• John Paisios, a psychologist, explained why his consulting firm decided to specialize in helping professional athletes adjust to adult life after their playing days were over: ‘They find that they have been living through a period of enforced adolescence. For years they are both pampered and bossed like rich little children. Consequently, they often find it difficult to make decisions about themselves, because they really don’t know who they are. This comes down especially hard on the nameless guy in the line when he reaches the twilight of his career.’
• Statistics were released showing that the average career of a professional football player is three years, which means two things: they retire before thirty; and the majority of college seniors who are chosen in the NFL draft each winter, to the accompaniment of approving headlines in local papers, will not last in the big time long enough to earn a pension.
Depressed by such thoughts, I read again that magnificent summary of the problem written years ago by the English poet A. E. Housman in his collection A Shropshire Lad. Unquestionably the finest poem ever written about sports, better than Homer’s lines on Ajax or John Updike’s well-regarded poem ‘Ex-Basketball Player,’ it tells of a village athlete who won a great championship and then died prematurely. I have always thought that the opening stanza, which I have recited to myself through the years, is the best evocation I know of sports:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Now those who carried him through the town in that early triumph bear his casket shoulder-high, and the poet makes this wry observation:
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
And then comes the other stanza that I have recited to myself so often. The lines are heartbreaking in their simplicity and truth, the epitome of all the stories I have mentioned and the play:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
A few years ago an American writer produced a work of the same philosophical gravity as Housman’s threnody. Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer is more than a book about athletes—in this case the Brooklyn Dodgers of their heroic years—it is also a work of high purpose and poetic accomplishment. It has been called the finest American book on sports, for it is both a re-creation of a heroic age and a tragic statement about the young men who provided the heroism. I commend it without qualification; spectators will find their appreciation of sport intensified; participants will be forced to reconsider their values.
What Kahn has done in this book is recollect what it was like to be an avid Dodger fan in the 1950s and then, by a miraculous stroke of luck, to become a baseball writer for the New York Herald Tribune at twenty-four, covering his heroes during some of their finest campaigns. But when he has done this, and done it very well with a superior prose style, he moves his book onto an entirely different emotional level by seeking out, almost twenty years later, his former heroes to see how they have adjusted to their post-heroic years. He tells, in singing paragraphs filled with emotional overtones, what happens to the boys of summer when they are forced to become the men of winter.
Perhaps by accident, perhaps because Kahn intended it that way, the team he chose to write about provided an unusual amount of drama, both in summer and winter. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier; then watched his son stagger into confusion and tragedy; then died prematurely. Roy Campanella played it more cool; his accusers said he Uncle Tommed it; we know for certain that he made himself into one of our greatest catchers, then jammed a rented automobile into a telephone pole, to spend the rest of his life immobilized in a wheelchair. Carl Furillo was one of the most daring outfielders baseball has produced; Kahn finds him an embittered right-wing hard-hat. Billy Cox was a fabled glove; Kahn discovers him serving beer in an American Legion bar.
It is a tender account of how men play games for a brief season, then spend the remainder of their lives listening as strangers drop by their tables to tell them, ‘I saw you once …’ I am reminded of that noble painting by Nicholas Poussin in the Louvre in which the shepherds try to decipher the lines on an ancient tomb left standing in Arcady; there had been days of grandeur, of this there could be no doubt, but now the memorial cannot even be deciphered.
This is the literary tradition in America regarding sports, and in the years ahead each of us will read a dozen new accounts of young studs who tore the town apart in high school and made love to all the pretty girls, went on to college with bundles of illegal money and all the pretty girls, graduated into the professionals with absolutely oodles of money and even more pretty girls, and then, at the age of thirty-two, watched in dismay as the world crumbled and they lost their money, and were deserted by the pretty girls, and ended their lives in despair.
But at this low point I began to look soberly at the hard evidence about me. I have known some sixty major athletes moderately well. The earliest was Domingo Ortega, the Spanish bullfighter who revolutionized his art and performed at the head of his profession for an unheard-of thirty years. The most recent was Taiho, a Japanese sumo wrestler who dominated his sport as no other contemporary athlete has ever dominated his. Taiho’s incredible record would have been equaled if Babe Ruth had hit ninety home runs in one year, or Jim Brown had piled up four thousand yards in a single season. In between I have known racing-car drivers, tennis players, deep-sea divers, soccer players and champions in the popular American sports.
And of these sixty athletes, not one has conformed to the myth. Without exception, mine knew considerable fame before the age of thirty and they have conducted themselves with modest distinction after the age of forty. Let’s look at the performance of the seven men I mentioned earlier.
Robin Roberts, whom I once described as my ideal athlete because of the way he reared back and slammed in his high hard one and to hell with the consequences, left baseball with an honorable chain of records, and then became a Philadelphia businessman with a delightful, outspoken wife and four sons. He made himself into a civic leader, a patron of the zoological gardens, a member of the board running a distinguished private school, and a coach of young boys.
