But with the advent in 1960 of a second league, the AFL, backed by aggressive multimillionaries like Lamar Hunt, things began to fall apart. AFL owners were not bound by the gentlemen’s rules of the NFL, and they could go into any college and bargain for the star players, escalating salaries overnight to astronomical dimensions. The most famous case was that of Joe Willie Namath, star quarterback for Bear Bryant at Alabama, who was signed by Sonny Werblin of the New York Jets for the announced salary of $450,000. Werblin is important in the story, because he had formerly been a theatrical agent and understood the publicity value of a huge salary, whether the actual details supported the newspaper stories or not.
At any rate, a salary war developed, and NFL owners complained that it was about to destroy the sport. So they went to Congress, and in 1966 gravel-voiced, silver-maned Everett Dirksen steamrollered special legislation which gave them roughly the same exemption from the law that baseball enjoyed. The NFL was free to absorb the AFL; a cartel could be established; college players would be assigned to the various teams in an orderly draft, and those fantastic salaries would be cut down to size. Once more the bargaining power of the athlete was destroyed by federal law, passed by Congress and approved by the courts.
Basketball provided the most interesting case. In 1971 a bill was proposed in Congress that would have given basketball the same exemption. However, it ran into two difficulties. It had no Everett Dirksen to run interference for it, and it faced vigorous and highly sophisticated opposition from some astute basketball players, who justly pointed out that it would favor a few owners while depriving many players of their right to bargain for a high salary between the two leagues.
I do not subscribe to what I am about to quote, but this view shows how far sports have come in a short time. A basketball player told me:
To understand our case you must realize that basketball players are more intelligent than football players. We are fewer in number. We have a tighter player organization. And we had outstanding brains like Oscar Robinson and Kareem and especially Bill Bradley and Jerry Lucas. So when our basketball owners decided to merge their two leagues and lower salaries, we decided to cut them off at the pass. We went right down to Congress and testified against the bill and killed it. And that’s why we earn those big salaries and the football players don’t. They weren’t minding the store. We were.
Hockey, being an international sport with its roots and its players in Canada, has not yet faced up to the problems just recited, and when it does, it is doubtful if the American Congress or the American courts will make the final decisions. On the other hand, one would expect comparable problems to arise and perhaps comparable stalemates.
Up to this point I have phrased my sentences as if I sided exclusively with the players. In law and logic I do; baseball and football players have received a rotten deal, with the connivance of Congress and the courts, and I do not see how any fair-minded man or woman could conclude otherwise. However, the management of so complex a social organism as a professional sports league involves much more than the mere satisfaction of the players. Balance, the maintenance of equal competition, the preservation of tradition and the adjustment to new opportunities like those presented by television, cable and pay TV all impose special responsibilities, and anyone with a sense of fair play will be hesitant to prescribe how the professional leagues ought to conduct their business.
Consider this case carefully. Starting around 1927 the American League began to dominate baseball, and with the cementing together of those remarkable Yankee teams, it became overpowering. In those years the league kowtowed to the Yankees shamefully, allowing them to steal players and dictate operating procedures. As a consequence, the Yankees won numerous pennants and a disgraceful number of 4-0 World Series.
But at a serious cost. The American League became stodgy, routine, unimaginative. It was the National League which brought in the great black superstars, the new stadiums, the night baseball, Astroturf, drum-tight pennant races, maximum attendance. By building the Yankees into a super-team, so that each home team could make a lot of money when the Yankees came to town, the owners condemned the American League to second-rate status, and they damn near destroyed it in the process. In other words, by being false to the very principles on which baseball had been given its exemptions—the maintenance of equal competition—they dissipated their advantages.
Roughly the same thing happened in football. In the days of Lombardi’s ascendancy, his league, the NFL, was so far superior to the AFL that comparison was painful. After the 1967 Green Bay walk-away over Kansas City 35–10 in the first Super Bowl, Lombardi judiciously refused to compare the two leagues, but after his 1968 humiliation of Oakland, 33–14, he allowed himself to be goaded by sportswriters into admitting that he judged AFL football to be below par.
But at this moment of NFL ascendancy, the seeds of its decline were sprouting. It became complacent while the AFL, stung by Lombardi’s honest evaluation, began initiating imaginative changes. It built better stadiums, attracted superior crowds, and within a few years its brand of football was visibly superior to that played in the NFL. It was then that teams like the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles started their stumble into serious trouble.
The maintenance of honest competition is the essence of professional sports, and basketball is going to be in even worse trouble than it already is if it allows television to force the super-players into Los Angeles and New York in order to provide grist for the media mills. This is the Yankee syndrome revisited, and if basketball repeats the error that baseball committed, it will reap similar ugly consequences.
