No doubt the 64th Army-Navy game will come off as scheduled next Saturday, if anybody cares. It is difficult to conceive of anybody caring but life has to go on, and work, and probably play, too.
John Kennedy enjoyed games as a participant and spectator, and sports had his hearty official support as President.
There is no disposition here to condemn the few college authorities who did not call off their games yesterday or the men in the National Football League who decided to go through with today’s schedule. A while back some promotion man on the Herald Tribune lumped the paper’s book reviewers and drama and television critics and a few others into a group he called the Tastemakers but this peanut stand wasn’t included.
What seems bad taste to one man is plain common sense to another. What one considers decent respect is mawkish in other eyes.
Maybe it’s important to determine whether the St. Louis Cardinals can upset the Giants in Yankee Stadium today, whether the Bears can push on against the Steelers in Pittsburgh. There’s a race to be finished and there’s money invested. Money.
Maybe a lot of people will feel it perfectly proper to attend. Like it or not, we newspaper stiffs will have to be there because that’s our job as much as it’s Y. A. Tittle’s job.
If Yale and Harvard had played yesterday, we’d have had to be there, too. Thank heaven they didn’t. Work must go on, but there’ll be other days to shiver in that crepe-gray heap called Yale Bowl being lighthearted about a game for children.
KENT STATE
1970
It is time for some of our professional sports leaders to declare that the games must go on because that is how those kids at Kent State would have wanted it.
This was the theme when John Kennedy was murdered and when Robert Kennedy was murdered and when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Indeed, Spec Richardson, the psychic general manager who minds store in Houston, knew so well what Robert Kennedy would have wanted that he slapped fines on Rusty Staub and Bob Aspromonte for refusing to play on the day of mourning for the senator.
Joe L. Brown of Pittsburgh either did or did not fine Maury Wills for the same offense—he didn’t have the guts to say—and Milt Pap-pas, the pitcher who led a protest by Cincinnati players, was swiftly traded to Atlanta.
Ken Fairman, athletic director at Princeton, isn’t sure how the kids at Kent State would have wanted it, and isn’t putting pressure on athletes who have suddenly lost interest in the playground.
“They feel very deeply about this,” Fairman says. “They’re dropping out because they feel they can’t go out and have fun in sports. . . . They always have a veto. They are not hired by us to play athletics.”
Princeton’s unbeaten tennis team has quit for the year, eight lacrosse players have left the squad, three basketball players have packed it in, and so have three oarsmen on the heavyweight crew.
The Princeton track team is down to eighteen athletes and Herman Stevenson, the captain, is trying to organize a boycott of the Heptagonal Games this weekend at Yale. Steve Tourek, the crew captain at Dartmouth, wants all oarsmen to wear black headbands in the Eastern sprint championships Saturday.
The Columbia baseball team canceled last Tuesday’s game with Manhattan College. At least one football player at Stanford stayed away from spring practice.
“These kids are for the most part very conservative kids,” Ken Fairman says. “One kid says to our lacrosse coach, you told us not to play unless we have a 100 percent commitment, and I can’t.”
They’re bums. They just don’t feel like playing games. I don’t feel like writing about games. I’m a bum. An old bum. I try to think about sports and I just keep hearing a too-familiar voice repeating on radio and television: “I have a plan to end the war. I promise you I can achieve a just peace.”
Richard Milhous Nixon says what happened at Kent State was an “unfortunate incident” and implies that the kids who were slaughtered had nobody but themselves to blame because “when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.”
Spiro T. Agnew says that what happened was “predictable and avoidable.” That’s the polysyllabic way to say, “I told you so.”
To Mr. Nixon, young people who detest the war in Vietnam and oppose his invasion of Cambodia are “bums.” To Mr. Agnew they are “tomentose exhibitionists.”
In most colleges, athletes are regarded as conservatives, often correctly. Some are just muscular jocks with limited interests beyond the playing field, and most of them are kept too busy to have much time for campus movements. More and more of them, however, are speaking out against the notion that they are part of the President’s “Silent Majority.”
