Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  Honor piled upon honor for Devaney, his staff and players for 1970 and 1971—the AP and UPI trophies, Grantland Rice Trophy, the MacArthur Bowl, Big Eight and Orange Bowl Championships, all-America honors and many others—but the greatest honor came after the 1970 season when President Richard M. Nixon visited Lincoln to speak to a University of Nebraska convocation and presented Devaney and the Husker co-captains with a plaque proclaiming the Cornhuskers the ‘No. 1 Team in the Nation.’

  I have spoken to only a few coaches about Nixon. They felt that he was innocent of any real wrongdoing and that he had been persecuted by the same kind of long-haired radicals who give coaches so much trouble on college faculties. I have heard of no coach who thinks otherwise, and this is understandable, because President Nixon was always on their side; he did telephone lockerrooms; and he did uphold verbally the old-fashioned virtues that they uphold.

  The athletes have had better luck with General Patton. His reputation has grown and his principles of battle have been shown to be correct in most respects. He was a superior athlete himself—at the 1912 Olympics he placed fifth in the Military Pentathlon; he carried a seven-goal handicap in polo with ten the highest, had won two hundred cups for horsemanship, and was topflight in shooting and handball. He might be said to be the beau ideal of American sportsmen.

  In his famous address to his troops who were about to invade Sicily he spelled out his philosophy of both war and sports, and all subsequent men who have related the two in locker room exhortations are indebted to him:

  Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood. Americans pride themselves on being he-men and they are he-men.

  We Americans are a competitive race. We bet on anything. We love to win. In this next fight, you are entering the greatest sporting competition of all times. You are competing with Americans and with Allies for the greatest prize of all—victory; and the one who wins the prize is the one who first attains victory—captures his objective. Never forget that. And remember also that the Deity, in whatever form you think of Him, is with us.

  There was another side of Patton which is duplicated in many of the top athletes. He was an intensely emotional man, and his biography is replete with situations in which he wept. To his record I append some additional instances:

  General Patton: When he spoke of the German enemy ‘tears came into his eyes several times.’ When the navy with whom he had been battling offered him a flag for his new army ‘Patton was crying.’ After he slapped the sick soldier ‘he began to sob.’ When a French general paid him respects ‘the gesture moved him to tears.’ When he delivered the routine fighting talk he called Form Number 7 ‘he wound up with tears.’ And when in Los Angeles, at the end of the war, he looked at his medals and said that not he but gallant men had won them ‘tears welled up in his eyes and he could not go on.’

  Vince Lombardi: When he had to cut Joe Scarpati, a wonderful fighting ballplayer, ‘he cried.’ When admirers handed him a plaque which read ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch on the hill,’ he wept.

  Woody Hayes: When he beat Michigan in 1972 he cried like a baby and was photographed doing so.

  Don Meredith: After making his hard final decision not to play football at Texas A & M ‘he cried.’

  Bear Bryant: When he went on television to deny charges that he and Wally Butts had rigged the Alabama-Georgia game ‘he broke into tears.’

  Mickey Mantle: When he left home to play professional ball ‘sobs rose up and choked me.’

  Dave Meggyesy: When his high school team lost the championship: ‘I remember sitting in the corner of the locker room, crying my head off.’

  Connie Hawkins: When his Pittsburgh Pipers won the 1968 ABA title: ‘Washington, who had taken down twenty-seven rebounds, sobbed uncontrollably: “I tried, I tried. I did the best I could.” “You were beautiful, Wash,” Connie said softly. Then he was crying, too, the tears wetting his mustache and dripping off his chin. Then Arthur Heyman had his arms around both of them, burying his sweaty hair in Wash’s chest. All three men were weeping.’

  Joe Namath: When he announced to a press conference that he was succumbing to the dictate from Commissioner Rozelle and surrendering any financial interest in his gambler-frequented night spot, Bachelor III, ‘he broke into tears.’

  I have a score of other citations, but these seem the most macho. I cite them for a peculiar reason. Male America, and I suppose female America too, deems it rather manly when an athlete weeps in public; certainly one of the greatest sports photos of all time, endlessly reproduced, show Lou Gehrig unable to fight back his tears. For such men it’s all right, because we know they are manly.

  But when Edmund Muskie allowed tears to come into his eyes for a far more justifiable cause, the honor of his wife, the American public rejected him brutally. For he was not an athlete who had already proved himself to be a man. He was a lanky Maine politician, and as such, he had to be suspect.

  NINE

  The Inescapable Problem

  This brief chapter poses a special problem which no athlete escapes: ‘After a long period of vigorous physical activity during school and college, how can I devise a program of moderate exercise that will keep me healthy till age seventy?’ The question can best be explored through the case history of a young football player I shall call Lew Cobberly.

  I first met him in prep school, a hefty, well-coordinated tackle weighing 222 at age eighteen. He was a good student, but his main delight was smashing into opposition backfields to haul down quarterbacks.

  It was obvious that the football colleges would offer him a plethora of scholarships, but he surprised me by choosing not one of the powers but a lesser university with an outstanding course in business administration.

