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For Americans these demonstrations of will connect with their history, or at least they feel that they connect with their history, which comes to the same thing. Everything Americans wish to believe about their national character is housed in sports: vitality, spontaneity, the bursting of bonds. No state religion for the U.S., but sports will do as well. The Puritans condemned games as antispiritual. Their heirs retaliated by fusing holidays with tournaments—football on Thanksgiving, basketball at Christmas—all blasphemies culminating in Super Sunday. Thorstein Veblen contended that sports and religion have the same genesis in a basic "belief in an inscrutable propensity or a preternatural interposition in the sequence of events." We'll take his word for it. In simpler terms, Americans make stadiums their churches because they trust that therein lies national virtue. Extolling baseball, Albert Spalding, the sporting-goods king, called the game "the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Vitality." Only real piety could inspire such alliteration.
Whatever else, these displays of individual worth are simply beautiful. In a way, the Games extend definitions of beauty. Why is synchronized swimming no more beautiful than the bulging grimace of a weight lifter? Art rarely pins these things down. Painters miss it. Writers do worse, with exceptions such as Mailer on boxing, Updike on golf, Hemingway on a bobsled run: "A bob shot past, all the crew moving in time, and as it rushed at express train speed for the first turn, the crew all cried 'Ga-a-a-a-r!' and the bob roared in an icy smother around the curve and dropped off down the glassy run below." The ands do it. Everything must keep moving. Housman celebrated an "athlete dying young" because the boy would never have to learn that eventually things slow down, grow old, stop.
The beauty is motion, and motion does not last. Most things ephemeral have limited appeal, but the heart of the Olympics is that things shine for a moment and no more. Did Dwight Stones really clear that bar at 7 ft. 8 in.? One saw it happen a second ago. One saw it again on instant replay. Yet the jump no longer exists, nor can it return. Billy Mills, who won the 10,000-meter run in Tokyo, said, "For one fleeting moment an athlete will know he or she is the best in the world. Then the moment is gone." Bill Russell, pro basketball's philosopher, likes the short-term nature of sports because it bespeaks a world of reasonable expectations. "Sports not only claims smaller bits of time," says Russell, "it also claims smaller bits of truth ... The only truth [sports] claims is the score." Since nothing lasts, pleasure relies on memory. It is not the feats that are preserved but the joy.