In Defense of the Fullback

...In his sophomore year during a practice session he gets the ball and goes beautifully, perfectly, for a 70yard touchdown...

...The threats of age and injury are always present, and the fallen star finds himself in the middle of the wood with no return path...

...Whatever the tragedy of the profes sional athlete may be, it cannot be the tragedy of Willy Loman...

...He looked back to it, the way that the star athletes look back to their moment of glory as the greatest experience of their life...

...Three of these former players who had "most disinguished themselves in later life" reported that "their experience of life since graduation" had led them to believe that Tad Jones was right...

...All I kept thinking," he explained, "is I got to pitch...

...Does your experience of life since graduation lead you to support this philosophy or reject it...

...In the middle of the desert, the thirsty man should not shun cactus milk because champagne would be more desirable...

...Both the value to society provided by bigtime sports and the social values that bigtime sports maintain are completely overlooked by the Hutchins-type detractors...

...The note was unsigned...

...Last fall Murray Kempton wrote a piece in New York Post on a day that Dick Nixon was mouthing his campaign cliches in the middle west, and Sal Maglie, at the age of 39, was pitching a shutout game in New York...

...It is one of the last to have room for the nonconformist...

...The halfback-husband takes a job as a traveling clothing salesman for colleges, returns to his own school and goes to the empty field to relive the moment of the 70-yard run...

...One variation on the theme of the athlete's destruction is stated by Irwin Shaw in a short story called "The 70-Yard Run...

...but because no one has challenged them since the days of "The Male Animal," when Thurber's All-American Joe Ferguson was tossing china cups in forward passes while the hero-professor looked on in anguish, the myth has stood and been reinforced...

...The dimensions of the athletic menace to society can be found in the fact that our leading professional liberal has faithfully battled to hold the line against the likes of those two fighting Irishmen, Joe McCarthy and Terry Brennan...

...and nothing, really, has ever happened to Richard Nixon...

...It was, we assume, their own "70-yard run...

...Ted Williams can spit at the fans and curse them, and as long as he hits the ball he can keep his job...

...But that is far from its most important contribution...

...It is a real moment of truth, in which things fit together and life, in a brilliant flash, has order and meaning...

...But such work is "inferior" to the white collar job of the salesman, which Willy drove himself into...

...He carries the ball again but there is always someone in the way to disturb the consummation of the run...

...He marries a woman who worshipped him as a halfback, gets bored with him in later life, and takes on a lover...

...This incident, not without parallels, dramatizes the role which baseball plays in the lives of many persons today...

...When he stops hitting the ball, no amount of public relations can keep his position for him...

...While liberal critics in banquet halls make speeches extolling the values of risk, individualism, honesty, and brotherhood, the athletes are out on the field, playing the game...

...In the myth of the spectator sports menace, it is not only the fans who are the victims...

...It would also eliminate a profession whose members act out in their work many of the basic values preached by their intellectual critics...

...The spectator at a sporting event is in many ways a participant...

...Yankees...

...things don't open up...

...The standard image is the great star who once had 50,000 people cheering his name in a din of glory, and then cannot ever "adjust" to the ponderously inglorious way of life that follows...

...In the folklore of American liberalism, the only figures more maligned than the Rotary president and the real estate salesman are the fullback and the first baseman...

...The men picked were college presidents, generals, surgeons, and business executives...

...The professional athlete is the only man among us who is doomed to an honest career...

...Jimmy Cannon, the last of the great sportswriters, once reported one aspect of the hazard with this comment: The pitcher with the flawed arm is the most miserable of all athletes...

...There are millions of souls who trudge through a boring existence without having had their 70-yard run...

...From a strictly financial standpoint, the sports de-emphasizers fail to acknowledge that in many universities the stadium pays for the library and the laboratory...

...In the 1930s James Wechsler entitled his book complaining against all that was bad in Ameri can life King Football...

...Identification with a team provides a background of continuity and purpose for many whose loyalties have few other outlets...

...Kempton asked why it was that Nixon, in his early 40s, is a young man hardly dry behind the ears and Maglie, at 39, is "an ancient of days," and he answered that it was because "things had happened" to Maglie...

...The title of the novel The Second Happiest Day by John Phillips comes from a statement by one of his characters, a rich and successful alumnus of an eastern prep school who returns to attend the victory banquet after the school's big game and tells the young star of the team that "This is the happiest day of your life...

...It may be, of course, that the Hutchins followers would be in favor of eliminating those things too...

...He forced himself to live a lie...

...Athletics is one of the few professions left wherein a man's success must be determined solely by the skill with which he does his job...

...It is generally, and correctly, accepted that the stars of the playing field never find anything in later life to match the big game...

...Later success seemed to be the greatest criterion, for only three of the "Silver All-America" had been named on any of the allAmerica football teams during their playing years...

...and the recent presidential campaign drained the last elements of spontaneity from party convention and campaign rituals, with hired "demonstrators" carrying convention posters and blowing noisemakers for planned periods of time in the calculated wildness of rehearsed parades around the convention hall...

