Sports in America by James A. Michener
Things got so bad in South America that they were advertising for Europeans to come over and officiate: ‘Good pay, good lodging and a decent burial.’ In one small town near Khartoum the referee made so many dubious calls that toward the end of the game the losing team kicked him to death, and their supporters asked, ‘Why did you wait till the second half?’
I saw some of my best soccer in Israel, but the fans were becoming so violent, they had to sit behind a basketweave of barbed wire to prevent them from running onto the field. During the winter of 1975 an Israeli judge found the rioting so endemic and severe that he canceled all league play.
It is strange that a game with such a powerful hold on spectators, one so popular throughout the world, should not have caught on in the United States. The answer, I think, is that in the three countries in which American-style football became established first—United States, Canada with slightly different rules, Australia with the wildest game of all—the superiority of the American game, with its violence, its variation in action and its more frequent opportunities for scoring, became evident, and fans could show no interest in the slower, more repetitious and low-scoring soccer version.
This brings us back to television. In 1967 a serious attempt was made to force soccer down the American throat, and CBS invested considerable funds in broadcasting league games on a regular basis. Danny Blanchflower, a famous, glib-tongued expert from England, was imported to do the commentary, and the result was a threefold disaster: 1) there was even less scoring than in hockey; 2) Blanchflower was an uninhibited realist who, when the local defenseman loused up a play, said so, to the consternation of the television people, who were accustomed to the ultra-sweet blandness of the American broadcaster; and 3) worst of all, the ebb and flow of soccer provided no reasonable stopping places for commercials, and when the referee did halt play to take care of that chore, he seemed always to do so just as the home team was about to run the opposition into a state of exhaustion. The enforced time-out, so alien to soccer, where the continuity of play is everything, gave the worn-down team time to recuperate, and the balance of the game was destroyed. CBS quickly got the silly game off the air and returned to hard-hitting American football, where the blood could be clearly seen as the opposition players limped off or were dragged away on stretchers.
A new attempt is being made to introduce soccer, this time with six players indoors in a confined hockey-lacrosse area with play continuous and no offsides. I can hear Danny Blanchflower telling his cronies in the local pub back in England, ‘Sounds logical, if that’s what a bloke wants in his football. But they ought to call it something else, because it’s not the game we play.’
Soccer’s big chance will come not on television, for it seems deadly dull when compared with American-style football—a comment I will delete if this book ever moves overseas, because nine-tenth of the world considers a television broadcast of a European final or a World Cup the supreme sporting thrill—but in the universities when the cost of fielding a football team of sixty or seventy players, with their ultra-expensive equipment, becomes insupportable. Soccer is one of the world’s great games, and I have rarely experienced the thrill I did in the summer of 1974 when I went to Germany to follow a group of teams from varied nations as they battled for the World Cup. Such competition offers a new dimension in sport, better in some ways than the comparable Olympics, for the overall level of performance is higher, and I will personally applaud the day when the sport becomes part of the American scene, with or without the sanction of television.
There is another way in which television dominates sports. It plays a major role in determining where franchises can profitably be placed. If City A and City B are competing for a football, basketball or baseball franchise, and if each has adequate funds to pay for it and a stadium or arena in which to play, and if City B ranks only 33 rd as a potential television market while City A ranks 21st, it is to the benefit of the league and of television to place the available franchise in City A with its much greater potential rather than in City B, which might have a higher raw population but which doesn’t amount to much as a television market.
At present two measurements are used to determine the television potential of a city. Area of Dominant Influence (ADI) allocates every county in the United States to that metropolitan area which dominates its viewing habits. For example, a county in mid-California might be awarded to San Francisco-Oakland if its viewers habitually relied on San Francisco for news and entertainment, or to Los Angeles if they customarily tuned southward.
Designated Market Area (DMA) assigns districts according to their viewing habits during prime time and is therefore a more sophisticated measure of the advertising potential than the cruder geographical allocations of ADI. Here [on this page] is how your area ranks:
These figures illuminate certain points in professional sport. The endemic weakness of franchises in either Baltimore or Milwaukee has been difficult to explain. The former has a population of 2,071,000, almost twice that of New Orleans or Denver and much bigger than Atlanta, yet it has represented a dubious sports market. Milwaukee has a population of 1,404,000, again, much bigger than that of cities whose franchises were doing well, while Milwaukee has had trouble.
The reason is found in the ADI and the DMA ratings. Baltimore was a fine city, with a large population, but its television viewers were siphoned south to Washington and north to Philadelphia. Its population rank was a high 12, its television potential a low 19–20. It really wasn’t a very enticing market. Milwaukee, delimited by both Chicago and Minneapolis, was worse, its population rank being a respectable 17, while its television potential was 26–23.
The opposite was the case with Tampa. I was astonished when in late 1974 the NFL announced that it was thinking of awarding the city a franchise costing some $16,000,000, so I was not surprised when Tom McCloskey, a Philadelphia builder, declined to accept when the franchise was offered. ‘He’s no dummy,’ I told my friends. ‘Tampa hasn’t the potential to support such a franchise.’
