Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  The appointment of James Tuite as head of the department had two salutary effects: the malfeasance just cited was stopped, and the paper began encouraging its reporters to dig rather deeply into the sports scene and start depicting the realities rather than the myths. The Times series on recruiting in colleges was a commendable performance, as were its occasional articles on the financial chicanery in the sports empire and its harsh condemnation of the growing violence in sport.

  In addition, Tuite instituted an opinion page in the Sunday editions where some of the gripping topics of contemporary sport were discussed. This was a real contribution, with the letters to the editor proving the intellectual depth at which many of the readers were prepared to grapple with these problems.

  But upon reflection, I had to decide that the best sports pages in the nation right now appeared in the Los Angeles Times. (If I were able to read the paper every day, I might think differently; I may have been lucky in seeing a relatively few exceptional issues.) In these pages I have found a surprising variety of topics treated, and almost never casually. I have found articles which probed high school sports, and the experiences of former athletes, and the negotiations of contracts, and the financial wizardry of franchise movements, and the role of women. The writing, too, has been above average, and there has been a knowing sophistication.

  In the late spring of 1973 I happened to be storm-bound in a remote town in New Mexico, and the only paper I could see was a local sixteen-sheeter. But the weekend I was there chanced to be the one in which the state-wide basketball championships of New Mexico were to be decided, and I started reading about the contending teams—towns I had never heard of—and the writing was so professional, the sports lore so topflight, that I found myself obsessed with wanting to know how the Class C and D semi-finals came out.

  For the writers on this little paper were using all the best techniques employed by either the New York or the Los Angeles Times. There were the interviews with players, the anguished statements by coaches, the careful predictions by experts, the editorials praising fair play, the accusations of unfairness on the part of the referees, and even a betting line.

  I became so involved with this small-time tournament—I was worried whether the Class C former champion, a town with 3,000 population, could repeat—that I stayed by my radio to catch the breathless announcer intoning the sad news that my team had lost.

  My point is that sportswriters around the world are able to generate this enthusiasm. They are uniformly good, some of the best being the English and Australian fanatics who rely excessively on the pronoun I, making the sports event seem something that was engineered primarily for the benefit of the writer, who is now able to confide what earthquaking thing it was that the coach said to the malingering center.

  I have written elsewhere about one of the most dramatic instances of influence I have witnessed. While working in Córdoba, Spain, in the spring of 1968 the local newspaper advised the Córdobans that in last Saturday’s soccer game at Palma de Mallorca the Palma rooters had so terrified the officials that they made every critical decision in favor of the home team. ‘The audience is the twelfth player on the field, and if Córdobans do not come out en masse this coming Saturday and terrorize the officials, we are not going to defeat Madrid Atletico.’

  I went to the game, and during the first half the Córdobans may not have terrified the officials but they did me. Even so the score was tied 1–1. But as the half ended, a young Córdoban rushed onto the field, swinging a heavy camera in an arc over his head. Bringing it with full force down onto the cranium of the referee, he knocked that poor man silly, and when the second half resumed the officials began calling the shots more fairly, in the judgment of the Córdobans, and the home team won, 2–1. Next day the local sports pages reported that the behavior of the Córdoban fans had been exemplary, just what was needed if the promise previously shown by Córdoba was ever to be realized.

  But the experience which best illustrates the relationship between the sports page and the sports enthusiast is exemplified by what happened when Joseph Avenick, the young man from New Jersey who helped me track down details for this book, worked as a beginning sportswriter for the Philadelphia Bulletin. He recalls:

  Like most tragedies, it started innocently. As a beginner in the department I was on the lobster shift, responsible for compiling those six-line trivia squibs used to fill out the tag end of a column. You’ve seen them:

  Detroit, June 23. Fans here remembered Bob Fats Fothergill, pudgy right fielder for the Tigers, who led the American League in 1929 in pinch hits, with a total of 19.

