Hal vs. Stice, Steeply and Poutrincourt in the crowd (pp. 680–681)
They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.
Context
Poutrincourt sets celebrity and play against each other as two masters you can't both serve, and calls the choice between them the "U.S.A. religion." The Syndrome of the Endless Party is what happens when the performer chooses to be watched — becomes a celebrity feeding the culture's hunger for the make-it instead of a player doing the suffering work of the game — and it's doomed precisely because being an object of the crowd's appetite is incompatible with the interior labor that made you worth watching. It's the choosing-your-master problem in athletic dress: the culture trains you to want the spectacle-self, the spectacle-self can only be sustained by more spectacle, and the appetite you're feeding is not yours but the audience's.