Justices Holmes and Blackmun were not talking idly when they spoke of the peculiar requirements of professional sports. Talented players must not be allowed to congregate on only the clubs of our biggest cities, those with the ability to pay the highest salaries. I would think that the Catfish Hunter case—in which the inept behavior of Charles Finley invited an arbitrator to declare Hunter a free agent, whereupon he threw himself into the marketplace, soliciting high bids—would terrify organized baseball. Presumed details of the Hunter settlement with the Yankees surfaced: ‘One million bonus before signing anything, $200,000 in cash to pay his attorneys, $200,000 salary a year for five years, a ten-year retirement plan requiring $50,000 a year, $1,000,000 of life insurance on himself, and $50,000 insurance on his children.’ This could be termed a fairly generous settlement, but I was assured by the owners of another American League team—in a smaller city—that they had offered Hunter $50,000 above whatever the Yankees might bid, but that some higher-up had deemed it in the interest of baseball that he go to New York, where media coverage would be greater. Frankly, that’s a hell of a way to run a sport.
The problem was aggravated in late 1975 when labor arbitrator Peter Seitz handed down a decision declaring pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos free agents, in the Catfish Hunter pattern. This adjudication, which might or might not be upheld by the courts, would mean that henceforth any baseball player could refuse to sign the contract his club offered him, play out his option for one year, declare himself a free agent, and then sell his services to the highest bidden The financial chaos that many feared and which Congress should have prevented by sensible legislation seemed at hand.
Like most fans I have become disgusted with the legal shenanigans in basketball: the Billy Cunningham contract-jumping case involving Philadelphia and Carolina; the Spencer Haywood contract-jumping case involving Denver and Seattle; the Jim McDaniels league-jumping case involving Carolina and Seattle; the George McGinnis case involving team-switching practically everybody. Each community has its own horror story of a basketball player who proved an ingrate and scurried to court to find legal justification for his cupidity. Basketball, and its players, should wake up to the fact that it is repelling fans by such misbehavior; much of the financial trouble that has overtaken the sport in recent years has occurred becau
se fans have become sickened by the unconscionable battle for the buck and the constant recourse to the courts to justify the breaking of contracts. The mess proves that Justice Holmes and Senator Dirksen were correct when they sponsored special interpretations of the law to cover the requirements of professional sports, and a similar law had better be passed quickly to salvage basketball.
The solution is twofold. Obviously, all professional sports should be under one legal umbrella, with no advantage to baseball and no disadvantage to ice hockey. This umbrella should be structured by Congress with the affirmation of the Supreme Court. It should prevent the accumulation of all the best players by one or two teams, and I believe this can be accomplished best by relying not on the common sense of the owners, for they are deficient in this commodity, but on some kind of reasonable reserve clause protecting the owners, some kind of draft, with the lowest-standing team choosing first, and some kind of mechanism for adjudicating salary disputes.
It is the last item that is difficult. I have high regard for the new system devised by baseball. If Owner O and Player P reach an impasse in a salary dispute, binding arbitration becomes obligatory. By February 1 Owner O writes down on a piece of paper the highest salary he is prepared to pay. Player P writes down on his piece of paper the salary he thinks he is entitled to. The arbitrator, chosen from a panel of fifteen experts from outside of baseball, studies the conflicting demands, holds brief hearings between February 10 and February 20, and within three days thereafter must choose one figure or the other. He does not average the two figures, trying to find a compromise representing an approximation of justice, because to do so would be to invite the owner to submit a very low figure and the player a very high one. He must choose one figure or the other. This is a real rule of reason, because if the owner submits a ridiculously low figure, and the player a reasonable one, the arbitrator will surely back the player, and vice versa. So far the rule has worked well and has been widely accepted.
But many believe that the tested American, and Western European, way to settle salary questions is by strike, as the football players tried unsuccessfully to do in the fall of 1974 and the baseball players successfully did in the spring of 1972. Strikes are messy, they are frustrating, and they rarely lead to hard-and-fast solutions, but they are an ultimate recourse when the laborer feels that he has been aggrieved, and no better substitute has been found.
While the baseball strike was under way some ridiculous charges were made that this would ruin baseball. Ruly Carpenter of the Phillies predicted, ‘This has taken all the fun out of the game. It’ll never be the same again.’ I deplored the decision to play a truncated season in which not all the teams would play the same number of games: San Diego, 153; San Francisco, 155: Milwaukee, 156. ‘It’ll throw all the statistics haywire,’ I complained, nodding soberly when one sportswriter warned that the National League West could end with a team standing of this order:
How would you like to defend that one? Well, the 1972 season produced several excellent pennant races, in which mathematical monstrosities did not decide the outcome, and a cliff-hanging World Series in which the Oakland A’s defeated Johnny Bench and the Cincinnati Reds in seven games. In retrospect, the great baseball strike did almost no damage except to owners who had lost the ticket sales from a few games.
The football strike of 1974 was uglier and had a curious psychological fallout. I spent the climax of the strike at an NFL training camp from which the established veterans were absent, and it became painfully obvious that the coaches, with no veterans to handle, were forced to spend so much time with the rookies that they were beginning to discover talents in the new men which would have gone undiscovered in a normal camp, when any coach could spend only a few desultory minutes a day with the rookies.
