The Three National Pastimes : Many Americans With Sports Interests Are Like This: They Watch Football, Read Baseball, Relax at the Beach

On the long, lazy days of summer, Californians head for the beach.

That’s a big league activity for most people, comparable with, though in a different world from, major league baseball and football.

And on the warmest days, lifeguards estimate, those swimming or lounging about number a million or more on the 31-mile circuit of beaches around Los Angeles.

The water is also a magnet in other states that border the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico.

Many U.S. residents live near an ocean. Most of the rest live near lakes, large or small, or rivers. And travel sources calculate that a lot of these individuals--a good one out of three Americans, more than 80 million--already have spent at least one day at the beach this summer.

It’s fun there, and it’s fashionable.

It’s a national pastime.

In U.S. legends, to be sure, baseball was for years the nation’s pastime--but the legends are well out of date.

Most late-century sports fans, tending toward multiple interests, are partial to one or more of three particular kinds of recreation. That is, modern America has not one but three national pastimes.

There is one for viewers, one for readers and one for doers:

* Pro football is the game that Americans prefer to watch.

* Baseball is what they like to read about, talk about, argue about--even when the players are on strike.

* Going to the beach is what they want to do.

ON THE SHORE

To begin with, in a summer like this, the place to visit is the beach.

It was there, scientists say, that life originated.

The first beings rose from the shore, they say, and, as the centuries rolled by, the quick and the lively got about the business of making a living.

But in their deepest inner consciousness, those surviving never forgot the oceans, the lakes, the rivers. On their days off, and especially on vacation days, in large numbers, they have customarily gone back to the water.

And they’re still going back.

In California and Hawaii alone last year, “The Western (lifesaving) Assn. reported 163,294,662 beach visitors,” Los Angeles’ chief lifeguard Bob Buchanan said the other day.

The 1993 national association count of U.S. beach-goers, Buchanan said, reached 267,624,205--in a country with a population of 250 million.

Doing the waterfront has become, clearly, a national pastime--even though few sports fans would pay to watch it, or read about it, and even though, as an everyday hobby, it doesn’t beat television. Nothing does. Jim Spring, the president of Leisure Trends, Inc., whose company researches American preferences, has found that TV viewing is still well ahead of any other form of entertainment. Reading is second.

Then, examining his most recent polls, Spring said, “After at-home activities that are easy to do, the No. 1 attraction for most Americans is going to the water--or being on it.”

The Gallup organization directs Leisure Trends polls.

“We don’t ask, ‘Do you like golf or swimming?’ ” Spring said from his office in Boulder, Colo. “We ask open-ended questions such as, ‘What do you really like to do?’ ”

And he considers it significant that from coast to coast, most respondents continue to volunteer a preference for the beach.

There’s a good reason for that, according to Stephen P. Leatherman, who heads the Coastal Research Laboratory at the University of Maryland.

“The beach offers a choice of two kinds of recreation, passive or active,” he said. “You can lie in the sun or play in the water.

“There aren’t so many options in the mountains.”

Leatherman, professor of geography and marine sciences at Maryland, enjoys what has been called one of America’s best jobs. He is required to spend much of the year visiting the world’s beaches, where he studies the interaction between people and the shore.

He has concluded the best beach for vacationers is Grayton Beach on the Florida Panhandle, the best for Westerners is Santa Barbara’s, the best for campers are those in Oregon, and the best for nudists is Black’s Beach in LaJolla.

“The biggest change (in beach-going) in recent years is that there are so many more things to do in the water today,” he said.

“It used to be just swimming and surfing. Today there’s everything from jet skiing, wind surfing and skim boarding to boogie boarding and ocean kayaking.”

Leatherman, known as Dr. Beach to his Maryland students, or sometimes as the beach bum professor, prefers oceans to lakes or rivers.

“It’s the air,” he said. “The salt spray in the ocean air is like an elixir. It isn’t good for auto bodies, but it’s good for human bodies. For one thing, it’s an allergy-fighter, knocking down things like pollen.”

The sound of the waves is another beach plus.

“It’s dynamic, ever-changing, mysterious, with an up-and-down crescendo that fascinates the average person,” he said.

At the beach, though, sunlight is no longer the principal plus, Leatherman cautions. Modern research has identified the sun, in an uncontrolled environment, as an enemy--as a wrinkle-builder that can kill.

“When I go to the beach, I wear a hat, sunglasses, and a high-level (usually No. 15) sunscreen,” Leatherman said. “I go in the early morning, and I’m back by 10:30 or so for a cold shower and lunch, then I read a book till about 4.

“When I go back out (to the beach) I’m meeting everyone else coming back in.”

All summer, in truth, millions still spend all day in the sun.

“But they’re taking more care now,” lifeguard Buchanan said. “They’re bringing more umbrellas and more hats.”

In any case, he said, the hot sun hasn’t affected beach attendance. There seems to be no place else that Americans would rather be.

ON THE FIELD

When choosing a spectator sport, Americans have shown a clear preference for one or more of four distinctive athletic values: action, artistry, strategy and harnessed violence.

