Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  This is so similar to the conclusion of the Córdoban sports editor—that the home-town crowd is the sixth man on the basketball team, because it terrorizes the referee—that I judge Koppett to be right. His two books contain many such insights.

  The best book on tennis is a short, deft account of how Arthur Ashe confronted Clark Graebner in a Forest Hills semi-final for the United States Open Championship. It is Levels of the Game by John McPhee, and it explains what goes through a player’s mind in the tensest moments of a grueling match. It also describes how these two very different young men reached the apex of their sport, and one finishes the book knowing more about the workings of tennis than he could otherwise have learned.

  Tom Meschery’s Caught in the Pivot is about basketball, and not only is it written by a poet of recognized merit, it’s also the best book on managing a team I’ve so far encountered. It deals with the heartbreak 1971–72 season in which as a rookie coach he tried vainly to drill some sense into the team billed as ‘Tomorrow’s Champions Today,” the Carolina Cougars—thirty-five wins, forty-nine losses—who were pioneering a new concept in big-time professional sports, a team without a hometown. The Cougars would have three rotating hometowns—Greensboro, Charlotte, Raleigh—none of which was prepared to accept wholeheartedly a team whose major stars were black.

  And those stars! Meschery classifies Joe Caldwell as ‘a superstar in the ABA. In the NBA a great sixth man.’ Joe had a no-cut salary and had to be played. Jim McDaniels was the hero of the season and of the book. Another no-cut, must-play star, he had quit Western Kentucky in the middle of a college season to join the Cougars, who offered him a million dollars to do so. Of him Meschery said, ‘Potential unlimited but weak on fundamentals. Obsessed with money. Heralded as the super rookie around which a Cougar championship would be built. Has received more than a million dollars strictly on potential.’

  I found Meschery’s book unusually interesting because I had been following Jim McDaniel’s career for some time. I had already come into possession of the brochure his college had issued on him: ‘All-American—On the Floor or Off.’ But his coaches had said that before their all-American quit them to become a pro. His year with Carolina did not work out well. Meschery, who had been one of the real gut players in the NBA, knew what a seven-foot hotshot was supposed to do, and he kept warning McDaniels that he wasn’t ready for the big time, that he didn’t know how to play defense, that the truly great centers of the NBA would eat him up.

  He was unable to penetrate McDaniels’ vanity, and at the apex of the season the seven-footer’s agent let it be known that McDaniels was about to jump to the NBA. In a series of meetings almost too painful to report, McDaniels’ agent, Al Ross, spelled out the demands which would have to be met if the unproved superstar deigned to remain with the Cougars:

  Mac wanted his $1,500,000 contract paid over fifteen years instead of twenty-five years. He wanted incentives—$25,000 for making the play-offs, $25,000 for Most Valuable Player. He wanted a life insurance policy for $100,000 and his yearly salary changed to a once-a-year lump sum. He also wanted Mr. Munchak’s personal guarantee on his contract. Finally, Mac wanted, according to Al Ross, $50,000 cash immediately as an aggravation fee for all the crap he claimed that he had had to put up with while playing for the Cougars and living in North Carolina. Crap? Hell! We’ve all had to put up with crap. Who hasn’t felt some aggravation during this season?

  When the sixteen points had been stated, Carl [Scheer, president and general manager of the Cougars] asked if there was anything else. There was. Mac was upset that his name was not nationally known, that he had not been given enough publicity. Ross referred to Mac as ‘This man so blessed with talent, etc., etc.’ Carl told me that at that moment Ross could have told Mac that he was Jesus Christ and he would have believed it.

  About this time Meschery was obligated to make a speech on the virtues of sports and how great our athletes are:

  I felt like going to the banquet and crying in a loud voice, ‘This whole business stinks of whores and pimps. You fans who look upon these fine athletes as though they represent models for your own children are looking in the wrong direction. Many of you look in disgust at the young who search after new life styles, who lament over the senseless bombing of other people, who scream that something is dreadfully wrong with the system. But these are the real models, these are the men of tomorrow, not our pro athletes. The pro athlete is a product of the commercial state. He should be looked upon as an anachronism.’