It was quite clear that the prolonged strike was having no negative effect on the stars, who would easily reclaim their old positions, but it was having a devastating effect on the older marginal player who was apt to be superseded by some recruit whom the coaches had accidentally discovered but who would normally have gone unnoticed. I was reminded once more of how brief and cruel the life of the journeyman professional can be.
Sports exist in an extra-legal shadowland, and I believe our government should take steps to clarify the ambiguities. But does this mean that the government should establish an administrative agency which would engineer a comprehensive set of laws through Congress and then apply them evenly to all sports?
This is a knotty question, and there is no better way to comprehend what it involves than to study bit by bit the extraordinary bill relating to professional sports which was introduced in the Senate on March 30, 1972, by Marlow Cook, of Kentucky, who entitled it The Federal Sports Act of 1972. In the moving speech with which he presented his bill to the Senate, Cook said:
Until recently the world of sports was always different, always sacred. However, with the recent snowball of controversy in the sports world, the time has obviously arrived for a new perspective. The sports world has been beset by a series of easily identifiable problems, all of which have resulted from the mass commercialization of sports. Until recently we have been reluctant to admit that sports are a business, as well as a national recreational form.
Few Americans have escaped the attraction of the sports world. Its drama, heroics and excitement involve over one-half of the American people every year. Indeed, it has been said that a sports event is a microcosm of life. Each participant begins his quest on an equal basis, each meets many obstacles along the way, and each finally experiences success or failure. The only difference is that the world of sports provides another chance of success, another hope of victory.
With that preamble, Cook unrolled his proposed law, which would provide these measures:
1. A Federal Sports Commission consisting of three salaried members, appointed by the President, with advice and consent of the Senate, serving staggered terms of five years, no more than two to be from the same political party.
2. A Sports Advisory Council of eight members—two owners, two athletes, two league representatives and two recognized leaders in the world of sports, including writers and broadcasters—to be paid $100 a day while working, plus travel and per diem.
3. The Commission, as advised by the Council, would have summary powers to promulgate rules, without specific adoption by Congress or prior approval of the court, relating to the granting of franchises to cities, the supervision of franchise sales, television coverage of sports, the legal form for all player contracts, and the orderly movement of school and college players into professional ranks.
4. Considerable powers for the enforcement of the rules promulgated under the preceding section, with civil penalties not to exceed $50,000 for those who do not comply and the right to invoke injunctions against them.
5. The right to collect relevant data plus the power of subpoena to get it.
This is a powerful proposal. That it did not become law does not mean that something like it will not be proposed in the near future, this time with a likely chance of adoption.
Does the sporting world need such governmental regulation? I think not. I have worked in Washington a good deal in recent years and am not overly impressed with the functioning of several of the commissions already established for the governance of industry, or aviation, or broadcasting. I concur wholly with James Quirk’s conclusion at the end of his investigation of certain abuses in professional sports. Much of what he saw called for correction, and perhaps governmental intervention at the legislative or judicial level, but not to the extent that a federal czar was needed:
Certainly, the history of regulatory commissions is not one which instills overwhelming confidence in such a device as a protector of the interests of the general public. Businessmen involved in the day-to-day decisions of running their firms are in a much better position to make judgments than the bureaucrat. Furthermore, regulatory commissions have the unhappy history of often developing into more eff
ective cartel organizations than could have been created by the businesses themselves. Hence, the suggestion to correct some of the worst abuses of professional sports by appointing a federal sports czar is not appealing.
There is one area in amateur sports in which governmental intrusion may be inescapable and even desirable. That is the feud which prevents the United States from sending to the Olympics, or other international competitions, our best teams. To comprehend the majestic silliness which thwarts us, the reader must be able to decipher four sets of initials: IOC, AAU, USOC and NCAA. And to do this, some appreciation of history is required.
In 1889 the government of France became aware that Frenchmen were lagging behind Germans and Czechs, then a part of Austria, in physical well-being. It appointed an amateur, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, to study the matter, and belatedly in 1893 he proposed a plan guaranteed to catch the imagination of young people. The Olympic Games, which had flourished in Greece from 776 B.C. until A.D. 394, when Roman corruption made them noisome, would be revived.
Baron de Coubertin and his counselors from various nations instituted what would become the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and early in its existence it stipulated that in each nation which wanted to participate in the Olympics, the selection of the participants and the organization of the supporting effort must rest in the hands of one committee independent of government. This prudent rule, so easy to state and so difficult to enforce, had as its objective the prevention of nationalism. A group of French athletes would be invited to participate as individuals, not as a team representing France.
Who in the United States should be accredited to the IOC as our legal, non-governmental committee? In 1888 a group of amateur sportsmen, increasingly concerned about the intrusions of an unbridled professionalism, had organized themselves into the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and had gradually assumed control over the conduct of some sixteen or seventeen individual sports as different as basketball and bobsledding. Almost inevitably it became the American authority for the first Olympic Games held in Greece in 1896 and has never relinquished that authority. It is the only committee recognized by the IOC, and without its approval there could be no American participation in the Olympics.