In the normal course of athletic affairs, 92 yards is nothing. It's a nine-second dash for some sprinters, and a mere one-minute stroll even for those of us nursing old sports injuries. But when the San Francisco 49ers stepped onto the field at Joe Robbie Stadium in Super Bowl XXIII, it must have looked like a mile. They had three minutes and 10 seconds to traverse the distance, and most spectators thought time had, for all intents and purposes, run out.

What stood in the 49ers' way were eleven massive and lightning-quick Cincinnati Bengals, one of the best defensive squads in the nfl, sitting on a 16-13 lead a mere 200 seconds from their first Super Bowl ring. They were prowling like lions, in no mood to give any ground. They'd heard the hype about the anointed Joe Montana (who already had two Super Bowl rings), but it was clear that he and the 12-6 49ers were past their prime.

But Randy Cross, who spent his Sunday afternoons that year hiking the ball to Montana, didn't hear the fat lady even warming up. Before the 49ers trotted on to the field for the last time, their center walked up and down the sidelines telling—make that screaming at—anybody he could find. "You gotta believe! You gotta believe!"

The mood in the huddle was businesslike—except for Montana, who wasn't nicknamed Joe Cool for nothing. As the players gathered in the huddle, Montana turned to tackle Harris Barton. "Hey, Harris," he said. "Check it out. There's John Candy."

The drive began with a couple of short passes and runs—Montana was, as usual, taking what the defense gave him, faithful in little. It wasn't much, and with 1:49 left, the 49ers had managed only to cross midfield. Another pass put them on the Cincinnati 35, but the next pass fell incomplete, followed by a penalty: Cross was downfield on a pass. Now it was second and 20 on the Cincinnati 45, with only 1:17 left.

"The crowd was so loud that I had to scream every word," Montana remembers. "And the excitement was just overwhelming. I couldn't catch my breath. I was dizzy. I should have called timeout, but it kind of faded away. All I could do was throw the ball out of bounds."

Joe Cool, fighting Bengals without and demons within, caught his breath, then threw to Jerry Rice for 27 yards, and Roger Craig for another eight. The 49ers were 10 yards from the end zone, with 39 seconds left on the clock.

"When we got to the 10, we were going to score a touchdown," Cross said, "even if we had to throw Joe through the air 10 yards to do it."

With the defense smothering Rice, Montana looked for his secondary receiver, John Taylor, in the back of the end zone. "I knew he was open when I threw it," Montana said, "but I got hit when the ball was halfway there and couldn't see what happened."

When the crowd of 75,000 roared, Joe Cool knew he'd triumphed, completing what is now known as The Drive.1

Meanwhile, this 49er fan sat in his living room, staring at his tv through misty eyes, repeating the mantra, "I don't believe it."

Joe, we believe. Help thou our unbelief.

As a culture, we give time, space, and money to sports in ways unparalleled in history. We wear our athletic heroes' jerseys, our moods fluctuate with the fate of our team, and sports stadiums dominate the skyline of many modern cities, architecturally signaling our highest devotion.

Annually, the 256 National League Football games draw an average of some 67,000 fans per game. On a per-game basis, only one other sport comes close, at some 56,000 fans per match: Europe's Six Nation Championships of rugby. For total annual attendance, nothing even approaches Major League Baseball, which draws some 72 million fans. ncaa Division I football and basketball come in for a respectable second and third at 30 and 25 million respectively.2

Financially the numbers are equally telling. By 2009, according to calculations in PricewaterhouseCooper's Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2005-2009, the worldwide sports market will achieve sales of $111.1 billion. That includes gate revenues, broadcast and cable rights, merchandising, sponsorships, and so on and so forth. I beg to differ in one respect: $111.1 billion is not a sales figure; it's an economy.

This confluence of time, space, and money has led many scholars to conclude that sports constitute not so much a diversion as a form of devotion, a set of myths, beliefs, and ritual behaviors that make it look very much like religion.3 Does anyone doubt that as a culture, as a world, we believe in sports? I certainly didn't—until I caught a whiff of heresy in, of all places, The Best American Sports Writing 2005.

