Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  A Brief History of Western Sports

  It is this little-noted “revolt” of sports fans that concerns us in this chapter, but first we need a bit of historical perspective on just whose sports we are talking about. For activities with no intrinsic meaning beyond the prowess of the players—no obvious ideology or transcendent vision—sports have a history of surprisingly intense conflict over who can play, who can watch, and whether there will even be a game at all. In recent decades, the most visible clashes have had to do with race and gender: whether blacks could play American Major League Baseball, for example, or whether women can be allowed to compete with men at golf. But for centuries the tensions over sports ran along lines of class. The upper classes had their sports, such as hunting; the lower classes had archery competitions and various “folk sports” in which there was little distinction between players and spectators. Early football, for example, often pitted whole villages against each other—men, women, and children battling over the pig’s bladder that served as a ball. There were footraces for women as well as men and, in some cases, competitions pitting one sex against the other, with a dance or a kiss as a prize.

  Early modern European sports typically occurred in the context of festivities like carnival or, in England, at parish holidays and fairs, and when those festivities came under fire from “reformers” from the sixteenth century on, so did the sports. Disorderly folk sports, like the original form of football, particularly outraged the authorities, who repeatedly tried to ban them. The court records of Middlesex, England, in 1576 mention the prosecution of seven men who “with unknown malefactors to the number of one hundred assembled themselves unlawfully and played a certain unlawful game called football, by means of which there was amongst them a great affray, likely to result in homicides and serious accident.”9 When industrialization left working-class people with only Sunday for sports, the strict Sabbatarians moved quickly to ban any activity other than worship on that day. Sports were condemned as a waste of time better spent at work or in contemplation of the status of one’s soul. In the puritan New England colonies, sports were never legal, with the law banning even “unnecessary and unseasonable walking” on the Lord’s Day.10

  Like so many of the festivities that they had once been a part of, sports were, by the late nineteenth century, transformed into spectacles. These were not, originally, spectacles organized from on high, but rather grudgingly permitted by elites. Baseball, for example, which began as a thoroughly working-class sport in the United States, met elite opposition ostensibly directed at “the crowd behavior: the drunks, the gamblers, the pickpockets, the mashers who bothered the women; the fans who yelled obscenities and threatened the umpire,” according to the sports historian Ted Vincent. As he goes on to comment, the real source of the opposition to baseball was the middle-class fear of working-class crowds: “It seemed that certain people didn’t like certain other people gathering in big crowds, a situation that gave those attending late-nineteenth-century spectator sports something in common with the defiant long-haired youth at rock concerts of the late 1960s.”11

  Soccer, which ultimately derived from folk football, had been reformulated in mid-nineteenth-century England as an elite sport meant to inculcate “the virtues of hard work, discipline, and self-control.” 12 Within a couple of decades, the ball, so to speak, passed once again to the working class, who learned the game from clergymen and factory owners interested in instilling the same virtues in the workforce. The professionalization of soccer from the 1880s on drove out the upper-class amateurs, who were replaced by professional players drawn from the working class, eventually leaving both the playing field and the bleachers to blue-collar men and, in much smaller numbers, women. In South America, local people learned the sport by watching amateur English players—sailors and the officials of British-owned businesses. Brazilian soccer had passed through three constituencies by 1915: from the British to the local elite and finally to the working class. “The fashionable ladies in the stands went home when the working class took over the game,” the sportswriter Janet Lever reports of the game in Brazil.13 Spectator sports became, by the early twentieth century, what Eric Hobsbawm called “a mass proletarian cult.”14

  What finally made spectator sports acceptable to the elites who at first disdained these unruly gatherings was the use of sports events, in Hobsbawm’s words, as “a medium for national identification and factitious community.”15 If the upper classes could not be present in person, at least sporting events could feature the flags and anthems that symbolized the supposed harmony of rich and poor under the aegis of the nation. With encouragement from teams’ businessmen backers, sporting events in the United States came to involve, by World War I, “elaborate pageantry, ceremony, politicians, military bands, and national anthems.”16 The bands and—in the United States—precision drill teams performing during halftime or other breaks gave sporting events a resemblance to the military reviews that had delighted nineteenth-century British crowds; the flags, ceremonies, and anthem singing foreshadowed the nationalist rallies staged by Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and ’30s. One might say that Hitier’s big mistake, in the design of events like the Nuremberg rallies, was to leave out the game.

  So either way—whether through the proletarianization of formerly elite sports or the increasing respectability of proletarian ones—sporting events evolved into a socially acceptable gathering space for working-class people, especially working-class men.. They gathered also in factories and other workplaces, but the stadium or arena was uniquely theirs—a place to meet with friends, drink, and cheer, all with minimal interference from representatives of the elites. The working class, or at least the male half of it, had reclaimed a vestige of the lost tradition of carnival. Very soon, they would want the whole thing.

