Everything They Had Read online

  There the comparisons end, and the Americas they performed for differ. They are produced by different Americas: Ali by an America which seemingly closed off all of its benefits to a young talented black man from the South, other than the most brutal, primitive road to fame, boxing; Jordan, born in a time which made him a beneficiary of all the modern civil rights struggles. He was born in 1963, a year before Ali as Clay won the heavyweight title. He went to integrated public schools and was able to go on and star at North Carolina, a school which only recently had been closed to black undergraduates and which at the time of his birth still had not fielded a black basketball player on its team. His parents were comfortably middle class, his father by dint of victories in another hard-won battle—that of blacks in the American military. At Carolina Michael received the kind of great education and exceptional coaching that had been denied black athletes in the past.

  Jordan was the most charismatic athlete of his era, and he was the best big-game, fourth-quarter player of a generation. He helped carry a team which often in other ways seemed somewhat ordinary to six world championships. He was the perfect figure for the American communications and entertainment society as the century came to a close, the first great athletic superstar of the wired world, arguably the most famous person on the planet. In his last season as a player, he earned some $78 million, $33 million in salary and $45 million in endorsements. It seemed only proper that as the century ended, he was engaged in serious negotiations to buy a large part of an NBA team.

  He was a new world prince, graceful, beautiful, but a warrior or samurai nonetheless, and easily recognizable to the rest of the world as such. He arrived, unlike those before him, such as Robinson and Mays and Aaron, in a nation which had begun finally to realize that it was not a white nation, and as much as any other American he was proof that America, in some way, despite all its ethnic and racial divisions, was moving toward the beginning of a universal culture.

  He gave the nation nothing less than a new concept of beauty. Not surprisingly, his comfort zone was singularly high. He was gifted, he worked hard, and was beautiful in a nation which was now willing to accept a more complicated definition of beauty. America, after some 30 years of racial turbulence, was delighted to have a gifted young black man who seemed to be smiling back at it. If he endorsed sneakers, millions of Americans bought them, and in time he sold hamburgers and soft drinks and underwear and sunglasses and batteries and a telephone company.

  As the century ended, he was known everywhere in the world, for the sport he played, basketball, was easily understandable, and traveled smoothly across borders in a way that American football and baseball did not. For in the new age of inexpensive satellites, America exported not its autos or its machine tools, but its culture—its music, its sports, and finally, the informality of its lifestyle. And Jordan was the most luminescent figure of the new world, his deeds the easiest to comprehend and admire.

  It had been, all in all, an astonishing century for America. No other country had ever changed so much in so short a time—rising to a position as a monopoly superpower, gaining steadily in power, affluence, and innate self-confidence. In this period much of the change, and the interior struggle, could be witnessed in the world of sports. It was not so much a metaphor for the society as a window on it—the tension, the conflicts, and the constant progress had often taken place first (and been witnessed more widely) in the world of sports. That was true, whether it was the rise of black athletes or the greater independence of the athletes themselves as they enjoyed greater personal freedom. Throughout the century, sports had served as a remarkable reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation—its diversity, its hungers, its excesses, its rank commercialism. But above all the fact that the athletes always seemed to get bigger and stronger and faster, and the games themselves better.

  SPORTS CAN DISTRACT, BUT THEY DON’T HEAL

  From ESPN.com, September 10, 2002

  The question before us today is sports and tragedy, most particularly Sept. 11. Is there a connection, and how important is it? Does the world of sports heal, and does it make us stronger, and give us precious, badly needed relief from the darker concerns and burdens of our lives, as so many people (most of them connected to the world of sports, and therefore with no small amount of vested interest) keep saying?

  I have my doubts … strong ones, as a matter of fact. Serious readers of this space will note that I disappeared from it for some 10 months after Sept. 11, largely because I could not find it in me for a long time to want to write about sports. That world seemed to shrink on me overnight. Instead, I wrote about the men of our local firehouse, 12 of whom had perished on that apocalyptic day. So, along with my doubts, I have my prejudices.

  I like sports, enjoy the artistry of them enormously. I love to watch great athletes compete against each other in big games or matches, like Sampras beating Agassi in the U.S. Open final. But I think there is an important faultline out there somewhere: The world of sports is the world of sports, and reality is reality.

  Sometimes sports mirrors society, sometimes it allows us to understand the larger society a little better. But mostly, it is a world of entertainment, of talented and driven young men and women who do certain things with both skill and passion. I am always amused at playoff time by those obsessive superfans, who cast the players from their home team as the good guys, and the visitors as evil—they hate the opposing players and do not understand that, in most circumstances, the players they root for are closer to the players they hate than they are to their adoring fans, and would almost surely rather go out for dinner with the alleged enemy than they would with the home-team fans.

  I am wary, as well, of those people who say after a given World Series or Super Bowl victory that it saved the city, made it whole and healed deep-seated racial grievances. When I hear things like that—and I often do—I usually think, “I’ll give it about two weeks before it all unheals.” In truth, if making your city whole demands a World Series victory on behalf of athletes who more often than not flee the city the moment the season is over, then your problems are probably harder to solve than you realize.

