At any rate, a local news crew is broadcasting from Legion Field. The camera pans across a parking lot and finally comes to rest on a massive contraption that has a name painted on its side like a ship: the Crimson Express. Motor homes come in three basic categories: the plastic ones that look like children’s toys, the large boxy ones that look like a country-and-western star’s tour bus, and the sleek aluminum ones that resemble a 737 with the wings lopped off. The Crimson Express is of the 737 variety. The reporter boards the craft and finds the owners, a middle-aged couple who seem entirely too subdued to own something as outrageous as the Express. The husband is thin and tan, with a perfectly maintained plank of hair on his head. He bears a striking resemblance to the country singer George Jones. His wife too is thin and tan, and oddly, she looks a bit like Tammy Wynette, who was once married to George Jones. The reporter probes the couple’s devotion to Alabama football, and they say they haven’t missed a game in about fifteen years. So the reporter idly asks what sort of things they’ve given up in pursuit of the Tide.

Let’s see, the man says in a soft Southern drawl. We missed our daughter’s wedding.

You what?

We told her, just don’t get married on a game day and we’ll be there, hundred percent, and she went off and picked the third Saturday in October which everybody knows is when Alabama plays Tennessee, so we told her, hey, we got a ball game to go to. We made the reception—went there soon as the game was over.

I’d wandered through the motor home encampment at Alabama football games since I was a kid, but until I saw the local news that night, I’d never thought much about what was really going on. People were taking their houses to football games—packing up their lives in big rectangular canisters, driving for hours or days at a time in order to live as close to games as possible. And not just that, but if the owners of the Crimson Express were to be believed, they were also taking their homes to football games, in the sense that that word suggests the locus of one’s emotional comfort and well-being. I couldn’t help comparing my own devotion to Alabama to that of the owners of the Crimson Express; I felt suddenly inadequate. I didn’t remotely measure up. But it was clear that the same mysterious fascination that compelled me to listen to football games on the telephone moved others to totally rearrange their lives, to uproot themselves, and to shelve their familial obligations. But where did that fascination come from?

It would be easy, perhaps, to dismiss such hardcore fans as freaks, except for the fact that the world is practically brimming over with them. Open your daily paper’s sports pages to the box scores. You might want to pause and ask yourself why your hometown paper devotes an entire section to sports. The implication is that the readers’ need to know the outcome of sporting contests ranks up there in importance with their need to know about global politics, business and the arts. Compare that with the amount of column inches per week on religion; it’s not even close.

For each box score, consider how many moods hung in the balance over the game’s outcome. Maybe tens of thousands attended in person. They may have “gone wild,” or “gone crazy,” in the telling clichés we use to describe the behavior of fans. Thousands more—millions more if we’re talking about a big play-off game in some sports—watched at home or listened on their car radios. If it was a close game, it’s possible that some of these people had the most intense emotional experiences of their lives, more acute than anything they’d felt at home with their spouses or kids. If this sounds like hyperbole, think of the most emotionally intense moments in your own life—when you realized you were in love, when your child was born, or when someone you cared for accomplished something important, like graduating from college. You were profoundly happy, but you probably didn’t hug the stranger sitting next to you. Most likely, you didn’t “go wild.” You probably didn’t tear down a goalpost.

Now look at all the other box scores in sports pages and consider how many hundreds of thousands of Americans were on similar trips last night. Think about all the newspapers published in the world today, all their sports pages and box scores. Now think, if you can grasp it, of all the people in the world last night who watched sports. America has football, baseball, and men’s and women’s basketball.

Europe, South America, Africa, and parts of the Middle East have soccer. Canada and Russia have hockey. The Japanese like baseball too, and also Sumo wrestling; Pakastanis, squash and cricket. Car racing is popular the world over. In Afghanistan there is a traditional game that involves two teams fighting on horseback for control of a ram’s carcass. There’s probably some kind of box score for that. (Cowboys 10, Rams nothing?) It’s dizzying, especially when you realize that what you just got your head around was one day’s worth of sports in the world, and that the cycle will repeat itself this evening. Millions more moods will hang in the balance, and the papers tomorrow will be full of another round of box scores. And so on, like the tides.

Given the torrential emotional outlay contests inspire on a daily basis, it’s amazing that human beings find time even to govern themselves. And yet—what is at the heart of every democracy but yet another contest—elections. We’ve even adopted the lingo of sports to describe our politics—the campaign is a “race”; and debates are scored like boxing matches. Constant polls amount to a sort of real-time scoreboard; election day is the buzzer. Perhaps this is the secret enduring quality of democracy: whichever way the ideological winds may be blowing, the public is always hungry for a good race. Even our judicial system is powered by contests—what is a trial but an intellectual sporting match? Everywhere you look, it seems, humans are compulsively gathering around to watch two sides battle it out. In this context, it was hard to see the couple aboard the Crimson Express as doing anything but steadfastly pursuing a universal human urge, third perhaps only to hunger and sex in its power over humankind.

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