One other official has been added, this one not in uniform and not listed in the program. He is the television network man, often wearing an iridescent orange vest, who instructs the real officials when arbitrary time-outs are to be called for advertisements. It is his job to see that the game is halted often enough to enable the network to unreel its commercials. Normally, he creates no problem, for the orderly flow of a football game presents numerous normal opportunities: after a punt, after a recovered fumble, after a score, at the two-minute warning. Interruptions like these affect the progress of the game in no way.
But tradition requires fourteen such time-outs in a game, 3–4–3–4 by quarters, and if toward the end of a half they have not come normally, it is the job of the network man to impose them. He signals the referee that he is hurting, and it is up to the official to find an excuse for a break. That’s when the announcer says, ‘Well, a time-out on the field, and now a word from the sponsor.’ No reason is given for the break; the rule is that it must not impede the normal momentum of the game.
But I saw a game at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia in which the hometown Eagles were holding on by their finger-nails to a 24–20 lead late in the game. The New York Jets kicked a field goal, making it 24–23, then kicked off to the Eagles, who got the ball deep in their own territory, with 3:35 to kill.
Prudently, they started running plays that used up a lot of clock, and the Jets could do nothing about this, because they had no time-outs left. But at this point the television man in the orange vest started signaling frantically that he had three more commercials to squeeze in. His arm-waving reminded the referee that the network was entitled to one more time-out, so in the midst of the Eagle defensive maneuvering, the referee called an arbitrary time-out, killing the clock, penalizing the Eagles in their attempt to use up time, and conferring a huge advantage on the Jets.
This was an indefensible interruption and it could have caused the Eagles to lose, except that their fired-up defense did manage to stifle the last Jet effort. This kind of intrusion ought not be permitted.
The second intrusion occurred during the summer of 1974. Notre Dame was scheduled to play Georgia Tech on Saturday afternoon, November 9. ABC found that it could persuade the two schools to move the game up to Monday, September 9, and play it at night, the network would be able to broadcast the game to the nation at the opening gun of the fall season, to the delight of fans and the considerable enrichment of the two schools. The change was quickly agreed upon, and while such supine surrender to TV caused adverse comment, the more mature reaction was that of Bear Bryant, who growled, ‘We think TV exposure is so important to our program and so important to this university that we will schedule ourselves to fit the medium. I’ll play at midnight if that’s what TV wants.’
I can’t decide what I think about this case, the two sides of my nature being in conflict. As a sports purist, I don’t like the idea of a university’s allowing itself to be pushed around by television executives who are in the business of selling advertising; but as a citizen who has had to spend a good deal of his spare time trying to raise money for good causes, I shudder to think of any worthy institution’s kicking away $200,000 in defense of a questionable virtue. Rescheduling a Notre Dame game far in advance is not the same as refusing to reschedule a World Series game when the sleep of the players is sacrificed to a commercial schedule.
The third interference came in April 1974. The New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics had faced grueling competition in the first round of the NBA play-offs, Boston requiring six tough games to eliminate Buffalo, New York seven to down Baltimore. Yet as soon as those games were over, CBS ordered New York and Boston to start immediately the next round, so as to catch the big Sunday audience. Bill Bradley, rarely one to complain, had to protest: ‘You’d think the owners would be too tired from watching to start the next round only thirty-six hours from now. But I guess not.’ Boston annihilated the weary Knicks, 113–88, and Phil Jackson of the losers pointed out: ‘If television didn’t run the league, it would have been a different game. Especially when you have two teams like these, both with players over thirty coming from tough series that ended Friday.’
