SPORTS WARS
Reviewed by Richard Arlin Stull, Department of Health and Physical Education, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California
OCTOBER 5, 2004 archive
Dream On
It was 1970. I stared across my desk in my high school English class into the intense eyes of a guest lecturer -- a well-muscled, bearded ex-football player whom I'd seen for years on television destroying hapless NFL running backs. He had a message that astounded me: that football was a capitalist, racist, exploitive game -- and that he had just retired at the top of his career to try to affect social change.
The class was silent. I considered whether I should hazard a question. Tentatively, I raised my hand and asked, "Don't you think you're being unrealistic and idealistic?"
He looked through me and paused for a moment.
"It starts with you," he said.
Like those running backs I'd seen careening out of bounds after a jarring hit, I was shaken up. The player was former St. Louis Cardinals linebacker, Dave Meggyesy. A product of the Sixties, Meggyesy was one of many athletes who were outspoken about their political beliefs. The very meaning of sport in society was being challenged, not only by the athletes that played them, but also by students, academics, and even university administrators. Many also questioned not only the notion that athletic participation builds character but the methods used to "build character."
These issues, according to author David Zang in his book Sports Wars: Athletes in the Age of Aquarius occurred in the Sixties on many fronts, from Muhammad Ali's defiance of the military draft, to the exposés and autobiographies that questioned every aspect of sport and the institutions that were part of sport. Well written, well referenced and thought provoking, this is a must-read for American Studies, American History, Sociology or anyone who is interested in the role of sport in American society.
Zang writes:
Many factors impinged on the old sports ideology-the quest for profits, television ratings points, and advertising dollars. Certainly, beginning in the 1950's, big money, television, and critical media helped to create a climate of inescapable scrutiny and overexposure that was inhospitable to myth making. But these things, along with a large influx of black athletes and the beginnings of female insistence on sharing the playing fields, were only parts of a fuller explanation.
Money and celebrity were always a part of our sports, but what you cannot trace back beyond the Vietnam era is the cultural tension that undermined SportsWorld's claims to character building and the tenets by which organized sports were conducted: sacrificial effort, submission to authority, controlled physical dominance, victory with honor, and manliness (for, above all, organized sports were self-consciously male before this time).
Zang opens his book with an account and analysis of the volatile reaction to singer/guitarist Jose Feliciano's rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Tiger Stadium on October 7, 1968, before Game Five of the World Series between Detroit and St. Louis. Feliciano's "personal expression" was met with approval by some, derision by others.
Zang contrasts the careers and lifestyles of Olympic wrestlers Dan Gable and Dave Sanders in Chapter 2. The Spartan, maniacal training methods and zeal of Gable vs. the counterculture, free-spirited Sanders is living myth at its best.
Zang writes, "As Gable was following the unswerving path mapped by his conviction, Sanders was moving through life like mercury on a tabletop." He cites Warren Susman's observations about the collision of two visions -- "self-sacrifice and self-realization."
Chapter 3 is a classic case study of an institution trying to reconcile the conflicting values inherent in the volatile mix of sports and academia. Zang gives the reader an overview of University of Pennsylvania's Athletic Director Jeremiah Ford II's (1953-1967) experimentation with a de-emphasis on winning; that is, playing for its own sake: "The tension between Ford's approach and the response of angry alumni had roots in Penn's schizophrenic institutional history and the role of athletics in the school's identity."
One of Chapter 4's themes is the introduction of new prototype athletes in America. 1972 Olympic marathon gold medallist Frank Shorter, for example, had the "body of a bookworm, and the gentle instincts of a hippie." And sport wasn't necessarily just about winning any more. It was about personal fitness and even self-transformation.
The early career of Muhammad Ali is the subject of Chapter 5. The juxtaposition of Ali's self-analysis compared to Zang's is highly enlightening. Zang quotes Ali:
All kinds of people come to see me. Women come because I was saying; 'I'm so pretty,' and they wanted to look at me. Some white people, they got tired of my bragging. They thought I was arrogant and talked too much, so they came to see someone give the nigger a whuppin'. Longhaired hippies came to my fights because I wouldn't go to Vietnam. And black people, the ones with sense, they were saying, 'Right on, brother; show them honkies.' Everyone in the whole country was talking about me.
Contrast Ali's personal take with Zang's cultural analysis:
Even stranger was Ali's own paradoxical contribution to the meaning of race and color: that he, light-skinned and pretty, suspicion of white blood tainting his claims to racial exclusivity, had come to embody the hopes, anger, and venom of so many blacks- had risen to become king of the world not only by beating other blacks but also by humiliating them publicly in the demeaning language used for centuries by whites- by addressing them as 'nigger' in the most casual of utterances, by pronouncing them dumb and unworthy, and by pointing out their similarity to apes. If Joe Frazier was, as Ali constantly maintained, a 'gorilla' in contrast to his own café au lait look-it was a stern refutation of more than Frazier's countenance. If black was truly beautiful, then how could Frazier be an 'ugly gorilla.'
A recent HBO special and public comments by Frazier attest to the psychic effects that Ali's unfair characterizations had upon Frazier, effects far more profound than the punches he took in his three epic fights with Ali.
Chapter 6 deals with the revolt of the University of Maryland football team against their traditional coach Bob Wade. Among the many interesting anecdotes in this chapter is a player commenting on the coach's seeming inability to accept the notion that talent might trump hard work.
Finally, Zang briefly surveys American sports films and follows with a critical analysis of the 1976 comedy, Bad News Bears. In contrast to Best Picture of the Year, Rocky, "The Bears offered the first film portrait of a new culture that no longer believed sport and good character were synonymous terms."
Zang's agile alliterations and similes ("the baby boomers moved through society like a pig in a python") add to his already alluring analysis. He is at his best in alluding to how sport could not escape the greater cultural earthquakes of opposition to the Vietnam war, racial strife, and the counterculture movement. During the 60's, sports as last bastion for patriotism and American values was openly challenged by courageous athletes who risked establishment disapproval, their reputations and their livelihoods.
Ever since Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987), where the activists and students of the Sixties were portrayed as spoiled, self-indulgent, uncritical and self-involved, popular culture has trivialized the era. The era has become a parody, a caricature in TV sitcoms, and a whipping boy for conservative politicians, talk-show hosts and authors for many of today's social ills. Zang refuses to simplify the era or the athletes who were a part of it. In our current age where the standard mantra is often "there's no team in me," or "show me the money," it is inspiring to see how and why certain individuals challenged basic societal assumptions from within the most conservative of our institutions -- sports. Zang writes:
Of course, those mythical fields never really existed, and in ignoring the '60s when confronting our dissatisfaction with the state of organized sports at the turn of the century, we are running from a past. What we are dismissing or avoiding is the realization that many baby boomers- in some cases, against all probabilities- once wrestled in sports with the same sense of oppression, of limits, and of corruption that led a great number of young people to the counterculture.
After reading Zang's book, I reread Dave Meggyesy's groundbreaking Out of Their League (1970) and watched the movie Bad News Bears (1976). They still seemed contemporary. And Meggysey is still crusading for social justice in 2004. Dream on?
David W. Zang. Sports Wars: Athletes in the Age of Aquarius. Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 2001. 180 pages. Photographs and bibliographic references. $25.00 (hardback). ISBN 1-55728-713-9.