Its' Tough To Be The Hometown Team In No One's Hometown!

Next, here are four views of Washington from some folks who went there from other towns for business reasons:

Richard M. Nixon, erstwhile District resident and Redskin fan: "The trouble is, Washington is a city without identity. Everybody comes from someplace else. Anywhere else people say, 'I'm from Cincinnati, I'm from New York, I'm from Topeka.' You never hear people say that about Washington. Deep down, they still think they're back home. But you take any hometown boy—well, these days I guess you have to say hometown 'person'—and they come to Washington for politics, but they need an identity with the city. And the Redskins provide that. The Redskins are the only thing in Washington that the people think of as 'ours.' Nobody in Washington gives a tinker's dam about the Kennedy Center or the Washington Symphony."

Mike Curtis, aging linebacker with the Redskins' Over the Hill Gang, formerly of the Baltimore Colts: "Washington fans are just like any others. They're all the same, fans—all the same, everywhere. Just because they're not educated in Baltimore and they are here—people are still all the same when they're fans."

Edward Bennett Williams, the high-powered lawyer and part owner and president of the Redskins, formerly of Hartford, Conn.: "People who come to Washington never go home, although they may keep their allegiances to their teams back home. People here are more secure—the government's not going out of business—so they're not as hungry. The real-estate market downtown is paralyzed because everybody's waiting for the next Arab. For a lawyer, it's heaven. It's like being a banker in New York or a surfer in Hawaii. This place has got to draw anyone with eyes and ears. It's a celebrity town, motivated by power. My motion-picture friends always tell me that Washington reminds them most of Hollywood."

Mort Sahl, recently a radio talk-show host in Washington, formerly of the 1950s: "This town is poison. It's petrified. The people are on automatic pilot. All they talk about is power. America's falling apart. Your sons are homosexual. Your women are ambivalent. Your people here are the walking dead. This city has nothing to do with America. Get out!"

Hmmm.

It certainly is a strange place, Washington, D.C., altogether atypical. But we all know that. It is not only that it was never cut out to be a sports town, it was never cut out to be any kind of town. It was just conjured up as part of a North-South trade one night by Jefferson and Hamilton, and to this day the people of Washington perceive themselves as throw-ins in the deal, players that were named later.

Even the most prominent "major league" American cities feel some need for their home teams to succeed against municipal rivals; every city has a little Sparta left in it. All but Washington: because no mere ball team is going to affect how its people feel about their city, which is now almost surely the most important one on the face of the earth. A nouveau riche burg like Dallas or L.A. needs a team to prove itself to a skeptical Establishment, just as an old, burned-over place—New York, say, or Pittsburgh—boasts of its champions all the more proudly, as if to say that the fading city still does throb and thrive. But what does the capital of the free world need its teams for?

Sure, devotion to the Redskins is widespread. They get as much attention as the government (and nearly as much as the subject of federal employee benefits), but there are only eight home games each season, which makes the commitment convenient. Besides, almost every city has had its NFL social disease sometime in the past 20 years, and the more sophisticated sports towns have long since been cured. More revealing is that Washington—and whenever we use the capital's name here, it means the whole metropolitan area—is the only city in baseball's modern era to have lost its big league franchise twice.

The capital did go spontaneously wild for about 24 seconds a year ago when the Bullets won the NBA, but just as quickly, it forgot about its first champions in 36 years—until this past season's playoffs. Certainly, no one in Washington feels shamefaced that he does not "support" a winner. Just as the city is recession-proof, so, too, is it booster-proof. The local Jaycees are not going to go out to the District line and erect signs saying WASHINGTON, D.C., HOME OF THE CAPITAL OF THE FREE WORLD. The Spirit of the town is national, at large, which conflicts absolutely with devotion to a home team, which is the quintessence of American localism.