Glenn Stout, the series editor, starts off well enough in his foreword. He recalls some of his favorite sports writing through the years, and nearly all the examples are game stories, in which the athletic contest is at the center of the piece: Dan Jenkins' description of the 10-10 tie between Notre Dame and Michigan State in 1966, Jack Nicklaus' failure to win the 1972 British Open, and so on. Stout then rehearses a key moment in the Red Sox-Yankee playoff series, which the Red Sox finally, miraculously won after a 3-0 deficit.

When Stout thinks of great sports writing of the past, he thinks instinctively about game stories. But when it comes to choosing stories for his annual, apparently another calculus is at play. Though Mike Lupica, New York Daily News columnist and the editor of the 2005 volume, made the final choices, it was Stout who sifted through the hundreds of entries and suggested the finalists.

I suspected something was amiss when Lupica described in the introduction the contents of the volume. "You will see an ambitious column by Richard Sandomir of the New York Times… [about abc's five-second delay] speaking to the whole notion of censorship… and a touching story from Sean Flynn that is more about friendship than golf… There are pieces about race and steroids and rape and illness and hope and loss, all spendidly told."

I began to wonder if I had mistakenly picked up The Best Social Issues Writing 2005. To be sure, the writing here is splendid, and, yes, a few pieces are about what happened in the games themselves. Gary Smith in "Running for the Lives" movingly describes the impact a committed white running coach has on his Hispanic cross country team. It begins:

There was silence when the footrace ended. Then Ayon threw his arms around the coach's wife and cried, "Why did God do this? I don't know why God did this" and the boys in red and white each staggered off to cry alone. They had failed the most successful coach in California school boy history.

The volume also reprints Michael Lewis' New York Times Magazine piece, "The Eli Experiment," on the latest Manning quarterback phenomenon. It's a now-typical example of Lewis' deep reporting, narrative skill, and flashes of insight:

[T]here is no way to react intelligently, in real time, to the chaos; you need to envision its pattern before it takes shape. You have to, in short, guess. A lot. Every time Eli Manning drops back and makes a decision, he's just guessing. His guesses produce uneven results, but he is shockingly good at not making the worst ones.

But mostly there are stories about what goes on around the games. About how steroid abuse in high school and college led to the death of one young man ("Dreams, Steroids, Death—A Ballplayer's Downfall" by Mark Fainaru-Wada); a coming-of-age story featuring David Shields' reflections on the brash broadcasting of Howard Cosell ("The Wound and the Bow"). And there is a lengthy Washington Post piece by Steve Coll on the death of former nfl star Pat Tillman in Iraq.

In the Best Sports Writing 2005, sports are often merely an incidental backdrop to some social or political commentary—the investigation into Pat Tillmans' death being the salient case in point. Sports plays no role in the piece; Tillman just happened to be a soldier who played in the nfl.

In this volume you won't find a single game story, in which the sine qua non of sports—an athletic contest itself—is described or analyzed or reflected upon. And this in a year when the Red Sox pulled off what is arguably the greatest comeback in playoff history, when the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team (yes, hockey; yes, Florida) won the Stanley Cup; when the Detroit Pistons won the nba title over the 9-1 favorites Los Angeles Lakers (with Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton in the lineup); when the dominating Smarty Jones came "this close" to winning the Triple Crown; when for the first time in ncaa Division I history one university, Connecticut, won both the men's and women's basketball championships in the same season; when Phil Mickleson—"the best player never to win a major"—won the Masters; when Lance Armstrong won his unprecedented sixth Tour de France; when Paul Hamm won the gold in gymnastics, and refused to give it back after the judges decided they should have awarded it to South Korean Yang Tae-young.

Are Stout and Lupica telling me that there was no stellar writing, reporting, commentary, or analysis of these magnificent sports events of 2004, or about the heroes of these events? What's with that?

