Asking a die-hard sports spectator to predict how we will spectate in the future can cause terrible cognitive dissonance. The sports fan is not oriented toward the future; he is the retrospective creature par excellence. He travels forward with his eyes glued to the rearview mirror. His preferred modes of spectating are historical–the highlight reel; the classic NFL film with its sonorous, Homeric narration; and, most perfectly, the instant replay, which, of course, instantly historicizes the present.
Obviously, the essential need to spectate will endure into the distant future. We can’t talk sports unless we watch sports. And talk we must. Sports blather will remain the lingua franca in bars, elevators and doctors’ waiting rooms around the world. In 2025, no matter how far-flung or misbegotten a place he finds himself in, man will always be able to strike up a lively conversation with the opening gambit “Livingston Bramble, Boom-Boom Mancini, 1985. That was a fight.”
We will continue to watch sports because it is one of the last areas in our life in which we can experience the unexpected, the improvisational. But how we watch will change radically. The two primary styles of live spectating–the self-aggrandizing preening of the ringside celebrity and the self-annulling ecstasy of the anonymous face-painted fan–will soon be relics of the past, available only in dioramas in sports museums.
Referring to the Golden Age of the Latin American caudillo, Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote that “stadiums play a double role: in peacetime they are sports venues; in war they turn into concentration camps.” Well, in the future, in the synergistic bliss of the globalized economy, stadiums and arenas will simply turn into malls and food courts. The live event–the game itself–will become, at best, a point-of-purchase display. Already, most people attending a basketball game rarely glance at the live action. They watch the Jumbotron screens cantilevered above the court or the monitors mounted in the arena’s various saloons and emporiums.
Except for the opportunity to begrudgingly share cheese-drenched nachos with complete strangers or stand in line and chat with other people who also have to urinate badly, there will be no valid reason to attend a live sports event as a spectator. All sports, and especially football, will continue to be better on TV. The only way to sustain interest in actual attendance at sports events in the future will be to incorporate fans into the action. But how?
Recent incidents, such as the projectile-throwing tantrum at the Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park and the abuse of European golfers at the Ryder Cup in Brookline, Mass., suggest an answer: legal hooliganism. Teams will sponsor cells of well-trained, remorseless thugs ready at any moment to storm the field and waylay players. Athletes will be expected to hone those skills necessary to contend with this exciting new variable.
For the rest of us, though, TV will more than suffice. And stunning technological advances will revolutionize our viewing pleasure. Computer-enhanced television will enable us to customize the content of broadcast sports coverage. Let’s say, for example, that you only want to watch players groom themselves and spit. The new personal-p.o.v. digital technology will allow you to remain focused on any player, on the field or off, who’s picking his nose, adjusting his protective cup or spewing tobacco juice–without the constant interruption of superfluous play-by-play coverage.
Watching is one thing, but what about having a vicarious sensory and kinesthetic experience of your favorite sport? Within the next 50 years, neural-input units will become as standard a feature of your entertainment console as the remote control. With this hairnet-like apparatus sending complex algorithmic signals into your motor cortex and parietal lobe, you’ll actually feel what it’s like to be slashed across the eyes by a high-sticking Tie Domi. Seated on your couch, you’ll writhe in agony from lactic-acid accumulation at the end of an Ironman Triathlon. And you’ll hop around your living room like a maniac as you actually experience the excruciating pain of Mike Tyson’s incisors on your ear.
Biotechnological innovations and gerontological research will also have a profound impact on how you watch sports. Cloning capabilities, discoveries in the genetics of longevity and advances in cryonics will enable scientists not only to extend the lives of current players but also to revivify long-deceased athletes. This will finally eliminate the need for stupefying talk-radio debates about how Honus Wagner might fare against Pedro Martinez or whether Serena Williams could have beaten Helen Wills Moody.
The athletic icons of the ensuing century will to a large degree resemble those of today. Egregious jackasses whose laziness and sense of entitlement have caused them to lose their starting positions and who then succumb to unlimited sex, drugs and fried foods will remain ascendant, their posters plastered on the walls of boys’ bedrooms across America. But it’s pro wrestlers who will reign supreme, because they are the embodiment of sport as soap opera. With wrestling’s incomparable melding of the trailer park and Valhalla, its intricate and interlacing narratives, its music, pyrotechnic stagecraft and glorification of oratory, it is the Gesamtkunstwerk–the total artwork–of the sports and entertainment world. Professional wrestling will be the single most powerful influence on all other sports well into the 22nd century.
As more and more televised sport is pumped into our homes, how will our children be affected? I need only extrapolate from my own experience. Several weeks ago, during her final soccer game of the season, my six-year-old daughter, while chatting with a friend and seemingly oblivious to the game, inadvertently allowed a ball to ricochet off her hip into her own goal. She responded with a vicious throat-slashing gesture directed at her teammates. She later spit at me, apparently mistaking me for an autograph-seeking fan. And that night at a local restaurant, she confessed to intentionally throwing the game, having placed a rather substantial wager on the opposing team.
Unfortunately, even these inchoate stirrings of competitive spirit will fade with maturity. As William Wordsworth (whose brooding peregrinations of the Lake District constitute perhaps the original Ironman sport) wrote, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Someday even my daughter, or her daughter’s daughter, will mist over at the memory of the androgen-swollen, coach-garroting, endorsement-besotted free agent ridiculing his teammates after a tough loss. Like today’s purists who long for the bunt, the pick-and-roll and touch tennis, they too will pine for the good old days.
Mark Leyner is a novelist and screenwriter. His most recent novel is The Tetherballs of Bougainville
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