Of course, I didn’t plan to be baseball’s resident deviant but I’m glad to help out. It’s the least I can do for a game which has given me so much pleasure. I still serve in that capacity, probably because I’m doing such a good job. Somehow though, I don’t think I’ll get a plaque from the Commissioner.
THE COMMISSIONER
Bowie Kuhn still hasn’t forgiven me for not apologizing when Ball Four first came out. I remember he called me into his office, which was decorated in Early Authority—paneled walls with pictures of presidents and a large desk between two American flags. The Commissioner said he was going to do me a big favor. He said he knew that I realized I had made a terrible mistake and all I had to do was simply sign a statement he had prepared. The statement said, in effect, that the book was a bunch of lies and it blamed everything on my editor, Lenny Shecter.
When I politely told the Commissioner what he could do with his statement, he turned a color which went very nicely with the wood paneling. He then spent the next three hours extracting a promise that I would never reveal what went on at our meeting. The sanctity of the clubhouse is exceeded only by the sanctity of the Commissioner’s office.
Observers of the Commissioner, over the years, may wonder where he gets his arrogance. I think the problem lies with his title “Commissioner of Baseball.” The guy thinks he’s the ruler of an entire sport. But since he is hired and paid by the owners and not the players or the fans, he should more accurately be described as the Person in Charge of Protecting the Financial Interests of the Twenty-Six Business Groups which Make Profits from Baseball.
And speaking of money, you may be wondering what I think about these enormous salaries being paid to players today. Aside from thinking I was born too soon, here’s how I feel: A million dollars a year is a lot of money to get paid for hitting a ball with a stick. Based on contribution to society, ballplayers are grossly overpaid. Teachers, policemen, and firemen should get more money. But we live in a society that says a man is worth what someone else is willing to pay him. Is Robert Redford worth three million dollars a picture? Is Barbra Streisand worth five million dollars a song? Evidently somebody thinks so. In baseball, the income is there; the only question is who’s going to get it. My position is that while the players don’t deserve all that money, the owners don’t deserve it even more.
The irony is that if the owners hadn’t abused the players so badly, we wouldn’t have gone out and hired Marvin Miller and the players wouldn’t be free agents today. If the owners had just doubled the minimum salary, say to $14,000, and given us some extra meal money, we would have been more than content to let things ride. Most ballplayers had no idea what kind of money they could be making. I remember sitting in the Yankee clubhouse while the player representative asked each of us what we thought the minimum salary should be. This was when it was $7,000. The players were all saying numbers like $8,000, $9,000, or $10,000. When it came to me I said $25,000 and everybody just laughed.
Now, thanks to Marvin Miller, the laugh is on the owners. Marvin showed the players how to become free agents and the owners are showing the players how much they’re worth.
Since they can’t use the reserve clause anymore, the owners are looking for the next best way to hold down salaries. (What good is having a monopoly if you can’t make enormous profits?) That’s what the “compensation” issue is really about. If a team that signs a free agent is required to compensate the team he came from, free agents won’t be worth much. That’s why there is likely to be a strike over the issue and if there is a strike, public opinion will be important.
Which is where the Baseball Commissioner comes in. Besides censoring books, it’s the Commissioner’s job to go around telling the fans, the media, the Congress, and anyone who will listen that the owners are losing money and that free agency will destroy “competitive balance” leading to bankruptcy, cancer, jock itch, and the end of the Free World as we know it.
The Commissioner has forgotten his humble beginnings. Twelve years ago, when the owners were looking for a new Commissioner, they met at an airport hotel near Chicago so they could fly in and out in a few hours. But instead of taking a few hours, the meeting lasted all day and half the night because different cliques of owners promoted their own man, each of who was viewed as a threat by the other owners. After about a thousand cups of coffee, and maybe half as many ballots, they gave up and went home without selecting a Commissioner.