This struck me as so odd, in fact, that I decided to check out similar anthologies from an earlier era. I went to the library and randomly pulled off the shelf Best Sports Stories 1967: A Panorama of the 1966 Sports World With the Year's Top Photographs, edited by Irving T. Marsh and Eward Ehre. It turned out to be a felicitous pick: I discovered that this collection contains what many consider to be the best sports article ever written, Gay Talese's profile of Joe DiMaggio, "The Silent Season of a Hero." More on that in a bit. That is not what caught my immediate attention.

First, there was the arrangement of the table of contents. After featuring the prize-winning stories for best news coverage, best news-feature, and best magazine story, the rest of the book was organized by sport, with headings for baseball, football, boxing, basketball, tennis, soccer, and so on. Sports themselves were pre-eminent.

Second, I discovered in this old volume a host of game stories. There were two pieces about Moe Drabowski's unexpectedly stellar pitching display for the Baltimore Orioles against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first game of the 1966 World Series; another about how Sam DeLuca, a lineman for the New York Jets, went about protecting team star Joe Namath from the wiles of oncoming defensive tackles; another about Roy Emerson's tragic Wimbledon loss to Owen Davidson; another about Jack Nicklaus' repeat win at the Masters. There was even a description of a demolition derby.

The volume also included colorful stories of events and people swirling around the games—one about gambling at Wrigley Field and another about the Milwaukee Braves moving to Atlanta, for example. But a large chunk of the book was dedicated to describing key moments of the year's best games, as well as profiling famous sports heroes of the day: boxer Rocky Graziano, jockey Johnny Longden, and the great Joe DiMaggio.

In 1966, it seems, sports writers—or at least people who picked "the best sports stories"—were much more interested in the games and their biggest heroes than are the editors of the 2005 volume. And just to make sure the latter volume wasn't idiosyncratic, I looked at the 2003 and 2004 Best Sports Writing volumes as well. While they contain a few of the 1967-type stories, the pattern is more or less the same.

The reasons for this shift are likely as large as a history of the late-20th century, but a subtle change in the titles of the books suggests one. The early volume is about "sport stories," the latter about "sports writing." Stout makes a point of this by saying his volumes are not about sportswriting but sports writing. But this just removes the question by one step: Why are Stout and his publishers more interested in sports writing than in sports stories?

Clearly this shift reflects a deep cultural ambiguity about sports, an ambiguity I see elsewhere, as well, and one that points to a deeper cultural anxiety. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a recent editorial said, "All of West Virginia should have been celebrating Tuesday, basking in the glow of a 38-35 Sugar Bowl victory over Georgia. Instead, a coal mine explosion in the Mountaineer state provided a sobering reminder of how little import should be attached to the games we play."

This sentiment is echoed after every national disaster or world tragedy. I remember Al Michaels waxing eloquent on this point—and a number of baseball players waxing not-so-eloquent—after the earthquake-interrupted 1989 "Bay Area" World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. And others doing the same the Sundays after 9/11 and Katrina. At such times, sober sports voices tell us, we've been "tragically reminded" about "what's really important" and how it "puts everything in perspective," and how "it's just a game."

Then comes the moment of silence to remember the victims—followed by wild cheers "annnnnd, here's the kickoff!" As a culture, we have lost the resources to intelligently cope with tragedy. After the ritual self-deprecation of the sportscasters, the games provide a handy way to escape for a few hours.

When it comes to writing about sports, this ambiguity has another dimension, as is made particularly clear in The Best American Sports Writing of the Century, edited by David Halberstam. A distinguished historian with a passion for sports, Halberstam contributes a long introduction, summarizing the recent changes in the genre. He points to what he considers the pivotal story, the one that set sports writing on a new course, Talese's 1966 profile of DiMaggio. Talese and many of his peers in that decade, Halberstam reminds us, were "struggling to break out of the narrow confines of traditional journalism and bring to their work both a greater sense of realism as well as a great literary touch." The New Journalism, as Tom Wolfe dubbed it, "stripped away the façade with which most celebrities protected themselves as they presented themselves to the public." For Halberstam, the point of the new journalism was to take heroes down a notch, to make them share our foibles and sins so that they become people who are as common and unlikable as the rest of us.

