In recent years members of the sports media have had to absorb one bit of criticism which seems either overemphasized or naively uninformed. Even the Federal Communications Commission got into the act with a policy directive which would henceforth govern public broadcasting, whether radio or television:
Licensees and networks are hereby notified that, effective October 16, 1974, they will be required to disclose clearly, publicly and prominently during each broadcast of an athletic event, the existence of any arrangement whereby announcers broadcasting that event may be directly or indirectly, chosen, paid, approved and/or removed by parties other than the licensee and/or network upon which the event is broadcast.
This is an attempt to counteract the effect of those sports broadcasters who are paid their salaries not by the stations but by the home teams, and who are suspected of disseminating not news but propaganda.
Vince Scully, for example, is one of the best baseball broadcasters in the business, but he happens to be an employee of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the new directive requires that he announce this fact to his listeners lest they get the idea that from Scully they are receiving unadulterated news. I am not sure what good will be achieved by such a confession.
I have listened to radio and television broadcasts for many decades, and I have enjoyed the blatant ‘homers,’ those men whose loyalties were all with the home team. I recall especially the media people in Denver whose hearts bled with the Broncos. As a matter of fact, I never knew who paid them; if they were on the Broncos’ payroll, they delivered the goods, and if they were not, the Broncos were getting a lot of free advertising. In either event, their broadcasts were informative, personal and fun.
The same was true of the Philadelphia broadcasters who covered the NHL Flyers, and I would have been disappointed if these men had not shown a partiality for a gutsy team which performed miracles in dragging down two Stanley Cup championships in a row. I’ve also heard some highly partisan broadcasting coming out of New York in favor of the football Jets and the basketball Knicks, especially the latter.
When I pointed out to a friend in Alabama that Alf Van Hoose seemed to be rather partisan where Bear Bryant and his Big Crimson Machine were concerned, my friend replied, ‘He damn well better be, or we’d shoot him.’
I am in favor of local partisanship. That’s what sports are all about, and to enforce a bland neutrality seems wrong. If I were a sportswriter or broadcaster I would certainly be for my home teams, and I would not try vainly to mask the fact. I would also hope to be a just critic of their failures and would endeavor to give my audience a clear report of the various shenanigans the locals were up to. Whether that would make me a ‘homer’ I can’t say, because that term has pejorative overtones implying corruption, and I’d want to avoid that. But if it came down to a World Series between the Phillies, whom I have always supported, versus the Yankees, whom I have always deplored, I feel sure that even a moron would be able to detect where my enthusiasm lay.
There remains the question of whether the media have subjected sports to overexposure. On a recent weekend in my home, television offered seventy-five and a half hours of sports programming. It was May, so the plethora could not be blamed on football, but we did have basketball play-offs, hockey Stanley Cup games, baseball night and day, boxing, tennis spectaculars and tournaments, golf, track and field, various anthologies and four hours of wrestling and roller derbies for laughs. This was rather much, even for an aficionado like myself.
Last autumn we had high school football on Friday, collegiate on Saturday, three professional games on Sunday, one on Monday and one on Thursday. This was ridiculous. On Monday mornings, after the NFL game, certain metropolitan dailies ran seven pages of sports, with whole pages being given to close-up shots of the preceding day’s action.
My concern here is not with the finances of such overexposure—I shall deal with that later—but rather with the general common sense of the matter. In a reasonable society should the basketball season extend from September almost to June? Should a competition with as honorable a tradition as ice hockey have its play-offs in Buffalo when the summer-like temperature is so high that the arena is filled with fog so dense that the players cannot find one another and the goalkeeper has difficulty seeing the shots coming at him?
In a column which attracted wide attention in April 1972, James Reston reflected on this question:
There isn’t a single professional sports season now that doesn’t go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both.
Even an old geezer and sports buff has to wonder whether the sports promoters are not going on too long and getting into trouble. And one day, if they all go on too long and demand too much, they will lose the magic. The game has gone on too long.
Jim Barniak, sports columnist for the Philadelphia Bulletin and a true believer, shocked his readers toward the conclusion of the 1975 ice-hockey season when he wrote:
I would like at this time to announce my farewell to ice hockey for the 1974–75 season. As for the remaining two, or possibly three, games of the current Stanley Cup championships, I will be there in body, but that’s all. My mind is completely blown. The game is no fun any more and, so, I’m getting out.
The irony of all this is that I was on the verge of becoming a real hockey fan there for a while. I actually bought tickets to games during the past season, which may be the greatest tribute a sportswriter can pay to a sport. But now, quite frankly, I’m sick of it.
Whatever bursts of peak form the players had left from an overly extended regular season looks to have been all but drained from them by these senseless intrusions into late May. The thing I will remember most about the series is forty dog-tired players skating through a dense fog.
I phrased my reaction more harshly. When I watched the worn-out skaters, the blankets of fog, the synthetic hoop-la, I switched my television off and said, ‘That’s a disgrace. I’ll be no part of it.’
