On Gamesmanship
LEIBOWITZ, HERBERT
Spring Books On Gamesmanship By Herbert Leibowitz Every sports fan considers himself a connoisseur of his favorite game, as knowing as an Egyptian priest about the solemn and picturesque rituals...
...Baseball was attuned to a slower, more leisurely world (though paradoxically the games usually lasted less than two hours...
...James Corbett's account of how he dethroned John L. Sullivan as heavyweight champion of the world, in their famous bout at New Orleans, reminds one of a vintage Mae West movie, with its cast of dandified racketeers, loose women, and the bawdy riverboat gambler atmosphere...
...Paper Lion, his account of a month spent training with the Detroit Lions, is a thoroughly engaging book?funny, well-paced, anecdotal...
...one on football because the contests are simple, visible, and elemental...
...Hazlitt was a man of sense and a man of feeling...
...But where Plimpton most excels is in the novelistic revelation of character and the lively talk...
...There was, for example, a large contingent of college boys in both leagues...
...Spring Books On Gamesmanship By Herbert Leibowitz Every sports fan considers himself a connoisseur of his favorite game, as knowing as an Egyptian priest about the solemn and picturesque rituals of life and death the players are symbolically enacting on the field...
...Stade is a hawk...
...his"''self-reliance and respect for his adversary...
...like the man in the street, he was...
...Every sports fan harbors the fantasy of going two sets with Pancho Gonzalez or batting against Sandy Koufax, but Plimpton, following in the tradition of Paul Gallico, has been our collective dream surrogate...
...Their superiority, their greatness, is finally a moral one, whose secret is not a pride in craft that makes them practice as diligently as a concert pianist but rather a serene indifference to luck, an incomparable inventiveness under pressure...
...It's the sports fan's right but hardly the last word...
...Because editor Lawrence Ritter has wisely let the men tell their own story, and their memory is un-dimmed by time...
...The sports writer must satisfy this Herbert Leibowitz, a frequent contributor, is a member of the English Department at Columbia University...
...He recreates for us the exhilaration and doggedness of physical contact (Plimpton does not venture into the "pit" where 300 pound linemen maul each other...
...The rococo metaphors of Grantland Rice, the prim whimsy of Red Smith, the understated elegance of Bernard Darwin, and the romantic extravagances of Pierce Egan and Nimrod, among many other good writers, suggest the stylistic range that is available...
...as Bernard Darwin put it, "as fervid a patriot and partisan about games as need be...
...The reasons are complicated...
...For George Plimpton, however, in Paper Lion (Harper and Row, 362., $5.95), football is a romantic idyll...
...To the devotee (is there really any other kind...
...his nerve and caution...
...Many of the players themselves are brilliant monologuists and storytellers: Night Train Lane, for instance, "a fervid kibbitzer" who is half scientist of his position (defensive halfback) and half astrologer riding his hobbyhorse theory of angles...
...The players dispose of several stereotypes and confirm others...
...Mays beats Mantle a million miles...
...The angler's quietism, patience, and contemplation...
...craving for statistics, facts, controversy, and the "inside dope"????those anecdotes, no matter how apocryphal or trivial, that bring the fan inside the locker room and close to the players, as though he were sharing in their charisma...
...The fan knows better...
...The Glory of their Times is a welcome contribution to the lore of the game, and its nostalgia is curiously affec'ins (the photoeraphs admirably recapture the color of the past...
...the "heartless procedure" of sacking a player known as "Squeaky Shoes...
...Wind's comprehensive selections, for the most part, avoid the cliches, the banal oratory, and the empty theatrical gestures of the school of self-conscious literary sports writing...
...Like the athletes, the sports writer must combine the showmanship and technical dexterity of the professional with the amateur's exuberance...
...The Glory of their Times (Macmillan, 320 pp., $7.95), a collection of reminiscences by ballplayers from the heyday of the sport, inadvertently sheds light on the change...
...In its rough-and-tumble way, baseball resembled the earlier, more improvised stages of myth before the commercial caste turned ritual into materia] profit...
...It is not so much the possession of exceptional skills or even a fierce competitiveness that awes us...
...I am a dove...
...the drudgery of learning complicated plays...
...In short, sports are, variously, entertainment, exercise, and the challenge to master physical limits and spiritual fears...
...or it is what the Renaissance esteemed as sprezzatura, a supreme and negligent grace: the boyish insouciance of Babe Ruth hitting a home run, the nonchalant air of Willie Mays catching a fly ball...
...in Conrad's phrase, "the honor of labor...
