but it don't really make a dent until he sees it."

Morristown is a rural hamlet of 670 people on the plains of southern Minnesota, 65 miles south of Minneapolis. Cornfields reach into the village limits, old tire swings dangle from the boughs of backyard trees, and the water tank, a point-capped cylinder perched high on spindly legs of steel, is the only structure in town rising above the treetops. Well, almost. There is a church steeple or two and a thicket of TV antennae, frail pipes bolted to roof beams that reach up to bring down the latest sound and newest pictures from Saigon or Shea Stadium or beautiful downtown Bur-bank. Along the washboard roads outside town, fields stretch in mammoth patchwork to the horizon a few miles away. Farms are dotted at random across the distance, each an island in the gentle rolls of the land: a clump of trees, a barn, a silo, perhaps a windmill and, of course, the TV antenna upon the farmhouse roof.

Some things don't change in 30 or 40 years around towns like Morristown. Fat orange school buses still roll through an autumn dusk, and the cheery oompahs of Whoopee John or Harold Loeffelmacher and his Six Fat Dutchmen are considered good music. At high school football games the crowd still strolls the sidelines keeping pace with the action, and the bank is always open on Saturdays, that being the day farmers flock into town. But other things are different, for Morristown is today a typical wired-up, plugged-in, turned-on neighborhood in Marshall McLuhan's Global Village. Farmers have transistor radios on their tractors now; no lonely corn picker or wheat combiner needs to tell time by the sun with a disc jockey from Minneapolis pinpointing it every five minutes. While they are milking in the barns, radios above the stalls sing out with music, news and commercials for Black Angus bulls ("About ready for a new bull? Get one that breeds more red meat! Less gristle! Less brisket! Buy Black Angus!"). And in the cool night when the chores are done, the glow of the tube fills the parlors and there is Walter Cronkite or Phyllis Diller or a Texas marching band come to visit.

Morristown is Super Spectator in the flesh, demographics with a beating heart. Here, for example, is Lowell Rasmussen, porkier now at 35 than when he was a 12-letter man for the Morristown High School Comets. Lowell runs the local Mobil station. He has his name stitched in red thread above the pocket of his blue coveralls, but he says it isn't necessary because he doesn't serve more than a dozen transient customers a month now that State Highway 60 bypasses Morristown. "My business is with my friends," he says. Lowell stays open 12 hours a day, and the passing time is marked by an electric 7-Up clock, by a calendar advertising an auto-parts outfit and bearing the painting of a cheerful, undressed lady, and, yes, by a constant flickering flow of tiny gray images on the 11-inch screen of his TV set.

"Well, I don't look all the time," says Lowell. "But it's like having company in the background when no one is around. I never miss anything that has to do with sports, though. I've been a fan of everything since I was 10 years old, and there's never been anything quite like sports on TV. When I was a kid I used to dig around for every newspaper clipping and every magazine story I could find. I'd cut out pictures and keep charts and listen to the radio and imagine a whole game in my head. But the kids now, they get to see it like it really is. And you should see them—little rascals in third and fourth grade—out playing football in a field, and they'll be fading to pass and pumping their arms like John Unitas. I see them, but I can't believe it. They're better at their games than we ever were; they can copy the superstars because they can see them."

And here is Rick Ellingworth, 15, a rather frail, good-looking boy who plays quarterback for the Morristown Comets. This is not exactly a superstar situation, for Morristown High has only 120 students, and even though the football coach, Mike McGovern, has installed such relatively sophisticated elements as a wing-T offense and a stunting defense, things never really crackle with big-time tension around the Comets. For example, Quarterback Ellingworth is given two audible signals to call at the line of scrimmage. If he sees the defense shift and he wants the play moved to the right he shouts "Gladys!" For left he yells "Jeanette!" Those are the names of the girl friends of two Comet players. Ellingworth is a farm boy who drives a pickup truck to and from football practice and arises each morning at 5 o'clock to milk 50 cows before school. In a setting as old as agriculture, the visions of a Super Spectator prevail. "When I'm doing chores," says Rick, "I'm always thinking about my roll-outs and sprint-outs, about the way I seen Staubach do 'em, and Tarkenton. I think about Bart Starr, and I try to think how I'll do some eye-fakes when I'm going to pass. Like Starr. I think about how Joe Na-math plays, how great he is. Not the way he lives—not that, because Namath does things he probably shouldn't do. But I can just see in my mind the stop-action of him dropping back and the way he gets rid of the ball so quick." There you have it—images of the hobbled grace of Joe Namath back to pass amid the morning milking in a Minnesota barn, an astounding combination of hero worship and the learning process that did not exist before TV sport came to Morristown.