Everything They Had Page 5

  In all of this change sports—amateur and particularly professional—would be among the main beneficiaries. By 1998, America’s most famous athlete, Michael Jordan, a young black man from North Carolina, made some $78 million a year in salary and endorsements, and certain professional sports franchises, like the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, were said to be worth close to a billion dollars.

  Rarely had the beginning of a century in one nation seemed so distant from the end of the same century. In January 1900 the country was barely a generation removed from a bitter and exceedingly violent civil war, yet from that war were the beginnings of American power, dynamism and industrialism first fashioned.

  But that was yet to come. If the Civil War had been fought to end slavery, then there was in the Reconstruction era, as the true political price of reunion emerged, a resurgence of racism, slavery replaced by legal racism, and fierce continued suppression of the children of slaves. If, in Lincoln’s phrase, a house divided against itself cannot stand, then America as the century began was neither a house divided nor a house unified. In the new century, one of the great struggles played out would be that of black Americans struggling for full citizenship. And no arena would showcase this battle in a series of stunning and often bitterly divisive increments, or reflect the true talents of black America more clearly, than the world of sports.

  The century would begin with what was virtually a national attempt to limit the possibilities of a great black fighter, Jack Johnson, because he was considered uppity and was far too often seen with white women. Special laws were passed as a means of entrapping Johnson and ending his right to be seen as the heavyweight champion of the world. It was just the beginning. The struggle of blacks in the century ahead would be an ongoing source of national tension and debate.

  But for those who weren’t bound by race (or gender), the country was still a land of promise, the place where the past could be shed and a man could start anew. America offered the concept of hope—if not for yourself, for your children, the place where in one generation change could be wrought. The most telling comment on that American ideal came when I. I. Rabi, the distinguished scientist, won the Nobel Prize for physics. A reporter interviewed him that day and asked him what he thought. “I think that in the old country I would have been a tailor,” he answered.

  No one would illustrate that unique American social fluidity more than most of the best-known athletes of the century, each with their own very American drive to excel. Babe Ruth, born of a troubled, shaky family. Joe DiMaggio and Johnny Unitas, each the son of immigrants. Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan, descendants of slaves who would become special American icons. All of them were in different ways driven by the unique forces which created America—the combination of prejudice inflicted on those who had gone before them, and yet the belief that in the lives of their children things would get better. More, the world of sports offered the ideal arena for new Americans, or black Americans whose forebears had been suppressed by racism, to show their strengths and their talents. Only the U.S. military was in any way nearly as democratic a venue.

  America was, of course, almost without knowing it, a favored nation. The quality and energy and passion of its immigrant citizens and the part they were to play in the successes of the coming century were not to be underestimated: They were to become inventors, scientists, workers, farmers and exceptional citizens. “Give me your tired, and wretched and poor,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, ironically mocking the words taken from Emma Lazarus and engraved on the Statue of Liberty, then adding himself, “Some wretched, some poor.” What Moynihan meant, of course, was that America was getting the cream of the crop, though when they had first arrived they did not look like the cream of the crop—all they carried were their hopes and ambitions, and their desire to be not just Americans but good Americans.

  This explosion of affluence and power and confidence connected directly, it would turn out, to the world of sports; more, the world of sports would serve as an almost ideal window through which to watch the profound changes taking place elsewhere in the society. Was the country more confident, more affluent, and did its citizens have more leisure time? Then they would show it by becoming more addicted to their games.

  No one signified the coming of power quite like Babe Ruth. He changed the very nature of sports. He was five years old when the century began (or at least he so believed, since it was also possible that he was four years old). Because his deeds were so awesome, particularly when measured against the existing dimensions of what passed for power, his name was almost immediately turned into an adjective. Long drives, more than half a century after he played his last game, are said to be Ruthian. He was the perfect figure about whom to create a vast assortment of myths and legends, some of them true, some of them not, though it meant little if they were true or not, because the ones which had been made up seemed just as true as those which could more readily be documented.

  Ruth was big, joyous and seemingly carefree. Rules were made to be broken—he had spent much of his childhood in an orphanage not because his parents were dead but because they could not control him. That sense of him, as a kind of all-American Peck’s Bad Boy, seemed to endear him to many of his fellow citizens, more trapped by all kinds of rules in their lives than he was in his. If editorial writers on occasion thundered against his childlike and occasionally boorish behavior, the same antics seemed to charm millions of ordinary American sports fans.

  He brought drama to everything he did. He was not just a great athlete, he was a show, fun even when he struck out. He became a phenomenon. Ordinary people longed to read about him. The outrages he committed socially were the outrages of the common man, the ordinary American catapulted to an elite world by his athletic success, but unspoiled in his heart. After he had signed for $80,000, a salary greater than that of President Herbert Hoover, and a reporter questioned him about it, he had said, “Why not? I had a better year than he did.” When he met Marshal Foch, the commander of the French forces during World War I, he had said, “I suppose you were in the war.”

