by Roy Blount
Sound incredible? It may be the coming thing in big-time athletics.
Consider: When Dave Cowens, at the height of his trend-setting powers as an NBA center, left the Boston Celtics on an indefinite leave of absence without pay early one season, he shook everyone to the roots. Who ever heard of a man like that opting out like that? He didn’t have personal problems. He wasn’t holding out for anything. He’s got red hair, for Christ’s sake. It was unaccountable. Then came the follow-up quote from Pete Maravich of the New Orleans Jazz: “Dave Cowens did what I had been thinking about doing for some time now. It’s funny in a way, because Dave beat me to the punch. Now I can’t do what he did.”
Maravich has, however, done this: he has put Cowens’s step into perspective. Cowens may protest that he is “just a guy who quit his job,” but a field in which things must not be repeated is not a job. It is not a trade. It is not a craft. It is an art. Expression is now the need of big-time athletes’ souls.
Winning is no longer enough for them. (Especially in years when it looks like they might not even take the division.) Nor is money enough—now that, in these days of free agentry and renegotiation, there is so much of it. Sports stars now, it is becoming increasingly evident, want to make a statement.
Thus Reggie Jackson signs not with the Montreal Expos, who offer him more money, but with the New York Yankees—because, as Yankee owner George Steinbrenner puts it, “When we were walking around town last week, a couple of kids came up to him, kids who didn’t have a dime. And he told me later, ‘We can do something to make those kids feel better.’” (Not give them a dime, but give them a World Series winner.)
A grand and also a very allusive gesture. What is Reggie doing here but paying an hommage to the Babe’s promise of a homer to a hospitalized kid—and also, further and more tellingly, turning Shoeless Joe on his head: the kid comes up to this Jackson and says, in effect, “Say you’re the edge, Reg.” And this Jackson does not turn away.
Let us look again at the Cowens move. Only six feet eight in a position that had seemed to require seven feet, Cowens had already proved that less can be more, had established a new style of play, just as in the late nineteenth century Toulouse-Lautrec had proved that painters needn’t be tall (pace Anthony Quinn and Charlton Heston), at least in the demimonde. Cowens had done that already. He was repeating himself.
Then, I think, he heard about artist Robert Rauschenberg’s aesthetic coup of the fifties: erasing a drawing by de Kooning. Cowens, though, had long been negating other people’s work with his aggressive defense. He had even been upstaged in that department, imagistically, by a lesser player, Marvin Webster, whose flair for blocking shots had earned him the sobriquet “The Human Eraser.” Cowens decided to carry this concept further, to turn it in upon itself. He would erase his own work. Suddenly, the Celtics were without Cowens. Or rather, a phantom Cowens was on the floor forty-eight minutes a game, glaring in his absence, nonperforming inimitably. Within three. weeks of his departure, a headline in the Boston Globe referred to the UN-COWENS ERA.
Imagine Maravich’s vexation: Maravich, whose passes—bounced through his own and opponents’ legs, rolled the length of the floor, and so on—are so creative that nobody including the intended recipient is ready for them. And yet it is clear when the ball bounces off the teammate’s head that he should, ideally, have known the pass was coming, would have if his imagination had been as rich and quick as Pete’s. For years, Maravich has been like Bobby Fischer trying to play team chess. It is a hell of an act, one that many critics prefer to ordinary effective basketball, but Maravich has by now rung all the changes on it. He has of late even been toying with ordinary effective basketball. The more inspired stroke, though, would have been withdrawal. Like James Agee belatedly leaving Time Inc., Maravich could have built a myth of the hoop-artist-better-than-his-context, going on to various nearly realized freelance projects implying what might have been achieved if only the context had held up its end.
But Cowens—ironically a quintessentially functional, winning, “team” player—beat Maravich to the punch; left him holding the ball. Cowens leaving the Celtics, a class act that he had to a great extent defined, is like E. B. White in the late thirties taking off from regular employment at The New Yorker, which he had seemed essential to; going off into the country to do some things on his own. (“He’s out right now on a tractor,” Cowens’s mother told a reporter, “bush-hogging, clearing some ground.”)
