Sports in America Page 19

  At 260 pounds, heavier than any of the men competing, Villapiano failed, with an enormous shout. Franco Harris tried, and he failed too. Then O. J., smallest of the trio, gave it a try, and with a superhuman effort he pushed the bar over his head. The crowd exploded with enthusiasm, and O. J. gave a little victory dance which pleased them even more.

  ‘That man’s so charming he could be our first black President,’ a white woman behind me said. ‘I’d vote for him.’

  In the end O. J. won this semi-final, and in February he went on to cop the final, too, with total winnings of $44,550. What with his television contracts, his high pay from Buffalo and his advertising income, he was undoubtedly the richest man in the competition. Bob Seagren, who could have used the money, said, ‘And he doesn’t even need the prize!’ But all agreed that here was a true superstar.

  However, I had not come to Florida to see these men. At the invitation of the Ladies Home Journal, which was publishing some excerpts from a book I had written, I was there to watch the women superstars in their finals.

  What a compelling group of twelve young women they were. Billie Jean King was there but was not competing; she was working as a broadcaster for Roone Arledge. Dianne Holum had won a gold medal in the Olympics at Japan, for speed skating; Wyomia Tyus, the only black among the women, had raced to gold medals at both the Tokyo and Mexico City Olympics. She had an irreverent wit, and when we invited her to dinner one night she said she’d be glad to join us; however, when she heard the name of the restaurant, the Plantation, she told me, ‘I’d be afraid to go. They might not let me off.’ Air Force Captain Micki King had also won an Olympic gold medal for divine at Munich.

  Three of the women were so good-looking they were known as the Cover Girls. Paula Sperber, the bowler, was a rowdy miniskirted hell-raiser who appeared for the bicycle race mounted on a motorcycle, with which she tore up the track. Kiki Cutter, the skier, might have been the best athlete, pound for pound, of the whole excursion, men or women. And little Cathy Rigby, under five feet tall and with a ravishing charm, was everybody’s sweetheart. As gentle as she looked, she delighted her fans with the easy way she handled herself and with her approachability.

  My favorite was a striking girl from Hawaii, Laura Ching, the surfer. Although Laura was a saucy kid who attracted many admirers during the three-day meet, it was her father who reminded me of some happy days I had spent years ago. At the height of the wrestling craze surrounding Gorgeous George, an Englishman visiting in the United States found an opportunity to serve as one of the villains of that theatrical sport. He was known as Lord Blears, and later Lord Tally-Ho, and when I saw him wrestle in Trenton one night, the announcer claimed that he was ‘the third son of the Duke of Marlborough, disinherited for dynastic reasons.’

  He was a marvelous plug-ugly who invented the ploy of having his manager announce that it would be improper for Lord Blears, ‘scion of one of the greatest noble families of England,’ to enter the ring until it had been fumigated and perfumed to take away the odors of the unpleasant types who had been wrestling in the preliminaries. The noble lord’s valet would then climb into the ring and with a huge atomizer spray the joint with cheap perfume, being sure that an ample supply landed on the front-row patrons so they could smell it for themselves.

  When Blears did climb into the ring—opera cape, medals, sash—he proved himself to be a real monster whom everyone could hate. I remember one night when he was performing with Farmer Burns, who appeared in tattered overalls, acquired, the announcer said, ‘from honest toil on his father’s wheat fields in Iowa.’ For thirty minutes Lord Blears knocked the stuffing out of the honest farmer, gouging, kicking, brutalizing and leaping feet-first upon the fallen man. The crowd was in a frenzy, with the referee apparently unable to see any of the cruel things Lord Blears was doing. Of course, in the thunderous finale the honest farmer turned the tables and smashed the noble lord for a fall.

  It was delightful nonsense, and Lord Blears was one of the best. Now, as I was talking with Laura Ching in the Florida sunlight, up to her comes this echo of the past, same pigeon-toed walk, same huge face, same delightful sense of the ridiculous. It was Lord Blears, now retired and married to a woman from Hawaii—and Laura Ching was his daughter.

  The women’s championship was decided in an anticlimactic way. A fine athlete named Mary Jo Peppler, volleyball expert from Texas with a most handsome face, had pulled several surprising wins, and had built up a good score. However, she was not competing in the last event, the obstacle course, and had to bite her fingernails in the crowd as she watched her chief rival Karen Logan, a tall, willowy basketball player, run the obstacles. If Karen placed fourth or better, her points would surpass Mary Jo’s. If Karen stumbled in this event, which she ought to win, Mary Jo would slip into the winner’s circle.

  Karen ran the course beautifully and clinched the championship, but before the announcement could be made, whistles started blowing. An eagle-eyed judge had detected that on the bars, a dozen iron bars ten feet in the air, Karen had merely flicked the last bar instead of gripping it. The penalty for this was enough to deprive her of a place among the scorers, so the championship, along with $34,100, went to Mary Jo Peppler. For a momentary lapse covering one-fiftieth of a second, Karen had lost first place and a whole bundle of money. Her share was $13,800, and like a good sport, she grinned.