In fact, unless his hearing has failed badly, Mr. Nixon must be aware of voices of dissent in many quarters that have been quiet until recently, in his own party and even in his own Cabinet. That was a remarkable letter he got from his Secretary of the Interior protesting the President’s insensitivity and the Vice President’s blackguarding of youth.
Walter J. Hickel is the Alaskan who said conservation was overrated, whereupon Nixon handed him the Interior Department, making him the National Conservation Commissioner. Now Walter has concluded that the President was overrated.
OUTPOINTING THE SUPREME COURT
1971
In the morning Cassius Muhammad Ali Clay stopped into a store on 79th Street on Chicago’s South Side and bought an orange. He was getting back into his car when the storekeeper came running and hugged him. “I’m so happy for you!” the man cried. “You’re free! You’re free! The Supreme Court says so!”
It was a mismatch. As eight members of the court saw it—Justice Thurgood Marshall abstained—the government never laid a glove on the former heavyweight champion of the world, whom the Department of Justice was trying to send to prison as a draft dodger.
“He lost a unanimous decision last time out,” said Angelo Dundee, who was in Muhammad’s corner when Joe Frazier administered the whipping that cleared the title in March. “I’m glad he won a unanimous decision this time.”
Those who love justice are glad, too, with one tiny reservation. The decision leaves Ali free to fight Jimmy Ellis, his sparring partner, in Houston July 26. Is this what the framers of the Constitution sought to accomplish when they created the United States Supreme Court?
Because it was never possible to believe that Muhammad Ali received fair and impartial treatment from his draft board, it was felt here that the Supreme Court would surely rule in his favor. Now that this has come to pass, a chronological review of developments might help us all to see the facts straight.
When he reached draft age, Cassius flunked his mental test and was rejected for military service. Later, standards were dropped to a level below the grade he had scored, and without a second test he was called up. He claimed exemption on the ground that his membership in the Nation of Islam, called the Black Muslims, forbade him to fight in any war except a holy war declared by Allah.
(Nations at war always say God is on their side, but there are in existence few formal declarations of war signed by the Almighty. Still, that was Ali’s position.)
His case was referred to an examiner who recommended that he be classified a conscientious objector, but the draft board rejected the recommendation. This was unusual enough to raise questions about the draft board’s impartiality. The questions were underlined by reports that the board’s files were fat with newspaper clippings, and it wasn’t hard to guess at the nature of this material. A professional fighter refusing to fight had not inspired much editorial applause.
When Ali delivered a sermon, it didn’t sound much like the sermons heard in most churches. Doubts were expressed about the Muslim faith qualifying as a religion. This is pretty impertinent, like a Catholic saying Jews, Moslems, and Unitarians don’t have a religion because they don’t accept the divinity of Christ.
At any rate, Ali was classified l-A, and on April 28,1967, he refused to accept induction. This was a clear violation of th
e Selective Service Act, for which he was convicted, drawing a five-year sentence and $10,000 fine. Four years of appeals and arguments followed.
Even before his conviction, boxing commissioners moved with obscene haste to lift his license and declare his championship vacant.
New York State and a few others named Frazier as Ali’s successor to the title. The World Boxing Association recognized Ellis. Frazier settled that dispute by stopping Ellis in five rounds.
At long last, a court held that the New York State Athletic Commission had been unreasonable and arbitrary in unfrocking the champion. After three and a half years, Ali was allowed back in the ring. Frazier whipped him and they split a $5 million purse.
In all this time, there couldn’t possibly be any doubt about Ali’s sincerity. He knew in the first place that he could have accepted induction and served his hitch boxing exhibitions at troop entertainments without ever hearing a shot fired. He chose instead to sacrifice years of his youth and millions in possible earnings, and take his chances on a stretch in the freezer.
Even the government prosecutors conceded that he was both religious and sincere. But because he has called Vietnam a white man’s war and said he didn’t have no quarrel with them Viet Congs, they argued his objections were political and racist.
