Sports in America by James A. Michener
But when I reported this conclusion to some men in a New York bar, one of them leaned over, grabbed me by the arm, and said in a rich western voice, ‘Son, if you ain’t been to Norman, Oklahoma, you ain’t even entitled to an opinion.’ I was so impressed by his fervor that I promised to visit Oklahoma if an opportunity ever arose.
At the start of the 1975 football season I was working in Denver, and a Tulsa tycoon offered to fly me to Norman to see some real football, so I went. The first Oklahoma fan I met set a high standard for partisanship. He was Earl Wells, oil magnate from Henrietta, Oklahoma, who told me, ‘The doctors said it was a matter of life and death. Open-heart surgery immediately. I told them, “Hold on! I’ve got to be able to walk up four flights of stadium steps on the opening day of football season.” They said, “No way,” so I said, “Then no operation.” And they said, “Then you’ll die.” So we compromised. They’d operate and I’d come to this game. When they warned me that if I did I might drop dead, I told them, “If I’m gonna die, let me die doin’ what I love most in this world. Watchin’ Oklahoma football.” And here I am!’
The first woman devotee I met was Earl’s equal. Betty Eick, a tall, lovely woman told me, ‘When we were first married my husband worked out a scheme by which we could each sell a pint of our blood and pick up enough money to see the Oklahoma-Texas game. He said that in a marriage it was important to get started right where fundamentals were concerned.’
Most instructive of all, I had two long sessions with Barry Switzer, the razor-sharp, tense, knowing coach who volunteered to answer any question I cared to throw at him: ‘We ought to institute a new conference immediately. At the end of this year. Made up of those universities who demonstrate a serious commitment to real football. Call it Division One-A. Keep it under the supervision of the NCAA. Clear-cut eligibility rules and a staff to enforce them. Employ as many coaches as you need. Provide a substantial number of full scholarships for the income sports of football and basketball. Eighty other scholarships for minor sports, to be allocated as the university prefers. Oklahoma would apply many to wrestling; Indiana to swimming. A realignment of the conferences as they exist today. And don’t call us a super-conference. We’re not super. We just want to associate ourselves with other schools like us who have a commitment to excellence.’
At his press conference following the game Switzer told a host of reporters from small Oklahoma towns, ‘I wasn’t pleased with today’s performance. We played very spotty ball that first quarter. Sat back and allowed Oregon to carry the fight to us. Couldn’t spring our runners free. We’ve got to look at the game films to see what happened to our kicking. We’ve got to do better.’ Score of this disappointing game: Oklahoma 62–Oregon 7.*
When I had finished visiting schools and digesting reports, I tried to summarize my personal feelings about college sport, and found myself coming back to a letter which George Hanford had sent me at the conclusion of his similar study:
I do not side with those who claim that the negative effects of unethical practices in intercollegiate athletics outweigh the positive values. There is an infection, and because it could spread, something needs to be done to control it. On balance, however, I believe that there is much more that is healthy about intercollegiate athletics than is sick.
I side with James Coleman, the University of Chicago sociologist, who told me that he had observed that many of the professions, education and the like—turned out, on specific inquiry, to have participated in sports. Like Coleman, I am inclined to ascribe some measure of their success to the lessons learned and the values developed on the playing field—lessons and values that have something to do with coping with success and failure, with the benefits of practice and persistence, and of teamwork and cooperation, and with the joys of physical well-being and healthful recreation.
*Switzer had a right to be apprehensive. A brilliant coach, he had already sensed that this team might be rather mediocre by Oklahoma standards. After the Oregon massacre it barely eked out several cliff-hanging wins, suffered a shattering defeat, but in the Orange Bowl, Oklahoma defeated Michigan, 14–6, winding up with the national championship.
EIGHT
The Athlete
When I originally outlined this book I had plans for twelve chapters, and this was not among them. A sobering experience forced its inclusion.
Within the space of a week I had social contacts with eight top athletes; three of them had been close personal friends of many years; the other five were outstanding professionals with national reputations. My friends were an interesting lot, men about my own age with whom I played tennis regularly.
Ham Place, a successful cartoonist who had invented a new way to make animated cartoons for television, had won a number eight national ranking as a tennis player at Ohio State. Pete Richards, a hundred and seventy pounds of gristle, had been one of the first professional football players for the old Frankford Yellow Jackets. And Barney Berlinger had been not only a great track and field star at the University of Pennsylvania, but also a member of our Olympic team in 1928.
