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Even as I type these words, pundits from Manhattan to Malibu are pawing through the debris of the Fifties and the Sixties in search of a Magic Key to life in the Nineties. A recent piece in Wiredmagazine (David Batstone, "Cyberbeats," March 1998) claimed that "the literary maelstrom of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs paved the way for the digital revolution." Uh huh. Just clap an academic title on it ("From Howlto Hypertext," say) and you've got a paper for the next session of the MLA.

But these savants are missing the forest for the trees. Who are the most influential figures in American culture over the past 40 years? Not Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs; not Elvis, Dylan, and Janis Joplin (though now you're getting warm). No, the figures in this pantheon are a bunch of guys (and, of late, girls) who can hit the ball farther, run faster and more elusively, dunk more spectacularly, swing more acrobatically than any ordinary mortal.

We've all seen the occasional screed about sports as the new American religion, the documentaries about exploitation (those East German factories for Olympic gold medalists had nothing on the NCAA). But the influence of sports is so pervasive, no one seems to know where to begin to take the measure of its meaning. Here is a start.

(By the way, my title is borrowed from Joseph Stowell, president of Moody Bible Institute, who referred to that apocryphal but not entirely implausible niche Bible in a recent sermon.)

—JW

moved onto college campuses and into middle-class respectability. After 1869, when the YMCAbuilt its first gymnasium in New York City, it quickly realized the potential that recreation and sport had for attracting youth to hear the Christian message. This realization, coupled with recognition of the increasing role athletics was playing in colleges, led to the YMCA's becoming a quasi-religio-social fraternity intent on evangelizing the "big men on campus" and spreading the gospel through sport.

This sentiment reached an apex in the late 1880s when D. L. Moody convened his annual Northfield conferences during the summer near his home in Massachusetts. Moody attracted hundreds of college YMCAleaders annually to his meetings, which combined Bible teaching and discussion with rigorous activity and athletic competition. All-American Amos Alonzo Stagg of Yale, later the most successful college football coach of the first half of the twentieth century, was in charge of the athletic activities, and Moody and fellow evangelicals instructed the YMCAleaders in how most effectively to return to their campuses and use their athletic prowess as a means to attract converts to Jesus.

Out of these conferences, not incidentally, arose the Student Volunteer Movement and its "watchword" of "Reaching the world for Christ in this generation." Out of these conferences also arose Springfield College as a permanent successor to Moody's summer meetings, given to training YMCAleaders who would skillfully combine athleticism and evangelism.

When James Naismith, the eventual inventor of basketball, applied on May 27, 1889, to be a student at the YMCATraining School at Springfield, he answered this question among others: "What is the work of a YMCAPhysical Director?" He answered, "To win men for the Master through the gym."

So from the last half of the nineteenth century, not only did educators generally accept the notion that sport was inherently good, so that participation in and of itself resulted in moral growth and character development, but other educators, such as those affiliated with Springfield and the YMCA, were willing to grant sport an essential, if more extrinsic, role in preparation for lives of ministry and service. What a surprise, then, to realize that even if these commitments to sport and Christianity in educational settings were in place about a century ago, for a wide range of reasons too complicated to pursue here, everything seemed to fall apart around the World War I era.

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