There is, however, a psychological danger in the recent explosion which does merit attention. The emphasis on sports is not of itself regrettable—our nation has the energy and the money to support the expansion—but when sports are encouraged to preempt financial and psychological support that might be spent on more worthy projects, society could be drifting into trouble. Apprehension about this tyranny of sports was voiced in Education of the Gifted and Talented, a report to the Subcommittee on Education of the United States Senate, March 1972:
Gifted adolescents as a group have reduced the extent of their reading from junior high to high school, perhaps because of fears that they will be viewed as ‘grinds’ or have suffered group pressures unless they exhibit athletic prowess …
The waste of talent has been emphasized by Pressey in several writings. In one article he compared the eighteenth-century European society, which valued the arts and nurtured many outstanding composers who produced works of lasting benefit, to the twentieth-century American society, which values athletics and provides outstanding opportunities and rich rewards to those who reached stardom. Consequently, Europe of one and two centuries ago experienced the remarkable achievements of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Verdi, Schubert, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Dvorak, Berlioz and Wagner, all of whom played, composed and/or conducted their own compositions between the ages of six and seventeen. In the United States, with similarly high valuation on athletics, Pressey noted the remarkable accomplishments of Bobby Jones and Marlene Bauer in golf, Sonja Henie and Barbara Ann Scott in skating, Vincent Richards and Maureen Connolly in tennis, and Mel Ott and Bobby Feller in baseball, all before the age of eighteen.
All of the individuals listed, whether musician or athlete, had the benefit of strong familial and social encouragement, early opportunity to develop their abilities, superior early and continuous guidance and instruction, individualized programs, close association with others in their fields, and many strong successes.
Eighteenth-century Europe produced musicians because society of that time prized creative talent; twentieth-century America produces athletes because our society obviously treaures sports more highly than creativity. John Leonard of The New York Times has summarized this predilection as follows: ‘This is a culture of little boys who would rather grow up to be Pete Rose than Gustave Flaubert; whose cathedrals are paved with Astroturf; a nation womanless, artless, Indian-killing and as point-scoring as the factitious West.’
I have already quoted the housewife who told me that any self-respecting American mother would want her daughter to be a cheerleader so that she might have a chance to marry a football player. I have heard fathers say, ‘If a son of mine could be either an honest, God-fearing football player or a long-haired musician, I’d despise him if he didn’t choose football.’
This unhealthy psychological overemphasis manifests itself in the recent attempts throughout the United States to forge an alliance between sports and nationalism. Our political leaders have been goading sports into performing three improper functions, and if this trend continues, sports will be hopelessly contaminated. 1) Sports are being asked to serve as propaganda in support of specific political parties. 2) They are being used to buttress military goals. 3) They are being grossly misused to create a fuzzy, shallow patriotism.
I do not warn against such abuse as an outsider. I am a politician who has run for various elective offices. I could be classified as a militarist for I volunteered to serve in war. And I would hope that I was a patriot. But I am beginning to feel most uneasy when I watch sports being asked to serve as handmaiden to politics, militarism and flamboyant patriotism. A halt should be called. Sports are games played by children and vivacious grownups; they serve us best when they are restricted to their proper sphere.
In the years 1969-74 I searched in vain for published material focusing directly on this problem and found nothing substantial, although some authors did make casual reference to the unholy alliance. In 1975 I discovered two excellent treatments. Brian M. Petrie’s ‘Sports and Polities’ in Ball and Loy, and Robert Lipsyte’s amusing and irreverent ‘Please Rise for Our National Pastime’ in his SportsWorld. The following incidents chosen from sources which have occurred recently, illustrate what Petrie and Lipsyte are worried about:
• In the fall of 1974 my wife and I attended a major college football game, and the mayor of the city, knowing that I enjoyed sports, arranged to have a motorcycle escort take us to the game. Through the crowded streets our one-car motorcade sped, attended by four state troopers, their sirens wailing. At the game, some two hundred police officials guarded the stadium, and one told me, ‘Our best duty comes in the fall, when we go out to the airport to meet the big sportswriters and escort them to their hotels.’
• It has been calculated that in the 1972 football season, 40 percent of all seats sold to games played by the Chicago Bears were deducted from income as business expense, and 54 percent of all tickets sold to Houston Oiler games, highlighting the interrelationship between sports and government.
• In 1972 I attended one important game at which a squad of marines, assisted by an army band, raised the flag at the start, then assembled at midfield during half time, assisted by three troops of National Guardsmen and two of Boy Scouts to honor America’s participation in the Vietnam war, while a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi and a Protestant clergyman offered prayers for our boys in Asia, and a member of the home team’s squad for the previous year marched on crutches to a receiving stand where the president of the university awarded him a medal and the verbal assurance that he, and not the unruly protesters in the streets, was the true American.
• In various eastern states I watched attentively as politicians arranged for local athletes to enroll in National Guard units rather than be drafted for Vietnam. These men, scores of them, never went overseas. Others were offered athletic scholarships to college, and this kept them from the draft. As Jeff Kinney, halfback at Nebraska, confessed, ‘Football has been my whole life. Without it, who knows where I might be now. Vietnam? Jail? Or what?’ To use football as an escape from civic duty is indecent.
