I’m beginning to see that the real source of the madness is the unconsciousness of the crowd. I mean, I’ve been trying to blame the players, the coach, the owners, and the Commissioner for the ugliness, but really WIN OR BE KILLED is a thing in our culture. Those fans today were murderous. Wildeyed. Angry. Excited. Ready to kill. It’s a huge circle. No one is responsible. It’s like a lot of other things in our culture—a lot of independent variables. It’s everywhere, in all of us. It doesn’t do any good to try to pin the blame on one scapegoat.
• As he so often does, Art Buchwald carried this mania to its logical conclusion. On November 16, 1975, the Washington Redskins faced the St. Louis Cardinals in a game that might decide the division championship and would determine the wild-card spot in the play-offs. Washington played well and led 17–10 going into the final minute, but St. Louis quarterback Jim Hart threw a desperation pass on which end Mel Gray made a sensational catch at the goal line, scoring the game-tying touchdown. Or did he? Incessant replays cast doubt on Gray’s possession of the ball as he crossed into the end zone, but proved conclusively that the ball had been knocked from his hands before a touchdown would normally have been scored. The officials, after unprecedented confusion and consultation, decreed that Gray had held the ball just long enough. The score counted. The game was tied. And in sudden death, Jim Bakken kicked a field goal to win for St. Louis and destroy Washington hopes. The ensuing outcry in Washington was horrendous. Senator Warren Magnuson demanded a recount. George Patrick Morse, a local attorney, filed suit in federal court to reverse the wrongful decision, and there was talk of carrying the case to the Supreme Court It was in the heat of this fury that Buchwald, a rabid Redskins fan, made the only sensible proposal: ‘I’m asking for the death penalty to be restored.’ He added, ‘If St Louis had any class, they would admit it was all a mistake and give us the game.’ He said he felt sure that if Washington ever won a game on a bad call, George Allen would insist upon forfeiting it to the rightful winner.
Vince Lombardi, shortly before he died, looked back on his quote which had helped get such unbridled enthusiasm started. He told Jerry Izenberg, ‘I wish to hell I’d never said that damned thing. I meant the effort … I meant having a goal … I sure as hell didn’t mean for people to crush human values and morality.’ I would like to think that that was his final word on the matter.
Others were not disturbed by violence. When the citizens of Pittsburgh rioted in the wake of a glorious World Series victory, with reports of crime, rape and multiple injuries, Police Chief Robert E. Colville had to rise in defense of his city. He said, ‘I have called this news conference because of the many unfounded and, in some cases, completely fabricated stories which went out over national news media.’ After assuring his listeners that there was nothing to such stories, the police admitted that there had been 128 reported injuries, 98 arrests, 25 store windows smashed, one taxicab overturned, one other car burned, and one woman yanked out of a passing car. ‘But she wasn’t raped,’ the police insisted.
The most thoughtful attack on the growing violence was written by a linebacker for the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian League. John McMurtry was an unusual type to begin with, a philosophy buff, and when he quit the big game he turned to the teaching of this subject in college. His essay appeared first in a Canadian magazine, Maclean’s, and was reprinted in the January 1972 issue of the Atlantic. It is entitled ‘Smash Thy Neighbor,’ and is a provocative analysis of why football has to be so violent:
Progressively and inexorably, as I moved through high school, college and pro leagues, my body was dismantled. Piece by piece. I started off with torn ligaments in my knee at thirteen. Then, as the organization and competition increased, the injuries came faster and harder. Broken nose (three times), broken jaw (fractured in the first half and dismissed as a ‘bad wisdom tooth,’ so I played with it for the rest of the game), ripped knee ligaments again. Torn ligaments in one ankle and a fracture in the other. Repeated rib fractures and cartilage tears. More dislocations of the left shoulder than I can remember. Occasional broken or dislocated fingers and toes. Chronically hurt lower back. Separated right shoulder, needled with morphine for the games.
