Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  ‘What happened at the end of twenty years?’

  ‘I was voted into the Hall of Fame. All my old friends from Oklahoma and the professional team in Baltimore, they all crowded into New York and it was a mighty experience. Extremely warm, and at that late date I began to reflect on what sports had meant to me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Bud Wilkinson, at Oklahoma. He enlarged my horizons enormously. He made me a whole new man.’ He stopped as if afraid that I might be writing down the wrong things.

  ‘You’ve got to understand this, and it’s difficult to understand, what with the nonsense they’re talking about the great dictatorial coaches. But under Wilkinson we had more fun than any other team I’ve known. The only way I can say it is that he was a man of greatness, and he inspired his players to be the same.’

  ‘What happened to your teammates?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that some of them must have turned out only average, or even failures. And for them I feel real pity. But when I think of my team I think of Eddie Crowder, who became a fine coach at Colorado. And Buck McPhail, who is with the big Levi Strauss clothing outfit in California. Or Buddy Leake, who’s a permanent member of the Million Dollar Round Table in his insurance business. Or Harry Moore, who just sold his oil firm for more than three million. Or the three guys who are now doctors in Oklahoma City. Or the dentists and the educators and businessmen. We weren’t world-beaters, Michener, but under Bud Wilkinson we were encouraged to become the best men possible.’

  ‘What have you been doing?”

  ‘You know, a little professional football in Canada. Darrell Royal was my coach. Two years in the artillery. A little pro ball in Baltimore, but already the monsters were moving in and I was too light. So at age twenty-six I put it all behind me. That’s when I made that little speech I told you about. Came to Miami. Met a man named Robert Mackle. He didn’t even know I’d played football. Never heard of the Heisman Trophy. And I started in real estate and worked like hell year after year.’

  In 1968, when Robert Mackle’s daughter Barbara was kidnapped and buried alive for eighty-three horrible hours, the family required someone of good reputation and nerves of steel to negotiate with the kidnappers and handle the ransom money. They chose Billy Vessels—he did not tell me this—and for several agonizing days he gambled for the girl’s life. With extraordinary self-control he brought the negotiations to a successful conclusion and helped save Barbara from her living grave.

  ‘Luck,’ Vessels says of his life. ‘Television came along just as I came along. In 1952 the year’s big feature would be Oklahoma at Notre Dame, a week or so before balloting for the Heisman Trophy. National television. Big excitement. And we lose 27–21.’

  ‘What was so lucky about that?’

  ‘I broke loose for three touchdowns. Best game I ever had. And all on camera. Without that I doubt if many people in states like New York or Pennsylvania would have heard of me. With it, I was the Oklahoma boy who made good. Pure luck.’ One might say that Billy Vessels was the mirror image of Irwin Shaw’s Christian Darling, who made one eighty-yard run in the darkness and never recovered. Vessels made three of them in television spotlights and then forgot them, to build an acceptable adult life.

  How does one reconcile such reality with the established myth? First, it is necessary to determine if each advocate is using honest data. John Updike in writing Rabbit, Run and Jason Miller in constructing his play That Championship Season were dealing with real situations as they observed them in the sports-mad coal regions of Pennsylvania. Young men did dedicate their whole lives to basketball and they did fail to mature into reasonable adults. Roger Kahn did observe at firsthand the tragic decline of those resplendent Brooklyn boys. And from research I have done I could list perhaps a hundred miserable cases of young men whose lives had halted abruptly at eighteen or twenty-six or thirty-two when the cheering stopped. Every small town has its quota of athletic failures, every city playground its wasted heroes who put on their basketball shoes for one last taste of glory.

  So the negative side is using honest data. What about the other? Billy Vessels says that the majority of his Oklahoma team members achieved pretty good lives. I have said that of the sixty topflight athletes I have known personally, all have performed well as adults. Randy L. Jesick, in a study which has become famous, has analyzed what happened to every member of the University of Pittsburgh 1963 football squad which went 9–1 against the top competition in the nation, finishing third in the polls. This was a hard-nosed club, coached by super-tough John Michelosen, and what were the players doing ten years later?

  Of the seventy-one players on the roster, sixty-six had graduated and an amazing thirty-three had stayed on to earn graduate or professional degrees. There were three doctors, fifteen dentists, five lawyers, seven educators, two ministers and twenty-eight in advanced positions in industry. Jesick does not give specifics on the failures; but they could not have been numerous.

  He does, however, give the starting line-up of the team—one platoon in those days and all white—and of the eleven men, each landed a good job. He concludes his report with a sentence that must have given him considerable satisfaction: ‘They were winners in the game of football, and now they’re winners in the game of life.’

  Stanford University, which is rather difficult to get into and even harder to get out of with a degree, made a similar study of its athletes who played during the academic year 1969–70 and found that taking 223 young men who participated in the five major sports—baseball, basketball, football, swimming and track—88.3 percent graduated, which is a remarkable achievement, especially since only 82.5 percent of the total student body did so. (Of the fourteen basketball players, all graduated; of the sixty-one football players, fifty-six did, with one likely to do so later.) Father Edmund Joyce, athletic director at Notre Dame has sent me a letter in which he states that ’99 percent of our athletes graduate,’ and Frank Howard, the outstanding Clemson coach told me, ‘Over a coaching lifetime of thirty-nine years I had only two boys of which I am not proud. All the rest went on to make something of themselves.’