...The decline of baseball in popularity may be due to the greed of the owners????their handling of expansion was scandalous????and the failure of the game to adjust to the quick tempo of the last two decades, but why should the fans be so infatuated with the "brutal world of professional football...
...it is some unpredictability, the "sinful daring" present, say, in the intuitive violence of Ty Cobb running the bases (he was a virago of a man...
...Jim Brosnan, a journeyman relief pitcher, writes with waspish irankness about his teammates, the quirks, dull stretches, and high drama of the "long season...
...Reading through The Realm of Sport, one is struck by two general notions: First, a surprisingly large number of athletes write vividly (and without ghost writers) about the great moments of triumph or failure in their careers...
...men played for the sheer love of the game rather than for money, though they often earned more in baseball than at their jobs...
...He was also a fan who thought nothing of catching the coach to Bath, sitting in the rain, and chatting animatedly over the prospects of the fight????bare-knuckled, of course????between the Gas-man and Bill Neate, then savoring every minute of the match and the gala crowds again in conversation on the way back to London...
...There was little system????no scouts, no pitching machines, no teams of umpires...
...games were played on bumpy, pocked fields, often with a ball whose stuffings had been knocked akilter...
...Many languages are spoken in the realm of sport...
...He must be a scientist of human nature as well as "master of the artless art...
...In a Brooklyn schoolyard and at City Hall an angry voice growls, "Aw, you're nuts...
...In a shrewd essay in The Columbia University Forum, George Stade, drawing on the analogy of the territorial imperative, argued that football is "par excellence the game of instinctual satisfactions, especially among Americans, who are notorious as violent patriots and instinctive defenders of private property," and that it provides as well, in its richly patterned formations, "esthetic satisfactions...
...Roger Bannister tells with wonderful modesty and intelligence how he broke the barrier of the four-minute mile...
...He had all the instincts and skills and enthusiasms of the sports writer...
...superstitions abounded (McGraw dressed his Giants in black uniforms for the World Series), and not until World War I did baseball stop being socially disreputable...
...It is harder, apparently, to write, idiomatically and well about team performance than about individual heroics...
...While we admit, somewhat insincerely, that a team, being a community, must rely on cooperation, our eye is restlessly seeking out a hero, a man whose sense of self is invincible, aristocratic, unduplicable...
...There are even lyrical interludes, as when Gail Cogdill, a showboating, exceptionally gifted end, describes how he beats his man every time in forethought, and the joy of catching a long floating pass for a touchdown...
...The articulateness of these men as they relive their glory should bury the idea that the athlete is an overgrown boy with a pea-sized brain...
...The section on fishing is more satisfying than the...
...Each sport necessarily has its own argot, humor characters like Casey Stengel, and parochial traditions????sports writing is as conventionalized as the comedy of manners????but within the tradition there is room for temperament, wit and expertise...
...Its equipment was primitive...
...Louis Browns, grinning sheepishly all the time), and match his impressions and interpretations with those of the sports writer...
...Sports are mythology, and if that is too grandiose a formulation, sports are a miniature of society, the occasion for an exemplary disclosure of character, the refinement of violence, and...
...About pro football, Mr...
...With his tribal mind, the sports fan likes to rush home to read a report of what he has seen, scan the statistics and commit them to memory (I was once startled by a mathematician who interrupted an argument to rattle off the starting line-up of the 1943 St...
...his authentic knowledge of such natural processes as currents, nesting habits, feeding practices, wind????all these have a drama that is easier to convey than the thud of gargantuan lineman colliding on the football field...
...the horse-play that relieves the stress of training (at meals rookies are made to stand up and sing their school songs...
...I have succumbed, without shame, to the temptation to set down my opinions, crotchets, and fervor...
...Branch Rickey's remark that games are "cos-mically unimportant" would be greeted with a chorus of Bronx cheers...
...in batting, manipulation counted more than power...
...is not hyperbole: "When a person dies, who does any one thing better than any one else in the world, which so many others are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in society...
...The organized bloodletting seems peculiarly suited to the "firepower" of America's military arsenal (the long touchdown pass is called "the bomb"), and its emphasis on raw courage almost mechanically confers a military tone on analyses of strategy, but as a sport football seems to me to possess the autocratic intellection of the computer, and in spite of television, its esthetic patterns, which have a sort of bureaucratic rigidity, escape the average fan...
...Sports are all...
...That is why Hazlitt's tribute to Cavanagh the Fives-Player (Fives-Playing is an ancestor of handball), reprinted by Herbert Warren Wind in his excellent anthology The Realm of Sport (Simon and Schuster, 704 pp., $10.00...
...Until recently, baseball was undisputably the sacred American game, but it has been giving way to professional football in fan interest, if not affection...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 11
