FIRST PERSON | JOHN NAURIGHT
As told to Michelle Hiskey, for the AJC
Numbers no longer support baseball’s claim as the national pastime. That honor belongs to football, said John Nauright, who has studied sports and society for 21 years. Nauright, who grew up near Augusta and previously taught at Georgia Southern, is professor of sport and leisure cultures at the University of Brighton in England.
The idea of baseball as national pastime is much more slogan than reality. Go back to free agency in the 1970s, when baseball began to struggle to keep pace with football’s popularity. Today, football has supplanted baseball as the No. 1 spectator sport. The tailgating experience and culture that has developed around college and pro football has changed the role of that sport, and baseball, in American society.
Watching many baseball movies, particularly “Field of Dreams,” you see baseball promoted as all that is good and pure about America — a nostalgic vision of an America that probably never was. This myth tells us that fathers and sons can be together and everyone is happy in an idyllic paradise.
That’s not the reality when you go to a baseball game now in a modern stadium, but it was “the” American sport in the past. Go back to the first six to seven decades of the 20th century, and you had the president throwing out the opening pitch each season, and radio and TV recorded it. Baseball marked the passage of time. My great-great uncle listened to every Braves game until he died at 97, and it gave us a common language.
Today there’s little mythologizing. If someone is chasing a home run record, we think he must be juiced up on steroids. However, we know now that Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle and others were carousers. Nowadays, we rather look to the media to find out what is wrong with our baseball heroes.
The closest we have to a national pastime now is football because of the cultural significance of the Super Bowl. Of the top TV programs in history, the majority are Super Bowls. Where else but football do you have spaces in public culture where 80,000 to 100,000 people or more regularly and safely gather to celebrate? They are unified by the connection to their team and sport of football.
There are still attempts to restore baseball to its mythical platform. You can’t underestimate the residual impact of baseball when President Bush and Congress addressed the steroids scandal. Despite other troubling issues in America, Congress took time to discuss the purity of baseball. The impact of the steroids scandal has been huge in eroding public confidence and trust in what was once our national pastime.
