It would appear that track and field authorities are creeping along the route tennis followed a decade ago when the amateur myth was discarded in favor of open competition. In a recent rule “clarification,” the I.A.A.F. announced that in certain cases amateurs may now associate with professionals whereas in the past it was believed that an amateur couldn’t say hello to a pro without catching a loathsome disease.
Under the new ruling, athletes like John Smith, the quarter-miler, and Brian Oldfield, the shotputter, who turned pro to tour with the defunct International Track Association, will be eligible for domestic meets but not international competitions. That is, they can compete against Americans but not if there is a Polish pole-vaulter in the meet. Seems like dipping a toe into the real world.
It has been a long time coming. After the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the International Olympic Committee appointed a subcommittee to recommend changes in the amateur rules. The subcommittee didn’t exactly go off the deep end. Bob Giegengack of Yale, who was one of the group, summed up its proposals in one sentence: “Let’s all be a little bit pregnant.”
It is high time the babies were delivered.
THE MILE IS A MOCKERY
1981
One opinion that has been held here too long to be lightly dismissed is that if God had intended man to run He would have given him four legs, or at least made him late for a bus. To be sure, speed afoot might have been useful to some of the young ladies pursued by Jack the Ripper, but unnecessary running is a crime against nature. This goes for the joggers who clutter our country roads and infest our parks, and young men like Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett who perform publicly in their underwear.
By breaking the world record every few days, those two Limeys are making a mockery of the mile race, which has been traditionally the core and kernel of any track meet. Mention the Millrose Games, and the discussion automatically turns to the Wanamaker Mile.
Today a world record endures for a week or less and the guy who breaks it can call his shot in advance, as Ovett did the other day in Koblenz, West Germany.
Still, slapping the event around with consummate disrespect hasn’t made it unpopular with the masses. More than 22,000 buffs, considerably more than Oberwerth Stadium can handle, saw Ovett chip a piece off Coe’s shiny new standard. Nearly 50,000 saw Coe on Friday.
It doesn’t seem possible that twenty-seven years have passed since Roger Bannister broke what has been nicknamed the “four-minute barrier,” yet it was May 6, 1954, when he did the deed.
Since man dropped out of a tree and took off with a saber-toothed tiger on his heels, no pedestrian had traveled 5,280 feet in four minutes. In 1864 one Charles Lawes of Great Britain had gone the distance in 4 minutes 56 seconds, and 90 years later Sweden’s Gunder Hagg had lowered the record to 4:01.-4.
May 6,1954, five days after Determine won the Kentucky Derby, was gray and drizzly at Oxford but Bannister knew that if he waited for ideal weather in that blessed plot, that earth, that realm, that England, hardening of the arteries could set in first. So he ran, and the stopwatches read 3:59.4.
A month later John Landy did 3:58 flat and took the record to Australia, but in the Empire Games that August Bannister beat Landy in 3:58.8 with the Aussie also under four minutes. John’s time was 3:59.6. The floodgates were open. Britain’s Derek Ibbotson was the next to break the record, then came Herb Elliott of Australia, Peter Snell of New Zealand, France’s Michel Jazy, Jim Ryun of the United States who lowered the mark twice, Filbert Bayi of Tanzania and John Walker, New Zealand.
Walker made 3:49.4 in 1975. That stood for five years, and then along came Coe and Ovett to exchange the record five times, three times in the last two weeks. Coe broke Walker’s record and Ovett broke Coe’s. On August 19 this year Coe took it back with a mile in 3:48.53 in Zurich, and exactly seven days later Ovett did 3:48.40.
Ovett held the record for two days. On Friday in Brussels, Coe snatched it back with a mile in 3:47.30.
Ovett’s record was 13 one-hundredths under Coe’s best previous effort. Coe’s latest clocking, though, was more than a second below Ovett’s.
Until recently, human timers worked events like this, hoping that each of them would hit his watch at the starting gun and hit it again at the exact moment the winner reached the tape. They measured time in tenths of a second and when they were lucky several timers got the same time down to a fraction.
