Sports in America by James A. Michener
‘We laughed about the old days and finally Jimmy said, “Barney, I’m desperate for a job. Anything you could possibly do for me?”
‘So I took him into our plant and as soon as the men saw him they stopped work and crowded around, and everyone said, “Jimmy, you were the greatest,” and they talked about the time he hit one of Lefty Gomez’ best pitches so far and so hard that it broke one of the seats in the top row of the left-field stands at Yankee Stadium.
‘And all the time Jimmy was sucking in his gut and telling one man after another, “I could get in shape again. I could lose a little weight and handle most anything you wanted to throw at me.” And he told everyone, “I’m a little ashamed that I’ve allowed myself to get out of shape, but I could sweat off a little weight and be right back in there.” There was no job that he could handle.’
In midwinter, 1958, when Jimmy was fifty years old, the sports pages of the country carried a dismal story. Boston sportswriters wanted someone for their winter banquet and naturally they thought of Old Double X, who had played at Fenway Park for many good years, but when they wrote to him they discovered, through one of his three teenage children, that the Foxx family was living in a shack, with no money. The father was dead broke and able to eat only because his eighteen-year-old son had dropped out of school and found a small job.
Well, there’s nothing more sentimental than a sports fan, and soon the phones were ringing in newspaper offices everywhere. Roscoe McGowen wrote:
Old Double X has been double-crossed by time and fate. But Jimmy is about to rebound from misfortune’s blows. The story that he was ‘flat broke’ has brought such a flood of offers of jobs that Foxx is overwhelmed.
‘I just want a job,’ said Jimmy. ‘I want to be able to take care of my wife and three children. Baseball? Yes, I’d like a job in baseball. Sure, I’m broke. I’ve been pretty much broke for ten years. Oh, I’ve had a few jobs here and there, but nothing much.’
But now the job offers were rolling in! I took the trouble to find out what these munificent offers actually were. Jimmy Silin, his former manager who must have earned a small fortune off Jimmy, sent him four hundred dollars. Someone sent a small check to a radio station in Bridgeport, Connecticut. An old-time friend said he had nothing definite but he thought he might be able to find Jimmy a speaking job here or there. He would be welcomed at a sportsman’s show. There might be a job in Spokane. All this for a man fifty years old with a wife and three hungry kids. You could have collected the whole nebulous bundle and it wouldn’t have totaled a thousand real dollars.
At age fifty-nine the huge man died, and his obituaries carried two interesting items. Shortly before Foxx’s death, Willie Mays had hit the home run which enable him to pass Foxx, who had stood second in the home-run derby at 534. ‘I hope Mays goes on to break Ruth’s record,’ Foxx said generously. ‘They always said only left-handers could hit the long ball. They even teach right-handed youngsters to bat left-handed.’ The second item was that Foxx had quit baseball one year before he would have become eligible for a pension.
As I was about to leave Sudlersville the man at the general store told me, ‘While you were getting your haircut I told Mrs. …’ and he used a name I had better not repeat, ‘that you were in town asking questions about Jimmy Foxx and she said she’d be glad to see you, because she knew him well.’
I walked down to her neat frame house and introduced myself. She invited me in and sat me in a needlepoint chair protected by an antimacassar. ‘I’m seventy-four,’ she said primly but with a certain excitement, ‘and I knew Jimmy all his life. He was a mean-spirited person, never did anything for his family while he had lots of money, then sponged off of them after he went broke. When his father died, and he was in Florida, he didn’t have carfare home and we had to take up a collection right here in Sudlersville and wire it to him so that he could attend his father’s funeral. Imagine, a grown man with children who couldn’t even manage things well enough to attend a family funeral.’
The Jimmy Foxx story would make an excellent book, but if I wrote it I would be guilty of the same error into which Roger Kahn fell when he wrote about the Dodgers of the early 1950s. I have said how much I admire that beautifully written baseball story, but I am not blind to its inherent defect: Kahn stresses the fact that baseball heroes retire and lead lives of frustration, ignoring the fact that all professions produce men and women who end their lives in despair. I would like to write a book about the men who graduated from the Harvard School of Business full of hope, only to end their lives in prison or in grim failure, or about the young people who know one season of success on Broadway or in Hollywood and long years of subsequent emptiness, or about any group of Americans who pursue any occupation to their despair.
Most of life is a falling-away, a gradual surrender of the dream. The reason sports provide such dramatic material is that the climax comes so early in a man’s life, the decline so swiftly. For a truly great athlete like Jimmy Foxx to enter the downward slide in his mid-thirties is tragic, because of both the magnitude of his fame and the totality of his collapse. But his story merely intensifies the story of us all. What a book I could write about the young authors of promise I have known whose descent to oblivion was as swift as Foxx’s but less well publicized. Sports provide an added poignancy because we make such a fuss over the young athlete and are so quick to forget the has-been.