...They were given a list of questions to answer, anonymously, the last of which was this: "Tad Jones, the old Yale coach, is supposed to have told his team on the eve of a game with Harvard that they would 'never again, as long as you live,' do anything so important as represent their college in the big game...

...Is it not better that the fan is at the field, instead of crouching in silence before the screen...

...of eliminating, in other words, the rituals that men so stubbornly conceive to graft an element of glory onto the deadly drudgery of everyday life...

...What else can I do to make a living...

...When the old pro is turned out to pasture, there are no picket lines...

...There are certain unreasonable reasons why this should be...

...It is an occupation for men, and a hazardous one...

...He was a man who found his most pleasurable moments in building things, in working with his hands, in fixing the back porch steps...

...No one laughs...

...But the question that the myth of sports-ruination fails to ask is this: is it better to have had one moment of enormous acclaim and public glory, or is it better to go through an ordinary white collar or blue denim life and never have known any glory at all...

...The essential tragedy of Loman lay in the fact that he was too afraid, too unwilling to risk disapproval and insecurity, to do the work he wanted...

...But before his junior year he injures himself and his career is never the same...

...I asked Bobby Shantz how he felt when he originally discovered his throwing arm was damaged...

...The Christmas issue of Sports 1llustrated carried a fascinating feature called the "Silver All-America...

...It is the story of an apallingly uninteresting fellow who was distinguished only by his talent as a broken-field runner...

...The second happiest day will be when you get married...

...The professional athlete is the man who risks his security-physical and financial-to make his living in the thing he often loves to do...

...The arguments against spectator sports events on the grounds that the spectators are only indulging in a "passive" experience first neglects the real aspects of a spectator's participation, and second assumes that if he were not at the stadium he would be doing something "active" with his leisure...

...the only name found in the room was on a social security card...

...The conclusions drawn by the athletic de-emphasis legion would be that the poor fellow was ruined by the 70yard run...

...We all know how the movie and the soap opera will end...

...The terror is not in the thought that a grown man was able to experience a moment of glory in a college game...

...II The people who rant against bigtime sports are also the ones who rant against the menace of conformity, the lack of individualism, the dulling results of "canned" entertainment, the lifelessness of men who are more interested in retirement plans and Rotary meetings than in trying to lead a life of personal fulfillment at the risk of losing security and approval...

...What the liberal-intellectual team has failed to realize is that to knock out Terry Brennan-or rather the symbol and substance of bigtime football at Notre Dame that he heads at the present-is to knock out the last refuge of glory from the lives of countless Americans...

...the TV quiz shows interview their prospective contestants for days before the program with a staff that includes a psychiatrist to make sure the fellow isn't "too odd...

...It is also the participants themselves...

...The present principal defender of the faith is Robert Hutchins, who booted the pigskin out of Chicago University and has since been acclaimed over countless courses of chicken a la king as the man who prevented America from turning into a giant stadium...

...It is rather in the prospect that the rest of his life holds so few possibilities of rising above the drabness to a similar moment of satisfaction...

...An excellent discussion in Liberation entitled "The Glory of Baseball" (which editor Dave Dellinger said was read by few of his intellectual friends because they told him "they saw it was about sports") opened with this commentary: A few years ago a man was found hanging in a hotel room in Mont pelier, Vermont...

...It was the first profession to admit that the color of a man's skin did not disqualify him from performing at the top in any league...

...If three of this group who had found success in careers that are a good deal more lively and glorious than the majority of jobs came to such a conclusion, what must the former stars who went on to ordinary work feel...

...To eliminate the annual Rose Bowl game from Pasadena with all its outlandish and wonderful pageantry, would be comparable to barring the bullfight from Madrid, or the jousting tournaments from medieval Europe...

...It is a field of risk, whereon the performer's ability determines his contract and salary...

...I got no trade or anything...

...The irony of this is that bigtime athletics provides one of the few ways of livelihood in our society that is filled with risk, devoid of security, and dependent solely on individual skill for success...

...The crowds who cheer Mickey Mantle and never heard of Colin Wilson have picked a more valid idol than many of their intellectual superiors...

...Three of this assemblage of successful career men had found that the big game in college was the most important experience of their life...

...As Kempton wrote once before in a piece on Maglie, "Baseball is not a game for boys...

...The mass adulation of the athletic hero is not so deplorable after all...

...But the most popular leisure entertainment is watching television...

...It was "to honor the 25 football lettermen of 25 years ago 'who have most distinguished themselves in their chosen fields of life.' " The point was to get the men who were the most outstanding players then and the most successful at their careers now...

...Beside his swinging legs, on a nearby table, was a note which read: "Goodbye to the New York...

...Pitching is all I can do...

...The playing field is one of the few areas of entertainment that is not subject to rehearsal, "canning," and elimination of the quirks of humanity...

...The terror is in the contemplation of spending the majority, the maturity, of life at one of the occupa tions most men must take-fox instance driving a truck or selling insurancewhich are predictably empty of moments of truth, glory, or excitement on the job...