• In 1972 the Kansas City Royals came up with a rational plan to play The Star-Spangled Banner only on special occasions, hoping that this would remind the patrons of the true significance of the anthem. Howls of protest prevented them from doing this. ‘Every game in every sport should begin with the National Anthem’ was a common response.
• October 6, 1972, was proclaimed by President Nixon as National Coaches Day, in tribute to those men who best exemplified the true spirit of our nation.
• In 1975, when New York City teetered on the abyss of bankruptcy, Governor Hugh Carey realized that he ought to issue a clarion call for courage. He did not refer to moral absolutes, or to economic irrefutables, or to the history of our republic. Instead he summoned up images to which most of the population would respond: ‘New York is a comeback city. It’s the place where Roy Campanella made a comeback, where Jack Dempsey made a comeback, where the “Boys of Summer”—the Brooklyn Dodgers—made a comeback. We’ll be here.’
• When Bill Walton spoke out against certain aspects of life in America, and especially against the FBI, the owners of the Portland Trail Blazers felt it incumbent to apologize to the public, on the presumed grounds that sports and patriotism are so interlinked that professional athletes were obligated to represent traditional values.
• On Monday night, September 17, 1973, during half-time ceremonies at the game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Jets, Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, appeared on the field to conduct ceremonies during which ninety young men volunteered to join the navy and were sworn in for active duty. This was loudly approved by the spectators as sports’ answer to the peaceniks.
• When the big-league baseball headquarters put out a handsome four-color thirty-two-page brochure extolling baseball as the heart of American sports, they said this about one player:
To George Scott, who once picked cotton for $1.75 per 100 pounds, baseball means a gold-plated Cadillac, $250 suits, a $175,000 home, a World Series ring … and more. ‘I achieved my life’s ambition. When I was a kid I wanted to be like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Both were $100,000 players, and now so am I. That’s why I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. When the National Anthem is played, I have my hand over my heart and thank the good Lord, who blessed me with a healthy body and a talent for working hard.
• At one point in 1975 the Senate was considering seven different bills on sports; the House, thirty-four bills; and the Senate found time to consider Resolution 144, which called upon the International Olympic Committee to restore posthumously the gold medals it had taken from Jim Thorpe and to declare him winner of various events back in 1912.
• Many big-time schools designate one coach or faculty member to protect the young athlete from the law. This ombudsman fixes traffic tickets, keeps his charges out of police courts, silences girls who have ‘gotten into trouble,’ and manipulates social agencies lest they annoy the athletes on the eve of a big game. Not surprisingly, several of our most famous universities have found themselves involved in ugly scandals when whole segments of a team have engaged in gang-rape, a jovial collegiate version of jus primae noctis in which the football hero expects to be accorded seignorial rights while the local sheriff stands guard.
There was a calculated move in the Nixon administration to align sports and politics in such a way that nationalism became the end product. The telephone calls to victorious teams, the granting of plaques symbolizing national championships arbitrarily decided, the prominence of coaches and ex-coaches in the entourage, the excessive entertainment of sports figures and the dabbling in quarterback decisions prior to big games made many observers uneasy, and I for one was not surprised when Watergate revelations uncovered the sports philosophy that underlay much of the thinking in that White House.
When James McCord gave signs of following his own inclinations rather than participating in a cover-up, he was told: ‘The President’s ability to govern is at stake. The government may fail. Everybody else is on the track but you. You are not following the game plan.’
When Herbert L. Porter was asked why, when he had interior doubts about hiring unsavory characters to perform dirty tricks, he still went ahead and hired them, he explained: ‘Because of the fear of group pressure that would ensue, of not being a team player.’
When anyone let it be known that he was going to stone-wall it, and refuse to cooperate with the grand jury, he was said to ‘tough it out,’ a football phrase. The code name for mining the North Vietnamese harbors was ‘Operation Linebacker.’ Nixon’s own code name during the attack on Cambodia was ‘The Quarterback.’ And when John Mitchell, formerly the chief legal officer of the nation, was consulted on a matter involving a real test of conscience, he answered with a phrase right out of coaching: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’
As someone said at the time, ‘What the White House needs is less Vince Lombardi and more Abraham Lincoln.’ Dave Meggyesy had written, long before Watergate:
A militaristic aura surrounds football. Not only in obvious things like football stars visiting troops in Vietnam, but in the language of the game—‘throwing a bomb,’ ‘being a field general,’ etc., and the players’ obligation to duty. The game has been wrapped in red, white and blue. It is no accident that some of the most maudlin and dangerous pre-game patriotism we see in this country appears in football stadiums. Nor is it an accident that the most repressive political regime in the history of this country is ruled by a football freak, R. M. Nixon.
I am disturbed by any effort to identify sports with patriotism: Olympics, World Cup, Davis Cup, European rugby. This is an improper alliance, two good things melded together to form one of doubtful merit. If we continue down this dubious path, sensible people are going to turn away from the presumptuous alliance and our national sense of patriotism will suffer. A young man with glasses who prefers medical research can be just as representative of his nation as one who plays football, and we had better remember that.