  If Ruth was the most egalitarian of sports heroes, then this was the most democratic of lands, the nation where mass production—and a new kind of economic democracy that went with it—was born. It was not by chance that the new century was perfectly designed for America, and indeed was often known as the American Century. That was a partial misnomer. In truth, it was the Oil Century, as the Japanese intellectual Naohiro Amaya called it, for it was a century in which gas-driven machines would replace coal-driven machines, with an explosive increase in productivity. In the oil century productivity flowered; it could generate products enough for everyone—not just for the handful of rich. The oil culture because of the nature of the fuel created vastly more wealth, a wealth so great that it was shared by ordinary people. And of all the industrialized nations poised for the start of a new era, America, with its rich indigenous oil deposits, was uniquely well-positioned for the new age.

  In the oil culture, because oil produced so much more in the way of goods, the workers became prosperous, too. The oil century produced, it would soon become clear, workers who would become consumers; and the more they consumed, the more they created work for others. It was the dawning of a culture in which ordinary people achieved not merely middle-class status, but an elemental social dignity which had in the past been reserved for a tiny number of people. This was an American invention—a nation with something new, a mass middle class. The citizens in this new society gained dignity, confidence, leisure time and, in time, disposable income. That alone was to have a profound effect on the rise and the obsession with sports in the century ahead.

  If there was one key figure who represented American genius in the first half of the century, and gave a sense of what America was to be—a mass-driven society with mass-produced goods, all those forces which would make America an economic superpower—it was the first Henry Ford. He was the architect of the most pow
erful of American ideas which drove the century and made American economic democracy unique—the worker as consumer. He brought the concept of mass production to its height with his River Rouge plant, and turned the auto from an item available only to the rich into something that all Americans could own. In time he came to love the assembly line—the true diamond in his eye—more than the car itself.

  Almost from the start, sensing that his workers were his real customers, he began to put most of his energy into what was his production line, to build more cars faster, to meet the unparalleled demand, and at the same time to keep reducing its price. Because the car was already so simple and well-designed there was not much to tinker with in the car itself, he poured most of his energies and his special genius into the production line.

  The cars poured off the line, soon more than a million a year. The speed of manufacture meant he was selling that many more cars per year and could cut the price per car accordingly. Ford loved making a car that benefited working people. “Every time I lower the price of a car $1,” he said, “I can get 1,000 new customers.” In its early incarnation, in the 1910–11 fiscal year, the Model T had cost $780; a year later with the production ascending in amazing increments, the price had dropped to $690 and then to $600, and on the eve of World War I, it was down to $260. What he had wrought was the beginning of a revolution—the good life for the common man.

  And so early in this century America became a vastly more dynamic, vastly less class-dominated, infinitely more open society than competing nations. Its people were busy; they were on the move, driving all the time now, it seemed, prosperous, and ever more confident. Its love of sports became a parallel force. The more confident and affluent Americans were, the more they became sports nuts. In addition, other inventions were taking place which would not only bind America together more as a nation, but make sports an ever more important part of the fabric of the society.

  It was not just the games themselves that were about to change and become more important. It was the delivery system—the coming of modern broadcasting, first radio, then network television, and then satellite television—which was going to change the way Americans felt about sports; for the new, more modern delivery system was about to make the games more accessible (and thus more important) and make the athletes themselves infinitely more famous, and soon, infinitely wealthier. In the beginning, there was radio. It would help usher in what became known as the Golden Age of Sport. In 1923 the Yankees defeated the Giants in the World Series in six games. Ruth hit three home runs, was walked constantly and scored eight times. It was a noteworthy series, not the least of all because it was the first time the World Series was broadcast across the country on radio. The principal voice at the microphone was that of a young man named Graham McNamee, and the fact that this was broadcast to millions of Americans made the Babe’s fame—and the importance of sport within the culture—that much greater.

  For it was not just the game itself which was changing, it was the amplification system in a country so vast, which for the first time was becoming linked as one by a new and powerful broadcasting system. On a vast, sprawling land mass where the connection of ordinary people to each other had often been tenuous, big-time sports, broadcast to the entire nation at one time, giving the nation shared icons, was to prove immensely important. It was not just a shared moment of entertainment, though that was critical in the rise of the popularity of sports, but it was to be an important part of the connecting tissue of the society, arguably more important in a country so large where the population was so ethnically diverse—and new—than it might have been in a smaller country with one dominating strain of ethnicity. Sports in some way united America and bound Americans to each other as other aspects of national life did not—it offered a common thread, and in time a common obsession. Americans who did not know each other could find community and commonality by talking of their mutual sports heroes.