Not more than one or two of these qualities are typically present in most sports. And hardly anything can offer all four.

Beach-going can’t. Wall Street can’t. Basketball can’t. Jurisprudence can’t. Baseball can’t. Journalism can’t. Soccer can’t.

Football can.

Which accounts, in large part, for football’s hold on the country.

Which didn’t just happen.

Football was invented by Americans, for Americans. It was created in the second half of the 19th Century by groups of U.S. soccer players who wanted something more stimulating.

They got it by deliberately, and radically, changing soccer’s rules.

It is of equal importance that major rule changes are still being made--almost every year--by NFL club owners, whose goal is to maintain the balance of artistry, action, strategy and violence.

And their ongoing attention works. The latest evidence that football has taken root as the national pastime for spectators is in the most recent Harris poll.

Those responding, asked to name their favorite sport, replied: football 31%, basketball 19%, baseball 17%--with nothing else over 5%.

Some critics have suggested in late years that the nation’s young people, who have a choice these days of so much to do, are beginning to draw away from NFL games in favor of others.

Not so.

U.S. youngsters in grades 6 through 12, polled in the most recent ESPN-Chilton survey on their favorite professional sport, replied: football 40%, basketball 28%, baseball 18%--with nothing else over 4%.

Other critics frequently suggest that football is a man’s game and that women hate it.

But that doesn’t seem to be so either.

The most recent Simmons survey showed that women account for 41% of those watching NFL games on TV.

In a separate poll, ESPN-Chilton found that 39.4% of the NFL’s female fans were more interested in pro football games last year than the year before.

No other sport showed such an upswing in fan support by either men or women.

Over the years, as an American spectacle, boxing alone has challenged pro football.

“The biggest sports events of this century have been certain heavyweight championship fights (Dempsey-Tunney, Louis-Schmeling, Ali-Frazier) and Super Bowl games,” veteran journalist George Kiseda said.

Yet there have been only eight or nine such fights, he noted, along with 28 Super Bowls.

A Louis-Ali fight, if you could somehow arrange it, would doubtless beat anything. In the meantime, there’s football.

OFF THE FIELD

The great irony of major league baseball is that although there is so little to see, there is so much to say.

Even many baseball fans concede there is almost no action in a baseball game compared with that in basketball, or even football.

But on the morning after, how it all changes.

Baseball then becomes, once more, the national pastime--for readers.

Nothing in any other sport compares with baseball’s box scores, or with, say, the written record of the lifetime batting averages of the thousands of big leaguers active and gone.

Take Babe Ruth.

People who wouldn’t be caught dead at Yankee Stadium remember that Ruth batted in the .340s lifetime.

They remember it because they know it’s phenomenal for anyone to hit home runs as regularly as Ruth did and at the same time bat .340--actually .342. They’ve been reading about baseball, and dabbling in baseball’s statistics, most of their lives.

The most familiar number in the American language, in or out of sports, is doubtless .300.

“Much of baseball’s appeal is in the romance of the numbers,” Kiseda said, mentioning 20 victories, 100 RBIs, .300 batting averages, 3,000 hits.

Basketball and football numbers, he said, just don’t measure up.

Even in boxing, there’s no real way to compare Louis and Ali. In baseball, by contrast, you can indefinitely argue player merits statistically.

It is simple to verify that Henry Aaron’s home-run hitting shattered one of the most famous numbers in sports, Ruth’s 714. But Aaron never hit 50 home runs in any year. Ruth hit more than 50 four times--and once hit 60. Roger Maris once hit 61. But in no other year did Maris even hit 40.

Gene Policinski, who doubles as editor in charge of USA Today sports and Baseball Weekly, said, “Every active baseball player takes the field against two opponents--the guy he’s playing against and everyone else whoever played.”

In a sense, that happens in track and field too. But there’s a difference in baseball, which is a team sport that uniquely grades individual performance in as many ways as it measures team achievement.

“More than any other sport, baseball is about history, about comparisons,” said baseball fan Bob Costas.

Hence any change in baseball harms it. And more than that, changes in baseball tend to be useless. Given the nature of the game, no new baseball rule can make more than a minimal difference.

The American League’s experiment with designated hitters is a transcendent mistake precisely because, in a nine-man sport, the DH position can make very little difference.

At too great a cost--the collapse of so much history.

Baseball’s records date far back into the darkness of the 19th Century, when the game stood alone as the national pastime--the descriptive phrase first used in 1857, when, according to Cooperstown, N.Y., historians, it was suggested by one Fred Ivor-Campbell, a writer in Warren, R.I.

Ivor-Campbell’s little game isn’t exactly the national pastime these days--until the morning paper hits the sidewalk out front.

Then it is.

Even in the year of a baseball strike, it is.

The strike has been Page 1 news frequently this summer--on the news page as well as in sports. Indeed, considering that baseball is now wholly without action, media coverage has at times been overwhelming.

It’s almost as if America’s three national pastimes had all shut down.

History and tradition did that--not designated hitters.