O friends, be men, and let your hearts be strong,
And let no warrior in the heat of fight
Do what may bring him shame in others’ eyes.
Housman, who knew his Homer, phrased the same idea in these words when sending his Shropshire lad off to the competition:
Be clean then; rot before you do
A thing they’d not believe of you.
I apologize for the use of men and lad in these citations, and for my repeated use of other masculine words in this chapter, but violence in sport is primarily a male aberration. There have, however, been warning signs that when women turn to professionalism, they embrace a rowdyism which often exceeds that of men. Four women wrestling in a pool of mud was one pretty example. The petite and beautiful roller-skater Judy Arnold slugging it out with 250-pound Erlene Brown is another. In other sports, like tennis, women professionals seem eager to go down that fatally wrong road of cheap sensationalism. If they succeed, it will be a pity, for they have an opportunity to give sports a fresh, clean start and to avoid the errors their brothers have made.
And now for one of the most perplexing questions in sports. If you are in favor of keen competition, yet opposed to violence, how do you react to the Lombardi ethic? Like all coaches of professional teams, including the big-time schools, he was required to win. In his remorseless world, only the won-lost percentage counted, and to protect it a player had to be ruthless and hate his opponent, because the penalty for relaxation was losing, and the penalty for that was extinction.
It would have been ugly enough if this machismo had been reserved for the professionals and the big-time schools, but violence-prone Americans applauded Lombardi so heartily that he became the norm for coaches in small colleges, high schools and even Little League. When I worked on Chapter IV, dealing with children, I met this complaint a score of times: ‘Our Little League coach thinks he is obligated to behave like Vince Lombardi.’ And always this was said resentfully; parents might enjoy watching violence on television, but they didn’t want their children to be on the receiving end.
I like Lombardi’s dedication to accomplishment. I like his doctrine that when you engage your opponent, you do so to win. But I deplore many of the methods he devised to ensure winning. And I especially dislike the psychological tyranny he imposed and gloried in. Perhaps he was the ideal coach for professionals who from grammar school had been so football-bound that they could not discipline themselves, but he is a poor model for amateurs.
One aspect of violence in American sports is accidental, but it requires special comment. From the most ancient times hunting animals and birds for the sheer joy of hunting has been an honorable recreation, and an imposing collection of art, poetry, and writing could be assembled from all cultures to demonstrate this. But in our country the gun which is used in sport is also used to take human life, and at a rate that is shocking. The city of Tokyo, with a population of 12,000,000, produces three firearm killings a year. New York, with a population of 10,000,000, produces five hundred. Per capita, Americans gun down thirty-five times as many victims as Englishmen do.
American ‘tradition’ defends the right of every red-blooded American man to tote his gun and bushwhack his neighbor, and of every American woman to flush out her husband and blast him with the family shotgun. In 1968 I served as state-wide chairman for the reelection of Senator Joseph E. Clark, an excellent gentleman and a good public servant. But early in the game he had the effrontery to say that he thought it about time we stopped gunning down our political leaders like John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and from that moment on, he was a dead duck. When I went to Erie, the hunting capital of our state, I was told by the committee of loyal Democrats that welcomed me at the airport, ‘We’re delighted to have you with us, Michener, and you can speak all night about Hubert Humphrey for President, but if you say one word in favor of Senator Clark and his bill to take our guns away from us, we’ll run you out of town.’ (There was no such bill.) And in the November election good Joe Clark and his moderate stand against guns went down to a crushing defeat.
In my home district, I would not dare to speak out against guns. Some hunters killed a little boy waiting for his school bus a couple of years ago. ‘He moved,’ they said in explanation. It was a wooded area and he could have been a deer. Other hunters shot at a deer in our back yard last year, and the bullet came ripping through my study and into my shelf of books. Had I been sitting at my typewriter, I would have been shot through the head. A Pan Am pilot who lives not far from me remonstrated with hunters who had invaded his property. They shot out one of his eyes and fled the scene, leaving him on the ground.
To protest such actions gets nowhere. If the President of the United States, coming from a gunners’ region, inveighs against gun control, how can I advocate it? But I do wish everyone would read a report by four Cleveland doctors which appeared in the February 19, 1973, issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association. It is entitled ‘Homicide and Suicide in a Metropolitan Area,’ and in dispassionate terms it simply records the shocking rise of gunrelated deaths in the period 1938-71:
The controversy over firearms control, especially as it relates to handguns, has many passionate advocates on both sides. Public debate is sure to continue. From 1938 to 1962 there was an average of 87 homicides per year, with firearms involved in 50% to 60%. We now have more than 300 homicides annually, and guns claim 80% of the victims! Since approximately 90% of firearms homicides are handgun fatalities, we interpret this as an unmistakable and tragic consequence of the availability and abuse of handguns.