As I worked on these paragraphs, trying to clarify my attitudes toward sports in literature, I received vivid demonstration of the conflict that always exists between the normal and the dramatic. I attended the fiftieth reunion of my championship basketball team and was happy to see that the boys I had played with had all become solid citizens of our society. George Waddington had retired from a substantial job in Philadelphia. Ed Twining was treasurer of our principal bank and the father of three sons whose athletic prowess has brought him much gratification. Peg McNealy was the father of three sons, too; his had tended toward the artistic and had done well. Bill Polk had served a long career in the army, with honor. No tragic declines here, and as we gathered I could hear again the song which some inspired 1924 cheerleader had set to the tune of ‘Just Give Me a June Night, the Moonlight and You’:
Just give us McNealy, and Twining and Polk,
Michener too, and Waddington, and then watch our smoke.
It had never seemed strange to me, in those old days, to hear an entire student body, from first grade to twelfth, chanting that song of praise. We were, after all, athletes and we deserved the roaring plaudits. In my hometown newspaper I am described till this day as the high-school athlete … who happened to write books.
But then I thought of Harry Bigley, that golden lad who had played forward with me, the champion of champions, first in our area to shoot equally well with either hand, the kid without nerves who could net nineteen out of twenty-one foul tries when one player shot them all, the handsome, straight-A lad for whom everything was possible. At an early age he had been struck with a back infection that left him so sorely crippled that when an ice storm came he slipped and, lacking control, killed himself. If I ever watched a heroic character pursued by envious Greek furies, it was he, and I suppose that if I were to write now about our team, I would find myself focusing on him. He had stood at the apex, in college days a forward on little Ursinus, who defeated mighty Penn almost single-handedly in the era when Penn ruled. And he had seen the glory fade.
Coaches
The coach is a special kind of athlete, the quintessence of the breed. If you take the salient characteristics of the athlete, and cube them, forcing them all into the mold of one hypertensive man, you have the foundation for a coach.
To understand the complexity of the coach’s job I recommend two books which have recently appeared on Woody Hayes, for until you have read them you cannot comprehend the pressure cooker in which the big-time coaches live. The books are radically different. The first, by Jerry Brondfield, is Woody Hayes and the 100-Yard
The other biography, Buckeye, by Robert Vare, was written from the outside and is certainly not a puff job. It depicts a brutual disciplinarian, an organizing genius and a wild man in his instantaneous responses to distressing situations. Here I recommend pages 77–101, which explain how a big-time university finds and recruits its players, and pages 102–126, which show how a football machine fits into a university structure.
From close study of these and half a dozen similar accounts, and from what I have observed at close hand of the work of outstanding football coaches like Ara Parseghian, Bo Schembechler and Bear Bryant, and Frank McGuire in basketball, I have reached certain conclusions.
No other member of any faculty is subjected to the close and constant scrutiny which the coach experiences. He is written about in the papers, criticized on radio and television, and reviewed constantly by the alumni who pay the bills. If he is of a sensitive or retiring type, he has no place in coaching.
Nor is any other faculty member subjected to the rigorous performance-evaluation which a coach must undergo. If he is deficient, a crowded stadium witnesses his failure, and he is not allowed to remain deficient very long. An ordinary faculty member can get away with murder for decades without detection.
Few other members of the faculty exert the degree of constructive leadership manifested by the coach. The testimony on this point is overwhelming; perhaps athletes are several degrees more simplistic than non-athletes and are thus predisposed to absorb the leadership their coaches exert, but too many athletes have testified to the moral importance of their coach to deny that it exists.
Most coaches more than earn their salaries. Since the curious system devised by America requires schools to provide public entertainment of a professional caliber, it is to the successful coach that we must look for the creation of a team that will enlist a maximum following. A basketball coach like Frank McGuire is worth a fortune to the University of South Carolina; a football coach like Don Shula is worth millions when he converts the Miami Dolphins first into contenders and then into champions. From the point of demonstrable worth, I would suppose that most successful coaches are severely underpaid insofar as salary is concerned, about correctly paid if television contracts and other perquisites are added in.
Coaches tend to be simplistic, conservative and dictatorial, and the outstanding ones have these characteristics to a marked degree. They operate in a pragmatic world in which raw success is measurable and determinative. John D. Massengale, himself a head coach at Eastern Washington State College, has compiled an excellent summary of what the coach should be: a member of a closely united occupational subculture operating somewhat against the grain of the rest of the faculty. His paper can be found in The Phi Delta Kappan for October 1974; in it he argues that coaches inherit a particular set of behavior patterns, values, language tricks and general life style. With machine-gun brevity Massengale lists some of those characteristics:
Coaches as a group are aggressive and highly organized, seldom paying attention to what others say. They display unusually high psychological endurance, persistence and inflexibility. Coaches appear to dislike change and tend to be very conservative politically, socially and attitudinally. They are often formally educated in the field of physical education. Physical-education majors tend to have little in common with other students in the field of education. They have a more traditional philosophy of education and a slightly lower social class background. They tend to be more dogmatic and appear to have different social values from other prospective teachers.
