Professional Sports/The Decline and Fafl of the Sports Empire
Nisbet, Robert
of the Go-Go year of 1968. In 1975 came the first $300 billion budget. In 1977 trading began in contracts for future delivery of Treasury bonds, thereby placing the solemn obligations of the...
...Still another destructive force coming out of the 1960s in sports is the same judicial imperialism that has damaged much of the political process and free private enterprise in America...
...since 1960, some quantum changes in all aspects of sports which are slowly choking off the possibility of heroes, indeed of widespread interest much longer in sports...
...Thus...
...were still pretty much the same in structure...
...He was unique...
...They not only gave stellar performances year after year that Jackson doesn't come close to, they made them look easy...
...Quarterbacks played with the rest of the players, calling plays...
...and f r a n c h i s e s . Seasons steadily become longer, overlapping egregiously in their length...
...Special awards (Ruthies, Grangies...
...What do we get for million-dollar salaries...
...mass...
...in the first place we are saturated today with the s h e e r volume of players, teams, leagues, divisions...
...It has nearly killed boxing through overexposure and it now threatens, with its round-thecalendar games, plays, and replays...
...Nagurski was as good at fullback as at tackle...
...Moreover, Marls made it only by virtue of one mighty gasp, so to speak...
...yesteryear they have also been unable to escape it...
...As for foreign-language requirements, they have come back from the very edge of extinction and are once again being enforced...
...He has become an appendage to the machine, a victim of narrowness of function...
...the Jacksons and Winfields little besides contracts...
...Sports, although changing considerably in the period 1930-1960...
...been very close to the titans of the twenties...
...In addition to having second-rate intellects, the typical graduate students of the 1970s clung tightly to the revolutionary attitudes of their undergraduate days...
...Second...
...We are thus down to, and fast losing, the world of sports as the spawning bed of heroes in America...
...Take the snap...
...What this country needs is a revolution in the streets, Professor Sheldon Wolin wrote in democracy in the summer of 1981, but in the absence of such a blessed event he would continue to speak out on political and cultural issues...
...Ty Cobb led the major leagues twelve years in a row and his lifetime batting average was .367...
...On January 23, 1980, it momentarily reached $875, thereby validating one of the most audacious financial forecasts ever made, namely, that the gold price would one day exceed the Dow Jones Industrial Average...
...What do they do...
...One can acquire a sense of infinity by the playoffs of basketball alone, h is difficult to r e p r e s s a shudder at the thought of some of the cities which have been brought into big-time sports...
...The marks of aggressive, cutthroat, profit-greedy business enterprise became increasingly evident to the world, stimulated in large degree by television's desire to conquer the sports world with its schedulebreakingl aggrandizing, and eventually overwhelming demands--all made with carrot as well as stick...
...to destroy other sports as well...
...passing, running, and blocking on offense, often punting and "drop kicking, and were almost always at safety on defense...
...Since the late 1960s all of the stigmata of industrial assembly line and marketplace--and much else m are in full view, diminishing the individual player, the sports hero, relentlessly...
...And we dare compare pitchers of today with the Mathewsons, J o h n s o n s . and Dizzy Deans Of the past...
...The only stars today are supplied by imitation galaxies...
...The desire, in short, to impose stiffer standards of performance upon the students coexists in the minds of contemporary professors with the desire to identify themselves with the flabbiest of radical causes...
...We look in virtual awe today at any baseball player who can hit .300 (the live ball, mind you) for two or three years running...
...Such are the rewards of being first and at exactly the right historical moment...
...Also in 1977 came the first $400 billion budget...
...A mere fifteen years after the sweeping curricular changes with which college and university faculties bought peace in their time, those same faculties are busily engaged in an attempt to restore some semblance of the status quo ante...
...Any of these, and there are o t h e r s , could have held their own...
...Nor can we look any longer to the republic of letters, arts, and sciences...
...now an injured hockey player takes his wounds to a court of law and receives a million 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1q82 dollars in damages...
...Only with the greatest difficulty can individual heroes breathe and prosper in such an atmosphere...
...An individual who does nothing but occasionally relieve starters can reach several hundred thousand dollars a y e a r . It is a rare s t a r t e r who today i s n ' t being helped to the showers by the fifth inning...
...Examining the course catalogue, however, hardly begins to suggest the weaknesses that have been built into our system of higher education in the last decade and a half...