  Nor did I think, during the Vietnam years, that the link between the NFL and the Pentagon (all those jet fighters flying overhead at the Super Bowl) greatly helped the war effort, nor factored into the NVA or the Viet Cong’s schedules. I was not much moved by the Army’s television recruitment commercials showing teamwork between NFL players, who most demonstrably had no intention of serving in the military.

  So back to the question at hand—did sports help bind us in the days, weeks and months after Sept. 11? Did we need to be so bound? The answer to the first question is, I suspect, a little bit, and my answer to the second is, I fear, surprisingly negative. If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.

  Let me suggest that there are notable exceptions to this, and that many of us, at one time or another, have gotten some kind of lift—albeit usually a brief one—from the performance of a favorite sports team on an unusual roll. I am a New Yorker, and there is no doubt that in all the pain and grief that followed the assault on the World Trade Center, the last-minute run of the Yankees—particularly some of the late-inning rallies in the World Series—was unusually sweet, that for a short period of time, they lifted many people in the city, including a great number (such as my wife, who usually does not care very much). It was an aging Yankee team, trying for one last hurrah, the starting pitching was wearing a bit thin—as were some of the left-handed hitters—but it made one last wonderful run. I suspect the city boosted the team and the team, in turn, boosted the city. It surely made The Stadium a more difficult place to play for some of the visiting teams.

  But for all the sportscasters who tr
ied to push the point too hard, that the grief and passion of New York lifted the local athletes, we have these other reminders: the dismal performances of the Giants (just a year removed from a Super Bowl appearance) and, all too soon, the even more dismal performance of a Knicks team that openly cheated its fan base—the sorriest performance by a local basketball team in the 35 years in which I had paid attention.

  So, if there is a connection, it is likely to be a thin one. In my own case, I can remember one particular time in my life when a sports team made something of a difference in my overall mood.

  It was in September and October 1967. I was in Vietnam on my second tour as a reporter. More than 500,000 U.S. troops were in the country, and I was in a terrible mood. I thought the war was stalemated, which meant we were eventually going to lose because it was their country, and sooner or later we would have to go home—those of us who would be lucky enough to get that chance. More, I hated what I saw about me every day—all the lying from the Saigon press officers—and I hated what it told me about my beloved country back home, which was, for me, becoming harder to love at that moment.

  That happened to be, by chance, the year that Carl Yastrzemski played so brilliantly in September to lead the Red Sox to the pennant. So I would go every morning (there was, as I recall, a 12-hour time difference) to the AP office in downtown Saigon where the baseball news and box scores would come in, clicking slowly over the old-fashioned teletype. And I would watch for Yaz, and he never seemed to disappoint—3-for-5, one home run, three RBIs. And of course, a great catch.

  I was joined there every day by Tom Durant, a Boston native who was over there working as a doctor. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with a man who was as close to being a contemporary saint as any man I’ve ever known. He devoted his entire career to bringing desperately needed medical care to people in Third World countries. Doc Durant died last year, and I, like thousands of others, mourned him; we were, it seemed, bonded by Vietnam, the 1967 baseball season and Yaz’s ability, and thus able to feel a little better about our country. When we saw each other, even in the 1990s, we thought about Yaz in 1967. But moments like this are rare—a brief bit of sunshine in an otherwise difficult setting. If it’s a fix, it’s a momentary one at best.

  That’s what I think is at stake here. The parallel between what sports does for the country now and what it did during World War II is, I think, the wrong one. The America of 1941–45 was more of a Calvinist nation, with far less in the way of entertainment. Baseball—poorly played as it was, with aging veterans and lots of minor-leaguers—was a small bit of normalcy in a nation where almost everyone’s life had been profoundly changed by the war. People’s lives were much harder, and almost the entire nation was making a national effort which demanded considerable sacrifice. There was radio, but no television, and a family going off together to a movie was a rare treat. So it was completely different from the America that exists today. In those days, we badly needed every respite we could get from the reality of the war, especially in the first year when the news was systematically bad. We needed some limited degree of diversion.

  But today it’s completely different. We live in an entertainment society. There is little around us but diversion—even people trying to broadcast the news have to make it ever quicker, simpler and more entertaining in order to compete with rival channels. Many people have television sets with 200 channels. Video games and computer games abound. The sports glut remains exactly that—a glut. We watch what has become a never-ending season—football in the summer, baseball in November, basketball, it sometimes seems, throughout the year.

  We lead lives surrounded by diversions. The manufacturers of our fantasies—in Hollywood with movies and television, and of course in the world of sports—are more powerful and influential than ever. Keeping the nation tuned to serious concerns is infinitely harder than it was 60 years ago. Diversion comes more readily.

  After Sept. 11, there was a relatively short span of time when people cared about foreign news and were momentarily weaned away from their more parochial concerns. But now it’s largely back to normal. There might be, in the back of the minds of millions of people, a certain uneasiness a year after Sept. 11, because we know that America is no longer invulnerable, and that we can be attacked.

  But in truth, the events themselves touched a very small percentage of the population. Unlike World War II, we operate with an elite, highly professional military that comes from very few homes. Almost no one else has been asked to sacrifice—there is no rationing, and the contemporary U.S. economy is so different from the one 60 years ago that the president’s main request to the American people was to ask us to travel more, presumably because the airline industry was so shaky.

