Everything They Had Page 6

  If American society, in the oddly pious-but-shrewd incarnation of Branch Rickey, was looking for the perfect candidate to undergo so withering a test as being the first black to play in the major leagues, then it could not have done better than Jackie Robinson. He was intelligent, purposeful, resourceful, modern; he played at a brilliant level, and he did not back down when taunted racially. He was fast and strong: clothed in his loose-fitting baseball uniform, he did not look particularly powerful, but there is one photo from those days of him alongside Joe Louis, both men stripped to the waist, where Robinson looks every bit as muscled and powerful as the heavyweight champion. Above all, Robinson was nothing if not a man. Everything about him demanded respect. He had played in endless integrated games as a collegian, and he had no illusion, as many blacks less privileged might have, that white athletes were either smarter or had more natural talent than blacks. White people to him were not people you were supposed to shuffle around who had superior abilities; they were just people, people who because of their skin had gotten a better deal than blacks.

  It was a great experiment, and it took place in 1947, seven years before Brown v. Board of Education. In a way, what Jackie Robinson did, performing in the most public arena in America, was every bit as important as that Supreme Court decision in 1954. His arrival in the big leagues had been the ultimate test of something that most Americans prided themselves on—the fairness of their country, that in this country the playing field was somehow supposed to be fair. In a way it was an experiment which put America itself at a crossroads between two powerful competing national impulses, one impulse reflecting the special darkness of racial prejudice and historic meanness of spirit which had begun with slavery, the other the impulse of idealism and optimism, that a true democracy offered the children of all American citizens a chance to exhibit their full talents and rise to their rightful place. What he was contesting was the worst myths of the past, for in the particular cruelty of the time, America had not merely barred blacks from its professional leagues, it had said it was barring them because they were unworthy. Yes, the rationale went in those days, they could run fast, but they lacked guts and heart, and they would fold in the late innings in big games, and, of course, by the way, they were lazy—everybody knew that.

  By midseason the argument was over. Robinson was a great player—clearly on his way to becoming rookie of the year. He had brought life and speed and intensity to an otherwise more passive Dodger team. He was an American samurai, the baseball player as warrior, and the other Dodgers became more like him—they were with his arrival much more a warrior team that fought you all the time than they had ever been in the past, and they would remain that way for the duration of his career. As a player no one was more explosive. Pitchers in particular feared him once he was on the base paths because of his explosive initial burst of speed. Years later, the Yankees pitcher Vic Raschi, talking about how he had lost a 1–0 game in the 1949 World Series by giving up a hit to Gil Hodges, said that it was Robinson, bluffing a dash from third toward home, who had beaten him. “I had just never seen anything like him before, a human being who could go from a standing stop to full speed in one step. He did something to me that almost never happened. He broke my concentration, and I paid more attention to him than to Hodges. He beat me more than Hodges.”

  If Robinson’s stunning success against the myths of the past marked the first great breakthrough of the postwar era, then the second one was driven by technological change. It was the coming of network television and it started as a true national phenomenon roughly a decade after the end of the war. It inaugurated nothing less than another golden age in sports. For in truth the world of sports as the postwar era started actually had two golden ages ahead, both of them driven by technological breakthroughs, the first one wrought by the coming of network television which dramatically boosted football as a sport, especially the professional game, and the second some 25 years later with the coming of satellite transmission, which created the world of cable television and aided all sports, most particularly basketball.

  It was the power of an instrument—the power of the camera—which now revolutionized American society. Nothing changed the culture and the habits of Americans more than the coming of television. Television had a kind of greenhouse effect on the society around it: What the camera liked grew and prospered beyond anyone’s expectations (often growing too quickly and too large for its own good, of course); what the camera did not like just as quickly withered.

  In particular, the camera liked professional football. What the camera caught and savored about football, which radio had always missed, was the speed of the sport, and, above all, the violence. For the camera more than anything else loved action. Football—fast, balletic, often brutal, with its bone-crushing hits—was made to order for the camera. Baseball, with its slow, leisurely pace, a sport which had its roots in an agrarian America where the pace of life was slower, had been perfect for radio, where an announcer could paint a gentle portrait and measure his cadence to the casual pace of the game.

  Before the coming of television, professional football was, in comparison to baseball, virtually a minor league; it was a very good game, indeed a connoisseur’s game, played by immensely talented athletes before passionate, diehard fans, but it had somehow never quite broken out of its rather narrow place in the sports spectrum. Radio revealed neither the talent nor the fury with which it was played. To the degree that ordinary sports fans committed their time to football on fall weekends—it was on Saturday when they could pick up a Notre Dame or Michigan game on the radio, not Sunday.

