Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  One man had brought not an ordinary radio but one specially geared so that it could pick up the audio from the television broadcast, and in my quarter he became the center of attraction. ‘What’s he saying now?’ people begged. ‘What did he say about that pass?’ What Howard Cosell said about a play was much more important than the play itself. Many of the spectators in my row did not even see the play, for they kept watching Cosell, but even those who did watch the field wanted confirmation of what they had seen. It was as if only the presence of Cosell lent verity.

  At intermission I was introduced into the world of the Monday-night banner, that strange development whereby otherwise sensible fans lug into the stadium cumbersome banners painstakingly lettered with innocuous and sometimes funny messages which the owners hope will be caught by the panning cameras, thus ensuring a brief immortality: ‘Cosell, the Mouth that Roars’ was one; ‘Jacksonville Loves Howard Cosell’ was another.

  As I went for a drink I was accosted in the passageway by two young women who carried a large banner rolled on sticks, which the police would not allow them to take into the stadium. Apparently a quota had been set, and scores of huge productions had been interdicted. ‘Would you please sneak this in for us?’ they pleaded, although how they expected me to conceal so huge a mass, I did not understand.

  ‘What’s it say?’ I asked.

  Proudly they unrolled a portion. ‘Parkersburg West Virginia loves you Howard.’ That was the message.

  ‘What’s it mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s well lettered, and if the cameras pick it up, there we’d be, on national television!’ They were almost tearful in their pleading, two young women in their early twenties, so I agreed to smuggle their world-shaking banner into the stadium.

  I got it past the guards by saying, ‘I had it in before,’ and as soon as I reached my seat the young women ran up, took the banner, and secreted themselves in a position from which they could spring forth when the roaming camera crew came their way to pick up that night’s free publicity for ABC. And sure enough, late in the game the girls unfurled their banner right in the face of the camera crew, and I suppose their deathless message of devotion to Cosell flashed on the screen for six or seven seconds.

  In the closing minutes of the game, when Pittsburgh roared back and threatened to win, the Dolphins decided on an unusual strategy, one slightly infra dig for a champion. They would direct their quarterback to down the ball intentionally in the end zone, surrendering two points to the enemy in the hope that the ensuing free punt from the twenty-yard line would place the ball so deep in enemy territory that no score would be possible in the remaining seconds.

  In my area there was heated discussion of this cowardly strategy, with certain fans proclaiming, ‘Givin’ away a safety’s a disgrace,’ but the man with the specially wired radio assured us, ‘Howard Cosell says it’s a smart move.’

  ‘He did?’ the protesters asked, and a multitude of faces stared out of the arena to the glassed-in compartment where the oracle sat. If he had said it was all right, it was all right. Miami gave away the safety, got off a soaring punt, ran out the clock, and preserved their lead. ‘Cosell said it was all right,’ the fans around me repeated, and they were standing there when I left, staring toward the spot where the great man still sat before the post-game cameras.

  Despite the spectacular growth which television made possible for football and golf, the success of a professional team still depends primarily on the coverage it gets free in the newspaper. The best thing that can happen to a team, or to a player, is to have the local papers write enthusiastically, for then financial success is assured. Constant favorable mention, especially in columns, is better than paid advertising, better than radio, better than television. With it a mediocre team can prosper; without it even a good team can fade.

  Of course fans enjoy seeing their team on the tube, but the opinion they form of that team stems principally from what is written about it. On television there is little opinion; when it does appear, it is apt to be pusillanimous, and when it is strong, it is apt to be uninformed. For a recapitulation of what he saw, and a judgment of its significance, the fan must turn to his newspaper; there his loyalty is engendered and his prejudices enforced. I have found that those papers whose opinions are most firmly voiced tend to be the most successful.

  It is therefore not surprising that owners will go to extreme lengths to ensure favorable coverage, and some of the most scandalous newspaper behavior in the past fifty years was found in the sports department, where writers often accepted pay from both the paper and the team upon which they were reporting. If the sanctity of the press has been the holy grail of the editorial page, it has been a cup difficult to find in the sports section.

  For the first hundred years of its existence, baseball had the press of this nation in its pocket. The true story of baseball was never told. The game received an unconscionable amount of free publicity, often written by men who were little more than paid lackeys of the owners, and the federal government was dragooned by popular opinion into granting the sport concessions and exemptions that continue to amaze.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re kind of tied up. Eddie and Paul are watching Game of the Week, then the Tulsa Open, Aussie Tennis and the Big Fight reruns. Karen’s signed in for Wide World of Sports, Celebrity Bowling, Gymnastics from Poland and the Roller Derby. I’m watching the Innsbruck slalom trials, African Safari, free falls and gliding.’

  And the public loved it. I remember so clearly those weeks, more than forty years ago, when Bing Miller of the A’s went on a hitting streak that ran through some eighteen games. Toward the end a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Bulletin wrote a column in which he explained that whenever Bing went on such a spree, he had the custom of not changing his socks until the skein had ended, a kind of superstition not uncommon among athletes.