For some time now we have been hearing athletes say things like, “I don’t want to be thought of as just a goalie.” (Or “just a SuperSonic,” or “just a person with incredible quickness,” or even “just Professor Up There Novotney.”) “I want to be thought of as a human being.” It is not much of a jump from there to “I want to be recognized as a person of vision.”
There was Ali—vaunting, rope-a-doping, making himself up as he went along. There was Wilt, missing free throws in rather the same way that Theodore Dreiser dangled modifiers. An early earth-artist was Richie Allen, writing cryptic words (Mom, Coke, No) in the base-path dirt with his foot. Baseball perhaps had its Duchamp in Jimmy Piersall, who circled the bases backward after hitting a home run. But Piersall was before his time. Baseball thought he was not an innovator but crazy.
Ten years ago, basketball would have thought Cowens was crazy. But today even crusty Celtics general manager Red Auerbach concedes that the eccentric, no-nonsense Cowens has his own way of doing things and that he knows what he is doing.
Never apologize, never explain. Surely it will not be long before other NBA’ers will be off on new departures. The concept of “moving without the ball” may be extended—dancing without the ball, moving without the ball or shorts, moving without the coliseum …
As usual, the owners, administrators, and legislators of sport (except for the NCAA, which has cannily suppressed spiking and dunking for years) have misperceived the threats posed by the new independence of players. The danger is not that they will sell themselves so freely and dearly to various high bidders as to destroy the respective structures of their sports, but that they will begin to express themselves so freely in what Rauschenberg has called the gap between art and life (as opposed to the gap between center and left, or the gap between tackle and end) that ball games will begin to look like halftime shows conceived and directed by John Cage.
Hockey will be staged—as wrestling already is—on gelatin. Baseball on ice. Quarterbacks will begin to experiment with form—standing behind the guard, for instance, to see what happens when the center’s snap sails straight up into emptiness. Antonioni has given us tennis without the ball. Writers of free verse, according to Robert Frost, have given us tennis without the net. Ilie Nastase may give us tennis with golf balls. Who knows?
It behooves the custodians of sport, then, to start thinking of ways to accommodate the artist in the athlete. Efforts may be made to channel the new impulses into off-the-field activity: theater groups, leather craft, bizarre private behavior.
But changes are also going to have to take place on the playing fields to allow for experimentation and the development of varying styles. Heretofore the picture of a sport has been cast almost entirely in terms of points scored—a sort of intense, or perhaps reverse, pointillism, the new sports critic might suggest. Henceforth more attention will be paid to the different modes of sport. An all-star game between baseball’s nine best sluggers and its five or six worst pitchers. Surely the judging of lay-ups in terms of quality—form, brio, hang time, degree of difficulty—along the lines of Olympic gymnastics scoring is long overdue. Why should Julius Erving get no more points for a whirling triple-pumping behind-the-back two-hand slam-dunk than Phil Jackson gets for an inelegantly coordinated tip-in? Football referees might award yardage for fresh, well-articulated insights and provocations (anybody can simply call the man across from him a fag) at the line of scrimmage.
Inevitably, of course, the new wave in sport will be co-opted. Owners will see the
commercial potential in expressiveness and will begin to pay players not for statistics but for magicality, for je-ne-sais-quoi quotient. A Dick Stuart, who is brilliant in the role of the terrible defensive first baseman, will be encouraged more than the solid but uncreative Gold Glover. Players who have built careers on just meeting the ball and always throwing to the right base will be asked at contract time, “So where is that at? Why couldn’t you once ask for a trapeze at the plate so you could ‘swing from the heels’? Why don’t you ever throw to the hot-dog vendor? You’re not mercurial, you’re not alive to the moment out there.” Coaches will begin inculcating the three I’s: Inspiration, Imagination, Impishness. Clutch hitting as such will be out—Tommy Henrich was doing that in the forties. Choking and then calling for a microphone to tell the crowd about it—how it felt, what you saw your parents doing when you were six years old, which probably had a lot to do with it—will be in.