I remember that when reading Jerry Kramer’s Instant Replay and his account of the twelve major operations he had undergone in order to continue with football, the impact on me was quite the opposite of what was intended. I thought that for a man to undergo such destruction of his body in order to participate in a game was insanity, yet almost everyone I spoke to, especially young people, said something like, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful, the way Kramer stuck to it?’ Constantly I have heard him held up as an American ideal, and whenever this has happened I have thought that the speaker must have acquired a most limited understanding of what the great ideals of history have been. They have not included self-destruction in a game. McMurtry speaks to this basic point repeatedly, and his suspicions are worthy of attention:
It is arguable that body shattering is the very point of football, as killing and maiming are of war. To grasp some of the more conspicuous similarities between football and war, it is instructive to listen to the imperatives most frequently issued to players by their coaches, teammates and fans. ‘Hurt ’em!’ ‘Level ’em!’ ‘Kill ’em!’ ‘Take ’em apart!’ Or watch for the plays that are most enthusiastically applauded by the fans, where someone is ‘smeared,’ ‘knocked still,’ ‘creamed,’ ‘nailed,’ broken in two,’ or even ‘crucified.’ In football the mouth waters most of all for the really crippling block or tackle. For the kill. Thus the good teams are ‘hungry,’ the best players are ‘mean,’ and ‘casualties’ are as much a part of the game as they are of war.
Competitive, organized injuring is integral to our way of life, and football is one of the more intelligible mirrors of the whole process: a sort of colorful morality play showing us how exciting and rewarding it is to Smash Thy Neighbor.
A classic case of what McMurtry was inveighing against was uncovered on June 10, 1973, when the St. Petersburg Times of Florida ran a story claiming that twenty-eight scholarship members of the football squad at Florida State had quit because they had been subjected to organized brutality, not during the game itself and not even during the season, but in the winter hardening drills. The class, presumably voluntary but actually obligatory if anyone wanted to keep his scholarship, met five times a week for six weeks, in a bare room in which a chicken-wire false ceiling had been suspended four feet from the floor. Under this, pairs of would-be football players were shoved to engage in what amounted to almost mortal combat, which was continued until one emerged clearly victor. Then the loser had to face a fresh combatant, and stay under the wire clutching and clawing and spitting blood until he finally defeated someone.
Eighteen of those who quit reported in a body to the newspaper, and one young man said, ‘Puny players were forced to wrestle huge linemen under the chicken wire, and the losers had to keep wrestling until they won, always screaming and cursing and trying to draw blood like some kind of animals.’ The final loser, who had been able to conquer no one, was forced to rise at dawn next morning and race up and down the steep stadium steps ten or twenty times.
Officials at the university stated that Florida State had done only what other universities were doing, and it was all sanctioned by the NCAA. This prompted Sports Illustrated to do a follow-up, which appeared in the July 23, 1973, issue. Wisely, it did not stress the Florida State case but focused on other schools, principally Kansas State, where the program seemed even tougher than at Florida. The report was sickening: sheer brutality, men told to vomit on their own time and not stop running, bloodied noses, sickening force applied for little reason. The most telling quote came from a man who had graduated from the pit and was now playing right end for the New England Patriots. Bob Windsor, who had experienced his hardening at Kentucky, said, ‘It was jungle-warfare training. I’ve never experienced anything like it in pro ball. There they treat you like human beings. No
t in college. I wouldn’t go through that again.’
‘Okay, Old Buddy, get in there and play the game win or lose. But remember, nice guys finish last, there’s no such word as chicken, and every time you lose you die a little.’
The moral problem of such attitudes first struck me when I read a passage in Robert Vare’s book on Woody Hayes. It came toward the end and was of no apparent significance, but it left an indelible impact:
An inordinate amount of folklore has sprung up already around the short happy-and-unhappy life of Harold Raymond Henson III. It begins with the story of how he got his nickname—how his father, then serving his country in Fort Eustis, Virginia, hitchhiked fifteen hours back to Ohio, eyed his newborn son and proclaimed, ‘He’s got to be a champ.’ Six months later, according to another story they tell around Columbus, the older Henson, his own football career rudely ended by an appendicitis attack, carried his Champ out to the fifty-yard line of Ohio Stadium and set him down on the sod. ‘Someday you will punish people on this field,’ said father to son. ‘Someday you will be a Buckeye.’