The fourth case was a shocker. On December 19, 1975, the Blue-Gray College All-Star Game was played in Montgomery, Alabama. The Miz-Lou Television Network had contracted with numerous stations throughout the country to provide a closely timed three-hour package, and when confusion at the start gave warning that the game might run long, television officials unilaterally ordained that the first period consist of twelve minutes instead of fifteen. But the game moved faster than anticipated, and it looked as if there would be empty space at the end. So the television people ordered the third quarter to be stretched out. Still too fast! Additional minutes were slipped into the fourth quarter, and in the final thirty-one seconds of what was loosely called a game the Blues scored a touchdown to win 14–13. Actually, the game had long since ended, and Bill Moseley, of the Blue-Gray Committee, apologized publicly to the Confederates, tacitly admitting that they had been robbed by television. The broadcast ended as planned, whereupon the stations in my area screened a fourth or fifth rerun of an episode from The Untouchables. Flagrant abuse like this calls into question the integrity of sports.
Of the five instances of television interference one was Justifiable (shifting the date of the Notre Dame-Georgia Tech game), one was debatable (jamming the Celtics-Knicks basketball game to Sunday so as to catch a large audience), two were reprehensible (making the World Series baseball teams fly all night to an afternoon game, and allowing the television official to interrupt a crucial situation in the Eagles-Jets football game) and one was scandalous (manipulation of the clock in the Blue-Gray football classic). Now I should like to cite a case in which substantial interference produced beneficial results for everyone.
In the old days the various bowl games used to compete for attention during the afternoon of January 1, and there was no possibility for one viewer to catch all the action. The committees who ran the bowls could not be expected to relinquish voluntarily their traditional spots, and since no outside force was strong enough to make them do so, chaos prevailed. But with the advent of big television money, the networks were able to dictate rational scheduling. Thus the Rose Bowl was allowed to retain its traditional late-afternoon timing (east coast), after which the others fell naturally into line: Sugar Bowl at night on New Year’s Eve; Cotton Bowl early on New Year’s afternoon; Orange Bowl on New Year’s night, after the Rose Bowl had finished; plus various other bowls strung along over a couple of weeks. It seems to me that everyone has profited from the new system.
One aspect of sports television leaves me perplexed. Why is it that broadcasts of the football Super Bowl have been so uniformly dull—fans call it the Stupor Bowl—while telecasts of the baseball World Series have been so superlative?
At first glance it would seem that as a television spectacle, football had everything in its favor, and its enormous popularity proves that this is so.
And yet football is to baseball as checkers is to chess. I would suppose that any thinking man or woman who loves finesse would, after a season of exposure to both games, realize that baseball was the game worthy of closest attention, the one with the most subtle variations, the one that has the capacity to make the viewer hold his breath with sheer joy.
As I was working on this chapter I found myself, because of airline scheduling, in Kansas City with an evening to waste, so I went out to the spanking new Royals Stadium in the Harry S Truman Sports Complex to watch a game between the Kansas City Royals and the California Angels. It was an appalling game, 11–10 in thirteen innings, highlighted by the fact that every time Harmon Killebrew came to bat, Kansas City had the bases loaded, and poor Harmon, the designated hitter, went 0 for 7 and left eleven stranded. The game produced eight recorded errors plus two others that the scorer mercifully called hits. There were nine pitchers; the game lasted four hours and twenty-two minutes;
and it should have been a real yawner.
But as it unfolded I saw three of the most exquisite plays I have ever watched in any athletic contest, gems so lovely they gleamed in the arc lights, leaving the watchers first choking with amazement, then limp from cheering. In the tenth inning Kansas City had a man on first with one out. The batter lashed a clean single into the hole between first and second, and it should have moved the runner from first to third. Denny Doyle, the California second baseman—who would be traded to the Boston Red Sox in time to star in the 1975 World Series—had no possible chance for an out, but he sped into right field, pursued the ball on a converging line, threw himself prone, grabbed the ball in the webbing of his glove, pivoted on his hip, sprang erect, and rifled the ball to third base, holding the runner at second. The next Kansas City batter drove a long fly which would have scored the runner had Doyle not held him at second, and the next batter grounded out, if I recall the sequence properly.