Dave Cowens, of course, terminated his leave of absence after two months. I think this was a failure of nerve. “I was taking a lot of flak from many circles,” he said—he who has given and withstood so much flak around hoops. You would think he might have found some way to emulate Dante, who stayed in exile and consigned all the circles to hell. Or he might have waited until the sports pendulum had swung to the ultimate in expressionism. And then come back and kicked ass.
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPORTS PROFILE
This piece first appeared during the 1980 presidential campaign, but since its recommendations were not widely seized upon, and since there is always the chance that someone might forget and take John Anderson seriously again, it is repeated—as you can see—here.
YOU ALWAYS HEAR THAT the CIA has secret psychological profiles of people. If the CIA really wants to know what makes world leaders tick, it ought to commission sports profiles of them.
If, years ago, we had sent a good scout down to watch Fidel Castro play ball and to chat with his coaches and the local barber, we might have anticipated Castro’s affinity for Russia. (I’ll bet he liked distant, unsubtle head coaches.)
It’s not just foreigners who ought to be checked out this way but also presidential candidates. I’m not saying a person should be disqualified from running for President because he or she likes the New England Patriots or says “Then again …” when someone is about to putt, but the people should know these things.
After all, every recent President can be definitively summed up in light of his sports involvement.
Eisenhower. Serenely played golf rather than meddle in government and mess things up.
Kennedy. Sailed—the wind made his hair look good—and played highly competitive touch football with his siblings and Arthur Schlesinger.
Johnson. Didn’t really care much about any sport except legislation-swinging and beagle-dangling, but occasionally went out and shot a deer, or claimed to have.
Nixon. Never got over warming the bench—which was perhaps the only thing he ever warmed—at Whittier College. Chose a Vice-President who persisted in hitting people with tennis and golf balls. Tried to disarm capital-besieging war protesters in 1970 by asking them how their schools’ football teams were doing.
Ford. Looked back through his legs all through college. Played too much football without a helmet. Liked being leader of the Free World okay, but really liked skiing, in the general direction of a condo.
Carter. A grim competitor at Softball. Suffered a rabbit attack while canoeing. Collapsed while trying to be a regular trendy guy—that is, while running in a road race. Insisted on keeping track of White House tennis-court reservations himself. [On leaving office he wrote a major piece for Fly Fisherman magazine.]
I ask you. Do we really need to say anything more about any of these men? Are any of them characterized so well by their interests in, say, movies? (Nixon and Patton, that’s about it.) Clothes? (When the chips are down, they all wear the same suit.)
No, sports is the key indicator. If you have a sense of what it would be like to get stuck watching “Monday Night Football” with someone, or pitching horseshoes with him for money, you have a sense of what it would be like to get stuck with him as your President.
Network television should jump on this. Call it trashsport if you like, but instead of debating each other the candidates could play a little televised racquetball. Not to see who wins, but so we could observe their style, which is the point of the debates.
Then, too, maybe each candidate could do a half-hour or so of color commentary on the sport of his choice. Reagan would presumably have the advantage there, but I don’t know: When he was announcing University of Iowa football on the radio, back in the thirties, he would say, if there was a running play, “It’s a hippety-hop to the left,” or “It’s a hippety-hop to the right.” And people complain about Howard Cosell.
The Freedom of Information Act does not require a candidate to reveal whether he could ever dribble with either hand, or hit to the opposite field, or how he felt when somebody ran a sweep at him for the first time, or whether he knows who Arky Vaughan and Charlie Trippi are, or how he stands on the designated hitter.
I have been able, however, to acquire a certain amount of conceivably revealing intelligence on Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and John Anderson.
Carter. According to Captain Ellery Clark, Jr., Carter’s plebe cross-country coach at Annapolis, plebe Carter was stubborn, sincere, dedicated and, above all, “a real loner. He was more off to himself than most. He got along with the rest of the team but didn’t mix much.” Yet Carter as President mixes Hooverism with spending, inflation with recession, niceness with meanness, Brzezinski with Muskie/Vance. Overcompensating for early nonmixing?
