Encyclopedia of Sports in America: A History from Foot Races to Extreme Sports (2 Volume Set)

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SPORTS IN AMERICA

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SPORTS IN AMERICA A History from Foot Races to Extreme Sports

VOLUME ONE Colonial Years to 1939

EDITED BY

MURRY R. NELSON

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut
London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of sports in America, two volumes : a history from foot races to extreme sports / edited by Murry R. Nelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-34790-0 ((set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34792-4 ((vol.1) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34794-8 ((vol.2) : alk. paper) 1. Sports—United States—History. 2. Sports—Social aspects— United States—History. I. Nelson, Murry R. GV583.E64 2009 796.0973—dc22 2008034749 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. C 2009 by Murry R. Nelson Copyright 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008034749 ISBN: 978-0-313-34790-0 (set) 978-0-313-34792-4 (Vol. 1) 978-0-313-34794-8 (Vol. 2) First published in 2009 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Volume One, Colonial Years to 1939 Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

Timeline

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Chapter 1 American Sports, 1607–1860 Nancy L. Struna

1

Chapter 2 American Sports, 1861–1889 Gerald R. Gems

41

Chapter 3 American Sports, 1890–1899 Matthew Llewellyn

75

Chapter 4 American Sports, 1900–1909 Jim Nendel

113

Chapter 5 American Sports, 1910–1919 Sarah Bair

153

Chapter 6 American Sports, 1920–1929 Murry R. Nelson

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Chapter 7 American Sports, 1930–1939 Mark Dyreson, Chad Carlson, John Gleaves, and Matthew Llewellyn

229

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CONTENTS

Volume Two, 1940 to Present Chapter 8 American Sports, 1940–1949 Ronald Briley

273

Chapter 9 American Sports, 1950–1959 Murry R. Nelson

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Chapter 10 American Sports, 1960–1969 Maureen Smith

351

Chapter 11 American Sports, 1970–1979 John Wong

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Chapter 12 American Sports, 1980–1989 Sarah K. Fields

437

Chapter 13 American Sports, 1990 to the Present Jaime Schultz, Callie Batts, Perry Cohen, Sarah Olson, Amie Chaudry, Jaime Ryan, and Caitlin Shannon

477

Resource Guide

543

Index

549

About the Editor and Contributors

571

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was supported, from its conception, by my Greenwood editor, Kristi Ward. She responded favorably to the idea of these volumes, sold the publisher on the idea, and encouraged me in each step of the writing and editing process. I thank her and all of the staff and editors at Greenwood and its affiliates who worked on the production of this book. The North American Society for Sport History is the professional nexus for many of the authors. That organization has provided inspiration, friendship, and intellectual growth for me over the past fifteen years. During the 2007–2008 academic year I held a Fulbright Senior Chair at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, which allowed me the time and freedom to edit this book. I express my thanks to both the Fulbright Program (sponsored by the U.S. Department of State) and the University of Debrecen Institute of English and American Studies for their support. My students at the institute read and responded to a number of the chapters, and I thank them for their comments and questions.

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INTRODUCTION

Sports are pervasive in the United States. Every day images appear on television, through the Internet, on billboards, on the radio, and elsewhere, indicating the impact of sports on the lives of Americans. Sports stars are emulated, revered, and sometimes reviled, but they are always recognized and discussed. This basic pattern of sport and its involvement with Americans has been apparent for at least the past eighty-five years, since the end of World War I and the creation of a more “leisuretime” culture. This two-volume work provides insights, information, and perspectives on the role of sports in American history, as well as reflects on historical events of the various eras that in turn affected sports in the culture. Though the book is not meant as a tribute to sports, it shows instances where sports have provided contributions of admirable character, and also where sports have exemplified the crass and hypocritical aspects of American society. The volumes thus show how sports have reflected the qualities of American society through the decades and allows for a better understanding of both sport and society.

ABOUT THIS WORK The purpose of Sports in America: A History from Foot Races to Extreme Sports is to provide a resource that is easily accessible as a reference, yet is more than just a list of names and dates. There are a number of excellent scholarly works that examine the history of sports in American life. Most are aimed at the scholar or are developed as textbooks in history, American studies, American culture, or foundations of sport courses. Those volumes are very good at serving those purposes. There are also reference works that provide lists of data regarding sports records and achievements. These, too, are numerous and successfully fill a niche. Sports in America sets a goal of doing a bit of both. The authors provide a scholarly foundation, but in a style meant for the general reader. There are ample data within each chapter, but these data are contextualized and discussed within the larger fields of sport and American history.

