Sports in America Read online

  Yet the critical analysis of school sports has been grossly neglected. Universities whose major moral positions have been dictated by sports have not encouraged their faculties to analyze the problems they create; it is easier to find a good study on the effect of the Flemish language on the children of Antwerp than to discover from articles in learned journals what really goes on in the sports department of the university in which the scholars reside.

  In discussing sports in American life, I shall try to apply specific definitions to seven recurring words, but they are of such common usage and appear in so many alternate meanings that I cannot guarantee consistency.

  Health. The general condition of the body with reference to soundness and vigor; freedom from disease or ailment. Many definitions of this word include mental health, but when I intend to indicate it, I shall say so.

  Physical fitness. The general state of one’s health; especially the ability to utilize one’s equipment, such as muscles, strength, dexterity, endurance, etc., at a satisfying level of proficiency.

  Sports. Of the three dozen definitions to be found in even a medium-sized dictionary, I restrict my usage to two: 1) an athletic activity requiring physical prowess or skill and usually of a competitive nature (baseball, football, tennis, Olympic field sports, fencing, boxing, etc.); 2) any form of activity carried on out of doors, often not of a competitive nature (hunting, fishing, horseback riding, sailing, birdwatching, etc.). Bridge, chess, backgammon, pinochle and the like are not sports.

  Game. Again one has a host of definitions to choose from. I restrict my usage to: a competitive activity involving skill, chance or athletic prowess on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, for their own enjoyment or for the entertainment of spectators. (Football, ice hockey, bridge, chess and their sort are games. Hunting, fishing, birdwatching and jogging are not.)

  Physical education. Systematic instruction in exercise, physical fitness, health practices and hygiene conducted as part of a school or college program.

  Athletics. A most imprecise word. I shall use it in the sense of ‘the organized program of games in a school, college or university.’ The athletic department supervises organized games, as contrasted to the physical education department, which supervises physical fitness, hygiene, etc.

  Lifetime sports. This recently coined phrase is a useful shorthand. It designates sports which can be engaged in at all ages (tennis, golf, bowling, birdwatching) as distinguished from those which cannot (football, pole vaulting, boxing).

  Every statement I make henceforth will be subject to three criteria, and I hope the reader will keep these in mind, because they will explain some of the arguments I advance.

  I. Sports should be fun for the participant. They should provide release from tensions, a joyful exuberance as the game progresses, and a discharge of those aggressions which, if kept bottled up, damage the human being. If sports become a drudgery, or a perverted competition, or a mere commercial enterprise, something is wrong. I believe that sports should be fun whether one is actively participating, like the ancient Greeks, or watching, like the ancient Romans. In either case they ought to provide a spiritual catharsis, which cannot occur if participants are overly dedicated to winning, or if spectators allow their partisanship to get out of hand. This criterion of fun will become especially important when we inspect Little Leagues in baseball and Pop Warner teams in football, but it will also apply at every other level of sports in America. If the game isn’t fun, it has lost at least half its justification, and there are many signs that in America some sports are no longer fun, to either the participant or the spectator.

  II. Sports should enhance the health of both the individual participant and the general society. I place this criterion at the apex of my value system. For me it takes precedence over everything else, and most of my conclusions will be incomprehensible if this goal is forgotten. I believe without question that the general health of the nation ought to be a concern of those who govern the nation, and the way in which we have allowed national health standards to decline in recent decades is a scandal for which schools, colleges and universities will one day be called to account. Specifically, a sport, to be effective, should place a demand upon big muscles, lung capacity, sweat glands, and particularly the heart. If it does not, much of the potential value of that sport is lost. Of course, prudent limits should be observed. Not many should engage in a marathon run of 26 miles 385 yards, because that requires too much exertion. But I cannot consider croquet a serious sport, because it requires none. A rigorous application of this criterion to all the sports we engage in will produce surprising results, and in a later chapter tables will be given showing that some of our most popular sports contribute little, whereas others of small reputation contribute much. For myself, I no longer have much interest in any sport that does not generate a vigorous sweat.

  III. Sports have an obligation to provide public entertainment. I am by nature a participant rather than a spectator, and my whole sympathy lies with the sandlot where boys are playing rather than the stadium where professionals are offering an exhibition. One might therefore expect me to be prejudiced against spectator sports, and I might have been had I not spent much of my adult life abroad, studying various cultures and countries. The more I learned, the more apparent it became that all societies in all periods of history have needed some kind of public entertainment, and it has usually been provided by sports.

