Beer and Circus by Murray Sperber Page A

teams and athletes, but older fans, particularly those over fifty, tended to believe in the NCAA’s student-athlete ideal as portrayed in the association’s halftime TV clips (younger fans remarked that these promos occurred at a time when most viewers were not watching TV but opening refrigerators or flushing toilets).

    Marketing surveys charted the generational split. In the early 1990s, one study reported that “fans aged 18–31 are much more tolerant … than their elders” about off-the-field problems, including “the commercialization in sports.” For example, a majority of all older fans believed that “beers shouldn’t be allowed as sponsors” of sports events, whereas almost two-thirds of young fans had no problem with brewery or even cigarette sponsorship (also opposed by older fans). In the twenty-first century, surveys would probably reveal a greater spread in the numbers, with youthful indifference and cynicism increasing every year.
    The split between doublethink and single-minded fans also varied somewhat from region to region and from school to school. Regardless of their age, many supporters of athletic programs that openly cheated and got caught justified the dishonesty with the “everyone does it” line; this attitude never prevented these fans from treating their corrupt coaches and athletes as traditional sports heroes, especially if they won. Doublethink prevailed in such conferences as the SEC, Big East, and Pac-10; on the other hand, universities adhering more closely to the NCAA rules kept and attracted fans of all ages who believed in the student-athlete ideals and wanted their schools to observe them, e.g., Penn State, with Joe Paterno (JoPa) heading its football program. (ESPN often treated JoPa reverently, but in 1997, in a radio ad campaign promoting its college football coverage, two announcers mocked Paterno’s nonconference “easy schedules,” predicting that West Chester State of Pennsylvania would play next year in Happy Valley!)
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    Just as doublethink evolved out of earlier, more unified attitudes about college sports, beer-and-circus also connected to various traditions, especially the collegiate fun and games surrounding intercollegiate athletics. Indeed, without such rich collegiate ground to plow, well fertilized by the Animal House mentality of the 1980s, companies like Miller Brewing could not have so easily instituted corporate beer-and-circus. The next chapter examines this phenomenon.

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    CORPORATE BEER-AND-CIRCUS
    F rom the founding of intercollegiate athletics in the nineteenth century, drinking often accompanied college sports events, particularly football games. As sociologists Clark and Trow indicated, this revelry formed an important part of the collegiate subculture. However, contrary to Animal House , in the pre-Vietnam War era depicted in the film, collegians mainly partied on the weekends and rarely consumed the massive quantities of alcohol downed by Bluto and his fellow Deltas.
    In the 1980s, beer-and-circus escalated, in large part because of marketing strategies by the major brewing companies. The college guidebooks for prospective students paralleled this escalation when they began to emphasize the collegiate subculture on university campuses, and to downplay the educational aspects of a school. The guidebooks often provided detailed descriptions of life as a college sports fan at a particular university, and tied this to the party scene.
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    If the prospect of cheering the Razorbacks at football games with chants of “Ooh-Pig-Sooey” doesn’t send anticipatory shivers up and down your spine, don’t even consider attending [the University of Arkansas]. This custom is known as “calling the hogs,” and if you can’t do it with conviction then you probably don’t belong here.
    â€œI’m a true Razorback fan!” gushes a junior. The sentiment is heartfelt