One of the surest ways to kill a snort is to overexpose it, make it mechanical, dilute the quality of its players, and extend its season arbitrarily. Even football could be killed if half a dozen wrong moves were made, and David Halberstam uttered the first serious warning to this sport in the December 16, 1974, issue of New York magazine. Now I grant that Halberstam is not your ordinary office worker who forms the mainstay of sports support. Even worse, he’s an intellectual. But it was men like him who start the publicity ball rolling for football, and if men like him now start to abandon the game, there’s bound to be trouble. They are the style-setters, and God help any sport in America when the style-setters make it unfashionable:
In those days football seemed the most perfect sport and it seemed unlikely that we would ever get enough … We rooted for the Jets against the Colts. We did in a perverse way root against certain teams—Dallas in particular because of its sudden infamy, and because to me at least Tom Landry was the least sympathetic of the coaches, looking more like a regional director of the FBI than anything else.
What also made the game so good in those days was the quality of the teams and the sense of identity they projected. There were only twelve teams and they were, by and large, good ones. They had character and identity and continuity.
Part of the problem is the fan. We must confess our own guilt. We have, for some fifteen years or so, simply seen too much. If there was a network greed which was matched by an owner’s greed, then it was also matched by a fan greed. Football was there every Sunday, it was free, or almost free, and so we watched it. One game was not enough, so we watched two.
Anyone who believes that football is home free, permanently, should read Halberstam. His could be the handwriting on the wall. Even more important than satiety and length of season is a more basic problem. Do we not make ourselves look like a nation of boobs if we enshrine schoolboy pastimes as a commanding function of our society?
It would be inappr
opriate to conclude a discussion of sports media—a characteristically light-hearted segment of our society—on so gloomy a note. After all, the sports report in television is known as the Happy Hour, and properly so, for it deals, as Tonto Coleman said, with man’s successes. Sports columns are best when they report humorous or outrageous situations, and no big-time coach could survive long if he lacked a good supply of stories for the winter banquets.
Over the years I’ve collected the best yarns from such sources, and none surpasses the one told by Doug Layton of WERC in Birmingham:
It was Pete Maravich’s senior year at LSU. Most charismatic college player in the country, flopping hair, dangling red socks, dynamic personality. Eighteen thousand people out to watch him every time he played. It was against Mississippi, and they knew they had to cut Pistol Pete down to size if they wanted to win, so they bumped him, hacked him, tugged at his shorts and stood on his toes. Well, this caused great anguish in the heart of Press Maravich, the boy’s father who coached LSU and who had devised a system whereby his son could shake himself free for twenty or thirty easy buckets a game. The Mississippi ruffians were making it impossible for Pistol Pete to get free for his easy layups, and Press Maravich began heckling the officials. ‘Look what they’re doin’ to my boy! Are you gonna allow them to do that to my boy? You’ve got to give some protection to my boy.’ Finally the referee could take no more and he slapped Press Maravich with a technical, but the barrage kept up, ‘They’re killin’ my boy.’
So the referee stopped the game, went to the LSU bench and asked in a voice of sweet reasonableness, ‘Now, Coach Maravich, I don’t want to hit you with another technical. What seems to be the problem?’ This conciliatory attitude disarmed Maravich Senior, who replied quietly, ‘Mr. Referee, you’re letting them kill my boy.’
‘Mr. Maravich,’ the referee asked, ‘which one is your boy?’
*When this manuscript was completed. Skip Myslenski, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, advised me that such a book had already been printed: Earnshaw Cook’s remarkable Percentage Baseball.
ELEVEN
Financing
This chapter deals with troublesome questions. Who should pay for stadiums? Who should own the teams that play in the stadiums? How much should the players earn who play on the teams? These questions, and others of a related nature, are discussed extensively in Roger G. Noll’s Government and the Sports Business. My analyses were completed before the appearance of this classic work, but I had used earlier studies by three of the contributors: Roger Noll and Benjamin Okner on basketball finances, James Quirk on the reasons why professional teams shift from one city to another. No one should discuss the financial realities of sport without careful attention to the writings of these men.
I shall tackle the problem of stadiums first, because their costs involve readers directly, especially when the stadium is to be paid for through public taxation, as 70 percent of them are. On this question I confess to a firm predilection, stemming from a lunch I had one day in 1958 at Toots Shor’s. The Brooklyn Dodgers had just left Brooklyn for Los Angeles and the New York Giants were leaving Manhattan for San Francisco, and some of us were discussing the consequences when a gentleman whose name I didn’t catch made this observation: ‘A city is a place where a large collection of people do the things that a city ought to do.’
When we asked what this meant, he explained, ‘To qualify as a city, any collection of people must have an orchestra, a large library, a system of parks, a transportation system, a university and, yes, a public stadium in which to gather and a professional team to play there. If a town doesn’t have these things, it’s got no right to call itself a city.’
He had a point. You can defend building a city stadium on the questionable grounds that it will bring more business into the city. (It does, to taxicabs and saloons like Toots Shor’s.) Or that it will help bind the city together. (It might have the opposite effect if a team excites partisan riots.) Or that it is essential for the city’s image. (What image does a losing team create?) Or for a variety of other dubious reasons.