  As for the families who were actually touched by this tragedy, I would not presume to speak for them—they are eloquent enough in their own behalf. But the idea that their lives are in any way better because of what a given sports team did in the following months is barely worth mentioning.

  In truth, our lives are what we make of them. We work hard and, at the end of the day, in a world that is often mundane, the ability to watch one or two sports games a week is a kind of blessing, a relief from what is often a difficult routine. But if we want any kind of real emotional balance, we must get it from our loved ones, family, friends, co-workers.

  I am made uneasy by those who seem to need sports too much, these crazed superfans who bring such obsessive behavior to games where complete strangers compete. There is an equation at work here: The more obsessive they are as fans, the emptier I suspect their real lives are.

  And so let me descend in advance from all the sportscasters and all the blathering that’s going to go on in the next few days about the importance of sports after Sept. 11. Many of these sportscasters will push the importance and restorative qualities of sports. Let me suggest that we will do well in the current and difficult crisis not because the 49ers, Cowboys or Patriots do well, but rather if as a nation we are strong, wise and patient. That’s all it really takes.

  * * *

  BASEBALL

  I am also moved again by a sense of the timelessness of baseball. More than any sport, it summons the past. In football, photos from another era look dated, the helmets too dinky, the players too small; in basketball, the players look too white. But in baseball it is as if there is a linear path. It is where, in our society, yesterday and today collide: the boy is thinking of the power of the young Kevin Maas, the father, looking at Maas, is seeing the same compact stroke and thinking of Roger Maris. The son sees the awesome power of Doc Gooden and thinks there has never been a power pitcher like him; the father sees Gooden and thinks of Bob Gibson, and the grandfather sees the same players and thinks of Bob Feller.

  INTRODUCTION TO BASEBALL:

  THE PERFECT GAME

  * * *

  BASEBALL AND THE NATIONAL MYTHOLOGY

  From Harper’s Magazine, September 1970

  We are a nation given to our myths. Short on history, short on national ties, still seeking an American culture, hardly rooted to village or church or an American past, we find comfort, sustenance, and indeed continuity in our myths. George Washington, honorable, steadfast in hardship, rallying his people; Abraham Lincoln, for men who like their myths a little darker in spirit and taste; handsome young Jack Kennedy, married to pretty young Jackie, a myth intensified by his murder in Dallas, celebrating him in death as never in life, the myth freed of the irritants of foot-dragging committee chairmen, anonymous bureaucrats in the State Department, primitive generals, and pesky newspapermen. So the myth lives or lived, shattered a little by the appearance of the Rich Short Greek. (“Did you hear the weather report?” my friend Dick Tuck said over the phone that day. “It’s raining in Camelot.”)

  Given that Washington is not exactly the ideal place for Camelot, and that our politics are more given to venality, drudgery, boredom, and frustration than to beautiful people and soaring ideas, it is not
surprising that we turn to sports for our myths. There we search beyond ourselves and our boredom and frustration for something that is different, more heroic, for other men never bothered by bills, who never argue with their wives, whose house painters show up on time (sober), who, facing adversity, always triumph. Baseball is, I suspect, our most mythological of sports; it has the longest history, it is by its own proclamation our national pastime, and it harbors, I think, our greatest mythological figures. Babe Ruth, so American that Japanese trying to infiltrate our lines summoned his name. Ruthian, gargantuan in feat and taste, lover of little cripples and orphans, sidelined—boys will be boys—for eating too many hot dogs (not for social disease). Lou Gehrig, gamely playing day after day, carrying finally a dread disease, modest and humble to the end. He and Gary Cooper teaching each other how to be laconic; one could see even now Gehrig as the sheriff of a bad Western town, cleaning it up, with a minimum of talk (Gehrig to Cooper: “Gary, you’re a good fella, but you talk too much”); his records obscured only by Ruth’s. Bob Feller, straight off the farm with farmboy virtues and a blazing fastball, all farmboys are pure and have blazing fastballs; Joe DiMaggio, the melting-pot candidate, the Fisherman’s Wharf boy, son of poor but simple stock, only in America could he rise to such fame, always a gentleman, DiMaggio has class, entering the ultimate mythological marriage (only Jack Kennedy and Grace Kelly might have done better), nothing there about Joe being, well, a little surly from time to time and liking, well, sycophants around him; Joe never talked, because it was, well, beneath him, not because he had nothing to say. And of course, Mickey Mantle (most mythology is manufactured in New York about American virtues; thus the mythologists are from New York, but the mythologized are preferably from Commerce, Oklahoma, or Fisherman’s Wharf), game Mickey, pure country boy (not so country that he didn’t understand it and later exploit it, opening, upon his retirement, Mickey Mantle’s Country Cooking Restaurants), great power in an injury-ridden body; no telling how great he might have been, the mythologist likes to dream, to let the imagination sweep, playing when mortals like you and me would be staying home from the office, gobbling aspirin, Mickey bandaged from head to foot, blood showing on the uniform, game to the end.