Two motives urge middle-class and prole fans to obsession with their sports. One is their need as losers to identify with winners, the need to dance and scream "We're number one!" while holding an index finger erect. One hockey player says: "The whole object of a pro game is to win. That is what we sell. We sell it to a lot of people who don't win at all in their regular lives. They involve themselves with their team, a winning team." In addition to this appeal through vicarious success, sports are popular for middles and proles to follow because they sanction a flux of pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship of the sort usually associated with the "decision-making" or "executive" or "opinion-molding" classes.

The World Series and the Super Bowl give every man his opportunity to perform as a learned bore, to play for the moment the impressive barroom pedant, to imitate for a brief season the superior classes identified by their practice of weighty utterance and informed opinion. Which is to say that the World Series and the Super Bowl constitute harmless twice-yearly opportunities – occurring, oddly, near the winter and summer solstices, as if designed by Nature herself – for the plain man to garner some self-respect. They are therefore indispensable as democratic holy days and ritual occasions.

If the prole doesn't know what might cause Union Carbide to go up or down, as a master of "the fine points of the game" he can affect to know why the Chargers or the Dodgers are going to win this time, and that's a powerful need satisfied. The barroom or living room debates occasioned by these events are a prole counterpart of the classy debates in statehouses and courthouses, and the shrewd weighing of evidence and thoughtful drawing of inferences ape the proceedings in the highest learned conferences and seminars. In addition, the satire and abuse visited upon holders of opposite views, especially in bars, is the prole equivalent of the contumely dispensed by the better book reviewers and theater critics. Exercising authority in learned matters like these is one way the middle and prole classes assert their value.

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