I first became suspicious of the popular alliance between sports and patriotism during World War II. Before enlisting, I had heard a good deal of hoop-la about our sports heroes who had joined Commander Tom Hamilton’s physical-fitness program in the navy. Throbbing stories were written about these heroic young men and I expected to find them storming the beaches. Where I found them was at land stations here at home, conducting one-two-three gymnastic exercises, and never in the destroyers or on the beaches. They were at Dartmouth and at Patuxent River and Great Lakes, and later at the posh headquarters in Honolulu and Guam. If I retain an admiration for Ted Williams it’s because he was out there … twice. If I have betrayed a fondness for Bear Bryant, it is in part because he served in the navy, spotting patrol planes.
In the 1936 Olympics, Adolf Hitler became the first to exploit sports as an arm of nationalism. In the 1968 Olympics, East Germany was caught heating the blades of its bobsleds with blowtorches, ‘for the greater glory of the state.’ In the 1972 games, Arab nationalists gunned down Israeli athletes in order to prove a political point. The world was outraged. Sober critics began to warn that if this unbridled nationalism were to continue, the Olympics would have to be halted.
In all Olympics the scoring of events like figure skating and high diving became so ridden with national animosities as to make honest competition impossible. I remember being in Finland on that Sunday in 1972 when two Finnish long-distance runners scored outstanding victories, and I know with what wild delight the little nation cheered its successors to Paavo Nurmi and Villie Ritola. That was legitimate national pride. That afternoon some Finnish sportsmen and I sat together watching the telecasts from Munich, witnessing the appalling manner in which partisan officials stole the basketball championship from the United States. For some years I had been telling my friends, ‘It’ll be a healthy day when some other country knocks us off in basketball. And I expect to see it happen soon.’ Normally I would have applauded a Russian victory, just as I thought it salutary when the Russian ice-hockey team gave the smug Canadians such a drubbing in the first games of their match.
But to have a game stolen, and so blatantly, and against the judgment of the responsible officials on the floor, was outrageous, and I said so. ‘Sure it was a steal,’ the Finns chided, “but what can you do about it?’ At the time, nothing. But later that year when the people of Colorado had to vote on whether to host the 1976 winter Olympics, I happened to be working in that state, and numerous voters, knowing my interest in sports, asked my opinion, I always reminded them of the abominable nationalism of the Munich games, and I asked the rhetorical question, ‘Do you want to sponsor such nonsense here in Colorado?’ The plebiscite was 358,906 for the Olympics, 537,440 against, and the games were thrown out of the United States, as they should have been. The Olympic Committee can countenance misbehavior like the basketball game if it wishes, but it cannot then come to the persons outraged and seek their approval.
I would be in error if I did not point out the constructive aspects of sports nationalism. The rejuvenation of East German spirit, after the bleakest kind of communist oppression, started with a renaissance in sports and peaked in the 1972 Olympics, when the little nation won some twenty or thirty times the places to which it would be entitled on a per capita basis. Sports in Hungary have had the same beneficent effect.
A perceptive article by Janet Lever, ‘Soccer as a Brazilian Way of Life,’ in Gregory Stone’s excellent Games, Sport and Power, explains that when the S$aTo Paolo soccer team wins over the weekend, production in the city’s factories rises by 12.3 percent in the following week. But when the home team loses, industrial accidents rise by 15.5 percent. It is a matter of historic record that in 1966, when Great Britain won the World Cup in London in the most exciting competition so far conducted, with at least a dozen games in the masterpiece category, em
igration from Britain to Australia and New Zealand dropped conspicuously, but when Britain lost, rather ignominiously in Mexico City in 1970, it rose. It was quite clear, in 1970, that a disastrous British soccer performance accounted in substantial measure for the loss of an election.
John Lindsay used the euphoria created by the Mets’ surging World Series victory in 1969 as a major spur in his campaign for reelection, and Frank Rizzo did the same with the Flyers’ hockey victories in 1975. I came upon a fascinating instance of sports nationalism when I visited Canada, whose major cities are stretched out along an east-west line just north of the American border. In the winter television viewers see Canadian hockey, played mainly in the United States, and basketball, played only there. In the summer Canadian viewers love the baseball games that appear on television, with the added excitement of having a major-league team of their own in Montreal. The problem came with football. Canada has its own version, with a bigger playing field, an extra man on each team and a more open style of play. The cities are divided into two rabidly competing leagues, an eastern with four teams, a western with five, and the struggle for the Grey Cup can be heroic.
But certain cities wanted to drop or diminish Canadian football and institute American, with Montreal joining the NFL, Toronto the WFL, and one of the western cities joining whichever league would have it. The money was available. The stadiums were ready. And certainly the population, nurtured on NFL games on television, was prepared to support the venture.
But the Canadian government, quite properly I believe, vetoed the proposal. As one official explained it to me:
We have a hard time sustaining a sense of Canadian unit. Our cities are so far apart, strung like pearls on a chain, reaching east to west. Sports are one of our most powerful unifying forces, particularly Canadian football. It binds us together in a way that not even hockey can do, because the better teams are now in the United States, even though the players are all Canadians.