...More and more sports THE AMERICAN SPECIAIOR DECEMBER Iq82 43 sections in the newspapers are filled with stories of contracts, contractviolations, reserve clauses, free agents, astronomical salaries, strikes, lockouts, industrial morale stories about the Yankees and other teams, cocaine-sniffing, exploits of the Steinbrenners and Finleys, and so on...
...The military is no better in this respect...
...The game has been broken down into assemblyline o p e r a t i o n s , each as small and r e p e t i t i v e as possible, with each player trained tirelessly to meet the specifications of that tiny specialization and no other...
...Dooley's fifty-year cycles of recurrence should be considerably shortened...
...And what heroes we have had...
...Beginning with the legendary John L. Sullivan at the turn of the century, there have been many heroes in boxing, baseball, football, tennis, golf, and, recently, basketball and hockey...
...the individual player threatens to become lost in the chaos of specialization, especially in professional football...
...Playoffs multiply exponentially, as do tournaments and matches in tennis and golf...
...Thus while there are grounds for believing that Ronald Reagan has succeeded in shifting the entire nation rightward, Democrats as well as Republicans, the generalization certainly does not apply to the academic world, nor is it likely to in the years ahead...
...Desert I in Iran might have produced heroes, but it has instead become one more symbol of the nonheroic, forever associated with the Joint Chiefs...
...And the blacks and women who have been professionally rewarded on the basis of their race or sex have in turn been in the forefront of the movement to discredit the official values of the American people...
...Dooley observed long ago, America is more given to rapid change than any other nation on earthmwith the result that if you take a close look at the Republic at fifty-year intervals you will find that it has hardly changed at all...
...We have known all along that p r o f e s s i o n a l s p o r t s are at bottom business enterprises, but that residual fact was kept well in the background for a long time...
...Given the industrialization ot: sports, it was perhaps inevitable that the courts would see fit to invade what was once an enclave of autonomy and self-government...
...Things are still somewhat better in these respects in baseball...
...No one complained when in 1922 J u s t i c e Holmes declared major league baseball a s p o r t , not a b u s i n e s s , and in truth it was far more sport than b u s i n e s s . But all of that changed d r a s t i c a l l y and i r r e v e r s i b l y in the 1960s...
...its malign effects be.coding all too vivid in the sixties...
...Each made his sport national in the popular mind, created followings and fans, and forged a whole new body of symbols in American culture...
...Television is of course the single g r e a t e s t cause of this...
...The presidency has already ceased to be individual, as it was down through FDR...
...pumping a d nauseam...
...It is simply presumptuous to compare t o d a y ' s quarterbacks with those of old...
...There aren't more than a handful of the obscenely paid luminaries of Anaheim, Kansas City, San Diego, and Milwaukee who would have made any of the great Yankee, Pirate, and Cardinal teams of the twenties and thirties...
...The golden age of sports heroes is the 1920s--comparable in its way with the Age of Pericles m when Dempsey, Ruth, Cobb, Grange, Tilden, Rockne, and Bobby Jones were veritable demigods...
...teams and task forces are the thing...
...crats rivaling such hopelessly unfecund areas as State, Defense, and HHS...
...To put that feat in perspective, however, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at this writing stands at roughly 940, which is where it was fifteen years ago...
...he can add at least hero-luster...
...Occasionally a record of one of the titans is broken: Babe Ruth's 60 by Roger Maris's 61...
...and has become corporate, composed literally of hundreds of White House bureauRobert Nisbet is Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Harvard University Press...
...Babe Ruth hit anywhere from 50 to 60 homers each of a dozen years...
...There are more people today who recognize instantly the names and heroic achievements of Ruth, Dempsey, and Grange than the more recent DiMaggio, All, and Unitas...
...the game advances but the player r e c e d e s . Without doubt any of today's major college and professional teams could defeat fairly easily any of the greatest teams of e a r l i e r d e c a d e s - - b u t through means which do no honor to the individuals involved...
...Where are the Swansons, Chaplins, Garbos, and Gables...
...It will not be long before the outcomes of Superbowl and World Series games are held up until some federal judge rules on a contested game-decision...
...Now that these veterans of the Harvard bust, the battle of Morningside Heights, and a hundred other confrontations have received their Ph.D.'s and entered full-time teaching, they have begun to take over the colleges and universities of this country by more subtle means than they formerly employed...
...hand off or else dart back...
...Even leaving nuclear war to one side, the conditions of war, at least for large nations, are antagonistic to emergence of heroes...