  I returned home sick of myself. Instead of truth I had given platitudes and funny stories. I had joked and laughed. I had put on a hilarious mask. I had promoted the sport like a robot performing his master’s commands. At the banquet I had sold eight tickets for a future Cougars game. I had made fans for a sport that was fast becoming something else.

  McDaniels made the jump, to the Seattle SuperSonics of the NBA, and I followed his new career with added interest. As Meschery had predicted, the superbly trained centers of the NBA crucified the newcomer, who didn’t know how to position himself or how to put up even a mediocre defense. In his first game against Bob Lanier of Detroit, the latter scored fourteen points in two minutes and McDaniels scored none. Later, against Nate Thurmond of San Francisco, McDaniels was again unable to score, and when the San Francisco coach pulled Thurmond, because he was no longer needed, Thurmond went over to McDaniels and said, ‘Okay, kid. You can score now.’

  The next year Bill Russell, perhaps the most knowledgeable of all ball handlers, took over as coach at Seattle, and one brief look at McDaniels satisfied him that there was no way this untrained, undisciplined young man could play for him. ‘But, Bill, we paid a million dollars for him,’ Russell was told, and he is supposed to have said, ‘You wasted your money.’

  When I was in Europe a few months back an American television man told me, ‘My next big story is supposed to be a report on the American college stars who couldn’t make it in the NBA, so come over here to play for the German and Italian basketball teams. They get a pretty good salary for a couple of years, then go back home. Maybe you can tell me about the man I’m supposed to track down. Fellow named Jim McDaniels. Used to play for the Seattle SuperSonics.’ So far as I know, the television show never materialized. But Meschery’s book did, and it’s a first-class look at the inside of basketball.

  The writer about sports whom I most admire, as opposed to the sportswriter on a daily newspaper, is Herbert Warren Wind, one of today’s most graceful masters of the English language. He writes mainly on golf, and has never been excelled, but an occasional article like one on jai alai or on John Wooden of UCLA is also perceptive and gracile. He is as good on golf as the great English writer John Arlott is on cricket, a man who epitomizes the game. Wind’s one drawback is that he writes everything as if he were an English country gentleman reporting on a country scene sometime around 1923, and I often wonder how his gentility would handle a maverick like Lee Trevino. I imagine he’s written about him, and rather well, but I haven’t seen it I do find that anything he puts his pen to, and it usually appears at good length in The New Yorker, is worth reading, for he is an adornment to his profession, and his reputation must grow with the years.

  Recently Wind has been challenged by the appearance of a gifted writer with a real flair for the intellectual and artistic implications of sports. George Plimpton’s first book, Paper Lion, was an ingenious working-out of the Walter Mitty fantasy. An enthusiastic amateur, with no pretensions to athletic professionalism, he talked his way into the training camp of the Detroit Lions, where he participated in scrimmages and took notes on how NFL players actually conducted themselves. His book enjoyed such wide success that he followed it with similar works on baseball and golf, plus a revisit to the Lions. How did the professional athletes respond? They spoke admiringly of his courage and conviviality. The reaction I liked best was voiced by a Lion: ‘You could tell George was a rich guy by the way he kept inviting us to have be
er with him and leaving us to pick up the tab.’

  Plimpton will probably write even better books about sports, because he has an appreciation for the 1970s and a sense of what the 1980s are going to bring. He is unfettered by the antique allegiances which hamper us older men, but we were somewhat confounded when he flew to Zaire and wrote rhapsodically about the boxing match there as if it were a legitimate sporting event rather than an amusing entertainment. I for one was pleased to see black enterpreneurs ripping off the white establishment; blacks have not been treated well by white promoters, and if there is great nonsense afoot, they should be cut in on the boodle. But I doubt that the frolics thus presented should be reviewed with the gravity that writers once accorded a fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.