Of course, notes Clark, cross-country “attracts loners. It’s a very mental, individualistic sport. You’re struggling against yourself.” Hmmm.
Clark always told his teams, “It’s nice to be a gentleman, but it’s nicer to win.” In a Softball game in Plains before the 1976 presidential election, Carter’s press secretary Jody Powell hit a comebacker to his boss, who was pitching. Carter threw to first, but Powell was called safe. The future President descended upon the umpire with all the prestige of a presidential candidate and also with all the certitude and heat of Earl Weaver. The umpire would not budge. Carter stalked back to his position. Powell turned to a reporter and said, “You know, he really is an arrogant little son of a bitch.”
Unanswered question: Carter writes in Why Not the Best? that when he was growing up he played baseball ten to the side. The extra player backed up the catcher. Can we really believe that anybody formed by ten-man baseball will fulfill his pledge to reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy?
Reagan. He portrayed George Gipp in the movie Knute Rockne—All American. In that movie Pat O’Brien, as Rockne, inspired Notre Dame to win by urging them to “win one for the Gipper.” Not long ago, John McHale, president of the Montreal Expos and no wild-eyed progressive, was asked whether he planned to make a Rockne-style pep talk to his players. “Those days are over,” he said.
Reagan played guard at Eureka College in Illinois. “No star, just an average player,” says Ralph McKinzie, who was Reagan’s coach. “He was a good loser, too. Of course, he got plenty of practice at that because we lost so often.”
As a radio announcer, Reagan did simulated broadcasts of Cubs games—off a ticker that brought him play-by-play in rather the way that diverse newspapers have brought him canned facts for his speeches. His shows were more popular than other announcers’ on-the-scene reports.
Eureka has a new sports center called the Reagan Complex. Yet the man’s critics accuse him of being simplistic.
Unanswered question: In 1931 the Eureka Pegasus listed Reagan as one of the men in the line up front who “afford the beef.” Will anyone Farther back in line be able to afford beef if Reagan gets elected?
Anderson. A sports cipher. When he gets a chance, he swims. That’s all. He follows no professional teams, and he played no sports in col
lege. His congressional staff used to have a softball team, but it broke up for lack of interest.
Rick Manning of Newsweek’s Chicago bureau once tried to josh Anderson in a sports-related way. Manning noted that there was an opening for manager of the Chicago Cubs, and he wondered whether Anderson might be interested in the job. “Why, no,” Anderson replied, with no hint of amusement. “I don’t think I’d be interested at all.”
Unanswered question: What if, say, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe visits Washington and Anderson is President, and the two are sitting around getting to know each other, and Mugabe—he’s a Pat Boone fan, so he may well follow pro football, and he may have relatives in Detroit—says, “Hey, how about those Lions?”
And there is an awkward pause, and then Anderson says, “This administration punctiliously supports Zimbabwean self-determination and stands squarely in favor of cultural exchange between our two nations. But … I don’t recall any lions. When did you send them?”
M.D. TO THE GREATEST
IN THE GREATEST, THE Muhammad Ali movie, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco is played by John Marley, but in real life he looks more like Jonathan Winters, only Latin. I can’t see Pacheco doing any funny—in the sense of dubious—medicine, though. If he were ever going to do any malpractice, he would have done it years ago, when this guy named Bert wanted to be dyed green so he could wrestle.
Bert made a good living estimating the value of cars for a fee and then calling people up and telling them, for another fee, where they could buy undervalued cars. But that wasn’t enough for him. Evenings he refereed wrestling. “You should have seen it last night!” he once told Dr. Pacheco. “One of the Hitler brothers threw me out of the ring and I landed on an Italian fella’s lap and there was pizza all over me and his Coke flew up in the air and came down on my head and then when I started climbing back into the ring the other brother stomped my hands and—”