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The book is arranged chronologically, with thirteen chapters, most discussing American sports a decade at a time. The book begins with the settlement of American colonists and their interests in sport (chapter 1) and continues in the next chapter through the Civil War to 1890. From that point forward, the chapters cover decades of American history. Each chapter is meant to focus on the same general themes and concepts as much as possible. The first two chapters examine an America much different from that in the 1890s. This earlier America was far more rural and less developed, and people had less real leisure time. The preference for more individual recreation activities faded away toward the end of the nineteenth century as team-oriented sports began to characterize the American sports landscape. Today, the sports of football, basketball, at both the amateur and professional levels, and professional baseball dominate the sports headlines with individual sports like professional golf and tennis also receiving a lot of coverage. Beyond this a number of sports have large followings, depending on the region of the country. These include professional and college hockey, auto racing, and track and field. The book is aimed at the general reader who is seeking information on a particular era, sport, concept, or individual from the nation’s sports history. The chapters are meant to be stimulating and complete on their own, but the volumes can also be read in sequence.

About the Chapters Each chapter begins with a general overview of the historical era, continuing with a focus on sports within that era. The most popular of the team sports—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—are examined in each chapter, with the exception of the first two chapters. The amount of attention paid to each sport is meant to reflect the amount of attention that each sport received societally within the era covered in the chapter. After the team sports sections, sports for individual competitors, such as boxing, golf, tennis, and others, are discussed. The final chapter includes “xtreme sports” and computer games. The chapters’ authors were selected on the basis of their research and scholarship within the period examined, the sports examined, or their general knowledge and writing for a broad-based audience. Nancy Struna, the author of chapter 1, which traces sport from the settlement of the American colonies until the Civil War, is an expert on colonial history and the games and recreations that were engaged in at that time. She weds the colonial experience and the creation of a new citizen, an American, with the creation of new sports and games for Americans, which were built on the foundations of England. Gerald Gems, the author of chapter 2, picks up the “story” at the Civil War and carries it through 1889, a period of about thirty years. During this time the first professional teams and leagues were formed in the United States, and sports began to take a new and different path in American life. Professor Gems has written widely on this era, mostly within the urban landscape, and this chapter draws on his great expertise in the academic area. Chapter 3 begins the decade approach that characterizes the remainder of the book. The 1890s are examined by Matthew Llewellyn, who has won awards for his research into this era in sport. In the 1890s more American sports were being refined and even invented, such as basketball and volleyball. The 1900s was a decade of reform, reflective of the changes that were sweeping American society as a

INTRODUCTION

result of progressivism and the concept of “muscular Christianity.” James Nendel draws on his research in this era to present the decade and its reform movements in both sports and society in chapter 4. The 1910s, the topic of chapter 5, encompassed some of the highs and lows of American sport and society, as a result of the great devastation of World War I. Sarah Bair has done research and writing on this era, and that work is reflected in her presentation of that decade in American sport The 1920s have been called a “golden age” in American sport and that chapter, written by Murry Nelson, a respected researcher and writer on this period, presents the heroes and events of this period against the backdrop of a postwar boom. Mark Dyreson, who has written widely about the Olympics in the twentieth century, with the assistance of some of his best doctoral students, covers American sports in the 1930s in chapter 7. The period of economic retraction in American society had both its counterparts and counterpoints in sport of that decade. Sports were a source of hope and escape. In the 1940s that escape was modified as the world went to war once again. American sports suffered from shortages of able-bodied athletes, as did American society in general. Ronald Briley, a historian of many sports of this era, brings the period and the sports to life with his chapter 8 examination. A period of postwar boom, as followed World War I, also followed World War II, and chapter 9 on the 1950s has many parallels to the 1920s. The big change, however, is the growth of opportunities for African Americans in sports and, to a significantly lesser degree, across society. Murry Nelson is the author of this chapter. The 1960s chapter (10) is by Maureen Smith, who has written widely on the era with an emphasis on African Americans in sport of this time. In this decade African Americans made their first significant and broad-based impact on professional and college sports. Chapter 11, on the 1970s, was written by John Wong, whose work on professional hockey has been widely praised. Wong closely examines the 1970s and the impact of gender equity as a major force of the period. That focus on gender equity is carried forward into chapter 12 where Sarah Fields looks at the 1980s from her perspective as scholar and lawyer. The final chapter, on 1991 to the present, is a bit different because it covers a slightly longer period of time and has the additional goal of speculating on sport in the American landscape of the near future. Jaime Schultz, from the University of Maryland, has enlisted some of her top doctoral students to augment her great expertise in this era. All of these authors have had the latitude to cover issues and concerns of their periods in their own ways, but within a broad chapter structure. Thus, these chapters are personal as well as informative, but other scholars might choose different points of emphasis, were they to examine the same eras. There are real analyses and evaluations of the periods, rather than just simple accounts of events and persons, giving a depth to the work. Sports in America: A History from Foot Races to Extreme Sports can be used in a variety of ways, depending on the goal of each user. For the general reader, there may be interest in a particular sport, such as basketball, and its changing status within American society over the past hundred years. Because there is a separate section on basketball in each of the chapters, beginning with the 1890s, a reader can limit him- or herself to that topic, and get some notion of the sport over the years as well as some of the key players and events in each era. This type of pursuit could work with any of the major sports examined in each chapter.