Now an electric timer does the work, depending on the starting gun to activate the gismo and the winner to break a beam at the finish. This presumably accurate device splits times down to hundredths instead of tenths and can spot a winner that no human eye could detect.
No doubt this is a step forward, if anybody cares. When it comes to the difference between 3:48.53 and 3:48.40, the attention span here is measured in thousandths of a second.
Much more interesting than the numbers is the mental attitude involved. It doesn’t make sense that scores of milers since 1954 have been faster than all the milers who preceded them in human history. It is obvious now that the barrier was psychological rather than physical.
For a millennium or two, nobody ran a mile in four minutes for the excellent reason that it was impossible. (To be sure, Glenn Cunningham says now that he broke four minutes in practice in high school and he and his coach kept it a secret, but that’s no part of recorded history.) Then Roger Bannister showed that it was not impossible, and it was like divine revelation. Suddenly it got to be like this:
Jesse Abramson, covering a Boston track meet for the New York Herald Tribune, was in a taxi with a colleague and they were discussing runners and their times. The cabbie spoke up:
“Anything that starts with four,” he said, “is slow.”
ROUNDBALL SCHOLAR
1964
Cecil John Rhodes, diamond king, empire builder and founder of the Rhodes Scholarships, was a ruthless tyrant who thought well of athletics, though he was no good at games himself. Since it was only eleven years before his death that James A. Naismith tacked up those peach baskets in the Springfield (Massachusetts) Y, there’s no telling how Rhodes would have felt about roundball if he had lived into Bob Cousy’s time.
There is, however, no need to speculate how Ned Irish, sometimes called Mr. Bounceball and sometimes Father Knickerbocker, feels about Cecil John Rhodes these days.
Ever since William Warren Bradley of Crystal City, Missouri, entered Princeton four years ago, Ned Irish has been waiting to snatch him for the New York Knicks. Indeed, when the National Basketball Association decided to abandon the territorial draft, it was extended through this season specifically to give the Knicks the rights to Bradley.
So now this studious history major has won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. For the next two years, instead of practicing lay-ups in Madison Square Garden, hell be reading for honors on the banks of the Cherwell where roundballs are for soccer players.
When Princeton plays Syracuse Monday afternoon in the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference’s Holiday Festival, it will be the first Garden appearance of the young man who is considered the finest college player in the world.
The better he plays and the more applause he hears, the harder his playmates will ride him. He likes that. If his companions didn’t give him the treatment he would be acutely uncomfortable.
“I don’t care for all this attention on one player in a team game,” says Bill van Breda Kolff, the coach, “and neither does he. To me he’s one of twelve, which is the way he wants it. Fortunately he can handle it all. It doesn’t change him, and we can’t hide him.”
Reluctantly, the coach went on. “The words are all so trite,” he said. “Unassuming, level-headed, mature beyond his years—they’re trite and true. He’s just another guy, except that he shoots better than most, passes better, does almost everything better.”
Crystal City (population 3,678) is about 50 miles down the Mississippi from St. Louis. Before Bill Bradley was born it had a girls’ basketball team playing in a S
t. Louis league with Dee Beckman, now a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee, as the star. When Bill was in high school, and making all-America twice, he worked out regularly with the professional St. Louis Hawks.
“Above all,” van Breda Kolff said, “it was the way he worked that made him. There are plenty of boys with his physical attributes (6 feet 5 inches, a shade over 200 pounds). There are some with his agility, his moves, his quick reactions.
“But kids who combine those talents with his capacity for work, his dedication—here are those trite words again—well, it’s the combination that makes him.
“Mind you, he has weaknesses. He’s been called a great defensive player, but he wasn’t all that good taking rebounds because he isn’t a natural jumper. The Olympics improved him in that respect. (Bradley was the only undergraduate on the team that won in Tokyo.) He played against bigger, stronger guys than he’d been used to and had to jump a little higher, block a little harder, grab the ball a little tighter.