The point is, Doyle postponed defeat by a superhuman effort that accomplished nothing. He didn’t get his man out at first. He didn’t throw the runner out at third. He delayed the outcome by three innings, but in the end his team lost As we left the park, everyone was talking about Doyle’s unbelievable play.
The other two plays that caught my attention were routine outs. A California batter, two outs and a runner in scoring position, swung vigorously at the ball, topped it, drove it into the ground about six inches in front of the plate, and ran like mad for first as the ball took an enormous high bounce toward short. Fred Patek, the Kansas City shortstop and the smallest man in big-league play, leaped forward, dashed at breakneck speed toward where the ball would bounce on the turf, trapped it with his gloved hand without looking, then leaped high, whirled in the air and threw the ball with a snap-wrist action that nipped the runner by half a stride.
The third play was an outfield masterpiece. I can’t say who made it, because each team used so many players in the final innings, thirty-six in all, that my scorecard became jumbled and I don’t really know who was playing left field when a Kansas City batter slammed a clothesline drive into left center. Again there was a runner on base, and from where I sat the game was over, but the California fielder sped to his left, never hesitated, appeared to intersect the trajectory of the ball, failed, then threw himself prone, and with his right gloved hand reached across his body, grabbed for the ball, and caught it in the webbing.
To have seen any one of these plays would have been a privilege. To have seen three in so miserable a game was one of the unforgettable pleasures of sport. They demonstrated the intricacy of baseball, that curious game of strategy and skill in which some lucky man determined that the bases should be ninety feet apart, a distance which enables a runner with a perfect sense of timing to steal second, while another just as swift but lacking that precision gets thrown out, a distance which permits the kind of play I’ve just described in which a daring shortstop with a rifle arm can gun down a runner a fiftieth of a second before his foot touches the bag.
I doubt that television could have caught the full poetry of those plays; baseball is not quite as good on the screen as football, which brings us back to that tantalizing question: Why then is the World Series so much more exciting than the Super Bowl?
The reason, I think, is that the World Series is indeed a series, with the tension mounting from game to game, so that no matter how nervous and inept the players may show themselves to be in game one, by the time the sixth game is reached, if it is, they have settled into their grooves, and they perform their minor miracles. Thus the sixth game in the 1975 Cincinnati-Boston Series was one of the supreme sports exhibitions. The Super Bowl, on the other hand, is a one-shot deal, and both coaches and players have disciplined themselves to play cautiously. No wild and sudden pass, no careless punt allowing the receiver to run back for a touchdown, no razzle-dazzle. If the Super Bowl were the best two out of three, you’d see some wild games in the second try, with a chance that game three could turn out to be a classic.
Certainly the elimination games in recent years have provided thrills comparable to the World Series: in 1971 the double overtime between Kansas City and Miami which was decided when two European-style soccer kickers attempted field goals (the Norwegian Jan Stenerud missed his, the Cypriote Garo Yepremian made his); in 1972 when Franco Harris of the Pittsburgh Steelers caught that incredible pass in the final moment to defeat Oakland 13–7; and perhaps best of all, the Raiders-Dolphin play-off game in 1974 when Kenny Stabler of the Raiders threw his desperate last-minute pass to enable his team to eke out a 28–26 victory.
I have suspected there might be an element of divine justice in the way recent World Series and Super Bowls have gone. Football is incomparable, but we need to be reminded now and then that a quieter game like baseball, which so many extroverts keep announcing as dead, still has the capacity to excite and astound.
One aspect of football captivates me, because it demonstrates how intelligence can aid a game. I have often asked but never discovered who first dreamed up the idea of admitting a wild-card team to the final play-offs. Each conference is divided into three divisions, and the champion of each is assured a berth in the play-offs. But an elimination with only six teams competing would be cumbersome or, if one team drew a bye, unfair. So some genius devised the plan whereby the second-place finisher with the best record in any one of the three divisions is awarded fourth place in that conference. This has the advantage of keeping interest alive throughout each conference, even if the champions of the three divisions have long been known. One year, in the final weeks of the season, twelve teams were still eligible for the play-offs, and it is not uncommon for one or both of the wild cards to be decided on the last Sunday of the season.
