Divided the stands: how skyboxes brought snob appeal to sports.

• Author: Cohn, Jonathan S.

The Morgan Stanley trader reclines on the sleek designer sofa, glancing occasionally at the massive TV screen spread before him. This isn't a half-bad way to spend an evening, he thinks as he summons his waiter to the table and peruses the menu impatiently. Filet mignon? No, thank you. Beluga caviar? That's not quite it, either. Dom Perignon for an extra $300? Well, maybe. But what he really craves, he discovers sheepishly, is a hot dog.

No wonder. He's at a game at Madison Square Garden. Or, more precisely, on the Garden's exclusive skybox level, where the carpets are plush, the bathrooms spotless, and a hot dog as rare as a hat trick. Here, hidden behind Plexiglas, lurk some of America's most privileged sports spectators: lawyers, bankers, publishing powerbrokers, and various and sundry CEOs. Like their brethren at Los Angeles's Great Western Forum, the Houston Astrodome, and countless other arenas nationwide, they shell out tens of thousands of dollars every year for the privilege of sweat-and scream-free sports. At New Jersey's Meadowlands, Giants and Jets boxes go for $95,000 per season. At Texas Stadium, home of the Cowboys, boxes can fetch a million dollars each - even during the lean years. Who's buying all these skyboxes? Mostly American corporations, which use their sweet seats to build profitable friendships and impress clients.

Given that businesses are inclined to lay off workers before setting aside their season tickets, one might credibly argue that the deluxe box is but another emblem of misplaced corporate priorities. Yet the real cost of the skybox doesn't register on the GNP curve. Instead, it registers in the hearts and minds of sports fans and in the communities they represent. Eating key lime pie high in the sky, these afficionados are undermining one of the last bastions of democracy in America: sports.

For better or worse, professional sports occupy a place of elevated civic importance in 20th-century America - a place that has traditionally offered refuge from the status anxiety otherwise entrenched in American life. While a few sports have consciously courted the elite (tennis's maxim "whites only" often seems to apply as much to attendees as to attire), baseball, basketball, and football have historically attracted a sociological spectrum from the Astors to the Average Joe. That mass appeal only widened in the latter half of the century, as an infusion of black athletes into major league sports brought new audiences to the arena. By the sixties, pro games had emerged, however unintentionally, as a paragon of old-fashioned American class-mixing - capable, at their best, of evoking what former Yale president and baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti once described as that "Emersonian crowd feeling." When it rained during a game at Miami's aging Orange Bowl, the filthy rich got drenched along with the great unwashed. The powers-that-were shifted foot to foot in the same nasty bathroom lines as the pressmen and their 10-year-old sons. They heard the same cheers, unfiltered by a Plexiglas shell. That proximity of rich and poor may have...