The report occasioned so much discussion and controversy that the four doctors went back to their figures, verified them, and came up with a finding even more startling than the one they had previously disclosed: They reported this in ‘Accidental Firearm Fatalities in a Metropolitan County,’ American Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 100, No. 6:
One hundred and twenty-three of the 148 accidental firearm fatalities (83%) resulted from mishaps with handguns. Over three-quarters of these fatalities occurred in the home (78%), and the majority of them (67%) occurred when someone was handling or ‘playing’ with a gun …
Our data also suggest that guns in the home are more dangerous than useful to the homeowner and his family who keep them to protect their persons and property. During the period surveyed in this study, only twenty-three burglars, robbers or intruders who were not relatives or acquaintances were killed by guns in the hands of persons who were protecting their homes. During this same interval, six times as many fatal firearm accidents occurred in the home. We conclude that a loaded firearm in the home is more likely to cause an accidental death than to be used as a lethal weapon against an intruder.
As I work on this passage, a lovely sixteen-year-old girl living down the road has been killed by a friend who did not believe that a gun largely dismantled could contain a bullet that would go off. It did.
I cannot foresee any substantial decrease in guns in family lockers during the rest of this century. Gunning people down is an American trait which will not easily be altered. In parts of the west that I know well, even to suggest that guns be controlled is tantamount to treason, and I no longer argue the matter. But people should realize that when they buy guns, it is they and their families who are in gravest danger.
The tragic consequences that can result when violence and sport intermix are demonstrated in the case of Howard McNeill. At age fourteen he stood six-eight and dominated play on Philadelphia’s ghetto courts. One of nine children in a disrupted black family, he was unusually handsome and well-mannered, and it was not surprising that he was avidly recruited by suburban high schools seeking basketball talent.
He saw the game as his best chance of escaping the harsh inner-city life and enrolled at a good prep school, but couldn’t get grades which would keep him eligible. He therefore transferred to Abington, of which we read on pages 112–13, where a local postman was appointed his
legal guardian. Howard not only played good basketball but also showed that he could fit into a suburban life.
His move to Abington occasioned much bitter comment in neighboring communities, and protracted legal hassles ensued, but in the end his right to play for his new team was confirmed. However, it is alleged that someone from arch-rival Norristown threatened him with serious harm if he showed up for the game against that team.
Abington, inspired by McNeill’s play, had a 19-0 record, and if it could beat Norristown, it would have a good shot at the state title, so McNeill had to play. In self-protection he acquired a gun, which he kept in his duffel, and following the Norristown game he displayed it to his fellow teammate Mitchell Lee, also sixteen years old. The gun went off. The bullet struck Lee in the head and killed him. Three comments followed:
Curtis Coull, athletic director at Norristown: ‘I’m very upset, bitter, about such a suggestion. No one from Norristown would make such a threat.’
Mrs. Helen Lee, mother of the dead athlete: ‘It was just Mitch’s time to go.’
Jim Wilkinson, much-loved coach of Abington: ‘Winning doesn’t seem so important any more.’
Epilogue
In the three final chapters of this book I have been preoccupied with money and violence, and I apologize. I seem to have lost sight of my preeminent criterion, that sports should be fun, but it has never been far from my mind. I should now like to conclude with several short examples of the delight one can find in the sublime nonsense of games. These are the highlights in a lifetime of following sports:
Hilarity. The most sheer fun I ever had in sports was playing volleyball, a game I commend highly. I understand that an effort is under way to establish a national league of professional volleyball teams, and if you have ever seen the great women’s teams of Japan and Russia or the equally good men’s teams of Cuba or East Germany, you know how exciting this playground game, which requires so little equipment, can be.
A commendable feature of the new league, and one which puts it at the head of the class in the emerging world of sports, is that each team consists of four men and two women, with the latter allowed to move freely up to the net or back.
I played for some years on a New York City YMCA team. I was a setter—the player who takes the pass from the back-court and projects it straight upward, so that the tall spiker can put it away—and I was a fierce competitor, with one weakness. When I set the ball it often went up crooked, just outside the reach of my teammates but directly into the paws of the opposition.
We were a championship team, beating all comers, until that fatal night when we were invited to go to Harlem to play a team of black railway porters who were reputed to be rather good. When we walked onto the court they were waiting, a gang of six-foot-six stringbeans who could jump so high we wondered if they would ever come down.
We lost the first game 15–6, then pulled ourselves together, determined to save our honor. By dint of superhuman effort, and because the other side relaxed, having won the first game so easily, we squeaked out a 19–17 victory.
But we had shot our bolt. The last game was 15–3, and during the second half our side sort of stood around in amazement, staring at those superb athletes who could jump so high. At one point one of our men protested, ‘Those sonsabitches are usin’ sky hooks!’ Everyone laughed, but my lasting memory of that third game when the porters let everything loose is of picking volleyballs out of my teeth. We were no longer champions.
I had learned volleyball in the navy, where all the captains and admirals wanted to be spikers, and I found then that a man who can subdue his own desires and master the art of serving others can make himself invaluable. In choosing sides the team captain always chose the good spikers on the first and second choice, but then the spikers would grab his arm and whisper, ‘Take Michener.’ I was never chosen lower than third, because I was needed. I wasn’t good but I was faithful.
