In fact, things have become so depressing that well-intentioned citizens are gravely discussing the practicality of passing federal laws to alter the picture. This is the problem: When a blue-chip high school football player is faced with the choice of where to go to college, he is naturally approached by people connected with the military academies—but what have they to offer him, compared with what the big-time powers can offer?
If he goes to Army he must attend real classes. He will not be handed a convertible or money under the table. He must live up to a rigorous code of deportment. Other students cannot take his exams for him. And at the end of his eligibility he cannot traipse off to the pros; he must proceed immediately to fulfill his five-year commitment to active duty in the armed services, while his friends who went to a standard university can draw down large salaries in the pros. Also, if he is a real tall basketball player, the kind coaches need, he can’t get in the academies because of height limitations.
So the last decade has watched the steady decline of academy sport, and not only in football. Though Army regularly used to win nearly 80 percent of all its athletic contests, in recent years it has won only 56 percent, and in football over a three-year period, only 29 percent. Part of the problem is that Army schedules, like those of most universities, are made twelve and fourteen years in advance. That explains why a really inept Army team, coming off an 0–10 season faced a line-up of these powerhouses, most of which had played in bowl games the previous season: Penn State, Notre Dame, Tulane and Vanderbilt. The combined scores of those games: Other teams 138, Army 42. A deeply patriotic man, reviewing this situation, told me:
It cannot be in the interest of our nation for us to allow our military academies to be held up to ridicule. It is bad for national morale and worse for the morale of our armed forces. Pitiful exhibitions like recent Army-Navy games proclaim to the world that our military establishment is sub-par. I think Congress should pass laws right away encouraging real athletes to enroll in the academies. If we have to lower standards a little for the athlete, do it. Above all, change that stupid rule which says an academy man must, immediately after graduation, go on active duty for five years. If the boy is good enough to land a job with the pros, encourage him to take it, then let him come back later to serve his five-year obligation, after his stint with the pros is over. That would help to entice the high school athlete back to West Point.
It seems strange that athletics, which has long been idolized for having produced military leaders, should now boycott the military because easy money is available elsewhere. And the agents through which this boycott is applied are those very high school and college coaches who have boasted, ‘We are training the nation’s leaders.’ This is more serious than it might seem. If we enthrone sports as a national virtue, it is dangerous to force one of our major national symbols, our academies, to live under rules which make sports accomplishment impossible.
In view of what I have said earlier about disliking the union of sports and the military, the reader might expect me to be indifferent if West Point and Annapolis were no longer able to compete with Nebraska and Arkansas, for the goals of the schools are different; philosophically it might even be in the national interest if West Point retreated in athletics to a position somewhat like Yale’s: a great university so preoccupied with education that advanced club football is about the best it can produce. I would find it repugnant to lower academy standards just to attract football players. But I cannot be indifferent to the fate of the academies; their very nature stresses athletic competence and rugged competition, and I have found that anything which runs counter to inherent nature must always be suspect. The academies are in trouble, and for athletes to be encouraged to boycott them is disgraceful.
One final word on government and sports. I have never been favorably impressed with czars for sports, or for anything else. In a crisis, perhaps, but for regular fare, no. I think Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis highly overrated; he was a posturing gentleman who sided with management against the rights of players, a dictator who impeded the development of the game at least as much as he enhanced it. He may have been necessary as an antidote following the poison of the Black Sox scandal, but the incorruptibility for which he was praised he acquired as a judge and not as a sports dictator.
Most of the other czars were inefficient, little more than tools of owners, but I do have high regard for Pete Rozelle. Essentially a public relations man, and without much obvious success when he later became general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, he seemed an unlikely candidate for sage and guide through the years of football’s major development. He has been right on most things he has done: opposition to Congress on the TV blackout law; disciplining Joe Namath; and particularly the masterminding of television contracts which have brought so much income to the game.
He has made only two bad mistakes. In 1963 after the Friday assassination of President Kennedy he saw no reason to postpone the Sunday football games, and in 1971 he did not comprehend when many women protested against flooding their homes on Christmas with two NFL play-off television broadcasts. If, in 1977, when Christmas falls on a football Sunday, the NFL insists upon business as usual, I shall volunteer to ring bells for whatever committee is organized to prevent it. There are some things in this world more sacred than sports, and family unity in observation of our major spiritual holiday is one of them.
*I find it Kafkaesque that our courts should be so eager to protect the purity of illegal gambling on sports events, and to punish college players for having done nothing more than control point spreads, and at the same time to ignore the truly criminal acts that are directed against the youthful players.
*What Rozelle feared occurred at the conclusion of the 1976 Super Bowl. Pittsburgh defeated Dallas, 21–17, to win the championship, but when the final whistle blew, the winning Pittsburgh fans were desolate while the losing Dallas backers were joyous. Why? A last-gasp Dallas touchdown had prevented Pittsburgh from winning by the seven-point spread the gamblers required. So everyone who had bet on Pittsburgh lost money, even though their team had won.