  But then the writer went on to explain to his sports-hungry public that when Bing said sacks he didn’t mean the kind that you and I wear, nor the colorful hose that the spectator sees and which gave two teams their monickers, Red Sox and Pale Hose. No, he meant the flimsy white stockings which the player puts on first, and which are necessary because the visible socks have no feet. The writer went on and on, explaning where the stockings were made, how much they cost, how long they lasted, and the normal frequency with which they were laundered. Real inside scoop, the stuff that fans eat up. I can still see it on the page, high in the left-hand corner, framed in a separate box. ‘Great writing,’ I said.

  Most of the stories of that period were like that, little glimpses into a make-believe world with almost never an honest insight into the ignorance, the bullying, the exploitation, the cupidity, the brief careers, the long years in the shadows. The social indifference of the sports pages was offset by the brilliance of the writing, and it was not by accident that so many of America’s most cogent writers had sports pages in their backgrounds.

  It was in the 1920s that the owners of The New York Times commissioned Professor William Lyon Phelps, the charismatic pundit of the Yale English department, to review the literary quality of their newspaper. He surprised them by reporting that whereas much of the paper was passably written, one department excelled. That was the work being done by John Kieran in the sports department. This represented the first public recognition that someone writing about sports could be a true artist.

  Others shared Kieran’s excellence: James C. Isaminger in Philadelphia, Westbrook Pegler for the Hearst papers, Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune and Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News. Reporters started to move from the sports page to the editorial; some shifted completely to the writing of short stories or books. Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, Bob Considine, Walter Cronkite and James Reston began as sportswriters.

  The sports page was an exciting place to work for several reasons. Tonto Coleman, former czar of the Southeastern Conference, has summed it up best: ‘I turn to the front pages of my newspaper to read about men’s
failures. I turn to the sports pages to read about their triumphs.’

  There is a sweet finality to the sports page. Team A met in deadly struggle with Team B and there was a specific outcome, which can be recorded. Even the appearance of the old morning sports page, with those eight baseball games with their line-ups in neat boxes, and the line scores underneath, was reassuring. Especially appealing to the eye were the box scores of games in which nine players on one team played the whole nine innings against nine on the other side, with perhaps a couple of doubles, one triple and three double plays listed in the smaller type below. ‘The beauty of agate’ a newspaperman once called this as I stood with him looking at proofs of that day’s paper. He was referring to the small clean type in which box scores were printed. Many writers have testified that they derive real pleasure from a box score properly presented. (I have never watched any baseball game, so far as I can recall, in which I did not keep a full play-by-play score.)

  The second advantage of the sports page in those days was that every significant act could be codified, recorded and compared with similar acts being performed by other players and other teams. The statistical data of baseball were narcotic. As a boy I could recite the batting order and batting averages of every team in the two leagues, and I have watched with interest in recent years when grown men, who have retained this mathematical interest, have patiently gone back to recalculate batting averages and slugging percentages and record every time that Babe Ruth came to bat, finding five instances, when, under previous rules, he had come to bat in the ninth inning with his team one run behind and two men on base and hit some tremendous blast right out of the park, only to have it recorded as a double because that would have sufficed to drive in the winning run, making the home run superfluous.

  I have often wished that I could associate myself with a good sports historian and a topflight computer expert with an interest in sports. We would take every World Series game ever played—because this is a neatly closed system of definable characteristics—and compute the coefficients of correlation between all known variables. In a World Series, who performs closest to the averages of the preceding season—the pitcher or the batter? A left-hander or a right-hander? Which is the crucial game to win? In an extra-inning game, what is the best strategy for using pinch hitters? And of course, the most debatable question of all, in a short series does the pitcher predominate?

  I have a score of other questions we could attack, but I will not bore the non-statistician; besides, the figger-filberts, as they have been contemptuously labeled by the sports press, will already have anticipated the questions.*

  One of the permanent delights of baseball is the minute accuracy of the mathematical data. I am appalled at the sloppy records of basketball, the hit-or-miss way hockey assists are awarded, and the general chaos of football statistics in which the heroic work of the linemen down in the pits must go unrecorded and unremembered. Again, the comparison of baseball with chess comes to mind: every move of the most intricate chess game can be recorded in a logical notation, imprisoning it for future reconstruction. When I state that Joe Sewell, a splendid fielding shortstop, batted .353 one season and .312 lifetime, I am offering a startling bit of information for the baseball addict, for these figures mean that this little man excelled most recorded competing shortstops, who are expected to field well but who can play the position today if they can bat no more than .238, an acceptable average for that spot.

  The sportswriter has this known body of information about which to write, and his task is made easier because he can assume that most of his readers will be keyed in to these basic data.

  The third advantage of the sports page is that it deals not only with current scores but also with past heroics. Nostalgic recollection is the basic commodity of the sportswriter, and I have noticed that even in the best journals, three signed columns out of five are apt to deal with remembrance of past glories.