During all this time, sitting there unnoticed, was Bowie Kuhn, the lawyer for the National League—in charge of yellow pads. It wasn’t until about ten days later that it dawned on somebody, probably Walter O’Malley, that the next baseball commissioner had been right under their noses all along. Bowie Kuhn, it was heartily agreed at their next meeting, represented no threat to any of them.
And that is how Kuhn came to be elected unanimously after not having been mentioned on any previous ballots. It was as if the Democratic convention couldn’t decide between Carter and Kennedy and chose a page instead. Maybe it is the shadow of his past which frightens Kuhn into acting like a dictator. At any rate, I’m sure I would have been forgiven for writing Ball Four if I had just signed his statement, stood in the corner for awhile, and kept my mouth shut.
THE SPORTSCASTER
Instead, I went on television. Why not? I was learning I could make a living in the deviant business. A nervous living maybe, but a living. Baseball had cast me in this role and so I might as well play it as well as I could. In truth, I found it rested comfortably upon my shoulders. Not that I was looking to be an oddball, nor that I relished the role, because it sometimes gets lonely. Whenever I go near a locker room, players will say, “Here he comes, watch what you say.” I feel like I have a dread disease. Sometimes I’m nervous about how people will respond to me. When my Yankee teammate Elston Howard died recently, I wanted to pay my respects at his funeral, but I was afraid to go. I knew he’d been upset by Ball Four and I wanted to avoid the possibility of one of the players making a scene.
Just when I’m asking myself if it’s worth it to rock the boat and wondering if I should compromise, something will happen to keep me going. Like one year I got an award from a women’s group for, “exposing the jockocratic values of society.” Then there was the time that John Lennon told me he enjoyed my work, and said I was “the Marjoe of sports.” And every once in a while some stranger will come up to me and say he likes what I stand for.
I wouldn’t call what I do “telling it like it is” because nobody knows how it is, including Howard Cosell. It’s telling it like you see it, and for some reason I seem to see things differently.
Take sportscasting, for example, which is what I did in New York for six years after I left baseball in 1970. One of my ideas about sports is that it’s something you play yourself, not just watch others do on television. So I did stories about girls’ basketball teams or old men lifting weights in their basement. One year I followed a high school football team that hadn’t won a game in five years. I’d cover the hopeful pep rallies on Fridays and the losing games on Saturday. (When the team finally won, they couldn’t understand why I stopped following them since they were just getting hot.) The best part was that the coach let me into the locker room for his halftime speeches where he tried to get the players to believe in themselves. Television viewers saw muddy, tired faces of teenage kids trying to believe. This was an inside view of sports that professional teams would never allow. What’s more, surveys showed that viewers liked these kinds of stories.
The Jets and Giants, however, did not. They wanted you to come out and interview right tackle Joe Doaks about his sore left toe and whether or not he’d be ready for the big game on Sunday. Professional teams have come to expect this form of free advertising (two minutes’ worth could otherwise cost $10,000), which is even more effective than a commercial because it’s presented as news. They get all upset when you don’t interview the coach about how great the club looks.
These kinds of
stories are very boring but sometimes you have to do them anyway. Once our weekend reporter Sal Marchiano did an interview with Giants’ coach Alex Webster who explained why the Giants had won only four and lost nine. Alex gave all the reasons coaches always give: 1. injuries, 2. bad breaks, 3. more injuries, 4. all of the above. (Just once I’d like to hear a coach say maybe he’s not such a good coach, or the team isn’t so hot.)
My producer suggested I use a piece of the interview in my broadcast since I hadn’t done much on the Giants lately. I reluctantly agreed. In the process of screening the interview to select the portion I would use, the editor ran the film backwards in order to show it a second time. Suddenly I heard Alex saying, “seirujni rof neeb tndah…” That’s it, I told the editor! Ten seconds of Alex Webster talking backwards would make a good commentary on coaches explaining a lousy season.