  Sunday became in the new televised age the day which was set aside in the fall for American males. It introduced the pro game to a vast new audience, and the pro game began to enter the consciousness of average sports fans as never before. Very quickly in the mid- to late Fifties, as the country was wired nationally for television, pro football went on a dizzying rise to a point where it began to rival professional baseball as the national sport. In those days not that many people owned sets, and many young American males would agree to meet at a neighborhood bar to watch and eat and drink. The sense of a sport on the rise was obvious—and nowhere was that more obvious than in New York, where the football Giants began to become something new in pro football ranks, media celebrities. Football stars like Frank Gifford, movie-star handsome, were doing commercials (for very little money, mind you), and being welcomed as never before in bars like Toots Shor’s, where baseball players, fighters and jockeys had held forth. The game was coming of age.

  With the coming of network television professional football became a truly national game, with a national constituency. A fan did not have to live in Baltimore to be a Unitas or a Colts fan, or for that matter to live in New York to root for the Giants defense led by middle linebacker Sam Huff. Millions of sports fans who cared nothing about Pittsburgh, had never been to the University of Louisville, and had no intention of ever visiting Baltimore turned on their sets on Sunday to watch the daring exploits of a young quarterback from Pittsburgh who had gone to the University of Louisville and now played for the Baltimore Colts. The camera, it turned out, was quite dazzled by Johnny Unitas, the least likely, it would seem, of American media heroes.

  In a way his career marked America in a cultural and economic transition. He grew up under the worst hardships inflicted on blue-collar America in the Depression and post-Depression years, living in a home which received almost no protections from the government, and yet he became one of the early celebrities under the gaze of a new and powerful medium which was going to change the nature of the economy and make part of the society infinitely more glitzy. He knew all too well an America which was tough and poor, and he was largely unmoved by his place in this new America which was more affluent and more celebrity oriented. Unlike Namath (and Ali), who came after him and understood intuitively that in the new sports world created by television, it was always both sport and show, he always thought it
was merely sport. His values had been set in that earlier age. Yet Unitas became the first superstar of the new age, the signature player of an old sport amplified by a new and loving medium, the perfect working-class hero for a sport just beginning to leave its working-class roots behind.

  To the degree that radio liked football, it loved offensive stars—quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers. But television was different, it had eyes for the defensive stars as well. Fans loved not only the long passes and the brilliant broken-field runs; they loved the savagery of clean hits. In this new era, living in the media capital of the world, Huff had become the first great national celebrity on defense. CBS did a documentary on him, “The Violent World of Sam Huff,” and Time magazine put him on the cover. Giants fans cheered more loudly when their defense came on the field than when the offense took over. “Our offensive unit was not highly regarded,” Kyle Rote remembered, years later. “When the offensive unit went out on the field, the defense shouted, ‘Get in there and hold them.’” Because of that new rivalries developed and flourished: If New York against Baltimore was not necessarily a historic rivalry, then that collision of the Colt offense against the Giant defense, a matchup perhaps without historic roots, was one the knowing fan could readily anticipate.

  In 1958, in what was later called the greatest game ever played, Unitas led the Colts to victory in overtime in the championship game against the Giants. He did it with two spectacular long drives, one at the end of regulation, the other in the sudden-death overtime. It was a signature game. Ewbank, not known for his pregame inspirational speeches, really pushed his players before the game. “In 14 years,” defensive end Gino Marchetti said about pregame pep talks, “I heard ’em all. ‘Win for Mother,’ ‘Win for Father,’ … ‘Don’t disappoint all those people watching on television.’” Sometimes, Marchetti said, “they even tried to tell you how to act: ‘Don’t piss in the air with forty million people watching.’ But that day Weeb really put it to us. He went up and down the roster, name by name: ‘Donovan, they got rid of you—too fat and slow … Ameche, Green Bay didn’t want you.’ Yeah, he named me, Unitas … he didn’t miss anybody.”

  On that December day the Colts, because of Unitas, were the favorites, and they took a 14–3 lead. At one point in the third quarter the Colts had a first down on the Giant three, and a chance to put the game away 21–3. But the Giants held and began to turn it around. They came back to take a 17–14 lead in the fourth quarter. With 1:56 on the clock, it was Unitas time. The Colts got the ball back on their 14. Unitas missed on his first two passes, and then he simply took over. He connected on four passes, three of them to Raymond Berry. When the drive was over, the Colts were comfortably poised for the tying field goal on the Giant 13. That drive and a comparable one in the overtime, when the Colts marched for the winning touchdown, were like works of art. “The man was a genius,” Huff said later. “I never saw a quarterback that good on those two drives.” The Colts were the winners, but when the game was over, the real winner was the game of football itself.

  Professional football ascended in popularity like a comet. In 1960, a second league was founded, and its star quarterback Joe Namath, coveted by both leagues because he had star quality, signed for $400,000. In just a few years more, the leagues merged, and played the defining event of America the Superpower in the Super Century, the Super Bowl.

