Sports in America
I am shocked by the proposal that giant-screen television be installed so that the calls of umpires can be second-guessed by spectators, accompanied by the riots that would surely ensue. This should not be allowed, and my stricture here goes for football, hockey, basketball and tennis, too. The umpiring of any game is a chancy thing, as is the Norns’ umpiring of human lives, and we are all better off if we learn to live with that fact. In the games I have played, the chance call of the umpire has been a constant factor: the tennis shot that may have nicked the line; the strike that could have been a ball; the cornerback who might have interfered with the pass receiver; and that most difficult of calls—did the basketball player dribbling the ball charge into the guard, or did the latter block him?
I think we ask too much of games if we demand a godlike finality in umpiring; we would take a giant step backward if we installed great screens where the fans could participate in the reaching of decisions, because a fundamental of play would have been violated: the uncertainty of judgment. I am not, however, opposed to the officials’ having somewhere an unexposed screen to enable them to review their judgment on close plays, or on any play in which the official responsible for the call was not in position to see it.
I remember the 1973 Cotton Bowl in which Alabama was defeated 17–13 by a late-period Texas touchdown in which the Texas halfback clearly tiptoed down the white chalk mark on his way to the goal, placing himself out of bounds on three separate steps. The official watching the play missed the infraction, which any television replay should have shown. But in a startling number of cases the television camera does not resolve the problem. For example, after this same Cotton Bowl, not one Texas coach, viewing the game films, would acknowledge that his halfback had stepped out of bounds. The cameras had been at the wrong angle to catch the missteps.
I am gratified to learn that the Italian National Soccer Federation has seen fit to petition the TV people not to show instant replays of crucial decisions, lest fans in the area of the stadium see the facts and rush forth to slay the referees, as has often been attempted in the past, sometimes successfully. I wish American sports could agree on a policy of keeping instant replays out of the stadiums.
The changes in tennis have been all to the good and there should be more of them. The new colorful uniforms, allowing the spectator to differentiate between players, are excellent. I still wear pure white, and so do my opponents, but we are from an older school and the new is better. Of course, the introduction of sudden death has saved the game for television, and for the players too. This has been a most happy solution to the problem of those 21–19 sets that I used to play, and I find few players or spectators who object to the new system, providing that the winner must be ahead by two points before he can be declared the winner of the tie-breaking game.
But now a new problem threatens. Tennis as now played, even with sudden death, is not yet ideal for television, because probable duration of play cannot be predicted. When John Newcombe plays Jimmy Connors the best three out of five sets, the afternoon may require only three 6–1 sets and be over in a jiffy, or five 7–6 sets, in which case, close to three hours might be required.
There is some talk of doing with tennis what television did with golf, quit the indeterminate set system (comparable to match play in golf) and switch to a system whereby a competition consists of three sets, with the total number of games determining the winner (like medal play in golf). In fact, the professional World Team Tennis League has already come up with something close to this. Two teams of men and women compete in six different sets: first man versus first man, woman versus woman, second man versus second man, men’s doubles, women’s doubles, mixed doubles, each one set. Add up the total score in games, and the team that won the most games wins the match. This keeps the evening to a predictable length; it provides the spectator with a good mix of fast tennis; and I deem it reasonable, but only for play that is primarily entertainment.
I would object, and I think those responsible for tennis should too, to any system which would do away with sets in individual competition and substitute mere games won. There is a finesse to set play which is beautiful to watch and excruciating to participate in; an older player has won the first set from a younger opponent, lost the second, won the third. In the fourth set he loses two quick games, then makes a sober calculation. If he fights with all his energy to regain ground in this fourth set and fails, he will have worn himself out, and will have no reserve for the fifth, which he will lose too. So he allows his opponent to run off the fourth set 6–0. Then, in the fifth, he is ready for an all-out fight, which his superior tactics and conserved strength give him a very good chance of winning.
If the final result depended on total games won, the younger man would win, with that one 6–0 bulge in his favor. But the men are not playing single games; they are engaging in a subtle competition in which mere games do not mean a great deal. The trick is to win three sets, and sometimes it is justifiable to throw away four quick games in order to get on with the real contest.
One development in tennis requires close watching. When a gambling hall in Las Vegas in company with a television network can put up $450,000 for a Laver-Connors match, and then $1,000,000 for Newcombe-Connors, it is usurping the traditional rights of the tournament director, it is dictating unfair procedures, and it is destroying the orderly processes of the game. It is one thing for Las Vegas to announce that John Newcombe and Jimmy Connors are the two top stars of the game; it is quite another for Newcombe and Connors to enter a field of sixty-four or thirty-two and battle their way slowly through the rounds, with the possibility of being knocked off by Bjorn Borg or VijayAmritraj or Roscoe Tanner, and surviving to the semi-finals as true champions, to meet in the finals for the purse. I do not want the judgment of television executives to be substituted for time-honored systems of play.