When I played it on the air, however, there was a technical difficulty and no sound came out of Alex’s mouth. This did not prevent the Giants from becoming irate. How they even knew I played the film backwards, since there was no sound, I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions. I relate this story to show the lengths to which professional sports will go to intimidate a reporter who fails to show the proper reverence. The Giants used this ten seconds of silence as an excuse to sue me and WABC–TV for a million-and-a-half dollars. Of course the case was eventually thrown out of court, but not before my employers were forced to conduct an inquiry, give depositions, and pay for expensive lawyers. You can be sure it became part of my file.
In television the greatest pressures come from within. Station executives don’t like it when their sports guy isn’t chummy with the local teams. It makes the news director uncomfortable when he calls up and asks for tickets to a ballgame. When I worked at WCBS in New York in 1979, Yankee tickets were used as currency in the newsroom for favors. In the sports reporting business, more phone calls are made to team press offices to arrange tickets than to arrange stories.
A reporter who makes waves creates problems for the station’s general manager, too. It puts him in a bad bargaining position if he wants to televise a team’s games. It’s no fun trying to hammer out a contract with disgruntled team officials.
Then there is the thunder from above. At the network they already have contracts to televise games; multi-million dollar contracts with entire leagues which make the networks, in effect, partners with professional sports. There are big bucks riding on these games and they need to be hyped, not ignored, and certainly not criticized. This could explain why my comment that, instead of watching three hours of super bowl hype, viewers should play touch football in their backyards, was not wildly hailed in the newsroom.
With network sports, of course, there are no real reporters. Although there are a few who pretend to be, like Howard Cosell. Howard will criticize the relevance of a particular boxing match, for example, while at the same time he will lead the pre-fight hype, announce the fight, and do the post-fight analysis. Cosell is always lecturing about the absurd overemphasis on sports in our society and yet nobody gets more excited about week-old football highlights than Cosell.
Many years ago, when he was outside the establishment, Cosell used to question everything. But now that he is personal friends with people like football Commissioner Pete Rozelle, he is reduced to criticizing coaches for poor strategy and athletes for not hustling.
Cosell does deserve credit for a past willingness to take unpopular positions, like the time he stood up for Muhammad Ali during Ali’s persecution for draft evasion. Unfortunately, Howard has become so unpopular himself that today his occasional criticisms of the establishment produce the opposite effect. Viewers figure that if Howard dislikes something, it can’t be all bad. So a knock from Howard becomes a boost in the same way that if Idi Amin knocked Ayatollah Khomeini, we’d have to give Khomeini another look. This may, in fact, be the secret of Cosell’s longevity on the air. He serves a real purpose for the establishment—as an unwitting agent provocateur.
Of course, most announcers don’t even try to be reporters. Their idea of objectivity is to avoid rooting openly for a particular team. That announcers are approved by the various league commissioners is a fact which the FCC now requires the stations to mention. This is not a knock on announcers. They are hired as salesmen and some of them do a very good job. It’s just that with everyone involved in sales, who’s doing the reporting?
On television today, what announcer is going to suggest that the college draft and the four-year rule are probably unconstitutional? Or that the rule forbidding college athletes to have agents is unfair? Or that tax write-offs for professional teams make no sense? Or that scholarships should go to underprivileged scholars and not athletes? Or that sports commissioners don’t truly represent a sport since two thirds of the interested parties (players and fans) have no say in their selection? In short, who is questioning the basic values of college and professional sports? Not anybody you’re likely to see on network television.
Nor on any other kind of program. Frank Deford, a marvelous writer at Sports Illustrated, was recently commissioned by ABC television to do a movie script. It was about a college football coach who gave pep talks with his fists, a la Woody Hayes. The head of programming loved it and pushed it upstairs to Roone Arledge. Since the script conflicted with ABC’s college football contract, Roone Arledge pushed it out the window. So much for editorial balance.