Now the Supreme Court says his position was “surely no less religiously based” than the positions of other conscientious objectors. Because it was unanimous, the opinion was not signed, but Justices John M. Harlan and William O. Douglas wrote concurring opinions of their own. A couple of frustrated sportswriters who had to get in theirs.
APARTHEID IN REVERSE
PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA, 1979
Sydney Maree, one of the two or three best mile runners in the world, is a victim of apartheid in reverse. The Villanova junior is a South African, and because the world sports community has ostracized South Africa in hope of persuading the government to abandon its policy of separate and unequal status for blacks, he is barred from international competition. Maree, who can do a mile in 3:53, may represent his university in intercollegiate meets like the National Collegiate Athletic Association championships, but may not run in the Olympics or the national Amateur Athletic Union championships, which might include a Polish pole-vaulter. The irony is that he is black.
“We are deeply disappointed,” said Mrs. Christine Susan Marina Maree.
Then her face lit up. She said Sydney had just telephoned. He had said he was fine but suburban Philadelphia was getting cold. He had asked how she and her husband, Philip, would feel if he applied for American citizenship so he would be eligible for international meets.
She said slowly that they would have no objection, provided this would not prevent Sydney from coming home again. She said that running was Sydney’s whole life and that she understood his frustration but she did not want to lose her son.
Sydney’s mother is a slender women of quiet dignity. Entirely composed, she sat in the tiny front room of the house at 3 Letswalo Street in Atteridgeville, the black township outside this capital, where Sydney grew up and where she and Philip are bringing up Sydney’s three younger brothers and sister—Patrick, Matthew, Stanley and Maria.
The house is like almost all others in Atteridgeville, a brick box with galvanized iron roof and a front door of sheet metal, sitting cheek by jowl with identical twins on an unpaved street of flinty red dust. There is a tiny plot of lawn in front, with one green shrub and a miniature triangle of flowers in bloom.
Joe Gemude, director of the Khazamula Sporting Club, had not known the Marees’ address when he and a driver took a reporter over from Johannesburg. They had gone first to a house opposite the township’s barren playing field, where a schoolteacher Joe knew gave directions to the right neighborhood. There Joe spoke in Sutu dialect to small boys, who grinned with delight when they heard the name Maree. Three of them jumped aboard for the ride to 3 Letswalo.
It was 4 P.M. Patrick Maree, a tall sixteen-year-old, thin as a stick, was home with an aunt. They said Mr. and Mrs. Maree would be home at six from their jobs in Pretoria. Mrs. Maree works in a coffee-roasting plant, Mr. Maree in the mint.
The visitors drove to the local hotel for a beer, then the driver took them to the home of a friend of his, a taxi driver. He went inside, and in a moment a smiling woman came out and invited the others in for tea. Her house was no bigger than its neighbors, but there was new leatherette furniture in the front room and a television set was playing. The visitors drank tea, made their manners and went back to Letswalo Street, where Mrs. Maree made them welcome.
She wore a white beret and a two-piece dress with a dark jersey. The front room was immaculate. There was no ceiling, just the galvanized roof. A kitchen table with a small tablecloth on top of the oilcloth took up most of the space. Against one wall, a glass-front china cabinet held many of Sydney’s trophies—cups, statuettes, a silver track shoe. Mrs. Maree brought them all out on the table, left the room and returned with handfuls of smaller awards, medals and ribbons.
A color photograph of Sydney laughed down from the wall. Beside it was a wedding picture of his parents. Other family pictures hung on the walls. Mrs. Maree served tea and cookies.
She understands English but speaks Afrikaans. Joe Gemude interpreted. She said that when Sydney was a boy in Phatogeng School down the street, his game was soccer. At fifteen or sixteen he entered a technical school in Pretoria where kids were mustered for intramural sports on teams called Lions, Kudus, Elephants and such. Sydney was an Elephant.
“He doesn’t look like one,” it was suggested. Mrs. Maree laughed. He didn’t run like one, either, though Elephants can get there rather soon. Sydney beat everybody in the Vleikfontein School and everybody in other schools and at length came the great day when he caught the attention of James Mokoka, the coach who made him.
