“Here is evidence that suggests that when your football team does well, grades suffer,” said Dr. Waddell, who compared transcripts of over 29,700 students from 1999 to 2007 against Oregon’s win-loss record. For every three games won, grade-point average for men dropped 0.02, widening the G.P.A. gender gap by 9 percent. Women’s grades didn’t suffer. In a separate survey of 183 students, the success of the Ducks also seemed to cause slacking off: students reported studying less (24 percent of men, 9 percent of women), consuming more alcohol (28 percent, 20 percent) and partying more (47 percent, 28 percent).

Despite Its TV Ubiquity, the League Won't Share "All-22" Footage; Second-Guessing the Coach

The decline is relative but unmistakable. There are still three Americans in the men’s top 20: Mardy Fish, Andy Roddick and Sam Querrey. But no American man has won a Grand Slam singles title since Roddick at the 2003 United States Open, the longest drought in history.

You know the big tent at the east end of the county fairgrounds? Next to the show barn? Imagine it’s an oval filled with 90,000 Pakistanis who love to watch pie-eating—who love pie-eating more than soccer—even though it seems to the rest of us that eating pie would be a fairly unpleasant reminder of British Colonialism.

OK. Got it.

In the final week of 1998, the national newsweekly Outlook dedicated an entire issue to him, declaring that he was “The Last Hero.” Tarun Tejpal, who was the magazine’s managing editor then, wrote in that special issue, “Indians are lucky that a short, gifted man can, with a few swishes of his wand, take away the cares and drudgery of their lives and transport them to a 22-yard pleasure palace where the onslaught of disease and the price of onions is for fleeting hours no more real than a distant mirage.”

Where else but football would you find clubs with nicknames like the Rat Stabbers, the Lepers, and the Scoundrels? All these and more can be found in Argentina, which also boasts the Millionaires and the Tripe Sellers.

I decide to leave ESPN, start my own blog and charge $10 per year for anyone to read my column. Just for fun -- again, it's hypothetical! -- let's say one million readers sign up, guaranteeing me $10 million for that first year (2007). And let's say I sign advertising deals with three sponsors for another $2 million apiece, raising my total haul to $16 million for Year 1. I spend the next 12 months writing and pinching myself for my good fortune. Life is good.

What is the sporting spirit, then? It’s an artistic spirit, for sport is an artistic enterprise, a craft. Its causes – the reasons we engage in it, the instincts that underpin it – are those of artistry. Think of it as a special form of theatre: a theatre that is only partially scripted (with rules), has competition as its means and human excellence as its end. Athletes illustrate the peaks and troughs of human excellence; they enact narratives of flourishing and demise, demonstrating what can be achieved on either side of perfection. Yet they are not simply actors following a script. Rather, they work together and compete with one another to compose and perform their own tales of excellence within the confines of the stage they’ve been given.