In the summer of 1974, if such executives had been allowed to determine ex cathedra the semi-finalists in World Cup soccer, they would surely have selected Brazil and West Germany and Argentina and one other, and they certainly wouldn’t have selected Poland, who beat practically everybody while Brazil and Argentina were foundering. As honest sport, the two Connors matches were a bad show; as an afternoon’s entertainment exhibition, a triumph. But the two should not be confused. A major fault with such matches is that they siphon away from a sport vast sums of money which should be more equitably distributed through a large field of competitors.
Ice hockey has been a disappointment on television, even in the major cities which sponsor NHL teams. The game, which is so very difficult to follow and which suffers from infrequent scoring, ought to be more acceptable than it is; in the rink itself it can excite wild passions, and its partisans often consider it the best game in sportsdom. When I started work on this book I knew none of the intricacies; attendance at some of the Flyer barnburners quickly rectified that deficiency, and I have since watched every game I could find on television. It’s a game of marvelous movement, swift change and exciting pileups. To watch a Bernie Parent or a Ken Dryden in the goal is to see the instantaneous beauty of great ballet; to watch Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, when they played for Boston, tearing the Philadelphia defense apart with minutely calculated moves was one of the most fluid moments in sport.
But whether it can be translated onto the television screen remains uncertain. There has been talk of a fluorescent puck, but I doubt if even it could be followed through the mysterious shifts and changes which are so commonplace in a good hockey game. I have sat with numerous unindoctrinated friends as we watched the moves on a little screen, and they all complained, ‘I can’t see them when they score.’
‘Watch the replay,’ I advised.
‘I do, and I still can’t see it.’
The problem of offsides, as in soccer, is a difficult one to explain, and I have heard serious proposals that this be discontinued. Let as many skaters as wish be where they want An advocate says, ‘You’d have more nine-seven g
ames with all the added excitement that would mean.’
Having received much of my education in Scotland, where soccer was king, and having been a most loyal partisan of Dundee United, in those days the nothing team of the league, I have often pondered this problem of offsides and have concluded that it is a refinement that no American will ever really comprehend. It is generic in hockey and soccer, and to abolish it would probably destroy the lovely balance of these two games.
No one was surprised when, at the conclusion of the drab 1975 play-offs, NBC announced that it was dropping hockey. No other network leaped at the chance of taking over, and it may be that hockey is fated to become the grand opera of sports: something not for the lay multitude, but for the perpetual joy of the connoisseur. I cannot foresee much change that it can undergo to make it more acceptable to the television audience, and maybe that’s all to the good. It will remain the sports lover’s sport.
Basketball faces serious limitation insofar as television is concerned. It is monotonous, and it had better make some changes or it will find itself far in the rear where the television dollar is concerned. I am, as I have previously confessed, a complete devotee of this marvelous sport, considering those who practice it well among our greatest athletes. But the domination of the game by hyper-pituitary seven-footers and the frequency with which the total focus of the game is compressed into the last three minutes make its appeal on television limited.
I have found the ABA rule, whereby a field goal made from beyond the twenty-five-foot circle is worth three points, a good one; it should be adopted by the NBA immediately. Other recent changes which have eliminated that incessant march to the foul line have been commendable, but the lane from foul line to basket should be widened and the basket perhaps raised in height so as to introduce more variation in play.
In other words, instead of basketball’s having been harmed by television, it has been delinquent in making those reasonable changes to accommodate the camera that would have strengthened the game and made it more popular. But perhaps basketball is a special case; its rule changes have been so prolific during the past forty years that it almost looks like a sport trying to find itself; for my money, most of the rule changes have been to the good. When I started, one man shot all fouls; we had jump balls at every opportunity; play was not continuous; a player was expelled after four personals; the zone, which would later be outlawed, had not yet been developed; the one-hand shot was not approved; the jump shot was frowned upon; the running hook was a scandal; and a championship game could go 16–14. The modern game is much better; the problem now is to fit it more exactly into the age of television, and if this cannot be done, its popularity will fade.
Halfway through the 1974–75 season a situation arose which pinpointed the ethical niceties that arise when television dominates a sport. I stress the fact that no one was at fault here, other than the exigencies of the game. When it became apparent that the Los Angeles Lakers and the Milwaukee Bucks were not going to make the play-offs, and that the New York Knicks might also miss. CBS awoke to the fact that they were in the middle year of a three-year $27,000,000 contract with the NBA and that this season was falling flat on its face. With the three top draws in the league going nowhere, who cared, asked the television people, what Kansas City-Omaha was doing?
Milwaukee was a dead duck because Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had missed a good portion of the season as a result of having broken his right hand when he slammed a strut in disgust at his own play. The Knicks were in pitiful shape because their two big horses, Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere, had retired, leaving the team without muscle. And the Lakers had simply withered on the vine, with Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor gone. In the first days of league play it was apparent to serious followers of the game that the Big Three had become the Three Blind Mice and that upstart teams lacking in charisma, like Washington, Buffalo and Golden State, were now going to dominate.