  I read all the sports columnists I come across and find myself liking Dave Anderson of The New York Times increasingly, although I deplore his addiction to that evasive phrase made so popular by Time magazine: ‘This just might be the best this-or-that of the season.’ That’s a weasel phrase which should be avoided, but the other day I caught myself telling a friend, ‘Dave Anderson just might be the best sports columnist in the business.’

  My affection for John Kieran and Red Smith is considerable: they have added luster to the sports page. Many of my friends believe Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times to be their inheritor, and has been named sportswriter of the year numerous times by a restricted group of experts who always choose Chris Schenkel as the television pundit.

  Murray is one of the funniest men alive, and a short, quick collection of his best lines would rate high: ‘This club has a chance to go all the way. So did the Titanic.’

  But Murray has a bad habit which his young imitators work into the ground. He takes one subject, usually something worthy of comment, then beats it to death, with crack after crack, belaboring the idea long after the dullest reader must have tired. Of Luis Rodriguez, the Cuban welterweight, he says: ‘This face is old, yet young. The eyes are merry, yet sad. It is not a fighter’s face, it is a clown’s face. Fernandel in burnt cork. Grimaldi without bells. Durante in boxing shorts.’ This habit of excessive citation can be seen at its most flamboyant in his introduction to his book about football.

  And yet, he can frequently come up with a series of preposterous comments which are as funny as anything I’ve read. The last sentence in this series is one of his best:

  Palm Springs. It is a place where every palm tree has its own spotlight, swimming pools come marked His and Hers, and anyone caught riding two to a Cadillac gets a ticket … It has so many golf courses that when an architect starts a new house he finds out first where the owner wants the first tee … Some people come down here for the 100-degree heat, but most come down for the 100-proof whiskey … Some of the hotels are so incredibly lavish that if the Queen of England ever came here, she would go home and set fire to Windsor Castle … They have so many swimming pools here, you could go home at night by canoe.

  Among the day-by-day professional writers who do both columns and hard reporting, Frank Dolson of the Philadelphia Inquirer maintains a consistently high standard of pertinence without flashy overwriting. It was he who led the campaign against Jim Harding when that immortal coached at LaSalle, on his way to catastrophes in the west. Dolson figured in an interesting exhibition of how important a sportswriter can become to a city. After a long tenure at the Inquirer he suddenly jumped to the Bulletin, which is like the Pope’s becoming head of the Lutheran Church. There was great fanfare and the Bulletin triumpeted its coup as a major cultural event, but within a few weeks for obscure reasons Dolson jumped back to the Inquirer, which promptly plastered the city with boastful signs: ‘Frank Dolson is back where he belongs.’

  For adventurous reporting solidly based on scoops, it is difficult to surpass the hard-working legmen who write for the New York Post. As Larry Merchant proved in his compelling book on big-time betting, The National Football Lottery, they know how to write with force and sometimes fury. Allan Malamud, sports editor of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, says admiringly, ‘The Post has probably the best sports section in the country, and they do it with beat reporting and columns. They do it with good writers.’

  The smaller cities in the hinterland produce first-rate sportwriters, as I learned when I came to know Alf Van Hoose of the Birmingham News. In that sports-crazy town Van Hoose could get away with murder, writing as loosely as he cared; instead he produces some of the most compact and chiseled prose I have ever read on a sports page. His paragraphs are so tightly wound that they could have been written by a professor of English, one who was especially attentive to style.

  Some time ago I began noticing the refreshing copy filed by a young man writing for the Philadelphia Bulletin. D D Eisenberg always displayed a novel touch, a kind of offbeat, sardonic approach, and I was pleased when the paper called to ask if he could interview me about sports. I invited him to our hill but was taken aback when a beautiful, lively young woman appeared. ‘I use only my initials to forestall the die-hards,’ she explained. Later I discovered that she was the granddaughter and heiress of Abe Plough, the multi-multi-Memphis-millionaire of Schering-Plough. A good example of her approach came when Bobby Riggs sashayed into Philadelphia on one of his promotions to find that he had been challenged by D D. She won. But of course she enjoyed a minor advantage: Riggs had to play in a wheelchair, pushed about the court by a young friend of D D’s who was eight months pregnant.

