Dick Schaap, an Emmy-award winning sports commentator with ABC News, is the author of 26 books, including the bestseller Bo Knows Bo, written in collaboration with the gifted athlete Bo Jackson.
Athletes are better than ever. They are taller, heavier, faster, stronger, smarter. In every sport in which achievement can be measured objectively, their progress is stunning. A girl barely into her teens swims more swiftly than Johnny Wrismuller swam in the Olympics, or in his loincloth. A high school boy jumps farther and sprints faster than Jesse Owens jumped and sprinted in front of Adolf Hitler. A 30-year-old married woman surpasses Jim Thorpe's best marks in a variety of track and field events. Even a man over 40 runs a mile faster than Paavo Nurmi ran in his prime. The performances are so much better. But so much of the joy is gone.
Sports has too often been called a microcosm of society, yet its present state certainly reflects the uneasy prosperity of the times, the suspicion that, despite encouraging facts and heartening figures, something is fundamentally wrong. The cheers may be louder than ever, but they ring a little hollow.
It is almost impossible to overstate the pervasiveness of sports in American society, the breadth and strength of its special appeal, to bricklayers and novelists, accountants and comedians. "Have you met Mr. Nixon yet?" the future President's press secretary once asked me. "You'll like him. He reads the sports pages first."
Then when I did meet Richard Nixon, he phrased his political thoughts in sports terms, spoke of hitting home runs and getting to first base and striking out. Sports is a language and a diversion and sometimes an obsession, and more than ever, it is a business.
The stakes are so high now. The average major league baseball player earns more than a million dollars a year. Losing pitchers and feeble hitters, men with stunningly modest statistics, demand much more. Steve Greenberg, the deputy commissioner of baseball, used to be an agent, negotiating players' contracts. He once told his father, Hank Greenberg, the Hall of Famer, who was the first ballplayer to earn $100,000 in a season, that he was representing a certain player. "What should I ask for?" Steve said. "He hit.238."
"Ask for a uniform," Hank said.
Steve shook his head. "Dad," he said, "you just don't understand baseball any more."
Nobody understands baseball any more. No one relates to the salaries. Not even the players themselves. They earn so much more than they ever dreamed of.
They also throw pitches Cy Young never dreamed of. (Ever see Cy Young's glove? Small. Very small. Now they have big hands, hands that can wrap around a ball and deliver a palmball.) They swing bats with muscles Babe Ruth never dreamed of. They sprint from home to first, or first to third, with incredible speed. That's the biggest difference, the way they run these days. They fly.
But they don't know how to bunt. They don't know how to hit and run. They don't know which base to throw to. They didn't spend childhoods in cornfields playing baseball 10 or 12 hours a day, absorbing the nuances of the game. They may have developed terrific hand-eye coordination playing video games but that didn't teach them how to hit the cutoff man.
Baseball players earn up to $7million a season. So do basketball players. Football players are embarrassed. Their ceiling is a few million dollars lower. Golfers and tennis players only go up to a million or two a year in prize money but they can quadruple their income by wearing the right clothes, wielding the right clubs, advertising the right corporate logos on their visors and their sleeves.
Even athletes who are officially amateurs, runners and skaters and skiers, earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. How can anyone afford to have fun?
Once there was a camaraderie among athletes. They competed on the field, but afterward they were friends, sharing a common experience, a common attitude, bonded by their love for their game. Tennis players, for instance, traveled together, roomed together, partied together, exchanged advice and rackets. Now each has a coach, and an agent, and a father or brother and a fistful of sponsors, walling them off, separating them. Then can face each other across for years and never get to know each other.
Even in team sports, team spirit is, for the most part, gone, rekindled only occasionally by victory. "We are family," in sports terms means: "We won." It doesn't mean we worry about each other, bolster each other, counsel each other.
How can fans relate to these athletes? How can they embrace heroes who have so much money and so little loyalty? Players change teams now as casually as they change jockstraps. Once you could fall in love with a lineup, commit it to your heart and your memory, and not have to learn more than one or two new names a year.
"The names, just to say the names, you could sing them," the playwright Herb Gardner once wrote, lamenting the Dodgers' move to Los Angeles. "Sandy Amoros, Jim Gilliam, Hoders, Newcombe, Campanella, Erskine, Furillo, Podres, gone, gone ... even the sound is gone. What's left? A cap, I got a cap, Dodgers, ’55 and sometimes on the wind I hear a gull and Red Barber's voice…”
Now the Dodger lineup changes everyday, millionaires come and go, succumbing to minor injuries, whining about imagined slights, and even the manager, Tom Lasorda, who loves the team so much he says he bleeds Dodgers blue, can't call all his players by name.
Once Dodgers were Dodgers for decades and Cardinals Cardinals, and Red Sox Red Sox but now they’re L.A. Kings for a day or maybe for a month or a season, and if an athlete puts in a full career with one team in one city, he isn’t a hero, he's a monument.