The real reason is that a city needs a big public stadium because that’s one of the things that distinguish a city. I would not elect to live in a city that did not have a spacious public building in which to play games, and as a taxpayer I would be willing to have the city use my dollars to help build such a stadium, if that were necessary. I am therefore unequivocally in support of public stadiums.
My reasons are not all pragmatic. I believe that each era of civilization generates its peculiar architectural symbol, and that this acquires a spiritual significance far beyond its mere utilitarian purpose. First we had the Age of Pyramids, in which I would include such edifices as the ziggurat in Babylon, Borobudur in Java and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. They came along at much different periods chronologically, but at comparable stages in the development of their local civilizations. Those societies which built well in this age of massive structures are well remembered.
Then came the Age of Temples, symbolized by the Parthenon, followed by the Age of Stadia, symbolized by the Colosseum. One of the most revealing explorations I made was through Turkey-in-Asia, where in one small forgotten town after another I found huge stadiums which imperial Rome had erected for the entertainment of its remote citizens. One finds more Greek and Roman ruins in Turkey than in Greece and Rome combined.
Then came the glorious Age of Cathedrals, and much later the Age of Bridges, when flying arches were thrown across all the rivers of the world. One of the best periods, architecturally, was the Age of the Railroad Stations, when a functional need was met by heavy but inspired buildings that lent dignity to small towns and big cities alike. In Europe some of the railroad stations—Munich, Helsinki—were masterpieces, and in the rural area in which I live they were low, solid and sometimes majestic forts.
Quickly came the Age of the Skyscraper, then the Age of the intricate Traffic Circle, the sprawling Airport and the splendiferous Shopping Center, which created merely blight and disruption without contributing to architectural beauty.
But now we are once more in an Age of the Stadium, and I shall not anticipate the favorable things I have to say later by designating those American stadiums I find creative. In Madrid the great Estadio Bernabeu, sunk in a hole in the middle of the city, is a masterpiece. In Rome the hideous oval marked by the statues of athletes in a surprise, and in Mexico City the huge bullring, set deep in a saucer, is adventurous.
We live in an age when cities are compressing much of their creative instinct into stadiums, and some very good things are being done. A major city ought to have a major stadium, but before it starts building, it ought to appoint a commission not solely of businessmen or architects to decide what kind of stadium would best serve and where it ought to be located. To rush either of these basic decisions is to court disaster.
Let us suppose that NEW, a younger person with contemporary imagination, and OLD, an older hand who has kicked around a lot of stadiums, are members of that commission. Their preliminary discussion might run like this:
NEW: We might as well get one thing straight right now. Throughout all these discussions, no matter how long they run, I’m going to be insisting that we build only where there is adequate parking. Sports and the automobile are inseparable partners, and it’s plain folly to build a stadium where no one can get to it, or away from it after the game’s over.
OLD: I’ll say amen if you make that transportation in general, instead of just the automobile.
NEW: What other kind of transportation is there? Really available, I mean?
OLD: Now, not much. In the future, maybe a lot.
NEW: I accept your correction. But my prime consideration leads me to think that we must build not in the city but in the suburbs, where the kind of people who can afford twelve dollars for a ticket live. I do not want my stadium tucked away in some corner of the city where there’s no parking and where people are afraid to visit because of hooliganism and w
orse. I opt for the suburbs without question.
OLD: The traditional site for a stadium is in the city. One of the best in the world is that bullring in Sevilla. Right in the heart of the city. Even in America today the really fine stadiums are those which have kept to the city. The Vet in Philadelphia. Three Rivers in Pittsburgh. Riverfront in Cincinnati. And one of the best, old Yankee Stadium in New York. And the current marvel, one of the most ambitious stadiums ever built anywhere at any time, the Superdome in New Orleans. You can walk to it from the downtown hotels.
NEW: And not one of them has adequate parking. They’re all antiquated before their bonds are paid off. The stadiums in this country that I like are the ones out in the countryside, with enough parking for the suburban customer who foots the bills. Shea in New York, an admirably placed stadium with plenty of space for autos plus subway availability. Foxboro some twenty miles south of Boston. Pontiac twenty-five miles north of Detroit. And the only sensible stadium construction in recent years, that marvelous twin pair of stadiums in Kansas City well east of the city.
OLD: I’m disturbed by your insistence that it’s the suburbanite who foots the sports bill. I think we have to differentiate here. You may be right that the suburbanite supports football, which offers at the most nine or ten home games a year. Maybe the well-to-do suburbanite can handle that. But in baseball it’s the city man who supports the team, and not at twelve dollars a throw, and not a mere nine or ten times a year. Baseball has eighty-one home games a year, and its stadium had better not be any twenty-five miles to the north of the city. Same with basketball. Hockey? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a suburban game, too, but I noticed that my team played a hundred and seven games this year, and if half of them were at home, that means fifty-three home dates, and their playing area had better be close to the city.