Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  On the other hand, the table makes clear why, for the average human being, football is such a restricted sport, combining as it does the heavy probability of body damage and a severely limited number of years during which it can be practiced. That schools should devote so much of the athletic dollar to a sport which offers such restricted benefits is remarkable; financial and emotional advantages which accrue to football are the only explanation.

  Enthusiasts may be surprised to notice that I have not included hunting or boxing. The first is a lively outdoor activity but one for which I can generate no empathy whatever. I cannot think of any legitimate grounds for recommending boxing to anyone.

  But with such a variety of engaging sports available—and I have not covered attractive alternatives like lacrosse, badminton, archery and croquet—it is a bewilderment why everyone does not acquire, in his youth, a group of sports which he or she can enjoy through life. The rougher games can be phased out early; the more compatible ones can be played at varied levels of competition forever.

  Should one continue to exercise in middle and advanced years? In Chapter III, I summarized my thinking on this subject; three points merit repetition.

  If you haven’t kept up your muscle tone, your heart resilience and your lung capacity, you could kill yourself by rushing precipitately onto a tennis court or into a squash enclosure for a sudden and vigorous game. No formerly energetic person who has allowed himself or herself to grow flabby should resume active sports without the supervision of a doctor.

  If you are one of the many persons who can lead a satisfactory life without much or any physical exercise, and if such a regimen keeps you alert and happy, don’t change, especially not past the age of forty.

  Finally, there is no evidence that vigorous athletic participation will prolong your life; indeed, as we have seen, there are several disturbing studies which indicate that it may shorten it. But, as I argued earlier, I strongly suspect that these negative studies reflect not on sports but on the sloppy way in which athletes who were active in college discipline their lives after they leave.

  I have discussed this problem with various groups of people who have remained active through their sixties, and one man, who has worked with extraordinary intensity in a demanding profession well into his seventies, summed up the general thinking in these apt words: ‘In view of the studies, I mustn’t claim that engaging in vigorous games has prolonged my life, but I’m sure of one thing. Those games have made what life I have had extra productive and extra enjoyable. I’m convinced that I was able to maintain my mental health only because I discharged my nervous aggressions on the tennis court, and that tranquillity alone has justified all the effort.’

  My friend’s opinion is supported by the testimony of experts. E.V. Cowdry, in his book The Care of the Geriatric Patient, says:

  Adults need regular exercise even into advanced years. Older muscular systems do respond. Exercise is needed for: maintenance of posture; correct joint alignment and mobility; to preserve strength; to keep good locomotor skills; to stimulate circulation; and to give emotional satisfaction from physical competition and independence.

  The President’s Council on Physical Fitness has issued an excellent statement entitled Adult Physical Fitness (Government Printing Office). Along with an illustrated program which intimidated me, since the man photographed seemed destined to rip telephone books apart with his bare hands, it summarizes current thinking:

  There is strong authoritative support for the concept that regular exercise can help prevent degenerative disease and slow down physical deterioration that accompanies aging. The evidence is conclusive: individuals who consistently engage in proper physical activity have better job performance records, fewer degenerative diseases, and probably a longer life expectancy than the population at large. By delaying the aging process, proper exercise also prolongs your active years.

  If the evidence is so persuasive and so clear, why do so many Americans fail to make the easy transition from vigorous youthful sport to the more productive lifelong kind? Seven reasons, some spurious, have been advanced to explain our indolence.

  The first is psychological. We have been brainwashed into believing that only those sports which entice spectators to sit in large stadiums to watch are manly or endowed with high acceptability value. Football, basketball, ice hockey and baseball are the regal sports, and they are the ones that are to be encouraged in junior and senior high school and supported financially in college and university. Yet active participation in such sports is ended by the twenty-five-thirty-five decade, leaving the practitioner, in his crucial early-middle years, bereft of a sensible program for maintaining good health. The intensive propaganda deifying spectator sports has psyched the athlete out of those alternative patterns which might prolong his life.

  The second reason is that athletic programs in schools and colleges are dominated by this spectator psychology, and decisions are made which support it rather than the welfare of the student body as a whole. I have already marveled at the fact that St. Jude’s would spend $7,000,000 on a basketball facility to be used by only sixteen players out of a student body of eleven thousand, and that each of the sixteen would drop the sport before he was thirty-five and most of them before twenty-five.

  The third reason is also psychological. Many former athletes have testified that they gave up all participation after their varsity years in college because their obvious drop in ability made competition at a lower level of performance distasteful. They would rather sit around in idleness than exhibit their growing deficiencies. Much as I deplore such reasoning, considering it extremely juvenile and narcissistic, I do understand it. To be an ex-athlete with fading powers is a demanding role from which most of us, fortunately, are excused.