THIRTEEN
Competition and Violence
In recent decades there has been a noticeable attack on the evils of competition. In kindergarten, children are taught to control aggressiveness and learn cooperation. In high school, students are encouraged to work for self-development and not for grades, which merely show their relative standing in competition with their classmates. In college, many undergraduates have turned away from competitive sports, preferring those experiences which enlarge friendships rather than engage enemies. In business life, managers are warned to avoid the constant tension of competition, and workers are directed by their unions not to compete against fellow workers but rather to perform up to an agreed-upon standard and no further. And medical men are beginning to emphasize that it is stress and self-induced tension that kill prematurely.
In sports, this revulsion against overcompetitiveness has manifested itself in a vigorous debate over the tactics of Vince Lombardi, who became the high priest of competition while coaching the Green Bay Packers. He achieved immortality with his summation of the competitor’s creed: ‘Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.’ But he said some other things too, and they are worth exploring.
• ‘Football isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.’
• ‘To play this game you must have fire in you, and there is nothing that stokes fire like hate.’
• ‘I will demand a commitment to excellence and to victory, and that is what life is all about.’
• ‘This is a violent sport. That’s why crowds love it.’
• ‘Don’t talk about injuries to anyone. Don’t even tell your wife. Keep your mouth shut. There are three things that are important to every man in this room. His religion, his family and the Green Bay Packers, in that order.’
After Lombardi died fans cast about for his successor, and by
general consent his mantle fell upon George Allen, the super-tense coach of the Washington Redskins. He, too, has uttered a series of apothegms which illustrate his competitive stance:
• ‘Every time you win, you’re reborn; when you lose, you die a little.’
• ‘The winner is the only individual who is truly alive.’
• ‘One hundred percent is not enough. The world belongs to those who aim for a hundred and ten.’
• ‘We took a city that was known for last place and united it. Blacks and whites, Marylanders, Virginians and Washingtonians, Democrats and Republicans, they all were pulling together for the same thing.’
• And, in words of great perception, ‘Careers don’t last forever, and the season is short.’ He was exhorting players to maximum performance during the brief period they were on the scene. Coaches, of course, go on year after year, prospering from the plaudits their players have won for them; players enter and depart quickly, like fodder through a chopping machine.
A few other memorable quotes from coaches will complete the testament of winning. Darrell Royal of Texas said, ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ Frank McGuire of South Carolina said, ‘In this country, when you finish second, no one knows your name.’ Bill Musselman of Minnesota said, ‘Defeat is worse than death because you have to live with defeat.’ And Leo Durocher summed it all up when he said, ‘Nice guys finish last.’
Ed McCluskey, coach of a ragamuffin little basketball team representing Farrell High School in the coal regions of western Pennsylvania, elevated the Lombardi ethic to a new high: ‘Through the year I’ve developed my own philosophy about high school basketball. Winning isn’t all that matters. I don’t care how many games you win, it’s how many championships you win that counts.’ He had won seven.
The first doubt to be cast on the deification of Lombardi came when George Sauer, an all-American from Texas and one of the heroes of the Jets’ victory over Baltimore in the Super Bowl upset in 1969, asked publicly whether a coach, to win, had to imitate Lombardi. He thought not, and cited Weeb Ewbank, the low-key coach of the New York Jets as proof. Sauer pointed out that Weeb had copped two national championships without feeling obliged to impose any psychological tyranny in order to make his players perform. Other professional footballers pointed to various abuses in the Lombardi program and pinpointed the many contradictions in that system. They voiced strong opposition to the manner in which he kept mature athletes in a state of juvenile dependence, making grown men tremble when he frowned, or rejoice when he deigned to smile upon them. Some players said specifically that they hoped the strategies used by Lombardi would end with him and not become the standard procedures for all sports; they felt that his harsh impositions were unnecessary in the conduct of what should be games played by mature men. There seemed to be a general rejection of the reign of terror he had imposed. There was also hope that his tactics would no longer dominate the thinking of coaches working with nine- and ten-year-old boys or of coaches in high school. The rejection of his methods was by no means universal, and it was shamefully late in coming, but it was substantial.
Once the professionals challenged the myth, critics felt free to question the necessity of the Lombardi approach. Sports Illustrated ran a horror story about a practice which had become common in the high schools at Louisville, Kentucky: If a boy quit football, his name tape was removed from his locker and pasted on a conspicuous ‘Hall of Shame,’ with the result that boys and girls in the school shunned him. The coach who instituted this psychological punishment explained that it was merely ‘negative motivation’; it accounted for the fact that his high school had left the ranks of habitual loser and entered the group of winners. Parents, however, protested.
Douglas Looney, in a widely reprinted article in the National Observer, tore the football ethic apart as it applied to business and general living. Under such topics as Competition is basically destructive and Winning doesn’t prove you’re a better human being, he rebutted Lombardi, but not in a stupid manner. He admitted that competition appeared to be a natural component of human life, but argued that it was best when one competed against oneself rather than against another human being whom one wished to destroy.
