The Constitution as a sports metaphor

[Sanford Levinson]

Imagine that we are discussing the "legitimacy" of the forward pass in,
say, 1906 (or whenever someone first had the idea of passing the football
instead of running with it) or the egregious designated hitter rule in
baseball, or "juicing up" the baseball in order to produce more home runs
(and, therefore, a more "interesting" game for louts who don't appreciate
the balletic beauty, a la soccer, of baseball), and so on.  I presume that
in all cases we would see those who argue in behalf of "the essential
integrity of the game" as given us by Abner Doubleday, et al., as against
those who see the sport as a "living enterprise" that has to be modified to
suit the times.  No one ever wants to change the game "entirely" at any
given p point, but, obviously, it is possible that an accretion of
incremental changes over many points in time would make the given game at
T2 almost unrecognizable to someone familiar with it at T1.  (Recall Bobby
Jones saying about Jack Nicklaus that he "was playing a game with which I
am not familiar," quoted many, many times when Tiger Woods transformed golf
as we knew it during his first Masters win (which led, among other things,
to digging up Augusta National and redesigning the holes in order to make
it harder for Tiger to dominate the tournament).

I trust my colleagues to fill in the rest of this posting for themselves.

sandy