Hal Greer, graduate of a small college in West Virginia, earned a great deal of money in basketball and saved much of it. After a career longer than the average—because he kept in such keen physical shape—he tried vainly to become a coach, at which I judge he would have been superior, and then resumed private life with dignity and success.
Chuck Bednarik, the man who walks like a gorilla, after compiling records in every aspect of his sport, also tried unsuccessfully to land a job as a coach, or a front-office man, or a publicity hand, or, as he says, ‘damned near anything in football’—but had to acknowledge that it wasn’t going to happen, and so became a very successful salesman for a company selling concrete. With an unusually beautiful wife and a batch of well-behaved kids, he has adjusted to adult life as well as most of my friends and discharges his aggressions easily by cursing publicly any one connected with the Philadelphia Eagles. ‘I gave them a championship and they gave me nothin’,’ he growls, and he is not exaggerating, for in the waning moments of the 1960 title game with Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers, Bednarik pulled a play which saved the championship for Philadelphia. His team was ahead, 17–13, but Green Bay had the ball and quarterback Bart Starr was masterminding a drive which seemed certain to produce the game-winning touchdown. But on what should have been the next-to-last play of the game, with Jim Taylor, the Green Bay fullback, almost free, Bednarik slammed him to the ground with a ferocious tackle, and then so twined his arms and legs about the fallen man that the referee could not untangle them
before the clock ran out. Chuck says, ‘If I’d allowed him to get up, and they’d a had one more play, and with the way Starr was throwin’ that ball, Green Bay woulda’ won for sure. So Taylor kept tryin’ to bite at my hands and was screamin’, “Get offen me, you slob!” But I kept my stranglehold, and by the time the referee untangled us the whistle had blown endin’ the game and we had the championship.’ Of course he is peeved that he has been unable to find a job in football. Of course a writer could legitimately depict him as a failure who went around trying to relive his days of glamour. But that would not be the whole truth. Bednarik is a giant with giant resentments but also with a giant capacity to live a good life. ‘I never go into a man’s office talkin’ football. I go there to sell him concrete. Now, if when the deal’s done he wants to talk about my days at Penn or with the Eagles, be my guest.’
In some ways Ham Place, the cartoonist, is the most remarkable athlete of the lot. Now in his seventies, he is still a championship tennis player, a man almost impossible to defeat. Not long ago the number one and number two players from a Big Ten school were vacationing in our area and wanted a workout to keep their game in shape; they felt they had a good chance of landing the Big Ten championship. Friends told them that there was a fellow who had a court and some good shots, so they called Ham and he called me. When the collegians saw us they sort of gasped; they needed a slambang workout and here were two old ducks. ‘Should we split up?’ they asked solicitously, but Ham said, ‘No, we’ll try to give you a little competition.’ It’s always interesting to see a young man hit a tennis ball with all his might, only to have it come floating back. He tries to wallop it even harder, and again it comes back. On his third try there is a slight sign of desperation, and pretty soon you can see the look of bewilderment in his eye. We won the first set 6-3 and the second 6–2, solely because Ham Place, over seventy, has some of the trickiest, meanest shots in the game. He hits no ball without a plan for the next three probable shots, the last of which will be a put-away for him. Like the other men of whom I speak, he is happily married, with a son and a respected place in his community.
Pete Richards, the old-time professional footballer, is the most compact bundle of aggressions I have ever known. In college he won nine letters, and every game was Armageddon. On the Frankford Yellow Jackets he tore opponents to shreds, and after his playing days were over he operated in the retail business the same way. He retired a wealthy man with a fine family and a murderous determination to win at handball, or golf, or tennis.
Barney Berlinger is something special, a super-athlete now in his sixties. He was registered to enter Swarthmore the year following me, but his father wisely judged that he would have a better chance to graduate if he brushed up his math and English in a good prep school, so late in the summer Mr. Berlinger drove his son out to Mercersburg, where Dr. William Mann Irvine, the gruff headmaster, gave the father a lecture: ‘You can’t expect to come into a first-class school this late in the season and find a vacancy for your boy. Now you get out of here.’ But then Barney sidled into the office, six feet tall, handsomely proportioned, clear-eyed and Dr. Irvine asked, ‘Do you play football?’ and Barney nodded. ‘Well,’ the good doctor mused, and then a bright idea struck him. Mercersburg was track-crazy and usually the interscholastic champion. ‘Would a big fellow like you possibly know anything about track?’ Irvine asked, and Barney said, ‘I pole vault twelve-feet-six,’ a tremendous height for that time. Dr. Irvine leaped from his chair with the good news: ‘Son, we just found a vacancy.’ The following year at the national interscholastic championships Barney, who could also run, jump and shot-put, scored more points by himself than the nearest competing team. He continued as an outstanding athlete at Penn and competed in the 1928 Olympics under the legendary coach Lawson Robertson, who said glumly as Finland and Sweden won the gold medals, ‘Barney, there’s two kinds of runners, human beings and Scandinavians.’