Revelation. Sometimes in the process of a game a man or woman will experience a moment of almost shattering revelation, about either himself or his opponent, or even about the nature of life. For me the greatest moment came in Denver in the year 1941, when I took a group of basketball players down from Greeley to see the latest sensation of the game, Hank Luisetti, recently graduated from Stanford and now playing for a California semi-pro team.
He was to play against the Denver Legion, a team which commanded the loyalties of our region because it was composed of former college stars like Jumpin’ Jack McCracken and Bob Doll and was always in contention for the Amateur Athletic Union Championship. It competed against the country’s top teams, like the Phillips 66ers from Bartlesville, the Fort Wayne Pistons and the Kansas City Healys, all of whom played tight defensive ball. In 1932 the Wichita Henrys had won the national championship 15–14. My crowd had seen phenoms come and go in this tough league, and we assumed haughtily that what we had been reading about Luisetti was the ordinary press agent’s extravagance. We expected him to be reasonably good. We had no comprehension of how good.
When Luisetti came on the floor, there was a buzz of excitement, but he wasn’t anything very special. A tallish, handsome man, not much over six feet and not very heavy. He did have graceful moves, but then so did McCracken of the Legion. In practice he showed no unusual speed, and from a distance out he missed about as many as he made.
But when the game started, with the California team moving from my right to my left, and with me in the first row of the balcony with a perfect view, something happened which left me stunned. Luisetti started from his own back-court, flipped an ordinary pass to a teammate, then cut like lightning to about the center of the floor. There he received a pass, flipping it immediately to another teammate. He then ran in a small circle toward the left of the basket, took a pass back in stride, dribbled right through two waiting guards and leaped high into the air as the Denver center bore down on him to block the attempted shot.
It was then that the miracle happened. Somehow, Luisetti stayed up in the air, faked a shot at the basket, made the Denver center commit himself, and with a movement I had never seen before, simply extended his right arm an extra foot and banked a one-handed shot gently against the backboard and into the basket. It seemed as if he had been in the air a full minute, deceiving three different players, and ending with a delayed shot that was staggering in its beauty.
The crowd exploded! They were still cheering when he did it again, that remarkable leap, that hanging in the air, that changing direction, ending with a soft shot at the basket.
We who had come to scoff sat silent. We were seeing the end of a basketball era, the beginning of a new world. We had been taught to shoot two-handed. We had been taught to work the ball in close. We had been taught never to take a wild shot from a distance. We had been taught to manage the games so that a runaway score was 23–17. And here was the revolutionary young man from California, proving that everything we had been taught was wrong.
It was a marvelous night, one I can never forget. It demonstrated that there is always the possibility someone will come along who will be able to do old things in bold new ways. And it taught me humility. Nobody that I ever played with or against could go on the same floor with Hank Luisetti. He paved the way for Pettit and Mikan and Fulks and Chamberlain and Abdul-Jabbar. He was a revelation, and I saw him at the beginning of his professional career.
Beauty. They told me in Hawaii, ‘As long as the rubber hose is attached to your midriff, and as long as the mask stays over your face, bringing oxygen, nothing really bad can happen.’ They would stay in the boat and supervise the compressor, which would be pumping air to me. After affixing a heavy lead belt around my belly, so that its weight could draw me down to the bottom of the sea, I plunged overboard, ready to start my first dive. While I clung to the boat, adjusting to the temperature and learning to control the air, the experts told me, ‘You should find coral at thirty feet. If you want to risk forty-five feet, go ahead. But come up in about ten minutes.’ r />
At thirty feet, with reassuring bubbles rising about my head, proving that the air system was functioning, I entered a fairyland of beauty: coral castles, long sweeps of bright sand, jungles of rock with eels and stingrays, and all sorts of corridors with the most graceful fish imaginable in variegated colors.
And then I fell under the spell of the ocean, the mysterious moving water that remains always the same, and the grayness of the light, and the flashing colors of the fish. I dropped to forty-five feet and discovered a more somber world, and then I was lured to sixty feet, rarely attempted on a first dive, and there I stayed for about forty-five minutes.
This was the best part of the journey, the dark-gray world where the fish moved more slowly and where new types emerged, much larger than those higher up. The coral was more pristine and the castles higher. The caves where the eels hid were like caverns in a fairy tale, and I could easily imagine that the upper world of air and sunlight existed no more.
How beautiful it was, and when I began to ascend slowly, moving always toward light and brighter colors and more lively fish, it was like being on an elevator moving upward through the evolution of the world, and when at last I left the coral behind me and the fish, and passed through the final twenty feet of clean green water, bursting at last into the free and open air, where I could breathe with my own lungs, unaided, and see the sun and the surface of the mysterious sea, I could only mutter to myself, ‘How beautiful it all was.’