  That’s the whole story. A big newspaper will use up several dozen a day, and it was my job to find them, keep them short, and provide usable headlines. ‘Cager Nets 29.’ ‘Trapshoot to Jackson.’ ‘Lefthander Runs Skein to 16.’

  I got my ideas from two sources. The barflies who’d call at two in the morning to ask, ‘Who hit nineteen homers for the L.A. Dodgers in 1959, their second year on the coast?’ (Answer: Wally Moon.) And what we called ‘squib beggars,’ who’d call at all hours to see if they could persuade the paper to print the score of their favorite team, whether anybody had ever heard of it or not.

  So one night it occurred to me to use the results of my father’s bowling team, Belmont Garage, which competed against such famous outfits as Filter House, 260 Club and the DeBuggers. I still have the first squib I ran: ‘Belmont Rolls Past 260 Club Behind Peitsch.’ I gave the three top scores of Pop’s team and the three best of the opponents, and the item created a sensation among the bowlers. Their names were in the paper!

  It also caused complication. Word got out that if a team played Belmont Garage, it would get its name in the Bulletin, and they did week after week. ‘Joe Reeser (209), Howard Sheetz (195), John Warfield (186).’ So every team that faced Belmont Garage was at peak form, with freshly laundered uniforms and new bowling shoes. Result was that Pop’s team lost every game.

  Its record fell to 2–13, but every week the squib reported the latest defeat as a major upset. ‘Mighty Belmont Bowled Over,’ Playing Bullies Bounced,’ ‘Belmont Leaders Edged by Upstarts.’ Playing Belmont was taken as seriously as a game against the New York Yankees.

  Well, late in the season Pop asked me if I could please not mention his team any more, it was humiliating, week after week. Even semi-pro teams who played in obscurity wanted to schedule Belmont, just so they could get their names in the paper. Pop said. ‘We’re trapped. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. The publicity destroyed us.’

  This hunger for publicity characterizes almost everyone associated with organized sports, and extraordinary measures are taken to ensure that a team receives its fair share. Whole departments within the corporation which owns a team sweat to see that the locals get their names in the paper with sufficient frequency, and big-time universities often have large staffs to circulate stories and pictures. Everyone writing about the scandal of recruitment has been aware of the role that publicity plays in persuading a high school boy to sign with this university instead of that: ‘I pointed out to his parents that if he came with us, their son’s friends could see him on national television.’ Ray Barrs, a blue-chip high school senior from Albuquerque, in explaining why he finally decided to enroll at Colorado rather than some smaller college, said frankly, ‘The conviction that at Colorado I would get more national exposure.’ Al Stump, writing in TV Guide, has summarized my experience when he quotes an unnamed West Coast scout:

  Lots of kids being recruited don’t ask for much extra if you can promise them six to eight appearances in three years before a U.S. television audience. The publicity, what it means to their ambitions to turn pro, is enough to sell them.

  We are raising a generation of athletes who will do anything to get on television, but what it will contribute to them in the end they do not seem to ask. Like the girls with their Cosell banner, just to get on that tube is enough.

  With the burgeoning interest in
sports, the time was ripe, on August 16, 1954, for the appearance of a new magazine focusing on the inside stories of the sporting world. There were satisfactory magazines already in existence, notably Sport, an adjunct of the MacFadden publishing empire, but it was cast in an old-fashioned mold. Time, Incorporated produced an attractive, well-illustrated, brightly written journal which they very much wanted to call Sport but which, being unable to acquire that title, they called Sports Illustrated, or SI in the trade.

  Dan Jenkins, the author of Semi-Tough, that hilarious yarn about professional football players at the near-literate level is, of course, a writer whose work appears regularly in SI, so he must not be accepted as an impartial witness, but even so, he is accurate in his novel when he has his hero Billy Clyde Puckett refer constantly to SI: ‘The Jets are still hot at the magazine because none of them made a cover during the regular season.’