“There’s a story, it’s awful corny but it’s true. When Bill was a sophomore we played off with Yale for the Ivy League championship. Bill fouled out with a minute or so to go, but we were twelve or thirteen points ahead and it was safe. He sat beside me on the bench, the happiest, most excited kid.
“‘Can we get the net?’ he asked. Sometimes kids go for those souvenirs.
“‘Come on, Bill,’ I said. ‘You’re too old for that sort of stuff.’
“‘But I’ve never been on a championship team before,’ he said, and he hadn’t. Twice all-America in high school but never a championship. Well, you have to humor your stars a little. ‘Okay,’ I told him, ‘get a scissors and when it’s over we’ll get you the net.’
“Oh,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand. I want it for Artie.’ Art Hyland, the captain.
“Pretty corny, eh? Still, I know if I asked him never to take a shot, he’d do it cheerfully. And if I told him it was best for the team if he shot every time he touched the ball, he’d be very unhappy but I think he’d do it. And I’d never be able to holler at him again.”
A CASE OF MALNUTRITION
1947
A few more nights like the opening round of the National Invitation Basketball Tournament and the memory of Dr. Naismith, who perpetrated basketball, will cease to be a hissing and a byword around here. Indeed, get a few more guys like Rhode Island State’s Ernie Calverly playing the game and some movie company is a cinch to do the life of Dr. Naismith, picturing him as a benefactor of the human race like Mme. Curie, Alexander Graham Bell and Al Capone.
This is written by one who would rather drink a Bronx cocktail than speak well of basketball. Yet it must be confessed that there hasn’t been another sports show in years which lifted the hackles and stirred the pulse quite so thoroughly as the performance of young Calverly leading his team to an 82-79 overtime conquest of Bowling Green.
Calverly is a gaunt, pale young case of malnutrition who’d probably measure up as a fairly sizable gent in your living room, but looks like a waif among the goons who clutter up the courts. He may be, as alleged, the most detached defensive player on a team whose members seem to feel there is something sordid and unclean about defensive basketball. But when he lays hand on that ball and starts moving, he is a whole troop of Calverly, including the pretty white horses. The guy is terrific, colossal, and also very good.
Throughout the fevered match with Bowling Green, he was the man who set up Rhode Island’s plays, taking the ball down the court, hiding it, passing it, shooting, dribbling, feinting, weaving, running the show with almost unbelievable dexterity and poise. He played without relief through a breakneck game that had others gasping inside the first quarter-hour and once he was knocked cold as an obsolete mackerel.
Making a pass, he tripped and hit the deck with his bony shoulder blades. As he lay there supine, the ball came back to him out of a scramble and he reached up and caught it and passed it off, and then passed out.
But despite his elegance, Bowling Green was winning the game as long as Don Otten remained in circulation. Otten is the Bowling Green center. He measures one-half inch less than seven feet from end to end and he looks and moves more like an institution than a man, with agonizing deliberation and great grinding of gears.
Joe DiMaggio would be hard pressed to throw a baseball over the top of Otten and there aren’t any DiMaggios playing for Rhode Island. He loped gawkily around the joint with his mouth open and plucked rebounds off the backboard like currants off a bush, while waves of adversaries surged around him and bounced off in a sort of spray. When a teammate missed a shot he simply reached up and palmed the ball and pushed it down through the hoop.
With three minutes, twenty seconds to go he committed his fifth personal foul and was flung out. The crowd cheered and it wasn’t applause; it was the rejoicing of Rhode Island fans, who figured they now had a chance.
There would have been no chance, however, without Calverly. A minute and ten seconds before the last horn, he took aim from a point near the center stripe and fired a long shot that went through the hoop as though it had eyes, squaring the match at 72-all. A moment later he was fouled and missed the throw that might have won. With ten seconds to play, Vern Dunham scored for Bowling Green, and that looked like the business. But somehow, in the scant time remaining, a Bowling Green player contrived to squeeze in another foul, giving Rhode Island the ball out of bounds at midfloor with two seconds remaining.