The italics are mine. Why would the vital element in an athletic career be a boy’s ability to punish someone else? Why would a father or a coach create an ideal for a boy in which destroying an opponent became the goal? Bill Walton was referring to this when he charged, after having left UCLA, ‘There were many times in college when opposing players were out seriously to maim the players on our team.’ I have heard linebackers boast, ‘I love to destroy the runner.’ And they mean just that. And it’s just as bad in baseball, where throwing directly at the batter’s head is standard. Doc Cramer once said:
If you hit a home run, you’d expect to be knocked down the next time up. Or if you beat a guy in a ball game, you wanted to be ready next time the fellow pitched against you. Johnny Allen was the worst I ever saw for that I said to him one day, ‘I believe you’d throw at your mother.’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t throw at her. But I might brush her back a bit.’
Such incidents raise the vital question: Are American sports especially violent because they are forced to reflect the inherent violence of our society? I think so. I have always believed that because of our frontier heritage, and our sentimental reliance on the gun, our society became somewhat more addicted to violence than others.
Within recent years the new frontier created by urban disruption has produced shocking levels of violence. I have just seen a report which states that in American schools last year there were 204,000 instances in which students beat up their teachers in the classroom, 9,000 cases of rape in washrooms, and about 100 murders during school hours. Such conduct is incredible, and there had better be a retreat from this dangerous addiction. One place to start would be sports, both in the way they are played and in the behavior of spectators. Ice hockey and football have become too violent, and they set a deplorable example for other sports. The other day I heard a radio advertisement for tennis which made this well-disciplined game sound like murder at high noon: ‘… the ball crashing at close to one hundred miles an hour … real men slashing at the net … superb athletes ready for anything.’ The sales pitch for box lacrosse was even worse, for it was being peddled as more violent and dangerous than hockey, with bodies clashing and sticks smashing across heads. The people selling those games knew what a large segment of the American public wanted. It wanted violence.
But at the same time that sports adjust to satisfy this hunger, there is danger that the public may become surfeited and turn away from something that is no longer a game. Everyone connected with sports must keep in mind what happened to wrestling and roller-skating. Years ago they were legitimate sports, but they were tempted by the easy money that raw violence assured, and bit by bit they lost self-respect, becoming nothing but spurious exhibitions. Now they exist in grubby arenas and on late-night television, their vitality and authenticity destroyed.
But they are good burlesque. They say in effect, ‘All right, if you want violence, we’ll give you some. But it will be make-believe, and no one will get hurt, at least not on purpose.’ Half the fun is the glib-tongued announcer who appears to take the wrestling nonsense seriously. He reports it dead-pan straight, appalled by brutality, exhilarated by the unexpected move so carefully rehearsed, outraged by unsportsmanlike behavior, and always sympathetic with the referee who goes through the motions of trying to keep order while the contestants are gouging, hitting one another with chairs, chasing opponents up and down the aisles, and committing various other forms of mayhem.
I also like the conclusion of the matches, when Chief Jay Strongbow, his Indian headdress in place, hurls his defy at Bruno Sammartino, or when the latest tag-team phenoms grab the microphone alternately to accuse the Visigoths of ducking them through craven cowardice. ‘But we’ll get you, Visigoths! And we’ll tear your limbs off one by one. You better be afraid! Because you got the hearts of cowards, and everybody in Chicago knows it. Watch out, Visigoths! We’re after you and there’s no hole deep enough for you to hide in!’
I like my violence that way, in a make-believe world. But my real affection goes out to the roller derby, where vicious skulduggery that hurts no one is carried to the level of high dramatic art. While writing this book I had occasion to visit Hollywood and participate in awarding the Oscars. No actor in California does the job, week after week, that Bob Martin does in refereeing the roller game. He is a tall, slim, good-looking man, master of the leer, the sneer, the snarl, the snide put-down, a man who loves to smirk into the eye of the television camera and say, ‘I’m in control because I’m smarter than the others. I use my brain and they have no brains.’