The five professionals were younger. Robin Roberts had won 286 games while pitching primarily for the Phillies. Hal Greer had played more professional basketball games than any other player in history, 1,122, primarily for the Philadelphia 76ers. Chuck Bednarik, that granite monolith, had been the last professional football player to go sixty minutes on both offense and defense, for the Philadelphia Eagles. He was all-American all-Everything. Don Budge had won every championship in tennis and was the last American man to win back-to-back titles at Wimbledon in 1937–38. And recently I had entered into a business agreement with Don Meredith, the Dallas quarterback, to purchase a local radio station in hopes of upgrading it.
The sobering experience was this. One afternoon as I left a meeting with Roberts, Greer and Bednarik it suddenly occurred to me that these superlative men, plus the other five I had been meeting, had been forced to retire from their athletic careers at an age when I, in my profession, had yet to write word one. Their public lives had ended before mine began. In their middle thirties these gifted men had reached the climax of their fame; they had scintillated for a decade, then been required to find other occupation; I had stumbled into a career at which I could work till eighty, if I lived that long.
It was then that I began to speculate on what kind of person the athlete is, and to compare him with other talented performers. Chuck Bednarik, a man of herculean talent, had blazed across the sports pages for a few brilliant years; Henry Fonda, a man of comparable gifts, could flourish as an actor during four decades or five. Hal Greer, a model of consistency and cautious self-preservation, had been through at forty, while David Rockefeller, the same kind of person, had just begun his illustrious banking career at that age.
There was another aspect. The newspapers were filled at this time with accounts of former athletic greats who had fallen on bad times and were ending their days in misery. A book of considerable literary merit had appeared, showing how the members of one of baseball’s finest teams had withered away. On Broadway a stunning drama depicted the moral erosion and physical downfall of a high school basketball team. And all these accounts derived their sense of tragedy from the fact that the athletes involved had known their moments of greatness so early and had spent so many bitter years in decline.
At this juncture I came upon a book whose author had analyzed this phenomenon as expressed in American fiction: Wiley Lee Umphlett, The Sporting Myth and the American Experience. The author, after reviewing a score of creative works focusing on athletes, reaches various conclusions, three of which are relevant to the present discussion. He says that American fiction presents young athletes who are: 1) anti-urban in their basic mindsets and always longing for a return to a simpler life closer to nature; 2) anti-feminine and incapable of coping with women; and 3) victims of a prolonged juvenilism, clinging to memories of youthful glory and rarely attaining enough maturity to grapple with adult problems.
The fact that success in athletics does not always mean success in business or life provides Philip Roth in Goodbye, Columbus and Irwin Shaw in ‘The Eighty-Yard Run’ with a convenient means for satirical expression. We discover that Roth’s Ron Patimkin and Shaw’s Christian Darling as ex-college athletes are unable to involve themselves with the realities of life. Instead, they continue to live in the idealized world of ‘the game’; consequently their lives exemplify still another theme in modem literature—the search for maturity.
Like a child, he cannot see himself clearly in relationship to his environment, and in this so-called innocent state is compelled to relate everything to his own ego-centered world. The result is lack of self-awareness and a failure in communication, not only in marriage but in social dealings as well. The only real world for him is, and always will be, we recognize, the world of the game. As early as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrait of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925), we are given an important clue to the reason for such an outlook. Tom as an all-American football player at Yale is described as ‘one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anticlimax.’ For the star athlete nothing in life can ever again approach the significance of the lost world of the Big Game.
I wish there were space to discuss each of the works Umphlett cites; he is especially perceptive in dealing with William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, but I must concentrate on the four examples which focus on prolonged adolescence and the harking back to days of glory.
The archetypal story is Irwin Shaw’s ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Christian Darling, a one-time college hero, returns fifteen years later to the scene of his triumph. Because of his football accomplishments he has married the daughter of a rich alumnus and now stands in the shadows of the stadium, trying to understand why he has lost her. In a haunting scene he dashes once more down the field, re-creating his eighty-yard run, the high point of his life, and discovers to his embarrassment that college lovers have been watching him. ‘I—once played here,’ he tells them. Shaw is brutal in his summary of his hero’s character:
He had practiced the wrong thing, perhaps. He hadn’t practiced for 1929 and New York City and a girl who would turn into a woman. Somewhere, he thought, there must have been a point where she moved up to me, was even with me a moment, when I could have held her hand, if I’d known, held tight, gone with her. Well, he’d never known. Here he was on a playing field that was fifteen years away and his wife was in another city having dinner with another and better man, speaking with him a different, new language, a language nobody had ever taught him.
Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ is the classic depiction of the stupid, unfeeling sportsman who stumbles and fumbles his way into adult life, only to be gunned down at last by a wife who despises him. I know of few portraits more cruel. John Cheever’s story ‘O Youth and Beauty!’ translates the Macomber situation into a suburban situation in which the fatuous and intolerable ex-college athlete is gunned down by his wife.
Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus deals with the basic athletic situation, but comically. Ron Patimkin, not the major character in the novel but brother to the girl who will date the hero, had been a hotshot basketball player at Ohio State but is now a would-be adult, dreaming vacuously of his glory days. He delights in listening to a long-playing record summarizing the sounds of his senior year: ‘And here comes Ron Patimkin, dribbling out. Ron, number eleven, from Short Hills, New Jersey. Big Ron’s last game and it’ll be some time before Buckeye fans forget him …’ But, as Ron’s business-minded father observes, his son doesn’t even know how to unload a truck.
The character study which best bridges the two shores of realism and ridicule is John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, in which the unforgettable Rabbit Angstrom, once a basketball hero in the coal towns of Pennsylvania, tries vainly to find a secure place for himself in adult society. He cannot unravel his relationships with his wife, or with the bar girl he has made pregnant; he cannot resolve his interior conflict between his longing for a free open space, symbolized by his fight south, and his actual life in the northern urban sprawl in which he is trapped; nor can he reconcile his religious beliefs. He can do only one thing: run furiously as he had once run during the closing minutes of basketball games. He is an engaging man, in spite of his confusions, and a tragic one because of his refusal to grow up. He is a significant figure in modern American fiction, and in numerous college classes he is presented as the standard American athlete.
After the preceding works had become popular, a play came along which summarized them all; indeed, it seemed to have been written to accomplish just this and will undoubtedly stand for some time as the culminating statement because it attacks the problem so relentlessly yet with such appealing humor.
That Championship Season, by Jason Miller, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1973, plus all the other prizes that year. It is a tightly constructed, one-set, five-character play covering the events of one evening in the home of a Pennsylvania high school basketball coach. It is reunion night for the team which twenty-five years before had won the state championship, and four of the five heroes from that historic quintet have come back to meet with the coach who led them to victory.
The four ex-champions disclose themselves to be a sorry lot. Phil Romano, now mayor of the city, is a characterless cuckold, willing to engage in any nefarious behavior if it will ensure his reelection. George Sikowski, the big Polish guard, has become a millionaire, a fearfully hollow man ready to destroy the countryside for a few extra bucks. The two Daley brothers who held the team together have become a pitiful pair: Tom, the elder, is a whining, masochistic schoolteacher maneuvering to attain a minor promotion for which he is not qualified; James, the younger, is a marvelously drawn alcoholic to whom the comic lines are given so that he can laugh at himself as his life staggers into chaos.
The central character, the coach, is a fiercely bigoted man who recites from memory Teddy Roosevelt’s flamboyant statement about being in the middle of the fight. He preaches sportsmanship and practices the most virulent anti-Semitism. He parades old virtues and launches a character assassination. Steeped in hatred and disappointment—for he has never subsequently had a championship season and has been fired for maltreating his players—he is invited, at the end of the play, to watch the NBA finals on color television, but he says he won’t bother: ‘It’s not a white man’s game any more.’
This bleak and very funny drama deserved the many prizes it won, for it is a cogent statement on a recurring American theme which Umphlett identified: the falling away of the dream, the incapacity of the athlete to adjust to adult life. I recommend it to anyone interested in American sports, and if one finds no chance to see it in the theater, it is a drama that reads almost as well as it plays.
And then in rapid-fire order I came upon one statistic after another which supported the thesis that sports are an ascent to greatness followed by a sickening drop to oblivion:
• S. Kirson Weinberg and Henry Arond compiled an analysis of what happened to ninety former boxing champions, each of whom had earned more than $100,000 in years when that amount of money was substantial and when there were few taxes. They now worked in taverns, or as unskilled laborers, or as ticket-takers at movie houses, or as bookies, or as janitors, or as helpers around gas stations, or as men walking race horses. Not one had a substantial job.
• Bill Murray, of Duke University, made a study of nine hundred young men who had signed contracts with professional baseball teams before graduating from high school. About twenty actually made it to the big leagues but only five stayed there for the required five years that would qualify them for a pension. And only a handful were able to get a college degree. The rest … Murray didn’t say, but we can imagine them working beside the former boxers in beer halls and in the digging of ditches.
• Eddie Arroyo, the jockey, told Studs Terkel