  Michigan State, on the other hand, has released figures which show that only 51 percent of its athletic-scholarship men graduated with their classes, including an appalling 20 percent of the basketball players, which fortifies my earlier argument that a great many basketball players are in college who shouldn’t conceivably be there, except for their ability to snag rebounds. (Of course, some of those who failed to graduate with their classes might trail along later, which supports my argument that all athletic scholarships should henceforth be awarded for five years.)

  I think we must concede that the evidence in favor of the athlete is respectable, and we can now try to reconcile these conflicting points of view.

  Some high school athletes are shamefully misled and waste their lives, especially blacks. Some college players pursue a dream they can never attain and are self-condemned to a life of protracted adolescence. Some professionals play out their years, fail to earn a pension, and never recover from the shock of subsiding back into the faceless mass.

  But many young men and women engage in athletics, acquire a temporary inflated sense of their ability and worth, then have some sense kicked into them and proceed to live perfectly satisfactory lives. They are not scarred; they are not driven to perpetual adolescence; the boys are not afraid of girls and vice versa; and in the vast majority of cases they receive far more good from athletics than they receive harm.

  It is possible that books about athletes are most often written by frustrated young intellectuals who hope that the agencies of moral compensation see to it that the superjocks whom they have watched so enviously in school and college fall on their faces in later life. The books tend to be written by people who have not themselves participated in games and to whom the fatuous idolatry granted sports heroes is ridiculous or even offensive. They have watched athletes gaining favors from misguided high school
faculties and unwarranted scholarships from colleges, and they begin to visualize the day when the young studs who have enjoyed these prerogatives lose them and have to face real life. They want the beautiful girls to abandon them. They want the structured lives to fall apart. They want life to correct its manifest injustices, and they write stories in which these corrections take place.

  The archetype of writer I am describing must be James Thurber, a man tormented by insecurities and blessed with one of the most mordant pens of our time. Blinded in one eye by a freak sports accident, he had to sit by and watch the heroes parade past, especially at Ohio State—which Philip Roth’s monumentally silly basketball player also attended—and out of this frustration came the description of Bolenciecwcz, the lineman that Time has called ‘the quintessential dumb jock.’

  In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox, he was not any smarter.

  Even Shakespeare indulged in this kind of abuse, and possibly for the same reason. In King Lear, Act 1, Scene IV, line 86, this confrontation takes place between the king, the infamous Oswald, and Kent, loyal servant to the king:

  Lear. Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal? (Striking him.)

  Oswald. I’ll not be strucken, my lord.

  Kent (Tripping up his heels.) Nor tripped neither, you base *football player.

  Lear. I thank thee, fellow. Thou serv’st me, and I’ll love thee.

  In a footnote to describe football, some cave-chested editor who loved the library better than the playing field has added this gloss:

  *football (a low game played by idle boys to the scandal of sensible men)

  Literature is filled with similar snide attacks on sports, but one night as I was reciting some of them, a wise librarian drew my attention to a sardonic little poem in which the comic versifier Morris Bishop distills in a few lines, as poets often do, what I had been thinking. ‘Settling Some Old Football Scores’ he calls his poem and it is written from the envious point of view of ‘a small dark wiry person’ who in his youth has had to sit in the library and watch the football heroes go past. His animosity reveals itself in the first stanza:

  This is the football hero’s moment of fame.

  Glory is his, though erstwhile he may have shunned it.

  In hall and street he hears the crying of his name.

  By youth and maiden, alumnus and radio pundit.

  In the next two stanzas Bishop relates how the hero’s fame is revered in newspapers, in maiden’s dreams and in the cinema. But! ‘In literature his fame has reached its minima.’ In Broadway plays the football hero is shown to be a downright dummy and in serious fiction a barbarian. And then in the last two verses Bishop’s inferiority-ridden scholar gets his revenge:

  We read of him telling victories won of yore,

  We see him vainly pursue fame’s fleeting bubble;

  The maid he adores is certain to leave him for

  A small dark wiry person, the author’s double!

  O football hero! Now while a million throats

  Acclaim thy glorious deeds, just set this much down:

  A small dark wiry person is taking notes.

  Literature will make the ultimate touchdown.

  I first became aware of the peculiar life a great athlete lives, when in the fall of 1960 John Kennedy was running for President and discovered that his regular supporters were finding it impossible to force newspaper coverage in certain strongly Republican states. A glamour plane was put together, with a variety of movie stars, intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and some of the Kennedy girls. We flew into eleven states, I recall, held meetings, and by dint of ingenious publicity devices, managed to pry a few headlines from a reluctant press.

  One member of our troupe accounted for most of our success. It was Stan Musial, who held a special place in the hearts of baseball fans across the country. I lived with him for the better part of two weeks and witnessed the awe and love in which he was held. I remember especially one dark, windy night as we landed at a small Nebraska airport well after dusk. In the shadows we saw several hundred silent ranchers awaiting us, dark shadows against the night sky.

