IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-century medical encyclopedias, the article “The Secret Vice” was about onanism. Inevitably accompanying the article was a photograph of a practitioner, a young man, poor fellow, who looked to be in the moral equivalent of advanced leprosy.
I have a secret vice of my own to report, and this is listening to talk-radio shows devoted to sports. I practice this vice only in my car, when alone, and until now nobody knew about it. Why, I have often asked myself, do I degrade myself in this way? For my own intellectual health, I’ve got to stop, and stop soon.
In the console of my car are CDs of Dvorak string quartets, Mitsuko Uchida’s sublime rendition of Schubert piano music, Sarah Vaughan singing old standards, and Joel Grey doing the subtler show tunes. This ought to be sufficient to keep me from the tedium of city traffic. Not so, it turns out.
Instead I prefer to hear argumentative men gas away on the exploits of other large and sometimes bulky men hitting, kicking, and stuffing balls of various shapes and sizes over different shaped fields and courts. I, who during the evening might be reading a biography of Dante (Alighieri, not Culpepper), in my car listen to the thin iconoclasm and even thinner commonsense observations of ex-jocks and newspaper sportswriters.
Chicago has two stations devoted to sports talk. Some of the men employed by these stations come on as very moral and perpetually ticked off; others are worldly and calmly cynical; everyone is terribly knowing.
Part of the attraction is what I believe the feminists would call “masculinist.” One of the shows I listen to advertises itself as America’s last corner bar. It has three so-called hosts: a pugnacious Irishman, a not especially brainy Jewish guy, and a retired Green Bay Packers defensive lineman. All are happily overweight. They eat unhealthily and are pleased about it; for them women are purely sexual objects, except wives, who are figures of mild terror that exist to raise one’s children and be outfoxed.
For your sports-talk show man, host or audience, life is largely lived in front of the television set, watching two, three games a night, and uncounted ones on lost weekends. No war on terror is going on, the state of the economy is a matter of little concern, gay marriage is a subject good chiefly for raw jokes. The only questions worth pondering are how corrupt are college sports, was Notre Dame right to fire its football coach, and was Sammy Sosa on steroids the two years he hit more than 60 homers.
Much of the content of sports-talk radio is about old, obviously unsettleable arguments: Who are the five all-time best quarterbacks in the NFL? How does Barry Bonds’s record stack up against Babe Ruth’s? Are all basketball games really won on defense? Gruff opinionation usually wins the day: “Whaddya mean you’d rather have Peyton Manning than Brett Favre in the red zone late in the fourth quarter in a playoff game? Look at the numbers, for God’s sake.” Ephemeral scandals–supplied in recent months by Jason Giambi and Kobe Bryant–and trades, potential and real, fill the day’s chitchat. The same few bones are gnawed continuously.
Occasionally I learn a little something. When the White Sox traded a power-hitting outfielder named Carlos Lee, I wondered why. On one of these shows I learned that, though Lee hit more than 30 home runs and batted around .300, and had an error-free year in left field, he also hit 50 points lower with men in scoring position, and more than 100 points lower with two outs with men in scoring position, and the reason he fielded as well as he did is that he played a short left field and the balls that sailed over his head did not count as errors.
These shows are all the radio equivalent of interactive–they allow the audience to put in its rusty two cents through call-ins, emails, faxes. I’ve never called in or sent an email myself. Even though I’ve wasted a vast portion of my life watching games, I find I have no strikingly original insight into any of them. I could, I suppose, call in politely to point out that the word “fortuitous” doesn’t mean fortunate or that “differential” has more properly to do with equations and with engines than the differences in scores. Somehow, though, I feel my pedantry would not be well received.
My mind would be so much better engaged listening to serious music. Shoot the Schubert to me, Hubert, should be my byword, or Hit me with more Dvorak, Jack. Yet I listen to the trivia-meisters of sports-talk radio instead. All I can do is admit to the vice, and, in the manner of Alcoholics Anonymous, hope, now that my vice isn’t secret any more, that I’ve taken a first step toward recovery.
–Joseph Epstein