  He played three years in college and gained one of those one-newspaper nominations as all-American. The designation was questionable, but enough to win him a round-nineteen draft into the pros, which he entered while eight credits short of a degree. He barely survived the cut the first year, played spasmodically the second, and was cast adrift at the end of training camp the third.

  With unusual perception he told me, ‘The fact that I shied away from testing my luck at Ohio State or Alabama betrayed the fact that I really lacked the killer instinct. I mean, in the pros you go up against men who know nothing but football. They’re out to tear you apart, and if you don’t devote every thinking minute of your life to crushing them before they crush you … Simple fact is, I never had that kind of dedication and the professional coaches saw it.’

  So at age twenty-five Cobberly found himself unemployed, but by no means unemployable. He hurried back to his university, obtained his degree, landed a good job in Detroit, started a new life. He had never intended becoming a football casualty, and he didn’t.

  His tragedy lay elsewhere. Having played games from age nine, he was now fed up. With his gift for self-analysis he acknowledged that in college he had allowed football to cheat him of a real education, while the pros had considered him no more than a low-grade commodity. Sports held no further glamour for him and he said, ‘To hell with it.’

  He quit all exercise, put on forty pounds, lost his edge, became a sedentary slob. Through two decades I watched him deteriorate, twenty-five through forty-five, and visited him in the hospital after he suffered a relatively mild heart attack. He should have recovered easily, but he was so flabby, his heart so encased in fat, his lungs so deficient in elasticity that he died.

  Any athlete should be able to make the transition from hyperactivity to relative inactivity with ease, but young men like Lew Cobberly fail the test. To understand why, three preliminary questions must be disposed of. 1) At what age are human beings at their apex, physically
? 2) Is their retreat from that apex so rapid that they can no longer find pleasure in playing games at which they once excelled? 3) Is it safe, or even desirable, for men and women in middle and advanced years to engage in exercise?

  At what age do the physical reactions of a human being start to slow down? During World War II, I handled the paper work on a study sponsored by the British and American military authorities who wanted to know at what age a young man was best qualified physically to pilot a jet fighter. He would be alone in the cockpit, depending only upon his own judgment and particularly upon the speed of his automatic reflexes. After applying a battery of tests to thousands of young men, the scientists decided the optimum age, if physical response alone was considered, to be sixteen years and eight months. After that, the young man was over the hill and really too old to pilot a jet fighter. But if other attributes like judgment and character were cranked into the equation, the optimum was something like twenty-two years and seven months. After that, regardless of what criteria you used, it was all downhill, and whereas a super-pilot might still do good work till he reached the advanced age of twenty-six, he was an exception, for the odds were heavily against him.

  Tests have shown that a human being reaches his or her maximum aerobic capacity, one of the best overall measurements of athletic capacity, at an age somewhere between nineteen and twenty, and that this capacity diminishes thereafter, first slowly, then swiftly.

  It is obvious that swimming champions are usually young, seventeen being a ripe age after which skills decline rapidly. Harvey Lehman, of Ohio University, made an extensive study of when the athletes of the preceding decade had peaked (Research Quarterly [October 1938]), and while his figures cannot apply to today’s professional football and basketball, for those sports were not well established then, his others deserve attention:

  AGES AT WHICH ATHLETES REACH THEIR MAXIMUM PROFICIENCY

  Since the Lehman study, more accurate figures have become available for the newer professional sports. An average football player now peaks at somewhere around twenty-eight, a basketball player at twenty-four, and a hockey player at twenty-seven. But Lehman’s other figures still hold. The master athlete tends to be a has-been at thirty-five.

  Stan Musial, who functioned longer than most, told me a bittersweet story. ‘One of the saddest days of my life was when I found out about my eyes. Before age forty I hadn’t felt the slightest loss in seeing. Then my eyes started to go bad. The ball looked so much smaller than it used to. First base seemed to be actually farther away. So the Cards sent me to the top eye doctors, and they examined me for a whole morning with the latest machines, and at the end they gave me the bad news. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes.” I was just getting older, like everyone else.’

  I played very rugged sports through age thirty-nine and would acknowledge no diminution of power, but at forty it was as if an iron gate had suddenly clanged shut. I could scarcely believe the finality of it. Lew Hoad told me at his tennis club on Spain’s Costa del Sol, ‘I can still go out and beat any of them … the first day. But in order to recover for five sets the next day, I have to go right to bed after the match and sleep twenty hours. After the second match I have to sleep twenty-four hours. After the third I need twenty-eight. My legs, my muscles, my lungs. Who wants to punish himself like that?’

  From researching most available studies on the subject I conclude that a man’s total physical-psychological equipment reaches its apex of efficiency somewhere before thirty-one. Thereafter he is in decline, whether he knows it or not. True, in sports like golf or trapshooting, which exact little physical demand, he can prolong his period of excellence. And obviously, in harness racing, which exacts practically no demand, he can last into his seventies. But for most of us, in most of the active sports, we are clearly on the way out by thirty-five.

