Front Row Seats

Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks franchise,
gets under my craw whenever I see him seated directly behind his team’s bench during games. Initially I was annoyed at Cuban for interfering with my viewing pleasure whenever I happen to tune in the Mavs. But now I am really steamed at Cuban, because when I really thought about his spotlight grabbing ways my thoughts careened off of their expected destination, which was a proper lambasting of Cuban’s WWF-Ringside-Manager courtside shtick, and landed me face-to-face with the realization that religion and I have failed one another. Mr. Cuban, I was quite happy hiding this from myself, thank you very much. But let me explain.

Unspoken etiquette dictates that professional sports franchise owners watch their team’s games from a dignified distance, in the Owner’s Box, shielded from prying eyes and difficult, at the very least, for cameras to capture. This etiquette has fallen out of fashion in recent years, with violators such as the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones (is it something about Dallas?) making his way onto the Cowboys’ sideline in the closing minutes of close games. Jones could easily be accused of using his Cowboys platform as a vehicle for his own media celebrity, and his penchant for national TV commercial spots squelch any doubts about the man’s appetite for attention. And to be fair, George Steinbrenner obliterated any standards of owner behavior twenty-five years ago upon his fourth or fifth firing and rehiring of Billy Martin. All that said, no owner has ever before had the audacity to plant his puss in our faces on game day by actually sitting with his team for the entire game. Cuban does this, and somehow no one bats an eye. Cuban takes the less out of shameless self promotion, because there is only ever more Mark Cuban.

One of the smartest ideas in professional sports was one of the first, affixing the home city’s name to a franchise. The idea is so central to professional team sports that it is unthinkable that a franchise in North American big league sports would not have its city, region, or state emblazoned on its chest. My own Baltimore Orioles are the only Major League Baseball team that does not have its home city’s name or initials located somewhere on any of its uniforms. But the Orioles reasons for omitting Charm City references from team garb dovetail with the importance of geographical identity; By omitting Baltimore the Orioles somehow believe they are more likely to attract fans from the entire state of Maryland, and beyond. The Cowboys may be America’s team, but the Orioles have a vision of themselves as DelMarVa’s Team (that’s short for Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland to all you Mid-Atlantic neophytes). Doesn’t have quite the same ring as America’s Team, but a decade of cellar dwelling puts the O’s desire to conquer mighty Delaware in perspective.

But back to Mark Cuban. The point being that the more he hogs the camera, the more he reminds us all that the Mavericks are his team, and not the great citizens of Dallas and the surrounding suburbs’ team. By now it is impossible to think of the Mavericks without also thinking of Cuban. The Yankees have a big enough mythology to contain even George Steinbrenner, but outside of the Lakers and Celtics, no NBA team could withstand Cuban’s media onslaught without being engulfed by sheer Cuban-ness. The blue road jerseys may still say Dallas, but squint and it almost looks like they say Cuban.

The more the Mavericks belong to Cuban, the less they belong to Dallas. Professional sports franchises continue to be named after places because doing so maximizes revenue streams. If it did not, and teams thought they could get away with it, you would see the Pepsi Mets, or the Sony Vikings. Teams are not shy about naming their arenas after corporations, so let’s not kid ourselves about the sanctity of team names. But pro franchises understand that an individual fan’s ability to identify with a given team, and to shell out mucho dollars in the process, hinges on the fan’s belief that the players on the field somehow represent that fan.

Baltimoreans have a collective inferiority complex. When the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl in 2000 it was like Baltimore was Rome for a day. For a second Baltimoreans were on top of the Titanic shouting “I’m the king of the world.” Baltimore’s chosen representatives had taken on and vanquished the best of the best, and brought the NFL’s crown back to Baltimore. Our boys won the day, and we bask in their glow. At Cuban’s current pace if his Mavericks ever win a title he might be the only one who shows up at the victory parade, because it will be his boys who won the day, and the people of Dallas will be talking about their Cowboys (like Steinbrenner and the Yankees, the Cowboys are too big for even Jerry Jones to engulf).

That is the basic argument I wanted to pin on Cuban. But the more I thought about the critique, that Cuban interferes with fans’ ability to identify with their team, the more I realized that the foundational premise of that critique was flawed. Upon further review, fans do not identify with the players on the field as their chosen representatives. Barbara Mikulski represents me in the United States Senate, and I identify with how cool it is that a little, liberal lady from a working class neighborhood in Baltimore has gone toe-to-toe with Helms, Thurmond, and Lott for the past twenty years. But I don’t run half-naked through the city streets painted in her campaign colors on the night she wins re-election. Thousands of people did just that when the Ravens won the Super Bowl in January 2001. I saw them with my own eyes, as I weaved my car slowly between them on the way to a little post-Super Bowl lovin’ from the lovely Ravens fan I had met before the conference championship game (needless to say, I did not pass up the chance to marry this sexy football fan).