The ball came in to Calverly in the back court. There was no time for a pass or a play and from where he stood a field goal was impossible. So, with appalling calm, he shot a field goal. Time was up.
Over in front of the Rhode Island bench, substitutes were leaping around in a crazed sort of war dance, flinging arms aloft and shouting, and out on the floor Calverly’s playmates were shouting and pum-meling him arid the kid had his head flung back and was laughing at the ceiling.
Well, Rhode Island scored eight fast points in the extra period and Bowling Green scored five, and with a minute and a half left Calvery set out to freeze the ball. He did a magical job, dribbling in and out and around and back, keeping an appraising eye on the enemy, passing when necessary and then squirming loose for a return pass.
Then the game was over and there was a threshing swirl of players and spectators in a knot on the floor and Calverly was shoved up out of the pack and rode off on the others’ shoulders. Which was fair enough, since the others had ridden to victory on his. They rushed him out and he broke loose barely in time to get down and avoid being skulled where the exit ramp goes under the stands. They like to bashed his brains out.
BASKETBALL IN A CAGE
1951
If a man has any decent instincts at all, he’s got to feel regret—not sympathy, but a sort of pain—over the crooked basketball players who are going to jail. He’s got to feel bad because they are young guys whose lives are ruined. But he’s got to applaud the decision of Judge Saul S. Streit to put the crooks in a cage.
There must be some deterrent to the spread of dishonesty in sports. Chances are it never occurred to the fakers that they could be put in jail for throwing in with sure-thing punks and dumping games for pay. Even the most stupid ones, who were dragged into college by the heels when they should have been working as longshoremen or grease monkeys, must have known that what they were doing was a dirty thing. They must have known that if the word ever got out, they would be put away as crumbs by the undergraduates and the neighbors and all decent associates.
Yet it is unlikely they realized they could be caught and tossed into the pokey. It is time that realization was brought home to everybody. There has been far too much breast-beating about unfortunate, immature lads who were led astray by hoodlums. Everybody has been too ready to forget that the most doltish of students in ballroom dancing and finger painting knew enough to count the money at payoff time. It is high time for the courts to teach what the colleges have neglected—that when you get caught stealing, there’s
a penalty for it. Maybe if that knowledge got around, it would make easy money look a little harder in young eyes.
It is unfortunate, of course, that these young men have to be put away. It is even more unfortunate that when they go behind the wall they will not be accompanied by their accomplices—the college presidents, the coaches, the registrars, the alumni, who compounded the felony. Regrettably, there is no law that can reach the educators who shut their eyes to everything except the financial ledgers of the athletic department, the authorities who enroll unqualified students with faked credentials, the professors who foul their academic nests by easing athletes through their courses, the diploma-mill operators who set up classes for cretins in Rope-Skipping IV and History of Tattooing VII, the alumni who insist on winning teams and back their demands with cash, the coaches who’d put a uniform on Lucky Luciano if he could work the pivot play. They’re the bums who ought to go to jail with the fixers whom they encouraged. But they won’t, and apparently they regret nothing except the fact that some crooks have been caught.
The most shocking feature of this whole sordid business is the attitude expressed by mature men entrusted with the guidance of the young.
“It isn’t any of the judge’s business in the first place,” says Matty Bell, athletic director of Southern Methodist, about Judge Streit’s comments on recruiting and subsidization in the Southwest.
“The public doesn’t understand,” says Clair Bee of Long Island University, “that the players were not throwing games. They were throwing points. They were not selling out to the extent that the public believed, and somehow the players did not feel that what they did was wrong.”
Admittedly, the public’s understanding of many things is faulty. Yet one can’t help believing it surpasses the understanding of some men who are supposed to set an example for boys.
The Red Smith Reader Page 25