Recurring Myopia
It was hard not to get caught up in it. Nuggets Fever! And while my beloved Celtics stumbled badly on the way to the NBA finals, the standard bearers in my recently adopted Denver more than held their own in claiming their first ever pro basketball championship. In the wake of their round-ball success came the predictable flood of accolades hailing their individual and collective performances in superlatives we’ve come to expect from local and national sports gurus: “Never before seen.” “Greatest of all time.” “Unprecedented.” “Not likely to be seen again.” And let’s not forget my least favorite of hackneyed epithets: “Iconic performances!” I’m sure you’ve heard them all, reminding some of us of the current “born yesterday” innocence guaranteed to provoke eye-rolling and grimaces from those as long-in-the-tooth as me.
This freshest of episodes from the world of sports stirred within me a past, but not forgotten, conversation from my teen-age years. I was at a friend’s house with a group of other guys, fully engaged in that wonderful pastime of youth: hanging out listening to records—you know those vinyl discs that were once state-of-the-art media for audiophiles. Anyway, as we were grooving to those sounds that both bonded us and kept us at cultural arms-length from our parents, one of my buddies ventured a comment that had such a ring of certainty to it I couldn’t let it pass unchallenged. Sylvester Stewart, whose music was deafening our ears, stood on such a pinnacle of genius, so he claimed, that even Beethoven would soon be eclipsed by him. Now some of you may recall the Mr. Stewart in question, a.k.a. Sly Stone. He was the creative force behind his “family” band of the same name, leaving us with such timeless masterpieces as Dance to the Music, Everyday People, Hot Fun in the Summertime, and the unforgettable, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin). (If you recall any of these, I can assume you are retired, just like me. Yet once upon a time I coveted his greatest hits album in the large collection of LPs that served as the musical soundtrack to my later high school years. So even though the passing mention of this band leaves my grandkids looking like I just started speaking in an archaic tongue, I am not embarrassed to admit that my fingers and toes easily pick up the beat when one of Sly’s oldies pours out of my car radio.) Even way back then I found it quite a reach for someone to claim that Sly Stewart should be mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven. Hadn’t Ludwig’s music lasted more than 150 years, while Sly’s seemed destined for the Top-40 dustbin where most of the other 12-week Billboard wonders end up? I think I can say, more than five decades later, that the validity of what I then sensed about popularity’s fleeting longevity has been confirmed in our ever-shifting judgments of what truly endures.
My old chum’s assertion, however, did offer me one of my first glimpses of our tendency to elevate our present experience over the much larger and longer sweep of human existence. For he gave voice to the kind of intellectual, cultural, or historical short-sightedness that so rivets us on the “now” that we seem unwilling or unable to put what is new and novel into a longer and broader perspective of time and change. I am not the first to liken such short-sightedness to the ocular condition known as myopia, in which are eyes can focus on what is up close much better than at a distance. It seems to be the particular gift—or affliction—of youth, inevitably giving way to the post-40 far-sightedness that sends us to drug stores for optical “readers,” soon to be followed by bi- and tri-focals. Trust me, I know first-hand about what I am speaking.
This realization from long ago is merely one of many reinforcements of that ancient wisdom declaring that there really is nothing new under the sun.* It has led me to conclude that cultural or generational myopia is one of the most predictable and recurring of human traits. Nowhere does this seem to be truer than in our most ardently followed religious form: sports**. Being a student of the Big 3 of American fandom: baseball, football and basketball (not discounting, but not as seriously following other ascendant, albeit imported sports like hockey and soccer), I find it hard to ignore the rampant myopia of those whose passions, livelihoods and financial commitments are so defined by and energized through institutional athletics.
Take the term GOAT for instance, a relatively recent ascription in our sports lexicon. It attempts to compare today’s teams and players with those of yesteryear, a hobby that has been going on since collegiate and professional athletics first evolved from recreational pastimes to seasonal preoccupations to year-round, economic bonanzas. Old-timers and younger folk like to jaw over which player or team was best in a specific era or across time immemorial, often posing hypotheticals about who would win in imagined head-to-head competitions. It is not only the stuff of barroom and poker game arguments. It fills so much of the round-the-clock airtime on sports networks that vie for our attention and our gambling dollars.
What I find so incredible about the lather we work up in these public jousts is that their premises seem to me so bogus. Aside from the general structure of the particular games in question—outs and innings in baseball, downs and distances in football, baskets and free-throw lines in basketball—there is far less than we think that links those sports of today with their antecedents, some stretching back into the 19th century. And since time travel remains an impossibility (no matter how compelling its abundant depictions), it is highly questionable that any of us can make any definitive comparisons between current sports now and those played more than a decade or two ago.