Physiologists warned that an overdeveloped sense of competition induced tensions which damaged the nervous system and led to various forms of physical degeneration. Cardiologists added that such tensions explained why so many American men died prematurely. Business moralists pointed out that excessive competition often led to a business immorality that could wreck our capitalist system, and as proof they pointed to the use of industrial spies, fake packaging, illegal advertising claims and massive bribes to foreign agents.
In the years when this questioning was becoming popular, I was working with radical youth groups, and in every extended discussion young people told me that they had been turned off by the excesses of organized sports, the adults who controlled it and the jocks who participated. This did not surprise me, for disaffected youth have usually been contemptuous of sports; but what did startle me was the discovery that hordes of traditional, non-radicalized college students were beginning to feel the same way. ‘To hell with all competition,’ they said repeatedly.
I have often felt that President Nixon could attribute his loss of office in 1974 to his football attitude about winning during the election of 1972. His Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) had collected some $64,000,000, which it refused to share with the various Republican senators then running for reelection, on the grounds that ‘the President has to win big.’ If large chunks of that money, some of it illegally obtained, had been pumped into close senatorial campaigns, like Gordon Allott’s in Colorado, the tremendous ground-swell of the 1972 race would probably have returned a Republican Senate, which would never have authorized a Watergate investigation. In this case, winning was not the only thing; winning a balanced government in accordance with rules was.
A statement about winning which has given me much difficulty was made by Jack Nicklaus. He was speaking with considerable contempt of his fellow golfers who lacked his fierce desire to win: ‘What gets to me are the self-admitted non-competitors—the guys who pick up $100,000 plus a year without ever winning a tournament, and go around telling the world how happy they are to finish ninth every week.’ He then extolled the ethic of always trying to be number one, and I thought at the time that to be number nine in United States golf, to be immeasurably better than twelve million other golfers, and to earn $100,000 yearly was not disgraceful. Had I, years ago, started playing golf, I seriously doubt that it would have been incumbent upon me to beat the world. I would have wanted to achieve the highest level to which my ability entitled me, but if I had landed at ninth best, I would have deemed my career as golfer a success.
I cannot support Lombardi and Nicklaus and the coaches. Losing a game is not equivalent to death. Failing to be numero uno does not make me a lesser human being. Over the past twenty years I have repeatedly played one fine tennis player who used to have a national ranking, and I have never once defeated him. This does not mean that he is a better man that I. (You should see what I did to him in bottle pool!) It merely means that he is the better tennis player. I would be delighted to play him again tomorrow, for losing 6–3, 6–2 to a fine player is more rewarding than beating some beginner 6–0, 6–0.
Of course I have found winning to be more satisfying than losing; if I had never experienced victory, I might have acquired some psychological dislocation, but I feel that the average man or woman ought to be able to absorb a fair ration of defeat, and if some superjock growls, ‘That merely proves you’re a born loser, and there’s nothing in the world lower than a loser,’ I no longer argue with him. I can only look at him with bewildered compassion.
And yet I must confess that I am on the side of healthy competition. I love it. I seek it out. I prosper under its lash. I have always lived in a fiercely competitive world and have never shied away. I live in s
uch a world now and I would find life quite dull without the challenge.
I find competition to be the rule of nature, tension to be the structure of the universe. I believe that normal competition is good for a human being and I am sure that flight from it hastens death. I am prepared to acknowledge every charge against fanatical competition, or senselessly prolonged tension, and I would not foist either upon young people. But I would not wish to avoid reasonable competition, for I like a world in which men and women test themselves against others or against abstract ideals. I applaud the schools which drop pass-fail marks and go back to A-B-C competitive grades. I do not want to see my nation fall into desuetude because its citizens are unwilling to meet the challenges of our time.
In nature I find no avoidance of competition. A cardinal has built his nest in the bushes outside my bedroom window, and at nesting time he is careful to delimit his territory and then to defend it against intruders. He certainly does not shy away from competition. Indeed, when he sees his reflection in my window and recognizes it as an invading male cardinal, he springs into action, attacks his reflection in the window, then looks at me with a sense of triumph.
Not long ago I was on the Serengeti Plains of Central Africa with John Owens, the Englishman who then supervised that vast preserve, and after he had shown me the lions and the wildebeest and the zebras he said, ‘Now I’ll show the most interesting thing we have.’ And he helped me spot a small bird with a sac on its chest, and we watched as this bird flew from corner to corner of a fairly large area, halting at boundary intersections and rubbing itself against some conspicuous weed.
When the bird had completed its rounds, Owen and I went to one of the marked weeds, pulled it, and returned to our car, where we found that the weed had been stained with a highly aromatic substance which other birds of that species could recognize from a distance. This would warn them that this area had been appropriated.