  The Carnivalization of Sports

  The first sign of a new assertiveness on the part of sports fans—and the only one ever noticed by most sports sociologists and journalists—was the emergence of hooliganism among English spectators in the early 1960s. Young male soccer “supporters,” as the fans are known in the United Kingdom, seemed to be taking the game too seriously—instigating riots in the stadiums and, more commonly, engaging in postgame street battles with the supporters of the “enemy” team. Many observers recognized that the violence had something to do with class and class resentment, since the hooligans were typically to be found occupying the cheapest seats or standing, seatless, throughout the game in the “terraces,” as they are called in Britain, of a stadium. About a decade later, hooliganism began showing up on the Continent, probably spread by traveling English fans following their teams as well as by television reports on English hooliganism at home. Noting the geographic distribution of soccer violence, a Belgian psychologist suggested that

  the violence is a symptom of societal problems, not soccer problems. In Belgium and France, there are relatively few problems. But in much of Latin America, in Britain and Italy, where the gaps between rich and poor are growing, there are more problems. Soccer is a poor-man’s game as much as any sport, and a lot of unhappy people are rebelling against their surroundings.17

  Whatever the hooligans’ motivations, they succeeded, in many instances, in stealing the show. Just as reports of rock and roll “riots” often eclipsed reviews of the music in the early 1960s, news stories on fan violence could easily overshadow accounts of the game.

  Engrossed by the violence, few observers noted a far more widespread and appealing change in fan behavior. Beginning in the 1970s, or at least first reported at that time, fans of soccer worldwide and various sports (football, basketball, baseball, and hockey) in the United States were unmistakably treating sports events as occasions for traditional carnival-like activities: costuming, masking, singing, and indulging in rhythmically synchronous behavior, if not actually dancing.

  Writing in 1983, when the trend was well under way, the sociologist Louis Kutcher observed that American sports “have long had
some elements of carnival—feasting, masquerading, merrymaking and rule and role suspension.”18 Masquerading, at an American game, traditionally meant wearing team colors.p The sports version of carnival’s king of fools was the team mascot—a person dressed as something like a chicken or a pirate and displaying a comic lack of athletic skill or even basic coordination. As for feasting, it involved, at the very least, peanuts, hot dogs, and Cracker Jacks, washed down with the requisite quantities of beer. More elaborately, American fans had, by the 1950s, started the day hours before the game with tailgate parties in the arena parking lots, usually featuring grilled meats or regional specialties. Although each group or family brought its own picnic meal, sharing with strangers, especially those with a beer to exchange for some food, was common, as in the feasts that so often accompanied traditional festivities.

  But by the last three decades of the twentieth century, the carnivalization of sports events was moving well beyond the hot dog and team colors stage. In one of the very few studies of festive fan behavior, the anthropologist Desmond Morris found English soccer fans in the 1970s wearing huge top hats or giant Afro wigs, as well as scarves and trouser bows in team colors. “Many of the costumes are obviously home-made,” he observed, making it clear that”many days of planning and preparation have gone into the build-up to the great event.”19 In the United States, a single exhibitionist fan—Rollen (“Rock ‘n’ Rollen”) Stewart—probably deserves some of the credit for popularizing the wearing of outlandish outfits to games. He traveled from game to game—football, baseball, and even golf matches—trying to attract the TV cameras to his outsized rainbowcolored Afro wig, which he abandoned only after a “born again” religious experience in 1980.20

  Another American innovator, a particularly fervent Cleveland Browns fan nicknamed “Big Dawg,” found a dog costume in a store in 1984, started wearing it to games, and thus helped set the trend toward team-related gear such as the foam-rubber Cheeseheads now routinely worn by Green Bay Packers fans, the Viking helmets of Minnesota Vikings fans, and the pig snouts assumed by Washington Redskins fans. By the late 1980s, as commercial enterprises moved in on the growing demand for team-related costumes, far less innovation was required on the part of individual fans. They could simply buy ready-made team T-shirts, sweatshirts, characteristic head gear, and, for the ever-growing number of female fans, earrings and dresses.q

  Costuming serves different, even opposite, functions for different people. For most, the wearing of team colors allows a fan to blend in with the mass of other similarly clad fans; it would be unwise to flout the color coding by inadvertently wearing the opponent’s colors while sitting in a section of the bleachers occupied by home team fans. But for others, costuming—and in some cases, uncostuming, as with the Yalies who run naked through the stadium at the annual Harvard-Yale game—is a vivid, some might say exhibitionist, bid for attention, as in the case of an unnamed Oakland A’s fan observed by a local journalist.

  There’s something poetic and beautiful about watching a middleaged fan dressed from head-to-toe in A’s garb, brandishing a baseball glove, proudly sporting an American flag fanny pack, waving a giant Bob Marley flag in the air, punctuating his bursts of obscenities by pounding on a conga drum, and loudly commanding visiting Yankees fans of Japanese descent to go back to Iraq.21

  Sports fans seldom wear masks to accompany their costumes; instead, they paint their faces in team colors. The origins of this practice are as murky as those of costuming. The British soccer journalist Simon Kuper referred to it as a European custom, Morris noted it among English fans in the 1970s, and some Americans insist it began in their country outside of the sports context, at hippie gatherings and rock concerts in the 1960s. Another theory is that it began among the habitually more expressive South American fans and spread northward as North Americans gained a taste for soccer. An account of the 1994 World Cup held in Palo Alto, California, for example, describes the carnivalistic, and no doubt contagious, behavior of fans who had followed their team from Brazil.