  SI has become the bible of the industry, and it has done so because it appreciated from the start the facts that faced printed journalism in the age of television: don’t give the scores, give the inside stories behind the Scores. And deal openly with those topics which men in saloons talk about in whispers.

  Slowly SI began issuing those excellent four- and five-part series on what might be termed the sociology of contemporary American sport: Jack Olsen on the black athlete: Bill Gilbert and Nancy Williamson on women’s rights in athletics; and Eddie Arcaro and Whitney Tower on the art of riding thoroughbreds. William Johnson, in the issues starting on December 22, 1969, had a somewhat complicated five-part series on the electronic revolution in sports, and there have been others which combined high reporting merit and social insight.

  In other words, SI is doing many of the things it ought to be doing, and its success, after an agonizing slow start, attests to the high regard in which sportsmen hold it. I have been especially interested in its style, for I judge that much of its acceptance has derived from this. Only The New Yorker, among contemporary magazines, has been as effective in sponsoring good writing with a certain wry touch, and if the style of The New Yorker has been correctly described by one critic as ‘Yale-Vassar smart-ass,’ then the decreed style of SI has got to be ‘Texas-Oklahoma refined jock.’ Here are some of the stylistic devices preferred by the magazine.

  The unexpected juxtaposition: ‘They are Pancho Gonzales and Pancho Segura, two men who have been around so long they have to mix Geritol with their Gatorade.’

  The unexpected metaphor: ‘So the losers in this [chess fiasco] are Fischer and Karpov. And don’t forget the wood-pushers of the world.’

  The backwoods simile: ‘Down among the moss and live oaks of a South Carolina retreat the Masters juices were starting to flow like the channel bass in Calibogue Sound.’

  The deft alliteration: ‘Clowns, that crazy congregation of mirthful minutemen.’

  The great one-liner: ‘Roone Arledge, as anyone at ABC will tell you, was born in a manger.’

  Refurbished oldie: ‘As ill as the phainting phantoms Jimmy Connors and Ilie Nastase.’ This is an apt reworking of the superb phrase in which some acid-tongued newsman described Phil Scott, the British heavyweight challenger who had a propensity for early collapse: ‘Phainting Phil, the Swooning Swan of Soho.’

  And the ploy I envy, the cliché apologized for: ‘There is a timeworn wheeze among pro golfers that you drive for show and putt for dough.’ The beauty of this device is that you get the benefit of the apt cliché, yet imply that anyone else who borrows it is a dunderhead. I’ve always wanted to use this shtick, but have never had the guts.

  On the other hand, SI can become too cute. Toward the end of the 1975 college basketball season USC and UCLA made their annual weekend foray out of Southern California and into the perilous wilds of Oregon. Each of the California invaders would play a crucial Friday-night game against either Oregon or Oregon State, and then on Saturday night switch partners. A good deal hung on this pair of doubleheaders, and there could be many interesting consequences, depending on how the four games came out.

  SI ran a delightful essay on the confrontation, replete with clever phrases, choice Americana—Oregon version—and allusive data. But it was too clever by half. One yearned for a good old Associated Press opening paragraph which stated in precise terms what was at stake in the two doubleheaders, plus a crisp summary of who won on Friday, who won on Saturday, and what the effect had been on the standings. But in spite of such lapses the magazine is a tonic. The sports explosion needed a journal just like SI, and we are fortunate that the one which came along had editors with insight into the kinds of explanatory stories that were needed.

  In recent years books on sport have matured. During most of my life the average sports book was a disgrace, a puff job about some team or local hero written by an overworked press agent who batted it out during free periods. At its best it was hagiography; at its worst, servile press agentry. Year after year I sampled the flood and found it little better than that ancient story about Bing Miller’s white socks. A portrait of sports was being painted which had so little relation to reality that it was preposterous. A whole decade would go by without one decent book on an activity that preoccupied millions. I pondered this anomaly and concluded that sports books were like sports movies: doomed to mediocrity because they were forced to deal with events which were colorful on the field but jejune on the printed page. It seemed impossible to write a sports book that was anything more than a compilation of records.