If you did not know the Ravens had just won the Super Bowl you would have thought that the whole city had just done some really good cocaine (having never done cocaine, the only explanation of its effects that has ever resonated with me was that it is like you just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl). Some might say that such a reaction to a football game is kind of sad or pathetic. I might agree with them if I believed that what fans do is identify with their team. But something much more powerful is taking place than mere identification. To understand it is to understand why running naked through the streets may have been the only appropriate response to the Ravens triumph (unless you were a Redskins fan on your way to get naked inside your favorite new Ravens fan’s Baltimore row-house).

Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about how rooting for sports teams is ultimately rooting for laundry. The players and coaches now seem to stick around for the proverbial cup of coffee. Ravens coach Brian Billick has been around for eight years, which gives him the third longest coaching tenure in a thirty-two team league. And Billick will be lucky to be back for his ninth. Over time the only thing a fan sees year in and year out is the team uniform, Seinfeld’s laundry. If fans were simply identifying with their teams, this constant turnover would stunt their capacity to do so. Identifying with the other rests largely on the process of propinquity, whereby the more time we spend with someone the more we come to like her, to identify with her. This process takes time, and time is exactly what vagabond professional athletes and coaches are not able to give any one city. My dirty laundry usually spends two or three months on the floor in my bedroom before I give in and wash it, but my laundry just doesn’t grow on me the way the moody diabetic administrative assistant did after a year at my old job. We never really loved our teams because the players were part of the fabric of our communities, the reigning myth in Baltimore about the beloved old Colts. If that’s why Baltimoreans loved the Colts, than they wouldn’t be filling 70,000 plastic purple seats every Sunday to watch a bunch of guys with mansions in Atlanta.

When people watch sports they do not want the team in white shirts to beat the team in blue shirts because the team in white somehow represents them. They want the team in white shirts to win because while they are watching the game they are the team in white shirts. The game is as real to the fully invested viewer as it is to the players on the field. By this I do not mean to suggest that fans have the same experience of the action on the field as do the players. Instead, I am suggesting that to be fully invested in viewing sports is to have an experience as intense, as emotionally involved, as dramatic, and as real as the players on the field. My experience as a fan is different, but no less profound than that of the player on the field.

The word spectator has a connotation of passivity, one stated overtly by Reebok’s old slogan that “Life is not a spectator sport”, and also lurking there in Nike’s now iconic slogan of “Just do it.” The company’s shared message is that consumer’s of sports entertainment are little more than couch potatoes (full disclosure: I received a stuffed animal couch potato from my grandmother around the 6th grade, by which time I was already an avid consumer of sports entertainment). Of course, both companies’ bottom lines are dependent on the very behavior they are smirking at in their ads; just check how much money each company pays celebrity athletes to wear in competition, just so their logos can be seen by the very TV sports viewer that the companies openly disparage. Apparently the message resonates with the American public. Nike would not have kept the “Just do it” ad campaign going for the past twenty years if their ad wizards could not show that it was continuing to touch a cultural nerve. Most Americans love watching sports on TV, but it appears that most Americans have also bought into the myth that watching sports on TV makes them lazy slobs, who thereby need to purchase the gear worn by the people really engaged in life, the athletes. Collectively, Nike and Reebok’s real slogan is “Get a life”, which is exactly what they are telling American sports fans to do. Do I need to add that if Americans collectively followed this advice then Nike and Reebok would soon be out of business, for if we are all out there kayaking and rock climbing we will have no time to watch Lebron James dunk in his Nikes, and will surely soon forget that we need Nikes to kayak or rock climb in the first place? Nike and Reebok really want us to just keep on passively watching ball games on TV, but they want us to feel anxious about what horrible couch potatoes we are while doing so. Because the best way to rid one’s self of that anxiety is to purchase the shoes that will jumpstart a new active lifestyle, or at least give one the image of someone with an active lifestyle. This was what Spike Lee really meant when, on Nike’s behalf, he told us all “It’s the shoes.”

It is time to redeem the American sports viewing couch potato, because there is nothing passive about what I do when I watch Tar Heel basketball on TV. To understand what really happens when a passionate fan watches a ballgame we must beat a dead horse, but one that may hopefully be resuscitated by a fresh take. The old nag in question is the dreaded “death of the author”, a onetime radical school of literary criticism that should have been called the birth of the reader, but death sells more copy than birth ever has. The death, or later, the decentering of the author sought to play down the centrality of authorial majesty in order to shed light on the important role of the reader’s imagination engaged with the text. Though attention grabbing, the whole death of the author imagery ultimately did a disservice to the movement, because the author never disappears, she just shifts from star of the show to co-star, collaborating with the reader rather than dictating to him. It was all too easy to dismiss a trendy theory that denied the author her props, because we all know that no authors equals no books. The academics who wished to kill the author in theory were probably frustrated authors themselves, expressing through their theory a repressed desire to kill real-life successful authors.

