Sport: The Endless Season

Wilt Chamberlain hook sliding into second base. Brooks Robinson passing the puck to Howard Cosell in the keyhole. Fran Tarkenton striking out the side in the World Series. Bobby Orr slashing over right tackle to win the Davis Cup for the Pittsburgh Orioles.

So it might have seemed to a sports fan who tried to keep up with the dizzying athletic kaleidoscope on the TV screen last week. Split vision, in fact, is almost a requirement these days for following all the bouncing balls of big-time sports. With leagues merging and teams multiplying like so many amoebae, games that once were seasonal are now practically year-round affairs. Pro basketball teams alone, whose number has grown from ten to 27 in the past five years, will play nearly 1,300 games in a seemingly endless season that stretches from September well into May. After football completes its rounds of playoffs, bowl and all-star games in late January, hockey will keep skating right through the opening month of the baseball season. As last week's sport spectaculars proved, the games not only overlap; they tend to upstage one another.

Arizona Congressman Morris K. Udall, for one, feels that "people are becoming satiated with sports." Last March he introduced a bill to restrict the TV coverage of professional sports to specified seasons before "the public turns away from the sporting world in a wave of apathy and disgust." Udall's bill has about as much chance of passage as the California Golden Seals have of winning this year's Stanley Cup. Nonetheless, as the World Series spills over into the football, basketball and hockey seasons, team owners, players and fans alike might ponder the possibility of sports overkill.