  I am respectful of sportswriters, but find that even the best are subject to certain occupational hazards of which they seem unaware. Glenn Seaborg, the University of California’s Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, was also a sports fanatic and served as his school’s faculty representative in athletics prior to becoming chancellor. He told me, ‘The most difficult aspect of dealing with sportswriters is their assumption of moral superiority. They insist on advising everyone.’ At the same time, they ridicule anyone else’s serious attempts to clean up unsavory messes in sports, like their contempt for the NCAA’s efforts to police eligibility or the AAU’s desire to preserve amateurism. They seem addicted to bigness and show disdain for the respectable little effort. Partisans of big-time collegiate sport, they go out of their way to demean small-college games, as if there were something shameful in not being the University of Arkansas or Oklahoma.

  Frank Dolson makes fun of the fact that Delaware and Central Michigan are going to be on television for their small-college championship game in Sacramento. ‘Delaware is such a household name they spelled it Deleware on the official stats.’

  Jim Murray, in castigating golf czar Deane Beman for defending the Quad Cities Open in Bettendorf, Iowa, as ‘part of the heart of the U.S. tour’: ‘Oh, sure, and Ursinus vs. Muhlenberg is the heart of football and would be wrecked by the Rose Bowl if it conflicted.’ I know Ursinus well. The fact that it produced J. D. Salinger was just as significant in American life as if it had produced a 275-pound tackle who played three undistinguished years for the San Diego Chargers. Sports columnists got off some great cracks when my little college, Swarthmore, lost thirty-six football games in a row, overlooking the fact that young graduates in science were picking up three Nobel Prizes.

  It is this arrogant assumption that only the big are worth watching which accounts for the scandal in the NCAA-ABC arrangement whereby the television network is allowed to decide which college games shall be shown on television, because ‘only the biggies draw.’ In the period 1966–73 ABC broadcast eight-seven football games nationally, paying in the latter years $244,000 to each team appearing in a game. In order to spread this windfall among the maximum number of schools, a rule was promulgated whereby no school could appear more than three times in a two-year period. In spite of this, a few teams dominated the screen and hauled down the loot. In the decade 1966–75 Notre Dame and Texas each appeared twenty-one times; Alabama, Southern California and UCLA, nineteen times; Ohio State, seventeen; Nebraska and Penn State, sixteen. Following close behind were
Arkansas, Auburn, Louisiana State, Michigan, Michigan State, Oklahoma, Tennessee. Obviously, the rich were getting richer and the poor, poorer. In spite of this imbalance, at the close of the 1975 season the NCAA and ABC negotiated an astonishing new contract: the network would shell out $36,000,000 for a two-year exclusive; financial returns per team would escalate to more than $250,000 a game; and since television wanted only the real biggies, the dominant teams would be allowed to appear four times in two years instead of the earlier three.

  This severe imbalance, if long continued, can have only two consequences: it can force the formation of the super-conference of which Frank Broyles has spoken and it can drive the lesser schools away from football. It seems to me the media have a responsibility to see that good schools are not squeezed out, but I see no evidence that television and newspapers are prepared to fight for a more rational system of distributing the athletic wealth in talent and dollars, or of even being aware that they ought to be doing something.

  It was well explained one Sunday morning when I asked the sports editor of a paper catering to one of the big-time powers whose coach appeared ready to shift to another job, ‘Will your paper be concerned about the selection of his successor?’

  ‘You better believe it! On a Sunday morning after a Saturday loss at the stadium, we sell nine thousand fewer papers, and at fifty cents a shot, that’s a lot of money.’ The symbiotic relationship between sports and media exists more strongly today than when I first became aware of it.