  But the point I want to make about these championships is a comparison between the men and the women, because the results may be startling.

  In five of the ten events, the men’s and the women’s contests were identical; they used the same facilities, over the same distances and with the same equipment: tennis, rowing, swimming, bowling and obstacle course. In three others they used the same facilities but at different distances: 60-yard dash for women, 100-yard dash for men; quarter-mile run for women, half-mile for men; half-mile bike race for women, mile for men. In two events the tests were quite different: basketball shooting for women, weight-lifting for men; softball throw for women, hitting a thrown ball for men.

  The results of the five identical events surprised me. Women actually won bowling and swimming, the results were there to see. In the judgment of everyone they also won the tennis; although comparable scores meant nothing, it was quite obvious that the top three women could have defeated any of the men. They did about as well over the obstacle course, and in rowboat rowing only the winning man had a time as good as the three top women.

  In the other three events, while it looked as if the top one or two men could have beaten the best women, had the races been of equal length, it was also quite obvious that the top two or three women could easily have beaten the last five or six men.

  Now I do not just meant that in the three sports the women won they did well, or that they could have competed without embarrassment. I mean they beat the men outright. They won the bowling. They won the swimming. They won the tennis.

  I overheard Micki King and Kiki Cutter discussing this. Kiki made the good point that when a boy shows signs of becoming an athlete he is channeled into one sport, and hopefully becomes a champion in it, whereas the girl who has athletic ability becomes known as a tomboy and is expected to compete in everything. Kiki said, ‘If we’d had skiing, the girls would beat the men too, and badminton and a lot of other casual things … like ice-skating, maybe. We’d beat them at that too.’

  Captain King said, ‘Girl athletes are more adventurous. Thev have to be. The best man in his field should always defeat the best woman. But like you saw, when neither the man nor the woman is an expert, the fourth and fifth women will usually be much better than the fourth and fifth men.’

  The most dramatic moment in the whole men’s-women’s competition came, surprisingly, in the softball throw for women. Some of the women did rather well, ‘better than I could do,’ some of the men athletes confessed. But then Mary Jo Peppler stepped to the line, drew her left arm back, ran a few steps, and whipped the cumbersome ball 222 feet on a bee
line.

  The men gasped. They doubted that any one of them could have bettered that astonishing toss. It was better than some big-league outfielders could do, a beautiful combination of grace and skill. ‘I’m gonna speak to her with more respect,’ one of the men told me.

  But in our enthusiasm for what women competing in collateral fields can accomplish, we must not forget that when a man and a woman both train for the same specialty and meet head to head, the man has an enormous advantage. In the 1972 Munich Olympics no top mark made by a woman in track and field was as good as the mark made by the boy who finished tenth in the 1972 United States high school championship track meet!

  I am now ready to disclose how I would apportion an athletic department budget of $3,900,000 if I were the powerful president of a state university in which men and women were enrolled in equal numbers.

  I assume that before distribution is made I will have convinced my board of regents, my student body and especially the newspapers and television stations covering university activities that my three criteria are sound. If I could do that, I would like to divide my total athletic budget: Fun, 30 percent; Health, 30 percent; Public Entertainment, 40 percent. Even though I would not personally believe that entertainment ought to get more than the other two, I would give it more to keep my state legislature happy. The members are apt to be football nuts and to judge the efficiency of the university by the number of football wins and losses.

  If the fun and health allocations were divided as I suggested earlier—54 percent men, 46 percent women—the former would receive $2,100,000 and the latter $1,800,000.

  However, when the factor of public entertainment is cranked in, and when funds specifically designated for men are removed from the general pot, the fairest allocation I could reach would be as follows:

  ALLOCATION OF A $3,900,000 ATHLETIC BUDGET FOR A STATE UNIVERSITY WITH A FIFTY-FIFTY DISTRIBUTION OF MEN-WOMEN

  Some notes are necessary. In this university each student pays $22 a semester and receives one free ticket to all home football and basketball games. (At Nebraska the six football tickets can be sold to alumni for $20 each; at Amherst they can’t be given away.) This $22 fee is high, but the university justifies it because the stadium debt must be paid off. I find it scandalous that in many universities, women students pay a heavy athletic fee, in the guise of a general student-activity fee, almost all of which goes to pay for men’s sports. This is indefensible, and student councils ought to correct it. I divide my student fees down the middle, which gives the women their fair share.

  It is almost impossible to determine what state funds are siphoned into men’s sports. Legislatures tend to grant a university a blanket sum, the division of which is handled under the table. In our fictional state, because the university has had big-time winners for years, the legislature is bountiful and encourages a little skulduggery. The money belongs to a total physical education program and should perhaps be divided fifty-fifty, but as I argued earlier, men’s games do require heavier and more expensive equipment than women’s, and I find no embarrassment in the suggested allocation.

  Box-office receipts are earned exclusively by men’s sports, and most male alumni feel that they should be spent solely on men’s programs. My subtraction of $100,000 will be fiercely contested by male alumni, who might start a movement to fire me. My argument that it is the university as a whole that earns the gate receipts will carry no weight whatever with them, nor with the male coaches.

