TAKE ME OUT TO THE WAR GAME.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: On militarism and sports

Can sports in the United States ever be delinked from this country's addiction to militarism? How do we make sports less martial, less warlike, less steeped in the language of life and death? Could we ever lose the lexicon of calling great point guards "floor generals" or home runs "nukes"? Could the country's most popular sport by a thousand miles--football--ever not be a game so dependent on explicitly violent verbiage and actions?

These questions present an almost unworkable challenge, a riddle similar to asking if it is possible to get sugar out of a cake once it's in the oven. The historic fact is that as long as there have been organized sports in this country, there has been an effort to tie them to training its young (formerly just white, but this has proven malleable in that regard) men to dominate the globe and prepare for war.

Professional sports began in earnest at the turn of the twentieth century, when all the minders of sports saw the thirst in the body politic and swaths of society for an imperial, expansionist U.S. century ahead.

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States quotes a Washington Post editorial published right before the Spanish-American War of 1898: "A new consciousness seems to have come upon us--the consciousness of strength--and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our strength .... We are face-to-face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle."

Sports did more than adapt itself to the new United States of Militarism. Its overseers put themselves forward as promoters of this transformation. Sports would be marketed explicitly as a training ground to make the new generation tough and ready for the challenges ahead on the world stage. Albert Spalding--of A.G. Spalding & Brothers sporting goods store, a critical figure in the professionalization of "the National Pastime"--said: "Baseball, I repeat, is war! And the playing of the game is a battle in which every contestant is a commanding general, who, having a field of occupation, must defend it; who, having gained an advantage, must hold it by the employment of every faculty of his brain and body, by every resource of his mind and muscle."

Spalding was a trailblazer in merging sports and the military, but he was far from alone. Future President...