They never looked back. At Villanova the track coach is Jumbo Elliott, whose eye is on every sparrow that runs, even sparrows 13,000 miles from Philadelphia’s Main Line. So Sydney crossed the sea.
Would he be home for the Christmas holidays? Mrs. Maree didn’t think so. He had some indoor meets ahead. In June, then? Maybe. But if he became eligible for a European tour or something, she would understand. By this time Philip Maree had come home, a little man composed mostly of smiles. Together they said they grieved when Sydney’s ambitions were frustrated, but if anti-apartheid pressure could bring changes in this country, then his sacrifice might be worthwhile.
Mrs. Maree said something in Afrikaans. Joe Gemude translated. “He is such a pride to them,” he said.
6.
Some Other Sports
A HUNDRED AND FOUR YEARS OLD
HOUSTON, 1964
For a couple of guys who are going to be a hundred and four years old in August (fifty-two each, that is), Ben Hogan and Sam Snead looked remarkably youthful striding into the locker room after a two-day pitched battle on the fairways of the Houston Country Club.
Sam scowled blackly, disgusted with himself and furious at his long irons. Ben was imperturbable. Between them they have played sixty-seven years of professional golf and this was the first time the tight-lipped Hawk had whipped Snead in head-to-head combat.
It was Hogan’s first television match, and if any distractions could weaken his frightening self-discipline they were all present here—frustrating delays, whirring cameras, violently erratic weather. A cloudburst had halted play on the third hole, leaving the greens drenched and heavy and the fairways deep in casual water; then came scorching sunshine and the standard Texas wind.
Impervious to everything, he had played eighteen perfect holes to beat par and Snead by three strokes with a 69.
The Houston Country Club has gold dust instead of sand in the traps and the greens are irrigated with oil. It is home base for those hackneyed caricatures, the Texas zillionaire and his lady hung with ice cubes.
“Beautiful round, Ben,” said one old goat in the clubhouse. “But I was watching you putt bac
k there on the thirteenth. Your stance was too open.”
The four-time Open champion kept a straight face, realizing that although golf is an ‘umbling game in Scotland, in Texas Humble means an oil company.
Incidentally, the Humble Company has a new office building in Houston whose forty-odd floors are staffed by employees from New York and New Jersey. The skyscraper is known as Yankee Stadium.
Snead was disconsolate because his long irons got him in trouble four times, but he scrambled sensationally. The seventh hole, for example, is a dogleg to the left around a thicket of tall trees. Along the left side behind the woods five traps yawn, one behind the other from turn to green.
Hogan hit an iron to the knee of the dogleg and had an open shot to the green. Sam tried to clear the trees with a wood, hit a pine, and his ball bounced back toward the tee. It wasn’t humanly possible to get home from there, but somehow he whistled his second shot through the trees to the edge of the green beyond the last trap.
“You dodged a bullet there,” said Fred Corcoran after Sam got down in two and halved the hole with a four.
“If I’da cleared the trees and drove the green,” Sam said, “it woulda been a great tee shot.”
“But I was lousy,” he said at the end.
“No, you weren’t,” a man told him. “I’m so glad I was able to see this match. I’ll remember it along with the War Admiral-Seabiscuit match race, Graziano-Zale, and Don Larsen’s perfect game.”
Somebody told Corcoran, who arranged the show for Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf that he ought to make it a series, five out of nine. Somebody else suggested teaming Snead and Hogan against Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.
If the round just filmed was the golfing equivalent of a Dempsey-Firpo rematch, the other would be like getting Dempsy and Joe Louis together. Only in golf is it possible to match the best of two eras.
Hogan would be interested. He can’t resist a challenge. Waiting at the seventeenth tee, a man had said to him: “What a round you’re having, Ben! Sixteen holes and you haven’t missed a fairway, you haven’t missed a green, you haven’t missed a shot.”
The Red Smith Reader Page 23