Barney went hunting one day with a friend and remembers remonstrating against the man’s taking along a sixteen-year-old boy who hadn’t handled a gun too often. ‘The man said, “My boy’s smart. He’ll get by all right,” but I was apprehensive, and for some reason I went back and put on a second vest, a leather one, and sure enough just a short while later I go into a swamp to flush some birds, the boy gets excited and fires a full blast right into the middle of my back. It knocked me into the water, and I remember thinking, “What a hell of a way to die! Shot in the back by a kid! And when I knew it was going to happen.” Well, I fought against passing out, but I could feel the blood gushing out of my back and my mouth and they rushed me into the hospital and the surgeon said, “That leather vest saved your life. It’s incredible you could have taken such a blast and lived.” ’ The medics cut twenty-five lead pellets out of his back, but by then it was so chopped up they decided to leave the other 210 in place along his backbone and in his lungs. So now when we play tennis, Barney sometimes has to twist his back until the score of lead pellets pressing on his backbone readjust themselves and relieve the pressure on his nerves.
Don Meredith is a special case. One of the most charismatic football players, he came from a small Texas high school, made all-American at SMU and starred as the controversial quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. From there he went to ABC-TV, where he attained fame as the honest country humorist contrasted to the snide city-slicker Howard Cosell. From there he moved up, he says, to NBC and a career in both TV and the movies. At Meredith’s departure from the Monday night phantasmagoria, Mr. Cosell widely reported that the program would not be hurt by his absence, and even intimated that he, Cosell, was pleased that he would no longer have to cover for the Texas hillbilly, but when Meredith quit, he left a conspicuous hole and his absence damaged the program considerably. For his retirement he purchased an old farm not far from where I live. The nearest settlement is the two-house village of Elephant, and he is now known as the squire of that community. If he conforms to the prototype of the American sporting myth, the delayed adolescent who falls from fame and broods about it, he has masked his character well. He seems to me a well-adjusted, happily married, irreverent type who loves to kid himself and the pomposities of others. He handles himself well, is not on the dole, and gives every indication of being able to maintain his complex and satisfying adult life.
In some ways the most reassuring adjustment has been made by tall, red-headed Donald Budge. Long retired from active competition, and with a cellarful of silver trinkets to prove that at one time or another he held every major title, he coaches tennis at Tres Vidas in Acapulco during the winter and at a posh tennis camp along the Delaware River in summer. Married to a beautiful and rowdy girl who takes neither herself nor her famous husband overseriously, Budge adjusts easily to whatever situation he finds himself in, tells great stories on himself, keeps in top condition, and graces any party he attends. I once spent fourteen straight lunches and dinners with him and found him more interesting and relaxing at the end than at the beginning. The good part about Budge’s life is that he has been able to make his living in the sport he played with such distinction. We should all be so lucky.
I could continue in this manner, analyzing each of my sixty athletes, but their stories would become repetitious. As youths they knew extraordinary adulation. As relatively young men they had to surrender their places in the sun. Most of them married intelligent and beautiful women; each found himself a good job. They had children, most of whom have turned out well, and they filled places of significance in their society. Most reminisce about their golden days, and those who do not are forced to do so by strangers who love sports. Invariably, in my reasoned judgment, they have handled their adult lives well.
Of Umphlett’s three mythic characteristics—an anti-urban mind-set, an inability to deal with women, an infinitely prolonged adolescence—my men certainly escaped the last two. They dated campus queens, and sometimes jet-set dazzlers, but they married stable girls and stayed married to them. They remained youthful
in spirit and performance but could not be accused of clinging to a delayed adolescence; most of them attained a maturity far above average.
Umphlett’s first generalization, however, did apply to them. They did prefer country life, and many of them, like Don Meredith and Barney Berlinger, went to some pains to ensure themselves of homes in the country where they could hunt and ride horses and run their dogs. But whether this implies that they were afraid of the city’s duplicity and sought instead the safe simplicity of rural life, I cannot say. Surely, if preferring country life is a sign of deficiency, more than half our adult population would have to be so stigmatized.
One athlete epitomizes for me the rebuttal of the Umphlett thesis. He is not a friend, but during some research work I was doing in Florida, I kept hearing about him—an unusual man who typified so much of what I was then thinking about—that one morning I sought him out.
He was Billy Vessels, Oklahoma 1949–53, all-American running back, and winner of the 1952 Heisman Trophy. He was a rugged man, well groomed, smiling, in his forties. He spoke forcefully and with a precise command of English, but his charm lay in the unpretentiousness with which he recalled old days.
‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he told me as soon as he discerned the trend of my questioning. ‘On my last day in football I said to myself, “All this hoop-la never happened. It was a dream, and my real life starts tomorrow.” So I put it aside for twenty years. Absolutely. I didn’t get my job through football. And I didn’t meet my wife there. And I certainly didn’t find my life style in the locker room. I am not a child of football.’