Robert Angell, the greatest baseball writer of my lifetime, once answered a critic who asked him why baseball should be taken seriously and why it should be given such weight in the life of the country, this at a time when baseball was the most popular American professional sport.
Angell knew the history of the sport. He knew about its long trail of racism and about the financial exploitation of its players by rapacious owners who saw them as disposable.
He wrote that in spite of all that, a love of baseball and of a team was a good thing for a people and a city. In spite of the drink, in spite of the occasional ugly behavior of some fans, baseball also provoked a sense of wonder at the supreme skills of the best athletes. It fed our need for heroes, however flawed, who on the field give performances that show us excellence in deeds and sometimes even in character. For us, they sacrifice their bodies. For us, for a few hours each game, for a season, for a lifetime of devotion, they provide a passage into a larger community. That is no small thing.
The Philadelphia Eagles won Super Bowl 59 in a full team victory, and in this long winter, lifted the spirits of several million human beings. Wait a sec, scrub the spirits bit. They made all those people happy – see a stranger at WAWA and fall into a conversation, “What about them Birds!” happy. Talk to your coworkers pleasantly happy. Laugh more easily happy. Forget the disintegrating world for a bit happy.
In spite of the pervasive stench of gambling that now surrounds the sport, in spite of the drunkenness, in spite of a few partisan fans’ xenophobic treatment of opposing teams’ supporters, in spite of the physical damage inflicted by the game on the bodies of its players – I know, in spite of and in spite of – but this past Sunday we witnessed men with guileless affection for each other play a very difficult sport at the highest levels of physical and intellectual excellence and in doing so actually make joy, actually craft out of their bodies on that field, a palpable and inescapable joy.
That feeling will pass, the winter will drag on, the news will darken, but the reality of those moments on Sunday will not go away, the reality of good cheer conjured out of a game will not go away and the expectation of future happiness will not go away. The Philadelphia Eagles did a service to all those who root for them – that team took people out of themselves for a while, took them away from algorithms and a plodding daily life and let them celebrate genuine achievement together. That too is no small thing.