  Almost overnight Graham McNamee became a major cultural figure. In January 1927 he worked the first true national sports hookup, broadcasting the Rose Bowl game. He did every World Series game from 1923 through 1934. He covered the first political conventions broadcast live. On the occasion of Lindbergh’s triumphant inaugural flight to Paris, the voice that most Americans heard the news from was that of McNamee. He was very good at what he did. “The father of broadcasting,” the distinguished broadcaster Red Barber called him. In the early days of broadcasting, there were no radio booths. So the announcers had to work in an open stadium and do their work in the most primitive of all possible settings. McNamee, Barber noted, “walked into the stadium, sat down … and told the nation what it was waiting to hear and had never heard before … told them about 10 different sports. I concentrated on two—baseball and football—and I thought I had my hands full.... His sign-off was distinctive: ‘This is Graham McNamee speaking. Good night, all.’”

  Thus was the audience increased, and thus was sports made more important. Americans by means of radio could now monitor its sports heroes as never before. Events in the world of sports seemed to be ever more important and hold the attention of the public that much more. The resulting popularity of sports was amazing, as was the resilience of its appeal throughout the Depression. On the eve of World War II, baseball seemed to be poised at a level of almost unique preeminence. The 1941 season was a historic one: Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games and Ted Williams hit. 406. Soon both were in the service, and baseball, like other sports, went on essentially a four-year vacation.

  If World War I had been the first act of America’s emergence as a world power, World War II would be the defining act. If there had been fears in America on the eve of the entry of the United States into the war that a democracy might not be able to stand up to powerful totalitarian military powers, those fears soon proved completely invalid: Rarely had a democratic society’s power been so brilliantly mobilized. America rose to true superpower status during the war; its industrial base, secure from enemy attack because of the two oceans, became the arsenal of democracy. When the war was over America stood alone, rich in a world which was poor. The change in the balance of power had taken place with a startling swiftness.

  For the war changed the balance of power in the world with a certain finality: In Europe the old powers had been bled white by two wars; America, by contrast, had been brought kicking and screaming to the zenith of its power. No bombs had fallen on America; its losses—roughly 350,000 men on two fronts—were slight in comparison with other nations.

  All of these factors had given the nation a startling boost in affluence, household by household, and equally important, a critical increase in personal confidence. Not only had America as a nation played a decisive part in the war, not only had it been, in contrast to most wars, considered a good war, but millions of Americans, whose professional careers might in an earlier part of the century have been proscribed by class, had left their small towns, had learned that they could lead men, and now had a chance to continue their careers through the G.I. Bill. If one of the things which distinguished America from the old world was its concept of social fluidity—the fact that in only one generation ordinary citizens could rise significantly above the level attained by their parents—then nothing made that concept more muscular than the G.I. Bill.

  In the postwar era America had to face the domestic consequences of its own wartime rhetoric. For the war had generated its own powerful propaganda, that of the democracies taking on two totalitarian powers, Germany and Japan, and in the case of Germany a racist, genocidal nation. But there were important domestic consequences to that. If America was the driving force of a new, more democratic world, then it was still a nation divided racially, not just in the South, where feudal laws imposed state-sanctioned legal and political racism, but in the North as well, its major professional sports events still lily white. In the courts a large number of cases trying to end the doctrine of separate but equal were working their way to the Supreme Court. But
it would be the world of sports that became the most important postwar laboratory of racial change and where black Americans finally got their first true chance at showing their real talents. That their sports were segregated was singularly unjust, and no one knew this better than the professional baseball players themselves. For they often barnstormed with black players from the Negro League after the season, and they knew exactly how good the black ballplayers were, that only racial prejudice prevented them from playing.

  Jackie Robinson, whose terrible responsibility it was to be the first, the man in the test tube, his abilities and conduct to be scrutinized by an entire nation—was nothing less than history’s man. He was a superb athlete, strong, quick, and wildly competitive. He had been a four-sport star at UCLA before he played professional baseball, and he could probably have played professionally in three major sports. Before he entered the service in World War II, though professional basketball and football were still quite embryonic in the West, he played with semi-pro teams in both.

  He brought with him a rare on-field and off-field intelligence, and exceptional mental discipline and toughness of mind, an ability to restrain himself despite extreme provocation (and control his hair-trigger temper). He resisted, as he promised he would, the temptation to lash back for a long time despite the constant taunts of fans and opposing players. “Mr. Rickey, what do you want?” he had asked the Brooklyn Dodger boss at their fateful first meeting. “Do you want a player with guts enough to fight back?” “I want a player,” Rickey had answered memorably, “with guts enough not to fight back.” He might rage inside, but he remained true to the challenge offered him by Rickey. Throughout his career, Robinson remained aware that the spotlight was always on him, and that the challenge to excel on field and behave with dignity off it was singular in his case. Few Americans were ever subjected to such relentless scrutiny in so public a manner; it is doubtful if any of his fellow citizens ever endured such relentless pressure with such sustained excellence.