'I find more genuine religion at the baseball match than I do at my father's church on Fifth Avenue," Ernest Howard Crosby, the 19th-century New York social reformer, is said to have remarked. This observation may also apply, for some, to football and basketball, the other two American sports that are public liturgies as well as games.
For certain sports are rather like religions-not like Chris- tianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the world's other great faiths, but forms of secular religion...