The New Enthusiast

So to kick-off this transcendentally celebratory blog, I thought I’d take a moment to consider, on the occasion of his induction into the Deadspin Hall of Fame, what exactly is up Buzz Bissinger’s craw.

Bissinger’s splenetic contretemps on CostasNOW (sic) aren’t really what I want to discuss here, other than to agree with most commentators that his opinions on blogging and the new New Journalism were inane and contradictory and more or less just dum-dum. Buzz’s invective seemed motivated by fear of his own impending obsolescence, and anyhow he was so blatheringly unhinged that it strikes me as somewhat unsporting to subject his ranting to serious inspection.

No, the particular craw I’m hoping to excavate here now has been on display in his recent series of New York Times guest columns, “The Throwback.” The series depicts Bissinger questing for Pure Sports Experience, but being thwarted by thuggish corporate apparatchiks, preening primadonna atheletes, and the generally rotten villainy of the modern SportsWorld.

In “All-Stars and Lay Offs,” for example, Bissinger decries the nearly $400 million combined salary of the All-Stars gathered at Yankee stadium as sympotmatic of the moral disease plaguing America. How can Brad Lidge ink a 3-year extension when there are autoworkers being laid off, Bissinger worries. And A-Rod, why, he’d rather laugh at an elderly pensioner than consider reducing his salary from $28 million to $25!

Look. If you want to quibble about the moral justice of the free market system, fine. But, baseball players possess a rare, highly prized skill, and autoworkers do not. That is why one group is rich and the other isn’t. Furthermore, the one doesn’t have anything to with the other. Several decades ago, GM tied its future to producing large vehicles with high-inital cost while also weighing itself down with onerous legacy obligations. That is why the autoworkers are out of work. At least I think it is. I’m almost positive it doesn’t have anything to do with Brad Lidge.  

And Buzz knows this. He’s a pretty smart guy. I’d bet he’s heard of supply and demand. Yet he insists on using this and other strawman arguments to indict the SportsWorld. And yet despite the depths of depravity that Bissinger claims to see every time he scans the sports page, he can’t stop watching. And why?

Here’s where I reiterate that this isn’t about Buzz Bissinger so much. Putting aside his views, and the fact that I disagree with pretty much all of them, Buzz’s sophistry presents an illustrative example of what I believe to be the role of sports.

Consider the title of his columns. It’s an atavistic, backward-looking term. Throwback. As Bissinger sees it, society is in perpetual decline, the world in eternal twilight, and sports are the harbinger of end-times. The true titans of yesteryear are long gone, having retreated into the misty haze of the hazy mist. Now the only thing standing between us and Billy Beane’s legion of mechanized statbots is Tony LaRussa and the sacred intricacies of the double-switch.

Ok so fine, maybe Bissinger doesn’t quite see it that way, but that’s the way he tells it. He reports as if he’s looking through Kevin Costner-colored glasses at a world that was better back when we were just playing a game of catch with our ghost dad. Maybe the monsters Bissinger sees hulking in the on-deck circle are real, or maybe he needs to pretend they are to sustain his chosen narrative. Either way, he’s not truly repulsed by what he decries, he’s drawn to it.

Again, this isn’t about Buzz Bissinger. It’s about choosing what we see. Sports are a pastime. A diversion. A distraction. Compared to pretty much every other possible human endeavor, they are way, way down near the bottom of the List of Things That Matter. But precisely because they are meaningless, we are free to give them whatever meaning we choose.

So Buzz is definitely bitter about, and probably a little bit scared by, what he sees in SportsWorld. But he chooses to see it, even if he doesn’t know he’s it. And anyway this isn’t about Buzz.

It’s about being aware of that choice. It’s about being aware to the fact that each choice leads to another choice, and the more choices we have to make, the more chances we have of getting one wrong.

It’s about paying attention to what we are paying attention to.