"The girls in Europe is nuts over ball players": Ring Lardner and Virginia Woolf.

Separated by much more than the same language, England and the United States have nevertheless long shared a common fascination with sports in which the most basic component involves a confrontation between two people mediated by a short distance and two similar pieces of equipment: from a space of several yards, one person throws a fist-sized ball toward a second person, who attempts to hit the ball with a piece of wood. As unofficial national sports, cricket and baseball have each generated a rich literary tradition. For every Eric Greenberg, W. P. Kinsella, or Bernard Malamud, England has produced a novelist whose passion for cricket invests his or her work with equal symbolic significance. On both sides of the Atlantic, even writers who typically pursue subjects far distant from the world of sports have, over the past couple hundred years, essayed onto the cricket pitch or the baseball diamond. Often these literary forays illuminate the depth of the emotional commitment with which English and American citizens invest their national games.

One particularly humorous example of this type of writing occurs in the Scottish writer A. G. Macdonell's 1933 novel England, Their England, in which a young Scotsman, Donald Cameron, recently returned from the Great War, sets off to educate himself about the nature of Englishness. In one episode he attends a cricket match between city and country teams and observes a telling incident involving an American journalist, Shakespeare Pollock, who knows nothing about cricket but has been enlisted as a member of the city team. In a passage in which one needs little if any knowledge of the rules of baseball or cricket (or rounders, a predecessor of baseball that traditionally has been played in rural England) to grasp its humor, Macdonell writes:

Mr. Pollock stepped up to the wicket in the lively manner of his native 
mustang ... and, striking the first ball he received ... threw down his 
bat, and himself set off at a great rate in the direction of cover- 
point. There was a paralyzed silence. The rustics on the bench rubbed 
their eyes. On the field no one moved. Mr. Pollock stopped suddenly, 
looked round, and broke into a genial laugh. 
  "Darn me--" he began, and then he pulled himself up and went on in 
refined English, "Well, well! I thought I was playing baseball." He 
smiled disarmingly round. 
  Baseball is a kind of rounders, isn't it, sir?" said cover-point 
sympathetically. 
  Donald thought he had never seen an expression change so suddenly as 
Mr. Pollock's did at this harmless, and true, statement. A look of 
concentrated, ferocious venom obliterated the disarming smile. (1) 

Early in the twentieth century, the career of the Chicago newspaper columnist and short story writer Ring Lardner crossed paths, in print, for a brief but fascinating moment with that of one of London's leading literary figures, the novelist Virginia Woolf. Both writers--Lardner as a matter of professional obligation as well as personal interest, Woolf as a feminist theorist--were attuned to an unusual degree to the ideological role of sports in their respective societies. There is no evidence that Lardner ever read Woolf's work, and Woolf's interest in Lardner found its fullest--and only--expression in one page of an essay she published in 1925 on the general characteristics of American fiction as it was being written at that time. They are, in short, a highly unlikely pair. But this brief convergence in the careers of Lardner and Woolf is interesting for the light it sheds on the relations between economics, politics, and sports during the early twentieth century. It exposes as many differences as similarities between their respective world-views, but whatever else it may achieve, in the final analysis the relation between Lardner and Woolf helps us to better understand the ideological role that sport played in England and the United States at a historical moment that so closely resembles our own largely because it was that moment that created ours.

SOCIAL ORDER

In this 1978 essay "Four Notes on Rugby," an intriguing philosophical foray into twentieth-century sports in his native South Africa, J. M. Coetzee argues that rugby's "political importance" there over the first six decades of the twentieth century "cannot be overemphasized," because of the symbolic social significance that the game possessed as a counter to the English colonial tradition. During these years rugby, a popular, even populist sport, was "a means ... for the economically disadvantaged Afrikaner to assert himself magically over the Englishman." (2) But beyond questions about the immediate affiliations between sport and postcolonial politics in South Africa, Coetzee also inquires into the theoretical issue of the ideological character of sports in general. How, for example, do sports educate social subjects--that is, "hail" individuals into an existing social order? How do sports encourage the individual player's acquiescence to a social order that preexists the player and whose interest lies in the social stability obtained through the perpetuation of that very order of things? How do specific sports function as vehicles of social organization, control, and mobilization?

Coetzee himself views athletic game playing as the "reenact[ment of] a profoundly important moment of culture ... the moment at which the knee is bent to government." (3) Thus, despite his recognition of how, in specific contexts, a specific sport may serve a politically subversive function (for example, rugby in South Africa from roughly 1900 to 1960), sports are, for Coetzee, ultimately an ideologically conservative affair, a type of sociocultural activity whose purpose ultimately is to reaffirm the status quo--or at least the idea of the status quo. "We can define a sport," Coetzee writes, "as a game played according to a well-defined code of rules," and a game, moreover, in which the players have no say in determining what the rules will be. (4) In other words, sports, as rule-bound games, teach individual participants and spectators the fundamental necessity and rightness of "the rules" as such. This is why, Coetzee argues, "sports are so easily captured and used by political authority." (5) It is why they are regularly employed, in schools as in the wider culture, to the ideological end of "character-building," just as the ceremonial accouterments of sporting events, such as the ritualized playing of the national anthem in the United States (a tradition begun during the 1918 World Series to show baseball's support of U.S. troops in the Great War), are deployed by event organizers to embed the event within, and compel players and spectators alike to consent to a specific version of, national-cultural discourse.