  Television income can be substantial if you have a winning football team. My team appeared on national television twice and went to one of the well-paying bowl games. Here again the male complement of the university insists that whatever a men’s team earns belongs to the men’s sporting program, and not a penny should go to women. Whenever I have tried out this proposed table of allocation on university friends, some of the men have become apoplectic over the $65,000 I have awarded the women. ‘What in hell did they do to earn it?’ was a frequent question. One Alabama fan was quite profane: ‘I’d like to see anyone take money like that away from Bear Bryant! Makes your stomach turn over.’ When I argued that perhaps the good name of the university as a whole had accounted for at least part of the television income, a male coach stopped me with an unanswerable question: ‘How long do you suppose we’d get on television if we didn’t field a winning team?’

  However, if I had tried to take one penny from the Boosters’ Club contribution, I’d have been crucified. Many big-time teams have achieved such a charisma that alumni and businessmen in the state are eager to contribute $500 or $1,000 each year to provide scholarships, give the coaches pourboires, and generally help buy a better team. In a really first-class operation, the contributions should total about $800,000 a year—for which payments the donors get the right to buy four seats at the fifty-yard line at regular box-office prices—but my university got started late. It will soon catch up. This money is for football players, and God help the administrator who tried to spend any of it on women.

  The car pool is a unique feature of big-time football programs. Car dealers in the state deem it a privilege to lend their university each year a fleet of new automobiles to be used by the coaches in recruiting, traveling to make speeches, and for the welfare of the team. At my university the male coaches get a total of thirty-three new cars a year; at the end of the year young men throughout the state are eager to buy these cars so that they can boast, ‘I own the car that Coach Taggart used to drive.’

  The Beef Boys exist in only certain universities. At mine they are a major factor in helping keep down the expense of running a training table for the athletes. Farmers and ranchers take pride in being allowed to contribute fatted steers to the football team; the animals are slaughtered and fed to the football players. The donors can sit in the stands and tell their friends that the linemen are rugged this year because ‘they’ve been fattened up on my steers.’ I cannot imagine a self-respecting rancher who would contribute one of his prize steers to be eaten by women athletes.

  The gross differential, $2,989,000 for men and only $911,000 for women (77 percent–23 percent) may seem unfair to the detached reader, but no educational institution in America of which I am cognizant comes even close to that degree of equity. And any administration who tried to achieve even such limited parity would probably be fired.

  I commend this budget. It seems fair all around. Funds earmarked for the first two criteria, fun and health, have been equably allocated, given current circumstances, and the money intended for male-dominated public entertainment has been protected, except for $100,000 of gate receipts and $65,000 of television money, which has been subtracted as a kind of fee for using the university’s good name.

  But this idealistic budget, which could not be installed at any real university, proves how far women still have to go in getting a fair share of the athletic dollar.

  One final aspect of women in sports baffles me and I would be prudent, perhaps, to avoid it, but it impinges so sharply on the general problem that I must speak.

  I cannot comprehend why parents, and particularly mothers, prefer their daughters to be cheerleaders and pompon girls rather than athletes. This relatively recent development is a perversion of the human instinct for play and makes of a young girl a blatant sex object rather than a human being in her own right. I am appalled when I find that the Athletic Institute of Chicago offers no less than ten motion picture films instructing girls in the various exotic splits and pirouettes required by the first-class pompon unit. The films sell for twenty dollars each.

  I hope the reader will go back to read the paragraph from the Pop Warner instructions in which male members of teams are encouraged to enroll their little sisters in cheerleader units; some of the most doleful performances I have seen in sports have been rows of eight-year-old girls, festooned like dance-hall girls of a century ago, waving their pompons and leading cheers and shivering in undress on cold, dark nights while their little brothers played football
.

  I have conducted several discussions of this phenomenon with parents, and have been enlightened, primarily by a charming woman from South Carolina who explained, ‘There is hardly a real mother in this nation who would not prefer to see her daughter dressed in a cute outfit, attracting boys and being voted the most popular girl in her class and maybe marrying a football star after she graduates, rather than growing big muscles and looking like a man in some sport.’

  A woman from Texas, whose daughter was a member of one of those famous girl drill teams west of Dallas, told me, ‘You Yankees will never understand. This is the south’s twentieth-century re-creation of ante-bellum days, when girls were supposed to be fluffy and frilly. Of course they were sex objects, then and now, and that’s not a bad thing to be.’

  The cheerleader bit, stressing sex and glamour, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from what I have been encouraging in this chapter. I want our society to produce real women concerned with their own activities rather than giddy cheerleaders whose lives revolve around what the boys do in football. But I fear that in this contest the cheerleaders are bound to win, and the other night I found myself arguing, ‘Well, twenty years from now, when we have a new society and a new type of girl, they’ll be interested in their health and their physical fitness rather than cute miniskirts.’

  And the woman from South Carolina warned, ‘Don’t hold your breath till that happens.’ But when the abler spokes-women for Women’s Lib protest the social silliness of the cheerleader syndrome, I cheer.

  SIX

  Sports and Upward Escalation