To appreciate the basic dangers, one must go back to the bad old days of the Calcutta pool. I participated in one in Reno, Nevada, and saw its menace. On the eve of a golf tournament the big gamblers of the area would each contribute substantial amounts of money to a pool. The names of the sixty-odd golfers competing the next day would be drawn by lot, and then you became intensely interested in your player. (In one version of the Calcutta, gamblers bid for the player they wanted.) If he won the opening round, you won so much. If he survived the cut, so much more. If he led at the end of any day, another return. And if he won the tournament, you got the remaining bundle.
A Calcutta could lead to some very unpleasant situations. In the one I joined, after the draw had been made, heavy gamblers wanted to buy the likely winners, and pressure was exerted to make the men holding those names sell. If a golfer who ought to have won went into a sudden slump, as golfers will, there were charges of his having thrown the Calcutta for a secret payoff. And through the three days of play there was an ugly tension. I believe it was the golfers themselves who, fearing they might get machine-gunned, shortly thereafter outlawed the Calcutta. To reinstate it, or anything like it, would be regression.
The fault of the Calcutta was that it placed the gambler and the golfer in a one-on-one situation; in a very real sense the gambler ‘owned’ the golfer, and I can remember snarling under my breath as my man faded, ‘You stinking bum! You’re quitting on purpose.’ For a measly ten dollars I was reviling a man I had never met.
The ability of a sport to resist corruption by gamblers is a matter not of tradition, but of numbers. Football has not so far suffered a major scandal, primarily because one team consists of twenty-six or more players, and to corrupt all of those who might be able to influence a score would be so complex a task that it could not be kept secret.
Boxing was the most susceptible, because only one man had to be suborned, and he could engineer his own defeat with such skill that even experts could scarcely detect it. Baseball had nine players on a team plus the noblest traditions in American sports, but as the Chicago Black Sox proved, the outcome of a series, if not a single game, could be manipulated by corrupting the pitcher, the major sluggers and a few key fielders. The Spanish soccer pool was easiest of all to police, because the bettor was backing fourteen teams of eleven players each, and it would be ridiculous to try to buy off the 154 opposing players.
Basketball, on the other hand, with its five players, each able to determine the drift of the game, was peculiarly vulnerable to the Calcutta evil. It was not by accident that the major scandals in collegiate sport focused on basketball,* and it is a tribute to the men running the NBA and the ABA that they have been able to keep their leagues free of visible corruption. There were rumors some years ago that games were being thrown, and after some study of the matter, I concluded that at least one had been, but officials took swift action, rebutted all charges and escaped a scandal.
The classic example of how numbers affect morality came when New York, eager to glean a few more dollars from harness racing, introduced the Superfecta, a gimmick race in which eight horses competed, with the bettor required to place the first four in their exact finishing order. When I first heard of this preposterous arrangement I doubted that anyone would be silly enough to be tempted by it, but so many did that the papers began to circulate stories of people who had made sensational killings—$50,000 for a three-dollar bet.
I had suspicions about the Superfecta from its beginning, and the huge payoffs agitated my doubts, but I failed to spot where the danger lay. I reasoned: ‘With the exact positions of four horses required to win, I don’t see how any gambler would be industrious enough, and careful enough, to fix them all.’ What I had overlooked was something the gamblers had spotted almost immediately. An old hand at Vernon Downs explained it to me: ‘Don’t worry about the four winners. Just make sure who the four losers will be. Because if you can guarantee that four horses will be removed from the race, you can then box the other four. That is, you bet every possible combination of A,B,C,D, which can be accomplished with twenty-four tickets, for a total cost of only $72. In return you get an iron-clad assurance that you have the winners of that day’s Superfecta. If no one else knows which four horses have been bought off, your lone ticket could be worth up to $128,000.’
So what the gamblers did was fix the race, not the four winners, but the four losers. Secure in their knowledge that E,F,G,H were fixed to lose—the four winners had to be A, B,C and D—they wheeled those four for $72 and started dragging down enormous profits. But human life is self-corrective. These clever gamblers who had thought of everything were so stupid that they always sent the same person to collect their huge winnings, and for this crucial job they chose an eye-stopping blonde that no man at the payoff window could forget. After she had appeared to collect six or seven times, it was an easy job for the detectives to nab her and her gang. (The legal resolution of this case was interesting. Everyone agreed that the fix had been engineered by the gamblers, and the court so found, but it was also decided that no drivers had been involved.)
It is for fear of such shenanigans that the administrators of professional sports advise against legalizing gambling. When they do so, they are ridiculed in the press, which points out that vast sums are already being bet without the evil consequences that men like Rozelle predict:
Suspicions would be created whenever something happened that determined the outcome of a game or even threatened the outcome. Instead of rooting for his home team to win, the fan’s basic interest would be in winning his bet by a certain number of points sufficient to beat the spread. You could have a stadium with 80,000 fans vocally supporting the visiting team’s rally and applauding the home team’s misfortune.*
And then Rozelle cites evidence from European sports to bolster his argument that heavy legalized betting would be more dangerous to the integrity of games than the informal system we now have. He refers to Great Britain’s decision in 1960 to legalize practically all types of sports betting:
Prior to 1960 there had been two major soccer scandals. Since 1960 there have been at least eight major teams and fifteen players involved. Ten of the players either confessed or were found guilty of bribery in court. Several have been fined and sentenced to jail terms by criminal courts.