This has accomplished so much for the sport, and is such a congenial way of providing a second life for a team, I would recommend that even if the leagues expand to thirty-two teams, which would permit an orderly four divisions of four teams each in both leagues, thus eliminating the need for the wild card, some way be devised whereby it could be retained. It is one of the best inventions sports has come up with recently, and the man responsible for it should be voted forthwith into the Hall of Fame.
It is equaled, I think, only by a system devised long ago for the soccer leagues in England and Scotland and adopted later by other nations around the world. Soccer is such an inexpensive game to play, with little equipment and none of it costly, almost any community can afford to field a team. So numerous are the cities that wish to enter topflight competition, in all countries, they are divided into divisions of descending competence, A, B, C, D, etc. In Scotland, where I became an avid fan, the A division consists of eighteen teams, and the lesser divisions have the same number.
The neat trick is that each year the two teams who finish last in the A division are automatically dropped back to B, their vacancies being filled by the two teams who finished first in the B division. The same is happening at the tail end of C, and so on down the line.
Thus there is a constant mobility among the teams, and as the season draws to a close it often happens that the champion of A is pretty well known, whereas a real dogfight is under way to see which two teams at the bottom of the ladder will be forced to accept the ignominy of relegation, as the phrase goes, to the next lower league. Some of the worst soccer riots in history have involved partisans whose beloved team was about to be either relegated or promoted.
For example, on May 18, 1969, the citizens of Caserta, a town of 70,000 northeast of Naples, were overjoyed when their League C team beat Trapani, because this meant next season Caserta would be promoted to League B. The celebration, which lasted for several days, was dampened by ugly rumors that Caserta had won only because it had bought off one of the key Trapani players.
Belatedly, on Monday, September 8, Italian radio carried the chilling announcement: ‘Players involved in the scandal are barred for life. Caserta forfeits the game and is refused promotion to L
eague B.’
When the news flashed through Caserta, all shops closed and people started massing in the street. By afternoon the news was officially confirmed, but no damage was done. That night the citizens of Caserta found that the game scheduled for Sunday, when they were to play their first game in League B, had been canceled. On Tuesday a sullen, embittered mob began ripping iron shutters off store windows and setting fire to municipal buildings.
When water pipes supplying the town were torn up, fires could not be checked, and barricades were erected in the streets. Football fans in nearby Naples, hearing that a first-class riot was under way, came to Caserta by bus, just to be in on the fun. By the time peace was restored, eighty people were in the hospital, ninety-nine in jail, and damage estimated at two billion lire had been done. Caserta was still in League C.
A Michener Miscellany: 1950–1970.
I have always been a supporter of soccer and from time to time have entertained fatuous hopes that it might become established in the United States as a major sport. It has so much to commend it, specifically its world-wide acceptance. As a nation we compete in very few true world championships—tennis, yachting and track are ones that come to mind—and it would be salutary, I think, if we fielded a national soccer team for the World Cup and played Argentina, let us say, home-and-home for a chance to go to the finals in Moscow, with total goals in the two games deciding the winner.
Suppose the first game were played in La Plata, with Argentina winning, 2–1. The second is to be played in Omaha, and with only a few minutes left in the game we are ahead 3–1, which means that we’re about to win on total goals, 4-3. But the Rumanian referee spots an American foul—maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but the Tunisian linesman nods yes—and Argentina is awarded a free kick at our goal. Our victory has been rubbed out by the referee, and he a Rumanian. Friends, it demands restraint for a fan to keep in his seat at such a moment In Peru on Sunday, May 24, 1964, such a decision evoked a riot which caused the death of almost three hundred spectators. This explains why many nations are now requiring deep trenches to separate the spectators from the playing field. Too many referees were getting killed.