The ethical problem is complicated. It appears that basketball cannot survive on television if two major markets, Los Angeles and New York, field wretched teams. (Since those cities are the fountainhead for other media too, the flood of exciting publicity which followed the ascendancy of the Knicks vanishes if they vanish.) But if television does not continue to pour money into basketball, seventeen of the eighteen NBA teams will be in mortal danger, and any survivors in the ABA. So, would it not be both reasonable and profitable for the new leaders in the league—Kansas City-Omaha, Buffalo, Washington—to trade away or even give away a good helping of their best players in order to rejuvenate New York and Los Angeles?
I had figured this out for myself; I was surprised when Paul Silas, a player for the Boston Celtics, was willing to ventilate the problem publicly. No rivalry is greater than the Celtic-Knick, yet here was a star of the Boston team seriously proposing that his arch-enemy be strengthened, for the good of the league:
Pro basketball needs a strong franchise in New York. The league is very dependent on how well the Knicks do. The NBA grew up with the Knicks’ success in the last half a dozen years or so. Some people think it’s about time to focus other cities, other good young players, but it doesn’t work that way. New York is where the media and the crowds are.
Silas, in addition to being a Celtic star, was also president of the NBA Players’ Association, and it was his responsibility to see that the league remain strong and retain its television income so that large salaries could continue.
Not long after he made his statement, Abdul-Jabbar was traded away by Milwaukee, an inexplicable deal until you found where he was going … to Los Angeles. And George McGinnis, the superstar of the ABA, was filched by the Knicks and promised $2,400,000 despite the fact that NBA rights to him were owned by Philadelphia. This latter piracy was so blatant that the incoming president, Larry O’Brien, simply had to cancel it, but New York’s attempted steal was economically justified by the fact that the city had to land a couple of superstars if the rest of the league was to remain solvent.
This is a ticklish point, one on which I cannot clarify my thinking. Certainly, the 1974–75 NBA season was a disaster, and the play-offs were worse, with a Washington-Golden State finale that could excite no one, but can this be corrected only by allowing television to reassign players in a pattern more interesting to viewers? A purist argues: ‘To modify a game for such a reason would be immoral.’ A realist counters: ‘But if basketball can survive only if it keeps getting television money, then the league must make whatever changes are demanded.’ An expert told me, ‘There’s a third choice. To hell with television money. Let the eleven weakest teams, financially, in the two leagues fold. Then place the fourteen survivors in a rational league paying rational salaries.’ Of the three positions, my guess is that the middle one will prevail. Television will certainly call the shots.
The game which has profited most from television is football. Starting with a spectacle which already had the ingredients—power, speed, varied movements, choice of plays, enough pause between plays to allow the man at home to decide what the quarterback ought to do, plus an alluring violence—the rules makers and Commissioner Rozelle have been uncanny in their ability to make the right decision at just about the right moment.
The massive rule changes prior to the 1974 season are a case in point. When I started intensive work on the book in 1972 many football people asked me my opinion of their sport, and I spoke for a majority of fans when I said, ‘Looks to me as if you’re running into two serious problems. The offense has been shackled, and it’s plain improper for an end to be knocked down four times while trying to get downfield to catch a pass. And the field goal is pretty soon going to bore the paying spectators. I side totally with Alex Karras, who said. “Twenty-two straining giants in perfect condition fight for fifty-nine minutes. Then some European runs onto the field, kicks a fifteen-yard field goal, wins the game, and shouts, ‘Hooray! I keek a touchdown!’ ” If I were you fellows, I’d change the rules.’
Sports exp
erts across the country had already begun issuing the same warning: I was merely parroting what the people I had been interviewing were saying. And even Don Meredith at the conclusion of one extremely dull game in which most of the scoring had been achieved by desultory field goals, actually said on the air, ‘It was a good game … if you like field goals.’
In spite of these danger signals, I had concluded that the men running the game would listen politely to the criticism and refuse to make changes. I was not remotely prepared for the flood of changes they did make: moving the goal posts back to where the collegians had had them for several decades, thus making field goals more difficult: moving the kickoff back so as to encourage more runbacks; replacing the ball, on a missed field goal, at the point where that play started so as to diminish the times when a team could take a wild shot at the crossbar, knowing that at worst the ball would be brought out to the twenty; protecting the receiving end so that he could get down field to catch the ball; eliminating the crack-back in which a man in motion was able to poleax a man from the blind side; and the institution of sudden death to diminish the number of tie games.
No other sport would have dared make such a congregation of radical changes at one time, and during the first season at least, each appeared to improve an already superior game. The important question is: Did these and other changes encouraged by television pose any threat to the inherent character of the sport? We have seen how television demands nearly wrecked a World Series game. Now let’s look at four additional instances of interference.
The first involves the behavior of the new football officials required by television. It was to serve broadcasters that a linesman was added, holding a flag to indicate the spot from which a team takes over possession of the ball. And there he stands, holding his flagged pole at that sacred spot while the action of the game moves far from him to the other end of the field. His purpose is to enable the announcer to say, ‘The Falcons’ drive started at the eighteen-yard line.’ To me this seems a silly waste of manpower, but it does no harm.