Which is a shame because the move to establish readers as full and equal partners with authors is similar to our continuing need to establish women as full and equal partners in society, in that it is both long overdue and rich in potential healing. Readers of books, audiences of drama, and, yes, spectators of sports are the forgotten half of the creative equation. This imbalance is symbolized by the shadow that falls across the audience as the spotlight shines on the stage, and the darkness that shrouds fans surrounding the blazing playing field. Our fervent celebration of authors, actors, and athletes has led to the belief that creative work is their singular accomplishment, leaving audiences cast as mere passive consumers. The secret truth of art, and sport, is that drama exists in the collaborative space between artist (or athlete) and audience. Just as no authors equals no books, no audience equals no art.

The point is not that if a tree falls it does not make a sound if there is no one to hear it. I am suggesting the more radical notion that artist and audience collaborate in the very creation of art. I will go so far as to identify the artist as the quarterback in the creative process. But in the history of football, no quarterback has ever completed a pass without a receiver, making the audience the wide receiver in the creative process. It is no coincidence that scholarly work being done along these lines is known as literary reception theory.
It is also no coincidence that this scholarly work is being done in the realm of literature. The active creative work of the audience is most apparent in the creative encounter between author and reader, though it is no less true for actors and audience, and for athletes and fans. Readers best exhibit the creative work of audience by transcribing the printed page into a living imaginative world. The reality of collaboration rests on the truth that there is not one work of art called “Moby Dick”, but that instead there are as many millions of “Moby Dicks” as there are millions of readers who have staged that drama in their imaginations. An artist can but create the potential for art. It is only when creative work is encountered and engaged by audience that it is born into art.

The spectator’s collaboration with the drama of competitive sport is the most visceral. Contrasting with the novel or the play, the ballgame’s outcome is never scripted. It is the scripted nature of professional wrestling that certifies its status as theatre and not sport. We are drawn to competitive sports by the symbolic connection between the unknown of victory and defeat, and the unknown of our mortality, of our life and death. It is often said of a passionate sports fan that he “lives and dies” with his chosen team. I live and die with the North Carolina Tar Heels. I of course do not mean that I literally biologically die when the Tar Heels lose a game. But life is full of many deaths, not limited to the biological. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe understands this: “The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” I might add, to lose to Duke is to die a little.

The inability to comprehend the truth of life’s many little deaths, and to function on the concrete level of biological death to the exclusion of all other realities, is at the core of the spread of literalist religions throughout the world. At the same time, literalist religions trade in fundamental truths that leave no room for the collaboration of audience that is as central to the creation of sacred spiritual experience as it is to the creation of art. The establishment of audience as full and equal partner in the creative act is central to any hope of reclaiming the world’s religions from the grasp of literalism that does not just render them meaningless, but makes them dangerous.

Religion, when successful, draws the believer into communication and ultimately creative collaboration with the sacred. No branch of Christianity in America today is successful in shepherding this basic religious experience to its congregants (I draw on the Christian example out of familiarity, but suspect that the general pattern applies to other religions as well). The literalist evangelicals, whose churches are bursting at the seams, have no intention of empowering a collaborative religious experience. Quite the opposite, as their stock in trade is received truth. Their growth in membership is testament to the seductive nature of literalist belief, and to how great the temptation that here, at last, are all the answers. The mainline Protestants, who are struggling to hold on to their members, and who do so largely through cultural inertia, have lost their ability to connect contemporary Americans to the sacred. And contemporary Americans have, in turn, either succumbed to the temptations of literalism or drifted off into American secularism, which is really American consumerism. In either case, Americans have largely abandoned their once meaningful churches.

I am one of these Americans. I was raised Episcopalian by my father, an Episcopal clergyman, and by my mother, a PhD theologian and professor of religion. As an adult I have found myself unable to connect to the sacred through the traditions of the Episcopal church. My response to this failure in collaboration has been to abandon my church.

One statement captures the heartbreaking failure of our traditional mainstream churches and at the same time contains the seed of their revival: “I am a spiritual person, I’m just not into organized religion.” I have heard it so many times that I do not doubt that this statement lives in 90% of the people who no longer or never did attend church, and who have not succumbed to literalist religion. This statement leaves the door open for some form of spiritual life. If mainstream religion is to once more be relevant in the lives of the people of this planet, if it is to avoid being swallowed by the flames of literalism, it must find new ways to feed the spiritual hunger that its current practices have left starving in the bulk of us. I submit that the redemption of our real (ie non-literalist) religions is entwined with the redemption of the sports viewing couch potato. Both depend on recognizing, honoring, and uplifting the collaborative, creative power of audience, be they sports fans or worshipers.

No human experience is more powerful than the flash of connecting with the sacred. Real churches, synagogues, and mosques will be bursting at the seams if they reclaim their right and joyful role of facilitating this flash, and cultivating the flash into a steady light. I believe they can and will, if and when the imbalance of artist, athlete, or religious celebrant over audience is corrected. The audience is ready to gaze directly into the celebrant’s eyes, as soon as the scales are balanced.

I owe Mark Cuban an apology. I see now that he is a player on the stage, and he needs me. Now that I have taken ownership of my power as audience, I see that Cuban and I are going to do great things together.