I was wrong. I hadn’t looked at the figures. Tampa may rate only twenty-seventh in population, but rates 20–18 in television potential, ahead of established markets like Cincinnati, Buffalo, Denver, New Orleans and San Diego. Having checked these data, I was not surprised when Hugh F. Culver-house, an attorney in Jacksonville, quickly picked up the Tampa slot. It looks to be a sound risk.
I do not think it proper that television should dictate where franchises go, but even so, if I were putting up my own money, I would think twice about locating a major franchise in Rochester, which shows an enormous differential between its population and its potential, and I would love to take an NFL team into Montreal, which dominates not only its share of Canada but also a good part of northern New England and New York. I would be most reluctant to invest my dollars in San Diego; the discrepancy seems too great; however, local pride might offset this, especially if the management happened to come up with a good team.
THIRTY-TWO METROPOLITAN AREAS
San Francisco and Oakland represent an interesting case. With a large population, impressive potential and an extremely high per capital wealth, this area could support one team in each major sport handsomely. But crowding two football and two baseball teams into this confined area puts too great a strain on the resources, and I was not surprised when it was announced that the San Francisco baseball Giants were going broke. Some of the other teams in the area may find themselves in trouble too, but when the sorting out has occurred, the survivors should prove healthy, with television’s help.
Television’s overpowering financial leverage must not obscure what I believe to be its greatest importance: its capacity to accelerate change. Consider these three cases.
For more than a decade football fans knew it was insane to conduct championship games in January in northern cities like Green Bay. Football played in a blizzard might be heroic but it wasn’t football. Yet the fans were powerless to enforce a change, because the me
But in 1967 television showed that dreadful Green Bay-Dallas play-off with the stadium thermometer at seventeen degrees below zero, and the general public could watch Dallas end Bob Hayes running pass patterns with his hands inside his pants lest they freeze solid and break off. Don Meredith can now laugh at that excursion into the Ice Bowl: ‘What we didn’t know and Green Bay did was that our receivers were running their patterns two ways. If, for example, Bob Hayes was just the decoy on a play, he kept his hands jammed in his pants. But if he knew I might throw him the ball, he ran with his hands out. Green Bay had us taped all the way.’ To play a game under such conditions was preposterous, and television forced a move to some more southerly city, where the January play-offs should have been all the time.
In the early days television sponsored safaris in which well-known sportsmen traipsed to far regions of the world, gunning down large animals. But when people began to protest that they did not want such scenes in their living rooms, the networks quickly left the high-powered rifles home and conducted camera safaris that were just as interesting.
In 1974–75 sports fans were subjected to two lamentable rip-offs, Evel Knievel’s closed-circuit ‘motorcycle’ jump across Snake River Canyon, and ABC’s telecast of the George Foreman fiasco in which he fought five so-called boxers in one afternoon. The outcry against such nonsense was immediate and unanimous. Knievel’s jump had been falsely sold from the beginning; the Foreman fights would not have been allowed in a well-run corner saloon, let alone on national television. Dick Young wrote of it: ‘This gimmickry, this phony trash exposes the ends to which TV producers will go for an audience. Boxing never sank so low as at this moment.’ Jim Murray turned in one of his strong columns: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more degrading “sports” spectacle. Everyone who had anything to do with it should be ashamed. It set boxing back to the barges. The game was exposed for its essential bankruptcy.’ But next year something equally trashy will be offered us, and we must condemn it.
Worthy innovations, like the Superstar competition, are needed; they add spice to the year. But television by itself cannot exercise the judgment required to sponsor the meritorious and condemn the meretricious. Only an alert public can do that.
I cannot leave television without grappling with the enigma of Howard Cosell. Into the bland and almost sophomoric world of television sports coverage came this rasping, opinionated, logorrheic, knowledgeable gadfly of whom a jealous critic once said, ‘Howard is the only man in the world who changed his name and put on a toupee in order to tell it like it is.’
Let me explain how I became a connoisseur of radio and television broadcasters. I was working in Colorado back in 1936, and on a blustery Saturday afternoon I was driving home with my car radio on. It was a football game between two western universities, late in the final quarter. It was obviously a game of heroic proportions, with players from the home team—I forget its name—performing miracles. They really must have been playing over their heads, because although I didn’t catch the score, they were socking it to their opponents, and the announcer was breathless in his excitement over the performance of his heroes. Then the game ended and he revealed the score. His miracle players had lost, something like 42–0, and I realized for the first time that the announcer’s job was to create suspense, sustain tension, and give the listener the feeling that he had participated in a game which had been decided only in the final seconds.
