In Defense of Sportsball (+Q&A Answers, pt. 1)
In the US, sports tend to be coded as right wing. In a country in which Presidential elections always fall within the margin of error from 50/50, nobody is surprised when Donald Trump is met with sustained, uproarious applause when he makes an appearance at a fight or college football game. Even when he showed up at UFC 309 in New York City - not exactly a hotbed of Trump support - nobody was shocked when he got the same pop as when he attended an SEC football game down South. The association has held up even after several years of sports leagues groveling before the dictates of left-wing race and gender ideology. Similarly, the military has and will always be coded as right-wing, regardless of how often General Mark Milley uses the phrase “white fragility” in front of Congress.
It makes sense. Sports and war are masculine pursuits. All the effort put into expanding their appeal has not changed that a bit. Yes, I am aware of women’s sports, but in every case they exist as appendages of their male counterparts. For example, the WNBA cannot fill an arena, and has been a money-losing pseudo-charity event run by the regular NBA, even though women are half the population of potential fans. The US Women’s Soccer team has enjoyed infinitely more success than the men’s team, but has never generated the same interest as the men’s team.
For the last decade or so, there’s been a trend among right wingers to deride “sportsball” as a distraction for the politically somnambulent. The left puts energy into political conflict, so the thinking goes, while people who should be right wing piss away that energy on games. It’s understandable, given the major sports leagues’ kowtowing to left-wing ideas that will, sooner rather than later, be seen by everyone as embarrassing fads. But it’s also wrong.
Since the days of Homer, Western man has always worshiped the warrior and the athlete. The poet’s most common praise of Achilles is that the son of Peleus was a fast runner. This connection was enshrined in the Greek Olympiad (where the best warriors and athletes were often the same men), reduced to its unsublimated base in the Roman Colosseum (where even slaves could achieve immortal glory), and elaborated in Medieval tournaments and modern spectator sports (which bring people to peaks of ecstasy the churches no longer even try to emulate).
For us, sports are more than just an expression of physical exuberance. They are very nearly a spiritual endeavor, an expression of our cherished virtues and moral understanding of the world. We forgive almost any vice or character defect in a champion athlete, but we never forgive one who undermines the integrity of the game (ask Pete Rose). I mean, for God’s sake, we had Congressional hearings over allegations of baseball players using steroids. In 1924, as the Washington Senators faced off against the New York Giants in the World Series, author Maurice Samuel wrote of Western man’s relationship to sports:
(Your love of sports) is not decadence, but the full and vigorous blossoming of your spirit. This is your way of life. The contention of the majority of your educators, that the moral instinct is trained on the football and baseball field, in boxing, rowing, wrestling, and other contests, is a true one, is truer, perhaps, than most of them realize. Your ideal morality is a sporting morality. The intense discipline of the game, the spirit of fair play, the qualities of endurance, of good humor, of conventionalized seriousness in effort, of loyalty, of struggle without malice or bitterness, of readiness to forget like a sport.
Indeed, our sporting morality is even ported over to the most bitter conflicts. A man who engages in a fist fight is outraged if his opponent strikes the groin or goes for the eyes - even if the outraged party started the fight! During and after the First World War, the Entente powers were always quick to point out that Germany was the first to use poison gas, even though both sides had stockpiled it at the front and had always intended to use it. Likewise, during the Second World War the Germans never missed an opportunity that the British were the first to engage in deliberate terror bombing against civilian targets. To an outsider like Samuel, such arguments appear downright absurd, and yet we are genuinely more morally outraged over an alleged violation of mutually-agreed rules than we are at the shooting, gassing, burning, starving, and exploding of millions of human bodies. Object if you like, but I insist: Few Americans would have considered the Japanese immoral for declaring war and attacking our fleet, but the perfidy of a surprise attack liberated our national conscience from the moral consequences of nuking two of their cities and firebombing the rest. If the Japanese had been better students of our culture, they would have known how personally we would take something like that.
Samuel points out that Western man has always elevated hunting as a noble pursuit, set about with limits and regulations to make the hunt “fair.” Hunters take the rules governing the hunt more seriously than anyone. Deer hunters know that you do not kill a doe who is still caring for a fawn, and many have contempt for hunters who use bait to attract their quarry (in fact, baiting deer is legal in only a handful of states). Samuel insists that this is incomprehensible from his Jewish perspective: How could the morality of killing a defenseless animal have anything to do with whether we followed certain self-imposed rules? To most Westerners, I think, it is not only comprehensible, but perfectly obvious.
Western men were only recently barbarians. We have our origins in the hordes of horse-borne warrior-hunters who swept down from the steppe upon the settled peoples of Greece and Italy. They always glorified individual effort and achievement; they placed supreme value on duty and loyalty, but were contemptuous of mere obedience. From Prometheus to Milton’s Satan, we cannot help but see a kind of nobility in their defiance of implacable divine wrath, while feeling, whether we like it or not, disappointed aversion at Job’s groveling submission after Yahweh’s tirade (at least in the traditional interpretation of the Book of Job… longtime subscribers know that I have a somewhat different view of it). When we subject ourselves to the discipline of an arbitrary ruleset, and compete with utmost seriousness in activities that have no meaning outside the context of the game, we defy the cold indifference of the universe. Sisyphus’ curse of endlessly rolling a stone uphill only to watch it roll back down becomes bearable the moment he starts timing himself and trying with each lap to beat his personal best. With sufficient dedication he’d soon attract a crowd of roaring fans and competitors who, with earnestness and joy, take up voluntarily what was imposed on Sisyphus by force. In this way, Zeus is defeated and the curse abolished, even as Sisyphus gears up for his next ascent.
