Sports in Post-World War II America: A Few Reflections

Looking back it seems that in the United States the post-World War II period represented a peak of sorts for popular interest in sports, markedly higher than before or after. Certainly rising affluence, changes in education, and new media all had their part in the story. Rising disposable income and auto-suburban living with its greater spaciousness and its physical mobility meant access to both sporting equipment, and places where people could use it--while the Mad Men then coming into their own were eager to sell as much of the stuff as possible. (Thus were kids less likely to improvise entertainments such as "kick the can," and more likely to not just have bats and gloves, but uniforms too that they wore when playing on Little League teams.) There were also more young people finishing high school and going to college, and participating in school athletics accordingly--as spectators and fans if not athletes themselves--exposing more young people, especially young people whose families were not well off, to sports culture, with colleges doing everything possible to sustain interest in their teams in their graduates long after graduation, both for the sake of the increasingly lucrative business of college athletics, and a way to leverage the financial and other support of their alumni. And of course there was the arrival of television, which meant that one could for the first time watch a game without actually being physically present at it--the more in as the broadcast of sporting events became such a staple of television programming--with the easy access television provided itself conducing to more interest, as the business of sports took advantage of the new medium. (The World Series had already been around for a long time, but the Super Bowl was a creation of the TV age, which benefited professional football at least as much as it did any other sport.) In cases there was a particular novelty as pastimes that had been particularly associated with the affluent, like tennis and golf, became "middle class" games. And of course this was an era in which a mass culture was highly conducive to celebrity, not least sports celebrity, the biggest stars in which shone brightly indeed, and found it easy to parlay their fame into something bigger within the existing media ecosystem, as for example football stars got celebrity endorsement opportunities, and opportunities for careers in broadcasting and even acting. (Remember that O.J. Simpson guy?) At the same time the ubiquity of sports in American life itself encouraged still more attention. (Thus do I find myself struck by how prominent childhood experiences on the playing field, high school athletics, and the rest are in the novels of post-war writers like, for example, John Updike or Philip Roth , with this the more pointed because they wrote of middle class and even working class characters rather than the Tom Buchanan types who had so often been the sportsmen of literature in the day of an F. Scott Fitzgerald. Indeed, it seems telling that the originally polo-playing Flash Gordon of the comic strip was a football player in the 1980 movie.)

Still, formidable as this array of factors was it would not seem the whole story, with it likely relevant too that this was a conservative period in American life--the time of the early Cold War, when the promotion of nationalistic, martial and religious feeling was much on the minds of the nation's elite, and amid this heyday of psycho-babble, and the traumas of a Korean conflict that was not unlike Britain's experience of the Second Boer War (if in American culture long since buried under more heroic narratives), those of a Cold War frame of mind anxious about raising a generation which would be both physically fit and psychologically equipped enough to be stalwart warriors against the Red Menace. If Veblen is anyone to go by (and I certainly think he is), even without much conscious reflection on the matter this would easily have had those in a Cold War frame of mind encouraging sports as a piece of social engineering, the more in as with any and every possibility for invidious comparison a potential judgment on nations' social systems athletic competition itself became a front in the conflict, most obviously at the Olympics--which I suspect has just not been the same for many since the Berlin Wall fell.

Of course, in speaking of this as a peak I do mean that interest has since declined for assorted reasons, not least the fragmentation of popular culture as new entertainments competed for the public's attention, often very successfully, at the expense of sports. Yet attention to sports has not declined so much or otherwise changed so much as to make the situation unrecognizable from the vantage point of 2025, or this history irrelevant to understanding that situation today, in which sports remains a major section of the entertainment world, sufficiently so as to be the basis of a colossal business whose weight is quite evident in a matter such as how those who tried to sound the alarm about the connection between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy were pushed to the margins so that the game could go on--and the corporations invested in it all could keep raking in the money.