Martin’s standard ploy is to fraternize with the bullies of the visiting team and to outrage the hometown fans by calling every infraction against them and none against the visitors. He is adept at large, irritating pantomime as he makes a call and in thrusting himself into all sorts of places where he is not wanted. Then, when the home team can bear him no more, they take after him with clubs and chairs and broken bottles, and he turns craven, running like a frightened deer to the protection of the out-of-town bullies. At this point total pandemonium erupts: furniture is broken: Little Richard, his leg in a cast, starts belting people over the head with his crutch; men and women alike engage in twenty or thirty fistfights, and someone clubs Martin over the head with a breakaway chair, while the announcer cries over the loudspeaker system, ‘Bob Martin is the lowest snake ever to crawl from beneath a rock. I wish someone would crush his head like a grape.’
This is a burlesque of sports’ machismo, and I find it therapeutic, a kind of divine nonsense. Imagine, sixty young people engaged in one massive brawl, with things being broken left and right and no one getting hurt! It’s Mack Sennett transferred to the sporting arena, and the burlesque is not only fun but does not result in injuries. The audience gets all the thrills, cheap and fake to be sure, that come from a linebacker pulverizing a quarterback for real.
The highlight of the wrestling-roller-skating season came one Sunday afternoon when one of the hometown bullies, apparently able to stand no more of the terrorizing Referee Martin had been visiting on him, went berserk. In one unbroken sweep he punched a girl skater in the face, knocked her down, kicked her in the throat with his skate, jumped on her, kneed her between the eyes, and hit her over the head with a chair. He then turned upon the chief bully of the visitors, picked him up, threw him onto a breakaway table, then kicked him repeatedly in the face. He then grabbed Little Richard’s crutch and belabored seven or eight of the visitors, knocked over all the remaining furniture, and lashed at three of the opposing girl skaters, knocking two of them down. He then went for Referee Martin and gave him an unmerciful beating, ending by throwing him bodily some feet across the arena, after which he clubbed him with chairs, a hunk of broken table and the crutch.
At the end of this volcanic eruption, in which not a single person was hurt, of course, pale and wounded Bob Martin hobbled to the television camera and s
aid in a voice trembling with menace and frustration, ‘He better watch out or he’ll be disqualified.’
Why did I waste my time on such frivolity? Because I wanted to review the downward steps by which once-popular sports descended to ridicule. In 1946 boxing and wrestling and roller derbies were still taken seriously, but when they began to grab for the nearest dollar, the quickest laugh, the most grotesque parody of violence their credibility was destroyed. When enough people begin laughing at the exaggerations of any sport, it is doomed. The custodians of the game refuse to heed the first warnings, because the people who are ridiculing the sport don’t appear to carry much weight: a few canny reporters from New York and Los Angeles, patrons in the know, people who write magazine articles, the younger editors of Time and Sports Illustrated. But once that fatal chorus derides a sport as phony, the death rattle has begun, for they are the opinion makers, and sports exist on good opinion.
DRAWING BY RICHARD DECKER; © 1934, 1962 THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, ING.
‘My man don’t wrestle till we hear it talk.’
I am worried about ice hockey. In the United States, I rarely hear a word against it, but in Canada, where they have known the game longer, there is fear that it may already have been so contaminated by violence that it is doomed. The fighting is largely fake and not required in the movement of the game. It is a cheap hype to attract American customers, and if it is continued, it will kill hockey, because opinion makers will start to ridicule it. The custodians of the game will have done to it what earlier custodians did to wrestling and roller-skating and boxing: made it a thing of scorn.
I first became aware of this danger during the 1974 season; it was even more apparent in 1975—not in the United States but in Canada. If the rate of deterioration increases, the game could be dead in another fifteen years. Crowds would still be going to see the games, especially in America, but it would have lost its television patronage except on the little stations, where it would be played primarily for violence and comedy. It can be saved only by preserving the basic nature of the game and avoiding ridiculous excesses. I abide by what Homer said of competition: