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Gooooo, Sports!(The Talk of the Town)(Sports Museum of America)
Between the Mitchell Report and the N.F.L.'s Spygate affair, the image of sports as an arena of fun and fair competition has taken a hit lately. Even the Olympics' opening ceremonies were marred by a controversy over lip-synching. So the recent inauguration, in lower Manhattan, of the Sports Museum of America--a booster's repository of "everything from NASCAR to the Negro Leagues," as its founder, Philip Schwalb, likes to say--seemed a fitting rehabilitation project.
The celebration began, appropriately enough, with cheerleaders. A pompom crew from West Point gathered in Bowling Green, and chanted "A-R-M-Y." Nearby, a soccer-juggling troupe was interrupted by a cavorting group of mascots--some two dozen costumed creatures, from the New Jersey Devil to Big Red, Sacred Heart's oversized Daniel Boone. (Titus, an orange-and-blue thing that represents the Titans, the New York lacrosse team, was having a tough time heading the ball with its Darth Vaderish mask.)
Onstage, Mayor Bloomberg and a range of athletic stars, including Eli Manning, Mario Andretti, and Martina Navratilova, participated in an age-old sports tradition: spouting cliches.
"We had a coach and we had a dream," Jim Craig said of his 1980 gold-medal-winning hockey team. "Sports inspire," Bloomberg said. "They teach us an awful lot about respect and teamwork."
"Sports bring us together," Billie Jean King chimed in. "If you can see it, you can be it."
The athletes and the mascots entered the museum, which is housed in the old Standard Oil Building. In addition to the Heisman Trophy and hundreds of video screens, there were the sweat-stained gloves of the Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes, photographs of the skateboarder Tony Hawk, and a Ziploc bag filled with brown soil. It was labelled, in Magic Marker, "Greece Dirt 2004." There were also lots of American flags and wall labels telling stories of perseverance in the face of adversity. There were no syringes or asterisks to be found.
"It's a lollapalooza!" Bud ...