It's easy to fault the players for earning so much money, for displaying so little loyalty, but it isn't fair. They didn't invent greed, or ingratitude. They learned from their mentors, the owners. The baseball players of the 1950s, the football players of the 1960s, had little idea of how underpaid they were. Soon after the salaries started to soar, a baseball player named Ken Singleton told me, "The owners screwed the players for one hundred years. We've been screwing them for five. We've got ninety-five more years coming”
The owners came up with the idea of moving for the money, too. The Braves went from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta, strip-mining stadia along the way. The Dodgers and the Giants traveled west hand in hand, with the other hands, of course, thrust out. They left shattered fans behind.
"They went, and the city went with them," Herb Gardner wrote. "The heart went with them, and the city started to die. Look what you got now, look what you got without no heart. What's to root for? Duke Snider! He went away! How many years in the stands hollering? A lifetime in the afternoon hollering, ‘I'm witcha,, Duke, I'm witcha,’ never dreaming for a moment that he wasn't with me!"
Teams, and owners, and athletes, have disappointed us in so many ways. The disappointment goes beyond the greed, beyond the selfishness. How can you put athletes up on a pedestal who flaunt fast cars at illegal speeds, who succumb to the lures of social drugs and performance-enhancing drugs, who maltreat women as spoils, who lose gambling fortunes that would change most people's lives? How can you pick a hero any more and count on him?
Sports has let us down.
Half a century ago, when Jackie Robinson became a Brooklyn Dodger and Joe Louis was the greatest fighter in the world, sports held out so much hope, so much promise. Equality, that elusive gift bestowed on all Americans by the Declaration of Independence, was going to be won and secured, finally, on the playing fields.
Of course. On the playing fields, every competitor was equal. The scoreboard knew no race, no religion, no nationality. Sports offered the ultimate democracy, where a man or a woman's success derived purely from his or her ability.
But, as brave as Jackie Robinson was, as good as Jimmy Brown was, and Henry Aaron and Bob Gibson and O.J. Simpson and Ernie Davis and Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell and Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe and Rod Carew and Bill White and Julius Erving and Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard and Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson and Willie Davis and Lawrence Taylor and Alan Page and Jerry Rice and Walter Payton and so many more, the brotherhood of man has flourished no more on the playing fields than in the street.
Thanks to sports, there are many more black millionaires now than there were a few decades ago, but there is not equality, not the kind of equality that not so long ago seemed possible, or even likely. Black players still tend to sit with black players on team buses and at training tables, and white players cluster together, and do so the black wives of black players.
For every Bill Bradley or Jack Kemp, who learned from the sports experience, who gained some insight into the dreams and fears of teammates of different color, who has sought to translate those into political action, dozens of athletes slipped back into prejudice as soon as black teammates are out of sight, or out of hearing. They use privately the same cruel words that Jackie Robinson heard publicly.
Corporate America is no better, only more polite. Michael Jordan and David Robinson and O.J. Simpson and Bo Jackson, men so much larger than life, have been able to transcend color and earn millions for endorsements, but below the superstar level, white athletes have an unmistakable edge, have first call on commercials and appearances and exposure.
It is ludicrous, the infinitesimally low percentage of black managers and coaches and executives in professional and collegiate sports. They don’t have “the necessities,” Alex Campanis, a Los Angles Dodgers executive, once blurted out on network television, clumsily sharing “a truth”, as he, and many other people in sports, perceived it. What necessities? Yogi Berra’s IQ? Whitey Herzog’s charm? They both managed first-place teams in both big leagues; so much for necessities. There are plenty of black Berras and black Whiteys, and smarter and more charming blacks - I thought Willie Davis, the former Green Bay Packer, a Hall of Fame defensive end, an enormously successful businessman and civic leader, a warm and thoughtful man, would have been a perfect commissioner of the National Football League; he got only token consideration – but they are so often overlooked, and more often snubbed.
I share the guilt. When I was editor of a sports magazine, I was frequently scolded by my employer for putting too many black athletes on the cover. I was told that white athletes sell more magazines, and I cycled and recycled Joe Namath and Tom Seaver and Dave DeBusschere and Pete Rose ("I’ve been on the cover of Sport three times,” Rose once cracked at a luncheon I hosted, "That's not bad for a white guy.") I've collaborated on books with many athletes Namath, Seaver, DeBusschere, Bill Freehan, Frank Beard, Jerry Kramer and Bo Jackson - and only one was black. I accepted the publishing belief, - nourished by an Ali autobiography that was a commercial disaster, that blacks did not buy books. When the Bo Jackson book became the best-selling sports autobiography ever, far outgrossing all my other works, that belief was sternly tested. Still, when I write and narrate feature stories for television, I realize, with a twinge, that I lean heavily upon white athletes as subjects and as interviewees. They certainly take up a larger portion of the screen than they do of the playing field.