I’m not here to defend or promote any particular sports league, most of which have admittedly beclowned themselves in recent years, but our obsession with competitive sports, our deification of the greatest players, our vicarious experience of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, all grow out of a healthy instinct that would have been familiar to our ancestors.
Signed,
Guy Who Read a Book about Interwar Europe instead of Watching the Super Bowl
OK, let’s knock out some questions from the Q&A.
Subscriber Zach Thompson asks: Off topic but given your missile defense expertise, hat is your opinion of the weapon Russia used in Ukraine that such a huge fuss was about?
(I’m about to geek out, so feel free to skip this one if you’re not interested in missile defense.)
Answer: I assume you’re talking about the Oreshnik ballistic missile used by Russia in November 2024. Ballistic missiles are just what the name implies. They have no onboard guidance system; you fire them in a given direction, they go up, tip over, and fall down, just like a bullet. Most of them have the radar cross-section of a flying schoolbus, so they’re not particularly hard to detect (if you’re looking in the right place), but they are very tricky to actually shoot down. The reason is simple: raw speed. Many countries have advanced cruise missiles with all kinds of exotic capabilities to help them evade and defeat defense radars. Ballistic missiles have none of that, they’re just really fast. So fast that the typical air defense goal of exploding an interceptor near a target so that its fragments puncture the airframe won’t cut it. You pretty much have to hit a ballistic missile “skin-to-skin,” as we say, because it’s so fast that the exploding fragments of your interceptor can’t catch up to it. Most countries don’t have radars or missiles capable of such high resolution; it’s hard enough for us to do it.
A typical intermediate- or long-range ballistic missile is fired into the upper atmosphere, and travels well over 10,000 mph at an altitude of several hundred miles before tipping over for re-entry. Our most advanced ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems are designed to attempt intercept during this midcourse phase, but few countries have that capability. Standard air defense radars have a range of 150-250 miles, so they’re not even capable of tracking a ballistic missile during its midcourse (exo-atmospheric stage). Our interceptor missiles have maximum ranges, too, mostly limited by the amount of fuel they can carry. The US Navy’s main air defense interceptor, the SM-2, is already over 15 feet long and 3 feet wide. Most of that space is taken up by fuel tanks, and its range is still only 90 miles. By contrast, our Ground Based Interceptor missile, which is designed to attack ICBMs in the upper atmosphere, is over 50 feet long and weighs almost 50,000 pounds. These are not things you can load on a ship or a truck; you need large, in-ground silos similar to those used to launch the ICBMs themselves. That’s fine for homeland defense, but they can’t be easily transferred to this or that theater as needed. Most countries have neither the radars capable of detecting and tracking missiles so far away, nor interceptor missiles capable of reaching them. If you don’t detect the incoming missile until re-entry, then you’ve got maybe 45-60 seconds to see it, authorize a defensive launch, and get a few interceptors in the air. If you miss the first time, there won’t be a second.
To add to the trouble, the Oreshnik has at least six MIRVs (multiple independent re-entry vehicle). When the Oreshnik approaches re-entry, it uses an onboard guidance system to fire its six warheads at different targets. So if you don’t take it out during its midcourse stage, you have to deal with six engagements instead of one. Its standard to launch more than one interceptor at a target to increase the chance of success, so a single ballistic missile with six MIRVs might cause us to spend 12-24 interceptor missiles. Do that 3-4 times and you’ve emptied your launcher. Reloading new interceptors is an industrial-scale job involving cranes and other specialized equipment, and it takes a while. For example, reloading the vertical launchers on a US Navy Aegis destroyer might take 2-3 work days.
These problems have always plagued ballistic missile defense, and as far as I can tell the Oreshnik doesn’t add much that’s new. The big knock on ballistic missiles has always been their accuracy. They’re great for nuclear warheads - it can land in Brooklyn or Manhattan, New York City is gone either way - but using them for conventional tactical strikes is less than ideal. Still, they are weapons that, an honest BMD engineer will tell you, cannot be reliably defended against in a real-world scenario. Even in our tests in which we know the launch time, trajectory, missile profile, everything ahead of time, and place all our resources in the perfect location from which to intercept, our hit rate is still less than satisfactory (and we’re the best in the world at it).
Subscriber Chad asks: How much does all this USAID crushing cripple the CIA’s ability to foment color revolutions in foreign countries?
Answer: Well, that remains to be seen. The regime is very resourceful, and USAID is just one tentacle of the octopus. But today’s news that Trump has suspended funding for the National Endowment for Democracy seems to indicate a broader attempt to dismantle the apparatus we’ve long used for social engineering and regime change around the world. Let’s hope so.
Well, I had better put a pin in this. I started answer a question about Trump’s silly comments about the using annexing Gaza, but you guys have given me enough attention for one day. I’ll tell you what, though: I’ve got a big list of your questions here, and I’ll start pounding through them tomorrow, posting the answers every time they add up to 3-4 pages.
Thanks for reading.
Please release more episodes on "The Germans' War." The first one was so good.
Was this concept of Sisyphus defeating Zeus by making a game out of his punishment an original thought of yours, or did you read that somewhere? One of the more profound simplicities I’ve read in a while.