Following the introduction I became addicted to the historic broadcasts of Frank Murray, the best P-Oner in the business. On days when his hometown St. Louis ball club was rained out he took bleak Western Union P-One transmissions (one paragraph), and using only his imagination and inside knowledge of what would probably have happened in a ball game, converted them into highly colorful re-creations which convinced the listener that Murray was sitting in the park in Boston, watching a thrilling game between the Red Sox and the Yanks.
The Western Union P-One reported: ‘Foxx flies center. Higeins singles. Chapman pops third. Cramer fans.’
Here’s the way Frank Murray would have handled this: ‘Jimmy Foxx, second only to Babe Ruth, hunches his mighty shoulders and swings with all his power. Gomez fools him with a low curve that misses the bat by a foot. Jimmy steps out of the batter’s box, rubs resin on his immense hands, and comes back, glaring. He takes ball one. Lefty Gomez studies him and delivers another tantalizing twister and again Foxx misses by a foot. Quick delivery, ball two missing the outside corner. Now Foxx means business. He crowds the plate, daring Gomez to throw at him. The ball comes in high, nothing on it, Foxx swings. [Here he raps the desk with his knuckles to simulate the sound of a bat on ball.] What a clout. DiMaggio goes back, back, back. He’s on the track, right up against the wall A leap! He spears it in his gloved hand. The crowd roars. [Sound of crowd roaring] What a catch, and Gomez smiles that enigmatic smile of his as Jimmy Foxx slings his bat toward the dugout.’
Some of the best ball games I ever attended were those imaginary ones coming at me from that smoke-filled room in the back of a radio station in St. Louis. From it I progressed to the broadcasting greats—Graham MacNamee, Red Barber and Mel Allen—and then to the retired ballplayers like Waite Hoyt and Dizzy Dean. They were a sterling lot, able to evoke cascading memories with a single apt phrase: Red Barber’s ‘Joe DiMaggio is sittin’ in the catbird seat right now, with everything in his favor.’ Or Dean’s ‘They woulda had him at second but he slud.’
I was instructed in the power of the sports broadcaster one Sunday afternoon in Miami when the Dolphins scored a touchdown and the better part of the audience of 68,901 took out their handkerchiefs and fluttered them. ‘What gives?’ I asked, and the man sitting next to me explained.
‘Look around you. More than half the people bring transistor radios to the game. They’ve always done that here. Some of those seats over there are pretty bad, and the scoreboard is not only lousy but from many seats it’s invisible. So we watch the game with our eyes and listen to it with our ears. Rick Weaver, of WIOD, is about the best sportscaster in the country, and he explains what’s happening. He gives us the inside analysis so that we understand what we’ve been seeing.’
‘Where do the handkerchiefs come in?’
‘One day he wanted to know how many of us in the stadium were listening to him, and the Dolphins had the ball first and goal to go from the nine-yard line. That’s one of the toughest situations in football, and Rick said, “If we score, everyone who’s listening wave a white handkerchief.” We did score, and the stadium looked like a snowstorm.’ Later I asked Weaver about this, and he said, ‘We calculate that these days about sixty to seventy percent of the couples who attend the game bring at least one transistor.’
It was into this juvenile electronic age that Howard Cosell exploded. Long before Monday Night Football he had been broadcasting in both radio and television for ABC, making a slowly growing impact on the New York audience as sensible commentator who tried valiantly to explain sports events and the milieu surrounding them in terms the listener or viewer could understand. I heard him infrequently in those years, but even then he seemed to me ‘to be telling it like it was.’ Just as newspapers and magazines were reaching the stage where their patrons were beginning to demand better reporting and more in-depth explanation, so television was getting to the point where the extreme blandness of normal videocasting was an insult to the perceptive viewer.
Cosell was the precipitant. When he was tossed into the television hopper, with his grating nasal voice and incredible vocabulary, the public quickly responded, initially with hate mail, then with accolades. I saw him first at a memorable snow-swept Monday-night game between the Eagles and the Giants. Television was unkind to him that night: ‘If anyone ever looked like an on-camera drunk,’ he later said, ‘I did.’
But he was good. He generated excitement, knew how to bounce his street smarts off country-boy Don Meredith, how to utiliz
It might be said that I recognized Cosell’s importance to television, but I did not admit how important he was until one Monday night in Miami when the Dolphins were playing Pittsburgh. I was sitting in the western curve of the stadium in a seat which would have allowed me to look back over my right shoulder and catch a good view of the suite from which Cosell would be broadcasting. I didn’t look back, because I had come to watch the football game, which turned out to be a wildly fluctuating affair. That was the game in which during the first minutes Dick Anderson intercepted two Pittsburgh passes thrown by the black quarterback Joe Gilliam, running each in for a quick touchdown.
But as I looked at this exciting game, one of the best played that year, I became aware that in order to see the field, I had to look over a veritable sea of faces. Everyone in my area was looking not at the players but back over his shoulder at Howard Cosell.
‘There he is!’ they reported breathlessly to each other. ‘He’s talking with someone now. Look! Look! It’s really Cosell. I can see him!’