And then there’s the NFL. How dare we compare Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers to a John Unitas, Bart Starr or Joe Montana when the games they played have so radically changed? The length of the seasons, the number of exhibitions, the off-days between games, the surfaces upon which they play and the roofs under which they compete—none are what they were even 20 years ago, let alone prior to that. Even some of the basic rules have changed, turning agile fist-closed blockers into jersey-grabbing Sumo wrestlers. Quarterbacks, who once were treated like any pigskin-toting player, are now encased in hands-off bubbles befitting their high salaries and the pass-on-any-down offenses they must command. I’m not certain what role great runners like Jim Brown, Gayle Sayers or Emmitt Smith might have in today’s offenses in which they are lucky to get 10 touches on a good day. So to extend a debate about who is the best-of-all-time in football—at any position—is an exercise no more insightful than arguing the superiority of apples over oranges.
Baseball is much the same, especially in its present obsession with 100 mph fireballers hurling cow-hide BBs at overmatched batsmen, largely reducing the game to an all-or-nothing contest between home runs and strike outs. Right now the Ks seem to be winning, and by a large margin. Apparently the laced spheroid, once described as “dead” and then “juiced,” is now mostly just unhittable.
And then there is basketball, which in the last forty years has been completely re-imaged, thanks to the impact of the 4”, semi-circular line behind which 3 or 4 teammates stand waiting for their next catch-and-shoot opportunity. At first the 3-point line was a novelty, viewed by traditionalists as an optional gift for long-distance buzzer beaters or a break from wide-butted big men backing their opponent into the hoop. But in the 21st Century it has become the centerpiece of basketball strategy, turning the game from a passing, weaving, rebounding effort to a run, scatter, and heave exercise. Why? Simple math. Once coaches realized that if enough 3-pointers are launched, even making fewer than 50% of them would most likely bring a victory. But for the occasional breakaway dunk so featured in highlight reels, basketball has become a different game than it ever was before. How then can we compare a Labron with an MJ or Bird, a Curry with a Robertson or West? Neither should a superlative talent like Denver’s Joker be mentioned in the same breath with dominant centers of the past like Wilt, Jabbar, Hakeem or Shaq—nor they with him. The players of yesterday shouldn’t be held up to those of today, nor vice versa, as if one era or team or individual ranks above the others. There are just too many of the variables that define both the athletes and the games, not to mention the economics and politics surrounding sports, that have changed. It seems to me that making such comparisons is little more than a variation of the childish taunt, “mine is better than yours.” Since none of these all-star players spanning the decades ever really played the same game, only arguments about who’s the best pitting them with their peers of the moment seem justified.
Ruminating about sports is not the only place where our myopia is expressed. Just consider the voluminous output of historical research now urging us to reconsider the lives and records of those who lived long before most of us drew our first breath. Among them are significant studies offering us new assessments of our predecessors as human beings best understood in the context of the times in which they lived. These explorations make clear, sometimes painfully so, how even those who authored our most noble and notable ideas were subject to, and often bound by the cultural milieu in which they lived. Their attitudes about race, ethnicity, gender, religion and politics do not always resonate with ours, nor should we demand that they do, disappointing as that may be to us living in this present moment of enlightenment. We must therefore be both honest and careful in rummaging through skeleton-laden closets lest we forget how biased--dare I say arrogant--we may become in doing so. For the imposition of our values and convictions on those who, in essence, played out their seasons of life on different playing fields than we do, with different rules, assumptions and expectations, is as historically naïve as it is myopic. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t justified in recognizing and calling out those who failed to live up to the beliefs and priorities of the present. But we must never do so unless we, in turn, are ready to turn the same critical lens on ourselves. The clay feet of all the gods should never be ignored. Neither should we pretend our feet are much different.
I should conclude this essay with a disclaimer, one I suspect that many of us might also need or want to make. The older I get, the more hyperoptic—far sighted—I think I’m becoming. A day doesn’t pass wherein I look at the world around me and shake my head in dismay or disgust, wondering what has become of this place I once thought I understood. But in doing so am I not making as false a comparison as speculating about present versus past stars of diamonds, gridirons and hardwood courts? The arenas in which we now compete in 2023 have changed over what they once were, or may now appear to have been in our retrospection. The social rules and conventions I once thought governed how people should appear, think or act, including that canon of sensibility that was once accepted as “common:” all of it has changed, as much as I may hate to admit or accept. For life is an always-changing game, requiring of us the ability to see both the present and the past with 20-20 acuity. Given that our insight is usually either myopic or hyperoptic, our judgments must always be qualified and checked lest we mistakenly see the past and the present through our own subjective, distorted lenses.
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*Perhaps one of the truest of the wise sayings attributed to Solomon in the Bible (Ecclesiastes 1:9), written a mere 2500 or so years ago.
**If religion can be defined in its broadest sense as that human experience of ultimate meaning which we express in socially recognizable faith communities, then sports, with its leagues, teams, saints and heroes, sacraments and sacrifices, rituals and myths, histories, moralities (rules and sanctions), battles and warriors, and reckonings of immortality (halls of fame), warrants inclusion among our most compelling and lucrative religions.
One causes us to see trees without forests…the other forests devoid of trees