  Ancient Greece had its Olympiad and Rome its Colosseum. In the most distant corners of Asia Minor, I saw amphitheaters constructed by these civilizations because the rulers knew that the general citizenry required some kind of public entertainment. In Mérida, in western Spain, I visited the enormous flat plain that had once been walled to a height of four feet and waterproofed so that when a river was led into the area a small lake resulted on which actual ships could engage in simulated naval battles. In Crete young men and women skillfully leaped on and off the backs of charging bulls, and I have always been impressed by the frequency with which games are mentioned in the Bible. Some of the most effective analogies of St. Paul were borrowed from the arena. Shakespeare, too, found examples in sports, and I have found only one society in which sports were not a functional part. The Hebrews of Biblical time held a low opinion of games and said so, but when they entered Greek and Roman society they became advocates, like their neighbors. The most dramatic example of a spectator sport I have ever witnessed occurred in the most primitive society I have known, one of the savage islands in the New Hebrides group. There the entire community gathered at the bottom of a cliff to watch admiringly as young men of the village climbed to the top of the cliff, and then to the top of a tall tree at the edge of the cliff. Posing there, the athlete would utter a defiant scream, then throw himself headfirst toward the rocks below, trusting that the vine rope attached to his heels would bring him up short just before he crashed onto the rocks. In all ages societies have looked to sports for entertainment, so that when the State of Alabama demands that its university provide first-class, big-time football, it is acting within a historical tradition, and when the State of Louisiana spends $163,000,000 to build a Superdome, it is aping only what Greece and Rome did ages ago. I am completely in favor of public sporting spectacles, for they fill a timeless need, but I am confused as to who should provide them and under what type of public sponsorship.

  While doing research for this book I sometimes outlined these three criteria to public groups. Frequently I was asked, ‘Why don’t you have one about sports building character?’ Originally I had that as my fourth criterion, but the more I considered it, and the more I weighed the evidence that has been forthcoming in recent years, the more doubtful I became as to its validity, and here we come to the nitty-gritty of this book.

  In favor of including character-building as one of the great contributions of sports is this kind of evidence: The Duke of Wellington has been quoted as having said, ‘The battle of Waterloo was won
on the playing fields of Eton.’ General MacArthur was lavish in his praise of West Point and its playing fields. The men who played for Vince Lombardi testified to the fact that he made them better men than they were when they joined his team. A thousand masters of ceremonies have introduced their local coaches as molders of character first and athletes second. Aging alumni, returning to their colleges, pay tribute first to long-dead coaches and much later to certain memorable professors. Hundreds of professional athletes have testified to the impact their high school coaches had on them. And I myself, a few pages back, stated that my character was formed in part by athletics.

  On the other hand, emerging evidence begins to erode the legend that participation in sports automatically builds character. The present Duke of Wellington has disclosed that within his family it has long been known that the famous duke never made his statement about the playing fields of Eton. That attractive quotation did not surface until forty-one years after the Battle of Waterloo, and then in the book of a Frenchman known for his ability to turn a neat phrase.

  I often thought about this during my navy service in World War II. I noticed that whenever an admiral had played on the football team at Annapolis, a great deal was made of the fact, and there were numerous stories to the effect that he had acquired his capacity for leadership and military strategy from playing football. The same was true, to an even greater degree, of generals who had played at West Point, and this impressed the public, as it did me.

  But then I began to look at the record, and many of the finest admirals and generals had never stepped on a football field, or a baseball field either. Some of the greatest had been primarily scholars, who had paid commendable attention to their bodies and who now even during the heat of war took care to get their daily exercise. Leadership and military brilliance, I discovered, had very little to do with football training. Some of the great leaders had played on teams; more had not. Capacity for leadership came principally from the fact that they were well-disciplined, intelligent men to begin with, and those who had happened to play football played it well, as now they fought well.

  I had also begun to suspect the legend that playing on a university football team, or basketball or baseball, created civic leaders. In company after company that I knew, the guiding man had played no organized games in college, although he was apt to play golf in his later years. I found little correlation between being a quarterback in college and a quarterback in life. Some college athletes graduated into good jobs and became absolutely topnotch human beings; but a larger number of topnotch leaders had never participated in organized college sports. And as every college graduate knows, a distressing number of college athletes failed to find themselves in adult life. For them the adulation of college athletics was a positive deterrent; it was an albatross which they could never shake off. For them football was not character-building; it was character-destroying.

  For some twenty years I kept these tentative suspicions to myself, insecure in my evidence and suspicious that I might be reasoning from inadequate data. Certainly, the whole popular legend was that athletics did build character, and it had done so for me. So I kept silent.

  And then, a few years ago, a slow but constant trickle of books and stories began to surface, calling into question the assumptions we had accepted automatically before. The intellectuals’ agitation of the 1960s, with their attack on all fronts against the establishment, made it inevitable that sports should be subjected to a more severe scrutiny, and the result was spectacular.

  I do not believe that anyone has the right to be doctrinaire on this question of character-building unless he has read at least some of the following books, most of which have appeared in paperback. He can reject them as sensational. He can deny their argument as prejudiced. He can inveigh against them as anti-American. And he can dismiss the individual authors as sensation mongers. But he cannot ignore the basic questions they raise.

  Paul Hoch. Rip Off the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite. A Canadian Marxist launches a frontal attack on almost every hallowed preconception of American sports. I know of no book which so totally rejects all the beliefs I sustained from my early experience. Always infuriating, sometimes unfair, grotesquely anti-capitalist, it is nevertheless a good book to read if you want the cobwebs blasted from your eyes.

  Harry Edwards. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. One of the first hard-nosed analyses of what the black athlete gains and loses when he becomes a part of big-time sports. Edwards, himself a black athlete, was bitterly criticized for having led the strike of black athletes at the Mexico City Olympics, but here he raises fundamental questions which destroy many illusions previously held by well-intentioned whites.