  A lone floodlight was switched on, and as I approached them I could see the stern anticipation with which they waited: ‘Jeff Chandler!’ the excited announcer yelled, but no one responded. ‘Arthur Schlesinger, Pulitzer Prize historian,’ but no one responded. ‘Angie Dickinson,’ as lovely then as now, but no one cheered. ‘Ethel Kennedy, a great woman in her own right!’ but no Republican cheers for her.

  Then Stan Musial appeared, and before the announcer could name him, a low rumble rose from the crowd, and men pressed forward, dragging their boys with them, and one man shouted, ‘It’s Stan the Man!’ And a great cry rose from the night, and Musial walked into the glare, a tall, straight man in his late thirties, an authentic American folk hero, and the men fell back to let him pass.

  As we disappeared into a waiting car I heard one rancher say to his son, ‘For the rest of your life, Claude, you can tell people about this night. You saw Stan Musial.’ (Of the eleven states in which Musial campaigned, Kennedy lost every one.)

  It was that way with Domingo Ortega, the bullfighter. I saw him not long ago, in his seventies, a dignified caballero with white hair and that incessant retinue of men and women who longed to be near him. I spent the evening with Taiho when he retired from the sumo ring, and hundreds stood along the streets and at the windows of the restaurant, longing to see him. It was the same with Joe DiMaggio when I knew him briefly, and it is that way now with Robin Roberts, Chuck Bednarik and Don Meredith.

  Obviously, to play basketball requires superior height, to play football demands superior weight, to be a jockey requires a minimum weight. To perform well in any sport demands some degree of superior coordination, so the physical component is always critical. But studies are emerging which show that athletes also tend to be superior in intelligence. Some of these studies depend upon class grades and must be suspect, since as we have seen, high school and college teachers are often either tempted or bullied into awarding grades that are not earned; but there are other more substantial studies which do not depend upon subjective grades, and these, too, support the claim that athletes tend to be somewhat more intelligent than the general run of the school, college or adult population. I have found this to be true; James Thurber’s Bolenciecwcz can still be found on most campuses, but he is far less common than he used to be.

  Other studies show that athletes tend to be better adjusted socially. They have more friends, exert more social leadership, are forces for stability, and are objects of admiration. James Coleman found that the athlete had three times as many friends as the none-athlete, and Richard Rehberg, who has done the major work in this field, concludes:

  Contrary to the belief that athletics is detrimental to scholastic performance and educational expectations, the evidence we have reviewed appears to support the belief that interscholastic athletics is conducive not only to higher scholastic performance but to higher educational expectations as well. (That is, sports encourages high school boys to continue their education.)

  Rehberg suggests that the athlete’s superior experience stems from five conditions: 1) he belongs to the achievement-oriented crowd; 2) he develops achievement values which steer him toward further education; 3) he maintains a positive self-image; 4) he realizes that others expect him to do well in his classes; 5) he is supported by encouragement from his family and faculty, and receives superior counseling. With this kind of supportive system, athletics has every chance to exert a constructive influence, and parents are well advised to encourage their children to share in an experience which can produce so much good.

  Some studies are emerging which show that athletes are slightly more tense, more subject to depression, more insecure emotionally than the non-athlete, but these usually relate to intense game-competition situations. The Harva
rd Psychiatric Service has reported that more non-athletes than athletes seek its help, but that when an athlete does report, he usually has several grinding problems, whereas the non-athlete usually has but one, and it less pressing. Also, the athlete rarely seeks help of his own volition:

  For many athletes, physical activity, rather than talking things out, appears to offer a means of expressing feelings and aggressions. Perhaps this substitution of action for words contributes to the seeming reluctance of athletes to come to a service that requires that they articulate their feelings.

  Some years ago the San Diego Chargers of the NFL hired a psychiatrist in hope that he could tell the management things about football players that they did not already know, thus giving San Diego an edge over other teams. In a delightful report published in Saturday Review (October 5, 1974), Dr. Arnold Mandell, the shrink in question, tells his findings. The most significant was that each position, offensive and defensive, had its peculiar requirements, and the men who filled those positions conformed to patterns:

  I quickly learned what many Sunday widows already realized—that football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbal, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.

  After only a few weeks I rushed to Coach Svare with my first systematic insight. ‘Harland,’ I said, ‘I think I can tell whether a player is on offense or defense just by looking at his locker. The offensive players keep their lockers clean and orderly, but the lockers of the defensive men are a mess. In fact, the better the defensive player, the bigger the mess.’

  And he proceeds to state why—offensive players seek an orderly world, with every man doing his assigned job, while defensive players like to wreck established offense, act on the spur of the moment and make unexpected tackles—but it is his analysis of the psychological requirements of each individual position which is most instructive. I have often daydreamed of being a cornerback and making flashy interceptions, but when I read the prescription for this hypochondriac position I realized that I would go stark batty trying to fill it. (While Mandell was revealing his hidden truths the Chargers compiled a 6–22 record.)