He then recalls the dismal experiences of Italy (four players suspended), Germany (thirteen players suspended for life), Czechoslovakia (eighty convicted in court). In a letter he spells out the rules: ‘Our football players are allowed to gamble legally at race tracks or Las Vegas casinos, but not on professional football. However, the extent to which they gamble, the type of persons they may gamble with and the places in which they gamble may be cause for this office to warn them to stop doing so under threat of suspension. No professional football player would be permitted to own a gambling casino.’
When Congress, in the late summer of 1973, galloped through the legislative process in order to terminate arbitrarily football’s traditional blackout on television within fifty miles of a game in progress, it did so for a group of persuasive reasons.
Politically, the legislators had been receiving flack from their constituents in large cities who complained, with logic, ‘The stadium is filled. We can’t buy tickets. And they have the gall to say we can’t look at it on television, either.’
Economically, the complainers had usually contributed tax dollars for the building of the stadium from which they were excluded. And since no more tickets could be sold, the owner of the team couldn’t be losing money if he allowed the game to be televised.
Legally, the congressmen had a presumed right to dictate how television should behave, because, unlike a newspaper, a television station was free to operate only because the government had granted it one of the relatively few channels. And for TV to deny local taxpayers access to a game which people fifty miles away could enjoy seemed indefensible.
Personally, many congressmen were irritated an
d offended when they could neither purchase tickets in the nation’s capital nor see the game on TV, especially since the revitalized Redskins, under George Allen’s leadership, were tearing up the league. I knew several congressmen in this period, and they were bitter about it.
Tactically, it was dangerous for professional sports, which had just yanked the baseball Senators out of Washington and placed them in Texas—disastrous decision—to do anything which might infuriate the legislators further, because sports enjoyed unusual legal exemptions, which Congress could rescind if it became embittered.
So, in a rush rarely seen on Capitol Hill, the Senate voted 76-6 to force the NFL to drop its blackout, and shortly thereafter the House voted 336-37 to do the same. There have been few governmental acts in the field of sports that were so wrong. Commissioner Rozelle was correct when he warned that televising a game free in the city where it is being played must in the long run prove destructive. People will not pay high prices to sit in weather-tormented stadiums to watch what they can see for nothing in the comfort of their homes. In time, football under this system must become a television spectacular, played before what might be termed a small studio audience, for the delectation of the video public.
I am not going to argue this point economically, even though the NFL is correct when it points out that selling all the tickets to the game is not the whole story. The fan who has bought the ticket, and paid for it, still depresses the economy if he stays home. He does not pay for parking his car, or for the scorecard, or for the booklet, and certainly not four or five dollars for food and beverages. If the average person spends six or seven dollars at the game, and if 10,000 stay away—a low figure for some games—the loss to the club and to the city, which would have collected taxes on the sales, can be substantial.
Before I state my serious objection to this congressional action, let’s look briefly at its effect. At the conclusion of the 1973 fall season, during which the new law was first enforced, the Federal Communications Commission issued a triumphant press release intended to prove that Congress has been justified in passing the law:
The anti-blackout law appears to have had minimal impact on twenty-six member teams of the NFL in its first season of operation. It is unlikely that season ticket sales will be adversely affected by the law because there seems to be an excess demand for tickets. In fact, 1973 was the best season ever for the NFL, and early reports on ticket sales for the 1974 season indicate a strong demand for available tickets.
Impartial analysis of those early data supported this claim. But with the 1974 season things began to take the track some of us had foreseen. In fact, the grim truth had begun to unroll at the end of 1973. On Sunday, December 16, I sat in Shea Stadium in New York to watch the Jets play the Buffalo Bills, with Joe Namath in top form and with O. J. Simpson poised to become the first two-thousand-yard gainer in football history. It promised to be a good game, but because it was being telecast throughout New York, 12,260 ticket holders failed to show, and O. J. went over the two-thousand mark to a vast collection of empty seats.
A year later, on Sunday, December 15, 1974, when the Atlanta Falcons hosted the Green Bay Packers, a shocking total of 48,830 ticket-holding fans stayed home. A week earlier, on December 8, I attended the Baltimore Colts-Miami Dolphins game, an important affair, and I was told there were 25,820 vacant seats. A few weeks before, on November 5, a total of 81,000 subscribers stayed away from NFL games, and in perfect weather. At the conclusion of the 1974 season, a total of 492,611 ticket holders had stayed home. And at the beginning of the 1975 season, the teams had nine million dollars’ worth of unsold tickets.