  In the second game of the 1973 World Series, when the New York Mets and Oakland were battling for the championship, with the Mets having lost the first game, they called upon a superannuated Willie Mays to help pull them through. It was a travesty. In the late innings they used him as a pinch runner, and that was all right. But they kept him in the game, and in the ninth inning, on a critical fly to left field by Deron Johnson, Mays ineptly lost the ball in the sun, misplayed it, and with his legs tangled converted an easy out into a run-producing double. However, the Mets tied the game, and on his next at bat Mays lined a hit into the outfield, stumbled at the plate, recovered partially, ran in a wavering line toward first and looked the fool.

  Mays must have been embarrassed, for this was his farewell appearance in baseball and he simply was not capable of performing. He was damaging the chances of an entire team and should have known better. But I quickly rejected this special pleading. If Willie Mays, with his tremendous career behind him, wanted to play a few more games, he was entitled to make the effort, and if he damaged his team, his coaches ought to have forced him to quit. I had felt exactly that way back in the late 1920s when Tris Speaker and the incredible Ty Cobb ended their playing days going through the motions with the Philadelphia Athletics. They weren’t what you’d call really good, but by God they were Speaker and Cobb, and I saw them.

  I cannot accept possible embarrassment over waning powers as an excuse for quitting participation in sports. I still recall the shock that swept over me when Mark Spitz, having won an unparalleled seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics announced, ‘I’ll never swim again.’ Of course, at his advanced age of twenty-two he should quit Olympic competition, and I hope that’s what he meant. But to give up entirely a sport which had meant so much to him and which had done so much for him was incomprehensible.

  Coaches have a responsibility here. If a man’s life reaches its climax at age thirty-one, after which he will be of diminished value to his coach, the latter is obligated to see that an orderly transition is made, to protect the athlete’s physical well-being if nothing more. And this should be the responsibility of coaches on all levels, from Little League, where, as we have seen, a boy can reach the apex of his life
at age twelve, to the championship professional football or basketball team, where the shock of quitting at thirty-one may be even more damaging.

  The fourth reason is that while our society prizes spectator sports, lavishing money and attention on them, it actually denigrates lifelong sports, or did until recently. During the most active years of my life the communities I lived in had too few tennis courts, swimming pools, golf links and general playgrounds. There were some communities with no facilities for lifelong sports for men or any sports at all for women. Budgets were pathetically out of line, and the prevailing mood of spending most of the budget on football was well expressed by Bear Bryant of Alabama in an interview with John E. Peterson of the Detroit News:

  Asked why his University of Alabama football players were housed in a luxury dorm, fed a diet twice as expensive as that provided other students, and given private tutors, the legendary coach Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant replied: ‘Our first concern is to teach these kids to play hard-nosed football. If they do, we’ll keep filling that stadium and we’ll be able to keep on giving scholarships to athletes who might never have gone to college otherwise. Sure, Joe Willie (Namath) never graduated. We got eleven players in the pros (professional football) right now and only two of them graduated. But Joe Willie, he signed with the Jets for more than $400,000, and the rest of them, they average about $30,000 a year. You know your typical college graduate, even if he’s magna cum laude … he’s going to be damn lucky to start at $10,000 a year.’

  Today even the most gung-ho athletic directors recognize the need for broader programs, and some which will incorporate women. Universities are providing excellent facilities for tennis, recreational skating and sometimes even golf. Frisbee, a delightful way to waste an afternoon and still work up a sweat, has had an amusing impact on the sports establishment. When Sports Illustrated dared to run an article on it as a semi-legitimate sport, various outraged macho types protested that whereas they beat themselves to death playing real sports like football—with bruises to show for it—now a pantywaist affair like frisbee was being accorded equal status.

  Some of the most enjoyable nonsense of my life has been centered on this game, which I discovered late while working at Kent State University. Later on, Chip Cronkite, son of the television broadcaster, and I held the championships of Hong Kong, Bali and Tahiti. Our culminating performance came on the last-named island, where we completed 122 consecutive long throws around a coconut palm. I can still recall the disdain with which a famous jock asked, when told of this feat, ‘Frisbee? A grown man playing frisbee?’ I took the trouble to indoctrinate him into the mysteries of the flying saucer and he became an addict.

  Park boards now build tennis courts and swimming pools, as well as golf links and fields for baseball, and some cities are providing facilities for soccer and lacrosse. But in my area at least, major funds still come from private enterprise. I know of no covered tennis courts available for year-round use which have been built at public expense. I know a score that have been put up with private funds, and perhaps that’s the way it should be done, except that then the underprivileged child is excluded from developing his or her skills.

  The fifth reason is pervasive. At home, at school, at college and in public life a person can spend his or her first twenty-five years without ever being told that plans ought to be made for a lifelong health program. I had a better education than most and I can recall not a single hour of instruction on this most vital of topics. In sixth grade I did have an enthusiastic teacher who lectured now and then on hygiene—horrible word—and one day she told us something which had a lasting effect. She said, ‘Each morning when you get up you must drink a full glass of water. This washes out your insides, and this is important, because as you walk to school you might be hit by an automobile and they’d rush you to the hospital and cut you open and then the nurse would see that you hadn’t washed your insides.’