  Martin Ralbovsky. Destiny’s Darlings. A World Championship Little League Team Twenty Years Later. A carefully researched, compassionate portrait of the Schenectady Little League team which won the world championship at Williamsport in 1954. Vivid portraits of the players and coaches, then and now. In no sense scandalmongering, this book nevertheless raises important questions and indicates solutions.

  Dave Meggyesy. Out of Their League. A cynical attack on college football (Syracuse) and professional (St. Louis). Shows a superjock as he slowly wakens to the realities of big-time sports. An eye-opener whose theses have been disputed by critics who castigate Meggyesy as a no-talent ingrate.

  Robert Vare. Buckeye, a Study of Coach Woody Hayes and the Ohio State Football Machine. A good book to read regarding character-building and the problems attached to the vigorous recruiting of high school athletes.

  Gary Shaw. Meat on the Hoof. A shocking personal account of how high school stars are recruited into the University of Texas and then abused when they don’t make the first team and shamed into voluntarily surrendering their scholarships. Some critics have accused Shaw of being a crybaby who couldn’t make it, but the basic accusations have not yet been refuted. If you can read only one book of adverse criticism, read this one for an inside look at what ‘big-time football’ means.

  David Wolf. Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story. A sad, angry guided tour through the irresponsibility of big-time basketball. The conductor, Connie Hawkins, is a talented black college star who becomes a case history in exploitation, gambling, disenchantment and legal gymnastics. Anyone misty-eyed about the influence of a benign coach must read Chapter 15. Of course, if you do, you’ll read the rest of the book.

  Peter Gent. North Dallas Forty. A shocking fictional account of what life is supposed to be like when playing for the Dallas Cowboys. Gent, a football star at Michigan State and with the Cowboys, writes with an insider’s know-how, but his unrelieved emphasis on brutality, venality, drugs and sex sometimes seems unreal. My comment on finishing the book: ‘If they had that much sex that constantly, how did they have the energy to suit up for the Sunday game?’ A book for those who retain a schoolboy’s dedication to sports.

  Dan Jenkins. Semi-Tough. A rollicking, hilariously written novel about big-time football, less brutal in its approach than North Dallas Forty, but based on the same assumptions. Difficult reading for those who still believe that sports build character.

  I assure the reader that later on I shall be citing an equal number of books highly favorable to sports, but I believe that familiarity with some of the above books, or at least the tenor of their criticisms, is essential.

  If the militaristic type of leadership evidenced in the Little League book, in the biography of Woody Hayes and the study of football at the University of Texas is what sports idealize and sponsor, then our democracy is doomed. If the professional football players presented in the two novels epitomize the kinds of all-Americans graduated by Oklahoma, Notre Dame and Michigan, our civilization has progressed to a point that leaves us some thousand leagues behind the Roman Empire.

  As I was typing these doubts, and wondering if I was being fair, The New York Times carried this brief notice about New York City basketball, with no headline, as if the story were too ordinary t
o deserve comment:

  New York, February 7, 1975. Another Public Schools Athletic League basketball team has forfeited its spot in the playoffs. Brandeis High School, which gained a playoff spot when Franklin gave up all its victories, admitted yesterday that one of its players was in his fifth year in high school and was thus ineligible. Franklin’s forfeits had been for the same reason. This week, in addition to Franklin and Brandeis, Bayside forfeited two games and George Washington forfeited all its games.

  Thus in one week, four major high schools in one city admitted that they had been playing ineligible players, and the nature of that offense is such that at least some officials in each school must have known about it. But the lure of fielding a winning team is so great, and the rewards to any coaching staff so attractive, that outright cheating is condoned. A coach whose team goes 23–2 but who gets reprimanded for playing an ineligible player, or two or three, suffers a momentary rebuke, but he also gains long-lasting accolades for having produced a winner. And if such coaches are building character, I must not understand the meaning of that word.

  I am very doubtful that big-time sports, whether high school, college, university or professional, do much to alter or enhance the character of the young men who participate. Those who enter the system with strong characters formed at home and who fall under the guidance of a good coach emerge strengthened in their convictions. Later on I shall refer to several who have had this experience.

  But if the boy already has a weak character, and if he falls into the hands of an irresponsible coach, the effect of sports can be disastrous, and he may well wind up a weaker person than when he began. I know of many such and will be referring to a few.

  Three conclusions have been offered to this problem-Heywood Hale Broun, who has written much in this field, has said, ‘Sports do not build character. They reveal it.’ Darrell Royal, of Texas, phrased it this way: ‘Football doesn’t build character. It eliminates the weak ones.’ And a comedian has said, ‘Sport develops not character, but characters.’ A sentimentalist, remembering only the best, can be forgiven if he argues that sports do build character. The most I will concede is that a balance is reached, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes offsetting the savagery, the drugs, the broken contracts, the chicanery and the awful abuses in recruiting high school athletes. The literature on this subject is ably summarized in Charles R. Kniker’s ‘The Values of Athletics in Schools: A Continuing Debate,’ in Phi Delta Kappan, October 1974.