Massengale places heavy emphasis on the solidarity that coaches feel toward their profession and all members of it:
Allegiance to the subculture’s values is reinforced by professional coaching organizations and coaching journals. Most teacher-coaches, regardless of their teaching field, tend to ignore teaching journals and become devoted readers of coaching journals. They also tend to ignore educational conferences, but regularly attend coaching conventions, clinics and workshops. Open opposition from the academic community strengthens the isolation caused by the uniqueness of coaching. That hostility reinforces the subculture by creating alienation and polarization; the separation is maintained by the complete or partial exclusion of the coach from the academic in-crowd. The result of this extreme polarization between the coaching and the academic communities is the creation of an in-group/out-group relationship. The two groups identify each other as opponents, and each group regards itself as the guardian of its members’ virtues, values and loyalties. The out-group becomes viewed as a threat to the cherished values of the in-group.
I commend this article enthusiastically for its conciseness and relevancy. A more detailed analysis can be found in the carefully researched article by George H. Sage, ‘An Occupational Analysis of the College Coach,’ in Ball and Loy’s Sport and the Social Order.
Coaches unquestionably intrude upon the civil rights of the young men and women who serve under them. Rules about hair, bedtime, living arrangements, associates, what women to date, the taking of medicines and sometimes the deprivation of medical care would not be tolerated in any other kind of activity, yet coaches seem generally to believe that it is their prerogative to lay down such rules and to enforce them by such economic sanctions as terminating scholarships.
When Dee Andros, football coach at Oregon State, was accused by his players of depriving them of their civil rights, the president of the university appointed a Commission on Human Rights to investigate the complaints. This drew the ire of Max Rafferty, California’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, himself a former coach with a 51–5 record, and in a speech which has become famous he took off after the critics: ‘Andros is of Greek descent, like Spiro Agnew, and he’s just as good at football coaching as Agnew is at pointing out the faults of the news media, which is pretty darned good,’ Then Rafferty suggested that Andros told his players: ‘If you want to play for me, fellows, no girlish necklaces and cutesy medallions, no Iroquois scalplocks, no hair-mattress beards and no Fu Manchu mustaches. You can sport these execrable excrescences and still go to Oregon State, but you can’t massage your egos thus publicly and still play football for Dee Andros. Period.’
Rafferty then proceeded to call anyone who questioned such coaching dictates ‘Communist agitators, the hairy, loudmouthed freaks of both sexes who infest our campuses today like so many unbathed boll-weevils, the pseudo-intellectuals, the beard-and-sandal set, crum-bums, kooks, and members of the Filthy Speech Movement.’
A few coaches bring disrepute upon their profession by adopting unethical practices. They brutalize their players. They play men who are obviously unfit medically. They connive to circumvent whatever rules are established for their own protection. And they provide their players with very poor models of behavior. They are found at all levels of coaching, from Little League through high school and college and in the pros, but fortunately they rarely predominate. The standard coach is more often like the Allen Gardy I knew in high school, a man of surpassing rectitude, or the Bud Wilkinson that Billy Vessels knew at Oklahoma.
Finally, I could not possibly play for some of the dictatorial coaches operating today. I would not be able to tolerate their nonsense for even one week, let alone four full seasons. (That would not worry them; they would see rather quickly that they had little to gain from a skeptical, self-directed oaf like me.) On the other hand, if I were a poor boy locked in some ghetto who saw athletics as my only avenue of escape, I might seek out one of the tyrranical coaches, trusting that he would make me mean enough to land a job with the pros.
Now for an elaboration of certain points made above. The average fan cannot comprehend the pressure that accumulates on a major coa
Its record now stood 4–1 with a big game looming. If another loss were sustained, the record would be 4–2 with little chance of television appearances, but if the coach could rack up a win his record would be 5–1 with a chance for television and a bowl game too.
So in the week before this critical game the coach drilled his right tackle on how to chop down the lineman coming through to block a kick, and he spent so much energy heckling his tackle, hammering at him until the boy almost staggered, that an observer complained, ‘He’s brutalizing that poor boy.’ But his efforts paid off.
The big game was a barn-burner, going right down to the final minutes with the coach’s team trailing 23–21 but in possession of the ball. Through a series of well-drilled plays sent in by the coach, the quarterback maneuvered his team into field-goal position.
The whole season would now culminate in one play. Would that right tackle be able to protect the kicker? The ball was snapped. The line held. The field goal was good. The coach had a 24–23 victory and a 5–1 record. This one play meant that he would be invited on television twice before the season ended, earning about $200,000 each time, and he would gain a bowl game, which would mean another $500,000. One play, by one boy, meant $900,000 to that school. And this doesn’t happen very often in chemistry class, or in the study of Chaucer, or in a course on ethics. That autumn no professor at the school could compete with the football coach in achieving public recognition; only his endless perfectionism enabled his school to pick up a quick nine hundred thousand.