As if it weren’t enough that television has become partners with sports, they are now inventing sports—the propriety of which may be as questionable as the events themselves. Take Evel Knievel’s leap across the Snake River, which was hyped to a fare-thee-well. “Would this motorcycle daredevil make it alive across the Snake River in a rocket ship?” the nation’s viewers were continuously asked. My opinion was yes, on the grounds that if we could get a man to the moon and back we could probably get him across the Snake River.
The key to an event like this is the hype, without which there would be no event. Even ABC’s distinguished science editor, Jules Bergman, was brought in for an analysis of Knievel’s chances. When an event must be sold, everybody’s gotta get into the act.
In 1973, Wide World of Sports bought the rights to televise a “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Then they began hyping the event as only a network can do. Part of that hype, they figured, should come from me as the local sportscaster for “Eyewitness News,” ABC’s flagship station in New York.
Except that I saw myself as a reporter for an autonomous (albeit affiliated) station, not as a salesman for the network. My producer and news director agreed with me. So when the network sent me a very dull three-minute interview between King and Riggs the Friday before the match, I didn’t use it. Instead, during my three minutes, I gave the match a 30 second plug, which was more than it deserved. Before you could say “network apoplexy,” our producer received a nasty telephone call. In the control room. While the news was still on the air. It was Roone Arledge calling from home, screaming into the phone that “‘Eyewitness News’ will never get any cooperation from Wide World of Sports as long as Jim Bouton is doing the news.” A short while later, my contract was not renewed. It came as no surprise to this reporter.
I don’t want you to think that I didn’t enjoy being a sportscaster. On the contrary, when I wasn’t being fired, I was having a wonderful time. I was an original member of the “Eyewitness News” team (WABC, channel 7 in New York), the first of the Happy Talk news programs, a concept which swept the country in the 1970s. It was developed by a very bright guy named Al Primo, who was a news director before he left to set up his own television consulting business. The idea was that viewers liked our news team because we liked each other. And we did, mostly.
We got to be great friends not by covering the news, but by making commercials showing us having fun together. All hell could be breaking loose in New York City and seven of our station’s crack reporters would be across town somewhere
in a studio decorated to look like a Puerto Rican wedding hall or a birthday party. The fun came during the breaks between scenes when they brought in the catered lunch and the booze. Sometimes if we didn’t get our lines right we’d get back to the station just in time to go on the air, slightly looped.
Occasionally it would affect the news. One afternoon we all came back feeling pretty good and our weatherman, Tex Antoine (the most popular member of our team), had to lean on his weather map for support. Problem was, he accidently rubbed off a low-pressure area with his elbow and when he went to point it out, the mark was gone.
Mostly, we did a lot of good work. Our anchormen, Roger Grimsby and Bill Beutel, were, and still are, excellent newsmen. Geraldo Rivera exposed the mistreatment of our mentally retarded in a way that brought real changes in their lives. (Give Arledge credit for making Rivera a national reporter on ABC’s 20/20.) And Melba Tolliver has won numerous awards over the years for her journalism.
The only member of the team nobody liked was our 6 o’clock sports guy, a fellow named Howard Cosell. “Monday Night Football” was just getting started and Howard was annoyed at having to be on the same news with mere local personalities, whom he would attack on the air. This was a mistake in the case of Roger Grimsby who was a lot sharper and even more devastating than Cosell, in his own way. I remember one night, at the end of his report, Howard went into a sarcastic putdown of Grimsby that lasted for what seemed like two minutes. Finally, when Howard was finished, the camera switched to Grimsby who was sitting there with his eyes closed, snoring.
At WABC I learned to cover stories from different perspectives. My favorite was the one on the Yankee tryout camp. Each summer the Yankees would hold open tryouts for anybody who thought they could play for the Yankees someday. Butchers, bakers, lawyers, and garage mechanics would show up wearing the strangest assortment of uniforms you ever saw. Out of about sixty players only one or two actually had a chance but everybody got a look.