What If They Held A Sporting Event And Nobody Came?

Every time I make a telephone call that is answered by a mechanical voice instructing me to "punch one for ticket information" or "punch two for marketing" and so on, I have the eerie sensation of being transported, as if in a science-fiction novel, to some remote time in the future. I know better, of course, for I am inescapably in the here and now, a place I find less congenial with each such scientific advance. Wouldn't it be nice, I ask myself after one of these telephonic encounters with talking robots, if I could dial a number someday and actually talk to a living person? I stress the word "dial" because the two phones in my residence are not only attached anachronistically to cords, but also have what the mechanical voices tell me are "rotary dials," not keypads, which most of these implements that were manufactured after 1925, or so, apparently feature. And as I have lately discovered, it is almost impossible to call anyone on a rotary phone without being subjected to the full robotic litany before a usually irritable human "information operator" takes over.

In fact, my home is beginning more and more to take on the appearance of a museum, stocked as it is with such antiques as tabletop radios, typewriters and typing paper, an actual phonograph that plays 78's, and a television set with only a 19-inch screen. Where, for heaven's sake, are the home computers, the word processors, the cellular push-button phones, the CD players, the fax machines? How can anyone live in such primitive squalor?

"Happily," I reply, cackling like Lionel Barrymore as Dr. Gillespie.

But I am here not to defend my own resolute fuddy-duddyism, but rather to explore the consequences of this technological onslaught on our lives, particularly our sporting lives, in the fast-approaching 21st century. We Americans are, with few exceptions (note the foregoing), passionate believers in the future and the supposedly life-enhancing gadgetry with which it will surely bless us. Naturally, there is always some attendant fear of what all the new stuff will do to our existing institutions. But we've learned from the past that many of these fears are unfounded: Weren't motion pictures, particularly the talkies, supposed to do away with the legitimate theater? Well, all they really did was to kill vaudeville, which stayed dead only long enough for television to revive it. The legitimate theater, if anything, changed for the better, abandoning much of its froth to the movies while exploring more serious themes. Radio was perceived as a triple threat, menacing the stage, newspapers and sports. What it in fact did was give jobs to unemployed vaudevillians and stage actors, while making fortunes for record producers and advertising agencies. And, not incidentally, while helping to introduce a golden age of sport, the era of Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey and Bill Tilden.

Major league baseball executives were at first terrified of radio, convinced as they were that it was going to keep people out of their ballparks. Games that were broadcast would be poorly attended, or so the argument went. The executives were, as usual, wrong. The more enlightened among them, particularly Larry MacPhail in his years with the Brooklyn Dodgers, realized that radio was a vital public relations tool. It remains so today, even with television.

Ah, yes, television. It was supposed to finish off radio and just about every other form of mass entertainment, especially spectator sports. It was one thing to hear a game on the radio, the owners lamented, quite another to see it "live" on TV. In truth, TV did pretty much KO the small fight clubs in the 1950s, but it also created a much larger audience for boxing, one that such master performers as Muhammad Ali wisely embraced. Television was the making of professional football, exposing it to the masses and turning it into the fastest-growing sport of the '60s and '70s, while transforming it into a media monster.

The smarter baseball owners discovered, as they had with radio, that television would attract new fans, not discourage them. In fact, some major league teams now televise virtually all of their games. And baseball has drawn larger crowds in the past five years than at any time in its history.

So why worry about what the future may bring, particularly since it already seems to be here? The theater remains a fabulous invalid. Movies seem to be surviving the competition of home videos. Radio has its music, news, sports, weather and interminable talk shows. And people are going to sporting events in record numbers. And all this is happening while American houses are being packed to the ceiling with technological marvels.

And yet, as technology marches relentlessly forward, an insidious process may be taking place in the all-but-forgotten realm of human relations. "There is an accretion of little things," says Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who has specialized in "the influence of social situations on behavior."

The electronic home entertainment centers, with their cable television, CD players, video games and computers, are "in a sense bringing the world to you," says Zimbardo. "Why go to the ballpark or the symphony? Why fight the traffic and the crowds? Why deal with all the inconvenience when your wall television set can bring you the game, plus instant replay? These electronic gadgets make other people irrelevant to you. You don't need people for entertainment. All of this technology is in the name of efficiency. Humans, after all, are inefficient compared with machines. These devices—the computers, the voice mail—buy you time away from people. They are all designed so you don't waste time. They work to isolate you from human contact. Video games are taking the place of playing outdoors for children. You never see kids playing in the streets anymore. What I think we're seeing is a minimizing, a short-circuiting of human relations. It takes practice to be comfortable and effective with other people. Our gadgetry is taking that away from us."