By The Commish

You've probably seen the t-shirt at some racetrack, some weekend: “Racing is Life. All the rest is just details.” In the wake of the tragedy in the Delta, it seems too ridiculous to even mention the shirt, or the attitude it represents. When we see the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of our country suffering in the wake of a natural disaster, racing — or any kind of sports — ought to be the last thing on our minds. Instead, though, I think it’s going to take on a much different tenor for some time.

We saw it in the weeks after 9/11, when going to a race or a ballgame became a patriotic gesture, when rescue workers were flown from all over the country to sporting venues and the World Trade Center flag made appearance after appearance at 50 yard-lines, center fields, and start-finish lines. Turning to sports was a sign that our country was “getting back to normal,” that the bad guys hadn’t defeated us, that America still worked. When Dale Earnhardt Jr. took a victory lap at Dover in a Budweiser car decorated with the American flag, fans roared defiance and confidence. Sports were proof that nobody could take America down, least of all a small band of terrorists from a country most Americans couldn’t even find on a map. Sports were a big part of the restoration of the American psyche, the confidence that we were mostly invulnerable, that disasters were a freak event.

This time it’s different. America wasn’t attacked by foreign invaders, it was overwhelmed by the forces of nature assisted by human disarray. The disaster wasn’t confined to 4 city blocks but to 900,000 square miles of America’s poorest states. Police and firefighters couldn’t mount a heroic response because there was nothing to mount it with — just desperation, a few boats, and anything that floated. Instead of having heavy equipment in the area in a few hours, it’s taken four days to start moving it down the broken highways of the Gulf. With 9/11, we knew within hours that there were no survivors. We didn’t see the suffering and dying everywhere the cameras turned. And unlike 9/11, we can’t blame foreign villains for our plight. We’re having to turn our critical eyes on ourselves. Faced with the pain of self-examination, sports is a convenient, and maybe a necessary diversion.

Watching the scenes of downtown New Orleans this week has shown us all what happens when all the rules break down. The line between good guys and bad guys has become dangerously blurred. Is it really looting when someone breaks into a grocery store for diapers and water, or into a pharmacy for insulin or formula? The cops turned out to be tragically human, while the National Guard medical, transportation, and logistics units were fighting a war on foreign soil. Elected officials, instead of bolstering public confidence, seem dangerously out of touch as they congratulate each other on the fine job they are doing. Some people mocked former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards in the last campaign for talking about “two Americas.” Now we know what that second one looks like, and where a large portion of it lived. To a shell-shocked and horrified nation, the need for rules and order has never seemed greater.

And sports, more than anything else in our world today, exemplifies the primacy of rules. It’s either fair or foul, out of bounds or in, legal or not. Decisions are made in split seconds (or, with instant replay, in just a few moments). Outcomes are clear—- win, lose, or tie. People may be disappointed, even heartbroken, by the way events turn out, but at least they know the scores. Even after the scandals that have rocked sports in the last few years, we still believe in them as an institution.

And so we turn even more desperately to tracks and courts and playing fields, to a regime where rules will hold sway, authority will prevail, and (we dearly hope) virtue will triumph. Sports are not an opiate for the masses, nor are they an anodyne for our pain, but they are. For a nation whose beliefs have been rocked to the core, a reassurance, a stopgap, a way to take a breath and try to regain our equilibrium. They re-establish our bonds, with ourselves and with our beliefs. When we share our enthusiasm with other people. We grasp for a kind of normalcy and order that our damaged psyches need very badly. Win or lose this weekend, we will feel stronger, somehow, because we are together.

We all know that Tripper Harrison of Meatballs is right in the grand scheme of things: “It just doesn’t matter.” And yet, sports do matter. They give us hope that order will be restored, that life will go on, that one day we’ll be able to focus on more than just tragedy. So let the races run and the games begin. Just don’t confuse them with reality. They ain’t even close.

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