BENTONVILLE— Sports have always been devotion and delusion, and even after living a large part of life in them, I still don’t know how seriously to take them. I often dream of games; my body remembers the tang of locker rooms—sweat and mildew, the faint citrus rot of orange peels fermenting in bins. I remember the humiliating sting of failure, the adrenal relief of execution. I long ago lost my fandom—this business teaches you to root for the story—but remember how it feels to live and die with the fortunes of my tribe.

Jerry Seinfeld once observed that all we’re rooting for is laundry; we cheer clothes stitched into patterns. We confuse laundry with blood. Still, we love sports with irrational devotion.

Which is why “Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture,” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art through Jan. 26, feels like both dare and absolution. To walk into a gallery and find not portraits and landscapes but football scrum and a marching band is disorienting. Olympic bikes, boxing gloves, and a fly rod, mounted like relics—altars disguised as gear. That is the dare of this traveling exhibition, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: to insist that sports are cultural expressions worthy of reflection, as freighted as any battlefield or cathedral.

The curators are wise to let Ernie Barnes have the first and last word. The exhibition opens with his 1994 painting “Fumble in the Line” and closes with “Homecoming” (1990). Between them, the spectrum of sport is laid bare: chaos and intimacy, triumph and burden, exaltation and mortality.

“Fumble in the Line” greets visitors with a knot of bodies twisting, tumbling, reaching. Limbs stretch, helmets collide, torsos bend at impossible angles. The ball is missing, and Barnes is telling you it doesn’t matter. What matters is the scramble, the desperation, the pile. Look at the hands—every one extended, fingers delicate, almost tender. The painting hums with exertion, but also with fragility. Elbows bend in ways that suggest breaking; necks crane toward, snapping. Exuberance is shadowed by danger.

Barnes knew that feeling. Born in Durham, N.C., in 1938, the son of a maid and a shipping clerk, he grew up sketching athletes from magazines while barred by segregation from attending white stadiums. He carried that dual identity—outsider artist, insider athlete—into college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he played football on scholarship while studying art. In 1960, the San Diego Chargers

drafted him; he played six bruising seasons in the AFL as an undersized lineman. He accumulated scars and bruises along with memory: the torque of a block, the burn of a hamstring, the claustrophobia of a pile.

He also carried something darker. While with the New York Titans, he watched his teammate Howard Glenn collapse on the field in the middle of a game. He never got up.

Officially, his death was attributed to a broken neck, but many players suspected heatstroke—a man pushed past his limits by an........

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