In 1966, there were still major sports heroes to be found, and there was no shame in describing the joy of the games we play and watch. In 2005, heroes are to be taken down a notch, and what goes on behind the scenes becomes the main attraction. For the heirs of the New Journalism, there are no more simple games. "We have tried to emphasize very good writing and the human element in sports," Halberstam notes; "as such there is less writing about teams' winning varying championships as there is about the human complexity of the world of sports."

A recent review by Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books (Jan. 12, 2006) hints at one of the conceptual problems in all this huffing and puffing about "human complexity." In "The Great Black Hope," a review of Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling and a World on the Brink by David Margolick (Knopf), Buruma begins:

Sometimes a game is more than a game. In 1969, for example, when Czechoslovakia beat the Soviet Union in the ice hockey finals in Stockholm, less than one year after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The exhausted Czech players were in tears as the Swedes cheered, "Dubcek! Dubcek!" and thousands of Czechs, defying the authorities, danced in the streets. On a night like that, when a humiliated people enjoy a moment of pride, revenge can taste sweet.

Sports as political commentary, sports as social release. But to Buruma, even these moments are ephemeral. By the end of his piece, he writes, "Alas, of course, these great events, however good for the morale of the moment, are fleeting, and their impact on the real world is little more than symbolic. The Czechs, after their famous ice hockey victory, still had to suffer through twenty years of oppression until they were finally free in 1989" [emphasis added].

As if sports were not part of the real world. As if symbol is useless. As if the joy the Czechs experienced in 1969 had no intrinsic value, regardless of its social and political usefulness.

What Buruma and Halberstam and Stout and other "serious writers" have forgotten is that what goes on between the foul lines or end zones is real, and that the symbolic participates in a deeper reality. It's easy to lose this meaning in a media-driven sports culture where money, sex, and power battle it out for pre-eminence. But for those who have eyes to see, the reality is plainly, blessedly there.

I've argued elsewhere that sports are a dimension of play, and play an expression of Sabbath, an activity that cannot have any socially useful purpose lest it become just another bit of work. Play is a celebration of the seventh day of creation, an activity in which we live out the imago Dei and create our own bounded but free worlds. Play points back to the culmination of creation and forward to the time when all existence will be nothing but a Sabbath.

Our ambiguity about sports is another instance of a widespread loss of transcendence, and specifically of Judeo-Christian faith. A culture which forgets the true nature of play is tempted to use sports as mere entertainment or as an addiction, a way to escape. Meanwhile, "serious writers" will try desperately to discover something socially useful in these frivolous contests. In either case, the joy of sports will be sabotaged.

To be sure, we need both sportswriting and sports writing. We need compelling stories about what goes on around sports—the good, the bad, and the ugly. And some athletes do need to be taken down a notch. But we also need stories about the games themselves, and their heroes, when men and women act out great dramas, games of tragedy and hope, meaningful precisely because they transcend the usual social calculus.

We need writers to help us remember the Red Sox miracle of 2004, the greatest pitching performance of the journeyman Moe Drabowski—and The Drive, when Joe Cool calmly destroyed an archetypal enemy when time itself seemed to have run out. Such moments are to be enjoyed precisely because they are symbolic, and thus precisely because they participate in a deep reality.

We do believe, Joe. Help thou our unbelief.

1. This story can be found in many places, but I depended on this account: "49ers' Joe Cool Comes Through: Joe Montana launches 92-yard drive that gives San Francisco its third title of the 1980s," by Bruce Lowitt, St. Petersburg Times, October 25, 1999: sptimes.com/News/102599/Sports/ 49ers__Joe_Cool_comes.shtml. See also usatoday.com/sports/nfl/super/superbowl-xxiii-plays.htm.

2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_league_attendances.

3. See especially Joseph Price, ed., From Season to Season: Sports as American Religion (Mercer Univ. Press, 2001).

Mark Galli is managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. He is the author most recently of Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God, just published by Baker.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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