So Rozelle was right when he predicted that Congress could not foresee the consequences of its action when it unilaterally killed the blackout. Football had taken its first giant step toward becoming a studio game, like boxing and wrestling.
But my apprehension is of a much different kind. I believe it to be socially desirable for people to congregate in groups and to share common experiences. I believe it to be psychologically and politically dangerous for people to experience great and moving events by themselves, with no one else to react with. I believe it to be destructive of our community way of life for people not to meet together at public spectacles, games or theaters.
The decline and destruction of our inner city—and of our small towns—began when citizens no longer went out at night to the movies and afterwards to the ice cream parlor or restaurant. The vital movement that keeps a community alive after dark was lost, and the core of the city was abandoned, to hoodlums. Now if our great stadiums are going to be deserted, too, we shall have surrendered one more part of the city, and in the long run we shall all be immeasurably poorer. To keep a community alive requires the interaction of many forces, and to kill off any one of them is to invite the collapse of others. A city cannot be kept alive by having one million people, each in his own cubicle, watching a game.
But the overriding danger, much greater than that threatening the city, is the psychological. If we become a nation of inactive observers, each huddling in his own darkened room and never going out to mingle with other human beings, we run the serious risk of becoming neurotic and even self-destructive. Human beings are animals who require constant interaction with others of their kind. Kids need to play with other kids, to get their highly personal corners knocked off. Young girls need to associate with other young girls and boys to find out what adolescence is all about. Young scholars must argue with other young brains to discover their capacities and what ought to be believed. And adults must not hide themselves away from other adults, living narrow cooped-up lives. The great danger of television is not only that it diminishes intellect, but that its invitation to isolation threatens psychological stability.
On the other hand, there is something positively therapeutic in being part of a crowd sharing a common emotional experience. It is probably better for a couple to attend a theater and share the reactions of a large group of people assembled for a common purpose than for one withdrawn woman or man to watch a late movie on television. The first experience is civilizing; the second can be quite anti-social.
We need more mass experience, not less. We need more civilizing contact with our neighbors, not less. To convert any of our major sports into television specials lacking human reality would be a major step backward. For those reasons, the anti-blackout bill should be repealed. It was a political success, a psychological disaster.
There is one area in which the federal government should intervene: the use of drugs in sports. The evidence is overwhelming that teams on all levels have been either encouraging their players to hype themselves with drugs, or refusing to acknowledge that it is being done surreptitiously. Some years ago popping pills became an accepted way of life for the athlete: amphetamines for super-effort; pain depressants to nullify damage; sedatives to induce sleep; and what seemed most dangerous of all, the taking of large amounts of anabolic steroids to induce rapid weight gain.
The rumors which surrounded the NFL, for example, finally surfaced in 1970 when Houston Ridge, a former player for the San Diego Chargers, brought suit against his team for having encouraged him to take dangerous drugs in order to heighten his physical capacity. Professional sports have been stubbornly tardy in facing up to these aberrations, insisting in the face of damaging evidence that nothing was wrong. In 1975 one Roxie Ann Rice, aged nineteen, was caught while serving as scheduled courier delivering quotas of marijuana to NFL players throughout the nation. ‘She was quite large, with an African-type turban on her head. She said she represented Shirley Temple Black’s office in Washington and wanted photo passes for representatives of the Ghana government.’ When arrested, Miss Rice said she also serviced the basketball teams of Pan American University and the St. Louis Spirits, and had plans for branching out into baseball, ‘because it would be more fun because it was warm then.’
As one tough-minded horse player said when butazolidin was legalized for race horses,
‘The problem with administering drugs to horses or athletes is not what the drugs will do if given, but what they will not do if not given. To be perfectly just, the bettor will have to be handed a list at the start of each football game, “Halversam has taken four pep pills this week, but Atkinson has taken none. However, Gregory, who plays next to Atkinson, has taken a snootful.” ’
My apprehension about the anabolic steroids is that while they certainly pile on the weight, changing a puny 209-pound guard into a 263-pound terror in one year, they probably do so at the risk of physiological and sexual alterations which cannot be reversed. That’s too high a price for a contract which will probably run no more than three and a half years.
A special problem our government faces in sports is the sad decline of athletics in our military academies. In the old days Army and Navy were powers, always in contention for national honors and often the champions. Those were the exciting days when Ed Garbisch of Army drop-kicked four field goals to defeat Navy, 12-0, going on to marry the Chrysler heiress in what seemed the ultimate American romance. They were also the days of Doc Blanchard going inside for Army while Glenn Davis roared outside. That was when Army would go undefeated and even beat Notre Dame 59-9. In those days an Army-Navy game at the big stadium in Philadelphia would draw more than 100,000 spectators and millions more on radio.
Well, it’s not like that any more. What with Vietnam conditioning the minds of young people against all military activities, and the general poor-mouthing of the military establishment, the academies have fallen on bad times in football: Army 0–10, Navy 4-7, Air Force 2-9. The last few Army-Navy games have been television disasters, and there has been serious talk that TV would drop them except for fear of congressional reprisal.