  If a player is traded, or performs some outstanding feat, or visits a town in his retirement, or dies, the event becomes an excuse for recalling the interesting trivia of his life. I shall not soon forget that during an evening I shared with columnist Red Smith, I introduced a variety of topics on which he could not possibly have been prepared, and listened as he spun one relevant tale after another, conjuring up names long forgotten and providing details of what this player had said or done, always with a delightful twist of whimsy or outrageousness. At one point we were speaking of sports and government, and without time to reflect he said, ‘Best example of that I ever witnessed was when the city council of Snohomish, Washington, passed an ordinance prohibiting the high school football coach from using one of the school’s all-around athletes, Earl Torgeson, on the football team. The city fathers had guessed that Torgeson might have it in him to play major-league baseball, and they didn’t want him to break any bones as halfback. They were right. The Earl of Snohomish, as we called him, went on to play first base for the Boston Braves, gaining considerable fame for his hometown.’ And it occurred to me, as I listened to this skilled narrative, that Smith must have had several thousand such recollections, all codified, all relevant and all stimulating.

  One of the major rewards of my own writing life was that I worked for about a year on the old Information Please show with John Kieran, who, as he so often proved, possessed an extraordinary memory for everything from light verse to bird habits. Before and after going on radio, Kieran and I would talk for a while about varied topics, but I liked best those periods in which he would recollect some preposterous sports story, telling it with acerbic Irish wit His treasury, like Smith’s, was inexhaustible.

  The best contemporary sportswriters have this valuable felicity, though less developed than the masters Smith and Kieran. Dave Anderson, of The New York Times, is approaching them in the grace with which he can summon past performances and make them relate to current topics.

  No other writer on the daily paper would dare to indulge in nostalgia the way the sportswriter does. His readers would command him ‘to get on with it.’ If President Ford is in trouble, I am not breathlessly interested in knowing that President Buchanan once faced the same problem and solved it by delaying decision. But the sportswriter is actually cherished for his ability to link past with present, for his witty charm in keeping faded figures alive. It must be fun to be reminded so contantly of afternoons enjoyed, of nights filled with exciting victories.

  But the greatest advantage the sportswriter has is freedom. It is not by accident that so many of our good writers once wrote sports, and not politics or business or city government. It was on the sports page alone that they were free to write evocatively or sardonically or brashly or alliteratively or pompously. Numerous former sportswriters have testified to the fact that the top editors left them alone; the sports pages were an arcane region which the big brains of the paper never really comprehended.

  The sportswriter was encouraged to develop a personal style, or even to become as irascible as Westbrook Pegler. It was one of the best jobs in the world, for it dealt with finite things in an infinite way. The unfolding of the season established the calendar, and the championship game brought everything to a known conclusion; but within that finite universe the sportswriter was free to indulge himself almost as he wished. I started my writing career as a fourteen-year-old sportswriter for our local newspaper, and one of the saddest days of my life came when I failed to land a job with the Detroit Free Press. It was clear to me that they needed some young writers with spark and affection for games, but I was unable to convince the editors and my sports career ended.

  With the advent of television, the old patterns had to change. Fans now had the scores before they went to sleep, and there was no need for ‘the beauty of agate’ to inform them in the morning. What they now needed was inside information revealing why the score ended as it had. As soon as I perceived the revolution, I started watching the big newspapers to determine which was responding most intelligently to the new ch
allenge.

  The best single performance in the new dimension that I have so far seen appeared in the Dallas News after a 1973 football game in which Los Angeles defeated Dallas unexpectedly, 37–31, with Harold Jackson catching four touchdown passes from John Hadl. The News gave the score and a brief rundown of the game, but then had three full pages of captivating analysis of why the debacle had occurred, with sensible quotes from both coaches, many of the players, Jackson the Los Angeles hero, plus a full page of photographs of the crucial plays.

  This was sports coverage at its best, but whether a newspaper in Dallas was entitled to award so many pages of newsprint to a football game, when the city had so many other problems of pressing nature, is a question I will beg for a moment.

  Three newspapers seem to me to have made the shift from mere press agentry to solid reporting with some distinction: The Philadelphia Inquirer, which I read daily and for which I may have a small predilection; the Washington Post, whose Shirley Povich I have been following since 1943 when I was stationed in that city with the navy; and the Miami Herald, which I have been seeing fairly often in recent years. In most editions of these papers the connoisseur will find some article worth his attention, an article which probes a little deeper than the ordinary sports story used to.

  But the two papers which have been preeminent in forging new policies are The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. I have oscillated between the two when trying to determine which was the better; I see the former more regularly than the latter and am inclined toward it. I particularly enjoy its spectacularly wide coverage; no other paper in the country can match its reportage on such sports as hunting, boating, tennis and squash and such games as chess and bridge.

  A sophisticated friend, who prefers either the New York Post or the Daily News, suggests that perhaps I am still a ‘prisoner of agate,’ and that what I prize is mere coverage and not interpretation. His position was strengthened when the Times’ sports department was hit by two scandals in a row: the first dealt with its solicitation and overuse of free passes to sporting events; the second was a savage article by Martin Ralbovsky, the sportswriter who did the book on the Schenectady Little League champions, who revealed the department’s improper reliance on publicity handouts, which young reporters like Ralbovsky were directed to rewrite as legitimate news.