  The rise of the nation in the postwar era to this pinnacle was constantly contentious. Isolationist before the war, it was now a leading international power. On the way the debate over race had become ever more barbed. In the early Fifties there had been a powerful challenge to the existing Jim Crow rules in the South. By the late Sixties, the existing laws had fallen, but the mood of American blacks was changing, and there were constant signs of the powerful alienation just under the surface. The black power movement began to flourish in the late Sixties—its slogan was black is beautiful, and in northern cities, the old religious ties which had been so important to black life in the South had begun to wither. A new movement, that of black Muslims, seemingly threatening to whites—its principal leaders spoke of white people as devils—had taken root among the deeply embittered blacks of the nation’s northern cities.

  That meant that a young man named Cassius Clay, who rose to fame as a heavyweight boxer, was to become at once the most dazzling, and the most controversial athlete of his era, a symbol of all the powerful societal forces let loose in the Sixties.

  He also in some way understood that television had changed the nature of sports, and no one, it would turn out, was a better entertainer; no one knew better how to hype his own fights. He was, he understood, as much actor as he was fighter, and he was exceptionally skilled at casting not just himself, but his opponents to his specifications. He himself, he liked to proclaim, was beautiful. His opponents were not. Sonny Liston, the most threatening of men until Ali completely defanged him, was too ugly, he boasted, to be the champ.

  He was the most volatile of superstars, joyous, talented, angry. Sportswriters, at least the younger ones, loved him, but Madison Avenue avoided him like the plague. He was the perfect figure to illuminate the contradictions of America in the late Sixties, as it surged past mere superpower status, and became even more affluent: Yes, the nation was making great progress in ending age-old racist laws, but no, the progress was never fast. Yes, the country was a bulwark against a totalitarian power in Europe, but yes, too, it had become an anti-revolutionary force fighting on the wrong side in a war of independence in Asia. He touched all of our fault lines and it was not surprising that attitudes toward him on the part of sportswriters and sports fans tended to divide along generational lines—a reflection of an America which was fighting a war not so much against the Vietnamese, but against itself, a great power with a fractured soul.

  Ali was not going to be like Joe Louis, or for that matter Floyd Patterson, the benign black fighter who knew his place, was grateful for his opportunity, was respectful to all in authority around him, no matter how sleazy they were or how tenuous their hold on a position of authority, and watched carefully what he said and did. Ali represented a new and angrier generation of more alienated blacks: A lot of damage had been done over centuries of slavery and neoslavery, and a lot of anger had been stored up.

  In the end he was a marvel, a figure not only of sports but, like Jackie Robinson, though in a different way, of history itself. The day after he became heavyweight champion, he had announced that he was a Muslim and that his name was Muhammad Ali. A few years later, because of the war in Vietnam, he refused induction into the army, citing his religious principles. So it was that he lost his crown—and the ability to fight—for more than three years.

  Politically, time worked on his side: By the Seventies, the Muslims were perceived to be less menacing. Dissident, and alienated, certainly, as blacks who lived in the poorer parts of America’s cities might well feel alienated and dissident, but not that threatening. As for the war in Vietnam, that became something of a badge of honor, that Ali had dissented, and acted upon his dissent; he, it turned out, had paid the price for others on a war which was something of a scar on the national conscience.

  In time he regained his crown. Older now, several critical years wasted, he returned, his conscience having been served, to fight better than ever, to demonstrate in his fight with Foreman in Zaire and in three wondrous battles with Joe Frazier his true greatness.

  His was a sobering challenge to America’s self-image at a volatile and emotional time. He, the most marginally educated young man, barely able to get through high school (he got his high school degree only because the officials at his school realized that he was going to be the school’s most famous product, and that it would shame the school rather than Clay if he did not graduate), had turned out to be right about a war about which the most brilliant national security advisers who had gathered around the President—including the Dean of Harvard College, the former head of the Ford Motor Company, and the fo
rmer head of the Rockefeller Foundation—had turned out to be wrong. That was sobering, a reminder that America at the height of its affluence and power in this century had lost sight of what its true meaning and purpose was. The arrogance of power, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright, called it. Ali would never have been able to come up with a phrase like that—instead he simply said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.” He had acted upon conscience; the advisers, even when they were later burdened by doubt as the war went forward, had not. He had paid the price for his actions when he was young; they, the architects of this disaster, would pay it when they were older. That, for a nation which in its increasing power had become too prideful, too sure of its value and its rectitude, was a sobering lesson. No wonder, then, by the Nineties he had become something of a beloved national figure.

  The success of Ali, the quality of his singular struggles, so much of it political, makes a sharp contrast with that of the final surpassing athlete of this era, Michael Jordan. The two had much in common: Both were supremely talented, both were black, both with their looks, their talent, and their style transcended their sports, appealing to millions of Americans who nominally had little interest in either boxing or basketball.