Fans can be as harsh as they ever were. Once, I was on a plane to Birmingham, Ala. to visit Bo Jackson's home, and a passenger across the aisle, watching me flip through Jackson clippings, leaned over and said, “You know why they called him ‘Bo?’” Before I could answer, he said “ Cause they didn’t know how to spell ‘Bob’.”
I don’t know why I was stunned.
Sports could be forgiven its flaws, at least some of them, if it had compensating strengths, if it taught the heroic lessons that Homer once sang of, if it emphasized positive vales, if it truly rewarded perseverance and teamwork and similar virtues.
But these days sports preaches greed above all else. Bad enough that the status of all professional athletes is determined, to a considerable extent, by their income; in golf, pretense is stripped away and the players are ranked, officially, by their earnings. Worse, the sports world also glamorizes hypocrisy and deception and corruption.
Big–time college athletic programs are a disgrace. In almost all of the major schools, the question isn’t: Do the athletic departments cheat? It’s: How baldy do they cheat? Even the squeaky clean programs, the Dukes, and the Stanfords and the Notre Dames, the schools that offer prestige and power and traditions instead of cash and cars (low monthly payments? Would you believe zero?), do not treat the so-called student athletes the way they treat nonathletes. And the Ivy League, which preaches purity, does not always practice it. Any good Ivy League football player, and there are more than a few every year, who does not have summer job on Wall street paying an inflated salary is either remarkably passive or independently wealth.
Colleges with winning big-time football and basketball programs are making millions of dollars a year, and their coaches, with their camps and their clinics and their TV shows, are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars – all of that money dependent on the skills and moods of agile and powerful teenagers. To keep all those dollars coming in, virtually all colleges and coaches to some extent are willing to lie or distort or bribe or glorify, to stretch rules and ignore academic deficiencies, to pamper the more gifted athletes beyond belief. (Paul Hornung, after whom the Golden Dame at Notre Dame, his alma mater, may have been named, once said his own epitaph should be: “He went through life on scholarship.")
Too many college football and players are treated, to use the title of a book one of them wrote, like "meat on the hoof” but surely black athletes are the most abused, fed visions of professional sports career that will never materialize, steered away from academic courses that might challenge or inspire them, presented with scholarships to nowhere, free room, free board, free tuition, but not free thought. A few years ago I visited a very talented college football player, a likable young man, whose dormitory room was outfitted with the latest in stereo equipment and Nike posters. There wasn't a book in his student-athlete room, not one. He was lucky. He made it to the National Football League. He was one of the rare ones.
In all this gloom there are glimmers of hope. In high schools and colleges and even in international competition, not all sports corrupt and demean. A pure amateur may be as rare as a whooping crane, but in such college sports as lacrosse (Princeton, of all schools, upset Syracuse for the national championship a few months ago) and field hockey (a dominion dominated by Old Dominion), to name two, sports which hold out little promise of fame or financial reward, men and women still can have fun, still can build character and self-confidence. In the Olympics, I love to wander among the winter biathletes, who couple such contradictory disciplines as shooting and skiing, and the summer pentathletes, who blend riding, shooting, fencing, swimming and running, the pursuits of an ancient courier. Their names are unknown outside the smallest circles, and their per diems are minimal, but their interests often seem to be as varied as their skills. "Our worlds are not confined by ski wax," as a biathlete once told me.
I still find individual athletes who lift my spirits: Bonny Warner, America's best female luger in the 1980s, a graduate of Stanford, a reformed sportscaster, now a United Airlines pilot; Jim Abbott, one of the few baseball players ever to leap straight from college to the major leagues, a man who expects neither sympathy nor attention for the fact that he was born with only one hand, yet a man who quietly offers time and hope and encouragement to children with physical differences; Mike Reid, first an All-American football player, then an All-Pro tackle, from Altoona, Pa., a town in which it is easy to play football but takes courage to play piano, now a Grammy Award-winning songwriter and singer of sensitive ballads.
In all sports, I find stars with the ultimate saving grace, the ability to laugh at themselves; stars who rose to great wealth from the meanest streets without forgetting their roots; stars whose intellect contradicts athletic stereotypes; stars whose values are the decent traditional ones that start with family and loyalty. "When I was growing up," Bo Jackson recalled, "my mom cleaned people's houses during the day and cleaned a motel at night. She also raised ten children by herself. And people try to tell me that playing two sports is hard." Bo Jackson's wife is a counseling psychologist; their three children are his most prized trophies.
Some athletes are better than ever. Even off the field. When I was a graduate student at Columbia, the school had a very good basketball team. The best player on the team became a degenerate gambler, a convicted criminal. The second-best player became president of the Ford Foundation. I still see both of them, on infrequent occasion, and they remind me of the potential of sports, and the peril. Sports can inspire greatness, but, too often these days, it inspires only greed.
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