  The likelihood that this was going to happen to me so dominated my thoughts for the next few weeks that I could see nurses standing about the operating room looking at one another in horror, saying, ‘He didn’t wash out his insides today. I suppose he never does.’ And I became so fearful that I started drinking a full glass of water immediately upon rising, a habit I continue till this day, to my considerable benefit.

  That may have been a silly approach to teaching health, but it worked, and I judge that if similar instruction had been given on the necessity for acquiring lifelong exercise habits, I would have been just as receptive, but I received none, and most young Americans in the age group five through twenty-five receive none either. The teachers of my youth did not have the knowledge. Now they do, and they should share it.

  An orderly program of health instruction should be provided at various levels in our educational system. In elementary school, the foundations of good health habits should be established. In high school, instruction should be given in the tenth grade so as to catch the maximum number of students, and I would wish the teaching to be emphatic, reminding the student that it is the well-being of fifty or sixty productive years of life that are at stake. In college, a concentrated review of basic health principles, including diet, should be offered in the sophomore year, possibly without credit but with emphasis on the truism that no man or woman can function at maximum effectiveness if health is allowed to deteriorate.

  ‘When he played at Southern Cal they clocked him in 4.5 seconds for 40 yards.’

  The sixth reason stems from American custom. As a nation we do not sponsor adult sports to the extent that many foreign countries do. We do not have the gymnastic competitions of Czechoslovakia, nor the addiction to cross-country skiing of the Scandinavians, nor the industrial soccer teams I found in Italy and England, nor the planned cultivation of an outdoor life that one finds in Germany. I would rate our public adult participation below that practiced by any of those countries. Taking all the countries of the world, I would rate us in the low upper middle, better than the median but not much. This is deplorable, for we have the wealth to provide a satisfactory program and the intelligence to know that we need it.

  The seventh reason and the last is one we shall hear more about in the future. As a nation we run the risk of forgetting the salutary effect of play. As adults we penalize ourselves unnecessarily by losing our capacity for it: the lazy flight of the frisbee with grown men and women chasing it ridiculously, running through the woods at a picnic, chasing with dogs over a freshly mown field, romping with kids on a lawn, playing stickball in the street, exhibiting lost prowess in a pick-up softball game, laughing with a beer can in the left hand while trying to toss a quoits ringer with the right.

  I prize the sheer nonsense of play above almost anything else in sports, for it keeps one young in spirit; it should remind us of our animal inheritance; and it loosens us up. I subscribe without reservation to the sagacious judgment of one of our leading psychologists, Dr. William Menninger:

  Mentally healthy people participate in some form of volitional activity to supplement their required daily work. This is not merely because they wish something to do in their leisure time, for many persons with little leisure time make time for play. Their satisfaction from these activities meets deep-seated psychological demands beyond the superficial rationalization of enjoyment.

  Too many people do not know how to play. Others limit their recreation to being merely passive observers of the activity of others. There is considerable scientific evidence that the healthy personality is one who not only plays, but who takes his play seriously. Furthermore, there is also evidence that the inability and unwillingness to play reveals an insecure or disordered aspect of personality.

  Good mental health is directly related to the capacity and willingness of an individual to play. Regardless of his objections, resistances or past practice, any individual will make a wise investment for himself if he does plan time for his play and take it seriously.

  While sitting passively in the great stadium or watchi
ng in grim-lipped silence some game on television, we surrender ourselves to the deadly seriousness of mere observing. This might be permissible as a diversion, but too often we allow watching the professional to serve as our total association with sports, thus missing the joy and benefit that come from playing the game oneself. There is another pitfall. The young man or woman of twenty-five who quits physical activity to concentrate exclusively on progressing at a job is overemphasizing economic competition, underemphasizing the benefits of play, and endangering his or her life.

  So much for the negative aspects. What can we do to improve the situation?

  Parents must assume responsibility for inculcating in their children a positive desire to build health habits that will produce well-being throughout life. During the past fifty years our society has learned much about caring for teeth, eyes and obesity. Now we should shift to more general goals, and a primary one must be the cultivation of lifetime participation in vigorous physical activity.

  Elementary and high schools are particularly responsible, and boards of education should see to it that verbal instruction is given, even though facilities for swimming, tennis and golf may not be available. The child may not actually acquire the skills for these sports in his school program, but he will at least be aware that he ought to be acquiring them outside.

  Colleges and universities have a special obligation, for they are educating many of the people who will be making community decisions later on. The man or woman who in college becomes addicted to watching football will be likely in later life to lead community drives to pay for public stadiums in which only that sport can be exhibited. But what college graduates should be voting for in their communities are more tennis courts and playing fields on which boys and girls can engage in the less heavily structured games.