  After the age of thirty-five do human beings retain the capability for active though diminished participation in sports? Lehman, in the study just cited, added a table which showed the most advanced ages at which individual athletes had accomplished outstanding performances, including world championships, in sports which did not require strenuous physical contact. His old-time big-league pitchers had twirled thirty-seven masterpieces between the ages of forty and forty-four, a feat not matched in recent years. Rifle and pistol marksmen at that age had won eighty-two major championships. And in the age group fifty-five to sixty-four, fourteen different men had turned in top performances in such diverse sports as bowling, target shooting, billiards and golf.

  Similar reports are becoming commonplace. A few years ago the Tournament Players Division of the Professional Golfers Association issued a quick rundown of one season’s play: halfway through the 1971 tour four of the top-ten money winners were over the age of forty; seven of the thirteen best scorers were over forty; and every low-scoring record had been racked up by a player over forty.

  ‘Boys, we all remember how Stretch Madden almost single-handedly sank the Lakers in the last game of the playoffs with eight consecutive dunks. Well, I’m delighted to announce that Stretch has agreed to apply those same competitive skills to the marketing of our budget lingerie.’

  Ernst Jokl, analyzing the ages of all participants in the 1952 Olympics held at Helsinki, found men competing successfully at these ages: canoeing, thirty-six; track and field, forty-two; swimming, forty-five; gymnastics, forty-five; and fencing, forty-nine. The senior women contestants were somewhat younger, except in canoeing, where they were two years older.

  James W. Whittaker, himself forty-six and the first American to climb Mount Everest, says, ‘The ideal age for mountain climbers is between thirty-five and forty. One member of the Italian team who conquered K-2 in 1954 was forty. What counts is mature judgment and how tightly you are wound.’ I like that last clause; it says so much about the athletic individual.

  Clarence DeMar, the indefatigable marathon runner turned in his best times between the ages of thirty-four to thirty-eight and completed his last race at the age of sixty-six, covering the twenty-six-plus miles at an average rate of slightly over eight minutes per mile. And Percy Dawson, an early advocate of physical fitness, walked six or seven miles one day each week at age ninety-two.

  In 1970 Sports Illustrated carried one of the funniest sports stories ever. In it John Cottrell recalled a famous bicycle race run in Sweden in 1954 from the northernmost tip of the country to the southernmost, a distance of one thousand miles. All the top professionals were competing, but the race soon degenerated into a classic farce because a bearded old duffer named Gustav Hakansson, seventy years old and grandfather of five, insisted upon entering without official sanction. He turned up at the starting line riding a woman’s beat-up antique bicycle with a cowcatcher in front and wearing an improvised uniform consisting of overalls. At the end of the first blistering day he was a figure of ridicule trailing the field by ten miles; at the end of the first three hundred miles he led the pack by twenty!

  The old man’s remarkable progress was explained by one vital difference in his racing strategy. He cheated. Unlike the other riders, he did not observe the rule by which competitors were required to stop each night at check points and restart in the morning. After an hour’s rest the first night, Gustav was back in the saddle, plodding on alone through the darkness. Still, since he was not an official entrant, one could hardly complain that he was taking an unfair advantage.

  Soon he was leading the field by more than a hundred and fifty miles; with only one hour’s sleep in each twenty-four he plugged on, giving a remarkable demonstration of endurance. He covered the thousand miles in five days and five hours, then sought refuge in a jail cell to catch up on his sleep. And in 1958 Steel Grandpa (as he was called) at seventy-four, made a whole new set of headlines by traveling from his home in Gantofta, Sweden, to Jerusalem on a motor scooter.

  Even more astonishing is the fact that lean, energetic Sanders Russell won the Hambletonian, premier event of harness racing, in 19
62 when he was sixty-two and hampered by a dislocated right ankle encased in a heavy bandage. In 1975, at seventy-five, he won a major race at Wilmington, Delaware.

  My own attitudes on this matter have been determined by fortunate personal experiences. I played rugged basketball till forty, then shifted to volleyball till forty-five, and now hope to play tennis for the rest of my life. Some of the most tenacious doubles I have experienced were played against former Vice-President Henry Wallace when he was seventy-six; I lost. I also lose to a remarkable mart in his mid-sixties who has a plastic hip; he can beat any of us.

  Obviously, then, men and women can perform capably in selected types of sport regardless of what decade of their lives they happen to be in, and I should like to offer a recommended list of sports appropriate for each of the decades:

  A LOGICAL PROGRESSION BY DECADES ILLUSTRATED ONLY, NOT TO BE CONSIDERED COMPREHENSIVE

  This table invites several important generalizations. Swimming is, as some have claimed, the ideal sport in that it is highly conducive to well-being, exercises all the big body muscles, expands heart and lung capacity and can be practiced over a total lifetime. Tennis and golf permit an extended participation, too, but it is walking, that ever-available, no-equipment exercise that tops the list. It could almost be called the criterion of the functioning human being.