...In the case of higher education, one could argue that Mr...
...There were some luminescent stars afterward to be worshipped: Hubbell, DiMaggio, Williams, Joe Louis, Baugh, Huff, Brown, Hull, Howe, Cousy, Russell, and others, not forgetting Budge in tennis and Palmer in golf...
...As Mr...
...Then, in the summer, after passage of what was described as the largest tax increase in history, the stock market vaulted by 150 points...
...each came close to being an a l l - p u r p o s e player...
...On the reasonable theory that nature'distributes her genetic talents fairly evenly through the decades, we may assume that there are natural Ruths, Cobbs, Deans, and Williamses out there now in the ballparks...
...It is probably good to have a professional actor in the White House every so often...
...The prophet was James Dines who had long since been ignored by respectable analysts...
...He was prouder of his pitching records than anything else in his extraordinary career...
...For what the catalogue doesnot record is that when turmoil came to the campuses in the late sixties, the quality of applicants to graduate schools of arts and sciences at once began to go down, and that as the real income of professors was eaten into by the inflation of the 1970s the nation's most gifted undergraduates turned away from teaching careers in ever increasing numbers...
...In 1977 trading began in contracts for future delivery of Treasury bonds, thereby placing the solemn obligations of the United States government on a speculative par with pork bellies, plywood, and soybean meal...
...At least free substitution, with its promise of a b a t t i n g team and a s e p a r a t e fiel'ding t e a m . h a s n ' t yet been a d o p t e d , though l am inclined to think that under the competitive pressure of football and the boundless g r e e d of owners, something along this line will have been developed before the end of the c e n t u r y . The Designated H i t t e r is perhaps the first s t e p . Bullpens become ever larger and more highly paid...
...guarded by several behemoths, in order to get rid of the ball as quickly as possible, pumping...
...At last report they were trying to get out...
...Indeed, the leftist professors of my acquaintance have lately become more intransigent than ever, for with the drying up of public funds for educational purposes they have found it easy to think of themselves as the victims of a brutal and uncaring society, and there is nothing that makes the anti-Americanism of academia grow faster than the tears of self-pity...
...Each was what the Greeks called a culturehero, that is, a creator or bringer and bestower...
...He generated five of them, and there wouldn't be another until Joe Louis...
...For the most part Reggie Jacksons, cavorting clumsily in the outfield, hitting a bare .290 at best, and belting two or three dozen home runs, usually late, a season...
...The proliferation of courses in ethnic studies and women's studies continues unabated, and indeed in many places whole departments have been organized around these pseudo-subjects...
...Why, then, are we obliged to become awestruck when someone hits .301 for two or three successive years or winds up with a 15-6 pitching record--with ample assistance from the multi-million-dollar bullpen...
...Sports heroes assuredly didn't die with the twenties...
...Whatever the regard for the Croesuses, Fuggers, Rothschilds, Morgans, and Rockefellers in Western history, it was the very opposite of hero-regard...
...Old sources have dried up in too many cases...
...In i979 gold bullion hit $.300 an ounce, having scraped $104 in the summer of 1976...
...The g r e a t players of yore in football played sixty minutes, offense and defense...
...Compare Jackson's relatively pathetic (but always arrogant)performance with the play of Babe Ruth and Hank Greenherg, of Cobb, Hornsby, and Ted Williams...
...Before that he set records as a pitcher for the Red Sox, among them that of pitching 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings of World Series baseball (1916, 1918...
...But we have seen...
...Today, more and more colleges are demanding that students take a universally prescribed "core curriculum...
...1982, an epidemic of corporate bankruptcies, still more recession, and numerous debt " r e - schedulings" by sovereign borrowers, which, so Walter Wriston, chairman of Citicorp, recently assured the readers of the New York Times, can't go broke (and the first $700 billion budget...
...In addition, he set extant records in the field and on the bases...
...Behold Hollywood...
...is the closest to hero in popular adulation in his time...
...Once such eminences as Longfellow, Lowell, Mark Twain, William James, William Lyon Phelps, and H. L. Mencken were authentic heroes, household names...
...Can anyone imagine an authentic hero being born and nurtured in Tampa Bay and Anaheim...
...It is highly unlikely that there will be any more Pattons, MacArthurs, and Eisenhowers...
...The structure of science today discourages individual achievement...
...paraphrasing Tocqueville...
...Another innovation of the liberationist sixties, the "pass-fail" grade, has likewise been largely replaced by the old system of letter gradesnand no one has been more pleased by this reactionary move than the students themselves, who are aware how important good grades are in landing an interesting job or in gaining admission to a professional school...
...Through the 1970s, as noted, people got into debt...
...Imagine Nevers and Grange r e s t i n g . Nor should we neglect the powerful role of the computer in recruitment, development of player, and in the calling of plays...
...Since true heroism is beyond any performer's reach in our politicized, industrialized, computerized, and hyper-publicized sports world today, what can be offered the public...
...The Ruths and Cobbs thought of little besides baseball...
...There will be no more Lincolns, Teddy Roosevelts, and Woodrow Wilsons in American politics...
...1981, another recession (and the first $600 billion budget...
...For any nation in this century needs all the heroes it can get for its pantheon...
...for each and all of the vast multitude of specializations, assembly-line techniques, and marketplace piracies, with the parade of noseguards and designated hitters all weeping their gratitude before camera and through tears thanking Morn and the agent who made it all possible...
...Succeeded by jerks, monsters, and robots...
...We are in a mass age out of which heroes cannot emerge...
...How long can NFL self-rule continue when a California court declares that longestablished NFL regulations notwithstanding, the free-booting Ai Davis can rob the city of Oakland by taking his Raiders to Los Angeles...
...It is almost inconceivable that we shall have another Thomas Edison' and Albert Einstein in our midst, each a household name...
...Yet at the same time that the colleges and universities have been trying to wipe out the legacy of Kenneth S. Lynn teaches American history at the Johns Hopkins University and is the author of books on Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and other American writers...
...In the field of history, for example, Marxism is by all odds the most fashionable mode of analysis among teachers of European history, while in American history more and more of the current scholarship is consecrated to the expression of contempt for the achievements of our civilization...
...Business as such has never been a fertile bed for heroes...
...There had never been a million-dollar gate before Dempsey...
...Again we ask, how can a sports hero emerge out of tawdry litigation...
...Last fall the Chicago Board of Trade unveiled a master creation for this time of financial volatility: an options contract on Treasury-bond futures...
...Today it is better to go to the dry-cleaning industry for heroes than to the writers of our books...
...The luxury of free s u b s t i t u t i o n today gives j u s t about all players anywhere from 25 to 55 minutes rest on the bench during the game...
...During the past fifteen years we have seen in American professional sports what Gibbon saw in secondcentury imperial Rome: zenith of prosperity but also the sharp signs of beginning decline...
...I suggest something along the lines of Hollywood's Oscar night, staged at the Los Angeles Coliseum and televised throughout the world...
...In this period we have seen professional sports industrialized, computerized, sl~ecialized, politicized, and egregiously over-publicized...
...And therein lies the greatest harm done to this country by the boundlessly self-aggrandizing owners and players...
...Hero-computers...
...The salaries alone will, on a little more fan reflection, come close to killing sports...
...Fifteen years down the road from the campus violence of the late sixties, a curious combination of fundamentalism and leftism sets the academic tone...
...As the judiciary has weakened the walls of family and local community, so it now weakens the walls of sports in America...
...and chemistry with followers during these decades...
...Politics and war are old seedbeds of heroes, but both have become desiccate under the sterilizing influences of bureaucracy, mechanization, and, in the case of the former, judicial imperialism that sucks the very marrow out of elective politics...
...The year 1980 brought credit controls, recession, and the first $500 billion budget...
...The answer is yes and is rooted in the psychology of the assembly line and the marketplace...
...The erstwhile occupiers of deans' offices~ have also been in the forefront of the effort to destroy meaningful standards of promotion by urging the rapid advancement of black professors and women professors regardless of the quality of their scholarly work...
...But only with the help of a significantly longer season and in conjunction with general outfield performance that the Babe would have been ashamed of...
...The thought of Streisand, Redford, and Eastwood walking where once walked the great and the mighty is enough to bring on the black bile...
...Is this really the best we can now hope for...
...Gone...
...Again, the triumph of committees, councils, and staffs over soldiers...
...Once when hockey players got too vicious with their sticks, they were rewarded with their own medicine...
...Henry Ford, St...
...In the insanely individualistic years when "doing your own thing" was the watchword of young people, students won the right to tailor their courses of study to fit their own perception of their needs...
Vol. 15 • December 1982 • No. 12