  And then the long years of drought ended. Jim Brosnan’s fine book on baseball, The Long Season. related the events of one season in mature terms. Jim Bouton’s iconoclastic Ball Four looked at the same material from a more irreverent perspective, and it became apparent that professional sports could be presented intelligently.

  Then came Roger Angell’s The Summer Game, the first American book with the high literary quality of the best European books on sports. But the work which caught the imagination of all who loved sports in a grown-up way was Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, clearly a work of art and a joy to read.

  It was not by accident that these ground-breaking books concerned baseball, for it is the most cerebral of our games and the one most worthy of reflective attention. But Jerry Kramer’s remarkable Instant Replay, written with the substantial help of Dick Schaap, was both commanding and the essence of football. However, the best book on football I’ve read is Robert Daley’s novel Only a Game. When I first read his chilling passage about what it means to a professional athlete when his knee gets conked, I said, ‘This must be one of the best passages on sport ever written,’ and in succeeding years I have met half a dozen students of the game who have told me, ‘If you want to catch the essence of what sports are all about, read that bit Bob Daley did on knee injuries.’

  The best book on basketball, perhaps the best on any sport insofar as the jungle of competition is concerned, is David Wolf’s Foul the study of what happened to Connie Hawkins. If I could read only one sports book, I would choose this. Wolf makes Hawkins a little bigger, a little more skilled than he actually was, but he can be forgiven for having become attached to his six-foot-eight subject. This is a book noble in intent, strong in execution. Blacks in particular should read it.

  The best book on golf I’ve read so far is Dick Schaap’s remarkable minute-by-minute re-creation of the Masters tournament of 1970, in which he follows the field through the anguishes and triumphs of that culminating test. Hubie Green assured me that what Schaap said about him was faithful to the way he was feeling and performing.

  For the inside story of sports technique, I have preferred Leonard Koppett’s two fine books A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball and The Essence of the Game Is Deception, an analysis of basketball. Koppett’s approach is so encyclopedic that he lulls you to sleep with a recitation of simple facts you already know, then snaps you awake with some fascinating original idea that you have never considered. In the baseball book he claims that the single most difficult feat in sports is for a b
atter to take a narrow piece of wood and with it endeavor to hit a small baseball thrown at one hundred miles an hour by a pitcher like Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax. The more I visualize myself standing at the plate with my Louisville slugger facing a pitcher only a few feet away, the more inclined I am to agree.

  In his basketball book he captivated me with an analysis of what the supposed home-court advantage consists of. First he proves that it exists: In twenty-six NBA seasons through 1972, the home teams won 63.1 percent of over 10,000 games played! But then he asks how this advantage operates, and his mental gymnastics are exciting. In the end he concludes that maybe it’s because the traveling team is worn out from one-night stands, while the home team has the advantage of rest, home cooking and the support of friends. I had figured that out for myself, but then Koppett surprises by saying, ‘Not so,’ and he proves his point by an ingenious bit of research. He looks at what happens on the first night when the travel-weary New York Knickerbockers return home to play a team which has been well rested over the preceding ten days. The result should either be a stand-off, or the rested opponents should have a substantial advantage. But they don’t. The Knicks, back home, win that opening game 58.8 percent of the time, a preponderance that is statistically significant; that is, it couldn’t have happened by chance. Then Koppett tells you what he thinks the home-court advantage really is:

  The crowd noise affects the referees. When a home crowd keeps roaring, all through a game, all in one direction, very few referees can resist the subliminal effect so vehemently rejected by their conscious minds. Every little bounce in favor of the home team brings cheers: everything against it brings boos. It takes exceptional psychic strength to be the man who abruptly turns off the cheers and turns them to boos. This situation will exist until someone invents robot referees.