  It was a party. A horde of Brazilians marched down El Camino to the stadium, dancing as a band played “Brazil.” Countless Brazilian flags were waved from cars and worn as capes or shawls or wraparound skirts. Fans painted their faces to resemble the Brazilian flag, including a blue nose signifying the night sky and Southern Cross that is at the center of the flag.22

  Wherever face painting began, though, television quickly spread the fad worldwide. Mentions of face painting in the United States go back at least to the 1980 Super Bowl, but not until the mid-1990s did the custom become firmly enough entrenched to merit commercial exploitation within the United States. As late as 1996, American fans were using Magic Markers or even house paint to give their allegiances epidermal expression. Now there are at least a half dozen (and possibly many more) purveyors of skin-compatible colored makeup, and spokespersons for these companies, interviewed in 2000, described the business as “really surprising”23 and “huge.”24 A similar industry has sprung up in South Korea, where “the popularity of the World Cup has created a secondary craze in the form of face painting. The popularity of game day face paint continues to grow producing long lines at shopping centers in Myeong-dong where the face painters ply their trade.”25

  But a sports event is hardly a party without some sort of rhythmic participation by the fans. The earliest form was chanting, often of derisive lines directed at the opponents, such as, in the United States, “Nah nah nah nah, hey hey hey, go-ood-bye.” As in the case of costuming and face painting, more elaborate songs arose spontaneously from within the ranks of fans themselves, most strikingly in the case of soccer. The Washington Post observed in 1994 that “soccer songs are traditionally born in the cheap-ticket sections … of league club stadiums, where working-class fans, often forced to stand throughout the game, compose sarcastic, musical epithets directed at their opponents.”26 One of the rare academic studies of nonviolent fan behavior found Germans fairly quiet and “unimaginative” in the 1960s, except to celebrate victory with the traditional carnival song “What a Day, What a Wonderful Day Today.” By the mid-1990s, however, German fans had created and memorized thirty to fifty songs of their own devising, some blending rock and roll with familiar soccer chants—the traditional “Olé,” for example, sung to the tune of a Pet Shop Boys song.27

  There are more energetic forms of rhythmic participation. South American fans often dance in the bleachers to the beat of drums they carry to the stadium. The Hawks of the Faithful, an organization of fans of São Paulo’s Corinthians soccer team, sing a song called “Fly, Hawk” while stretching out their arms and turning from side to side to imitate the bird in flight.28 In England in the 1970s, Morris observed soccer fans “Pogo jumping,” or jumping vertically “until a whole section of the crowd appears to be heaving and swelling like a rough sea”29—a practice that may have originated at punk rock concerts. English fans also invented “synchroclapping,” in which they clap rhythmically with their hands held over their heads. A psychologist who studied this activity marveled at the degree of synchrony a soccer crowd could achieve without the slightest central coordination: “How this remarkable precision is achieved, within what most people would see as a disorderly rabble, is a mystery … it is orderly to an almost absurd extent.”30

  But by far the most widespread form of rhythmic participation is “the wave,” in which fans in one section of the stadium stand and raise their arms, then sit down while fans in an adjacent section follow suit, so that the motion appears to roll around the bleachers, “creating what many fans consider an exhilarating and visually stunning experience.”31 Who invented it is, again, unclear. The Europeans call it “the Mexican wave,” but Americans are sure it was an American who invented it in 1981; they’re just not sure who or where: “Crazy George” Henderson, a professional cheerleader for the Oakland A’s games, claims to be the wave’s inventor; others insist it was first performed by the fans at a University of Washington, or possibly
at a University of Michigan, football game.

  Although fans may think exuberant behavior like the wave somehow aids their team, coaches and players initially objected to it as distracting, with the New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey going so far as to condemn it as a “plague”: “like acid rain defoliating the countryside or a new strain of virus or killer bees mercilessly working their way up the Americas.”32 But the wave proved to be unstoppable, spreading to baseball in 1984 and to soccer by 1992 and sweeping up such notable soccer spectators as Fidel Castro, King Juan Carlos of Spain, and François Mitterrand. As the sociologist Michael Givant observed in 1984: “It’s a way of not being passive … They want to participate. If everybody is a celebrity these days, they ask, ‘Why can’t I be involved?’”33

  So by the close of the twentieth century, the clash of the athletes on the field was only one part, and for many only a minor part, of the activities and events that made up a game. People went to the stadium for the opportunity to dress up and paint their faces, to see and be seen, to eat and drink immoderately, to shout and sing and engage in the sports fan’s equivalent of dancing. The games on the playing field had changed very little since the early part of the century; it was the behavior of the fans that would have seemed ludicrous and disruptive by the standards of, say, the 1920s. Why this global carnivalization of sports in the final decades of the last century?. Or, given what is perhaps a natural human tendency to liven up spectacles with drink and fancy dress and dance, we might ask why the carnivalization of sports has accelerated so spectacularly since the 1970s.