Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 9

_Ex£ecling_Jhe^arbaria^ Like heroism in American popular culture, tragedy too has lost its intrinsic value of otherness, or what Douglas J. Stewart calls the absolute sense of a "devastating and equivocal tangency (the Greek gods] were always reputed to have with human destiny Indeed, in televised sporting events, where "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" are regularly played out in millions of American living rooms, the "tangency" of tragedy and of triumph often takes strikingly unequivocal forms. Consider the phenomenon of Christian and Muslim athletes who often begin TV post-game interviews by giving the credit for their victories to God or Allah. Following an upset victory over Denver in a 1997 American Football Conference divisional playoff, quarterback Mark Brunell of the Jacksonville Jaguars had this to say: "God has been with this team from the beginning—we've got a bunch of guys who love the Lord, and it showed today." Offensive tackle Tony Boselli echoed Brunell's sentiments: "I was sick as a dog [with the flu] before the game, but God healed me and I was able to come out and help defeat the Broncos." There's no reason to question the sincerity of such expressions of belief. The assumptions behind them do raise questions, however. If God intervenes on the behalf of one football team, does He then conspire to undermine the opponent's chances of victory? Why is it in His interest to influence the outcome of a sporting event? And what of the players on the losing side who might believe in Him as well and who, if they'd won, would probably also have given due credit to the Deity in locker room interviews? On the other hand, in more than three decades of watching football, basketball, and baseball on TV, I don't recall a single instance when an athlete actually blamed God for not helping him and his teammates win a game. It's as if the idea of a "devastating" Other is simply unacceptable to Americans who participate in sporting rituals. In Greek tragedy, the house of Atreus was characterized by a series of punishments handed down by the Furies to sons for ghastly crimes committed by their fathers. The fathers, of course, could not foresee that their offspring would suffer the consequences of their malfeasances, and so this vicious cycle was interrupted only when the Furies "put an end to the atrocities which had stained the family of Atreus with blood."^