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Another reader may be interested in one particular time period, such as between the world wars. Thus, the chapters on the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s could give an overview of both societal events and the impact of sports during those decades. The index also provides numerous opportunities to pursue specific people noted in sports throughout American history. These notions can be modified and reshaped for school work on the part of high school or college students. Sports in America is a great initial source to research a topic and has the benefit of offering other recommended resources, including books, articles, Web sites, and films to provide more information on American sports.

Introduction Since the American colonies were settled, Americans have played games, which have become more and more developed and organized over each ensuing period of American history. American sports represent much of what is associated with Americans themselves. American athletic competition is fierce, and many Americans seem to be aggressive in their business and professional dealings as well. Success in sport comes from a willingness to practice for long hours to perfect both techniques and basics. So, too, do we see such practices pervade American culture in general. Americans, for better or worse, work far more hours per week than their European counterparts. Americans also seem to play harder. There’s an intensity to American culture and sport that permeates all areas of the country, a negative ramification of which is that many Americans simply don’t know how to relax. This may carry over into American sport participation and fan behavior. The study of American sports and sport history is a relatively young field and has had to fight for recognition as a legitimate field of study. There is little argument over the interest that sport holds for most Americans, but many academicians see a scholarly interest in such activities and behaviors as less “legitimate.” Of course, many fields within social sciences, as well as history, held various canons of scholarly behavior and study that only began to be questioned and revised within the past fifty years. In some instances, such as in sport history, those canons were only really broadened and accepted within the past twenty-five years. Americans have been reading about sports figures and contests for nearly one hundred years. Sports pages became pervasive in major American daily newspapers in the 1920s, and their popularity certainly led to the publication of sport biographies and other sports stories. Many renowned authors started within sports and later moved into more “respected” writing, including Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, Westbrook Pegler, and more recently, Mitch Albom. Major sport historians in the United States were inspired by the work of John Betts, and general sport histories by luminaries like John Lucas, Ben Rader, and Ron Smith have laid a solid foundation for further work in sport history in general, as well as histories of various American sports specifically. Some journalists-turnedhistorians have penned useful histories, such as the work of Robert Peterson, who wrote very readable volumes on African Americans in baseball, early football, and a history of professional basketball. All major sports have histories that trace their origins and impacts within the United States, with baseball dominating this field by far. Harold Seymour and David Voigt, in particular, have written ground-breaking volumes, and their work has been often cited and acknowledged. So, too, must

INTRODUCTION

we acknowledge all of these excellent writers and research by earlier sport historians. Sports in America draws on this prior research as well as popular history and popular writing about sports, and provides a comprehensive hybrid work about sports and the American Republic written by academicians with sport as a scholarly interest. The writing style is easy and unstudied, but the content is not. It reflects deep understanding and interest in basic questions about sport. Such issues include: • How African Americans were accepted in various sports and how they responded to the lack of acceptance in various venues; • The role of the news media in creating sports rivalries and larger fan interest in sports, particularly in the earlier parts of the twentieth century; • The opportunities for women in sports and how they were able to engage in various sporting enterprises; • The effect of various wars on the growth, development, or stagnation of various American sports and the role sports played during these conflicts; • How America and Americans performed in the Olympic Games, once they were revived in 1896; • Economic impacts that sports had on American society and how economic cycles affected the way sports were perceived and carried out; • How an American “sporting culture” developed amid the larger notion of American culture; • The role of government in the development of the American sporting culture; • How the development of American professional sports reflected the changing demographics of America generally; • How American sports heroes became among the most recognized persons in American culture, beginning in the 1920s; and • The participation of various ethnic groups in American sports and the development of parallel sports leagues.

Though not all of these issues are discussed in every chapter, they provide an impetus for much of a chapter’s content. We hope you learn more about our cherished American tradition of sports throughout United States history and are inspired to research more.

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TIMELINE

Christmas 1621 1740s 1823–45 1840s 1844 1845 1852 1858 1869

1871 1875

1876 1881 1885 1886

Governor William Bradford forbids “play” on Christmas Day (the first notion of “Blue Laws”). A “Physical Club” is established in Boston. “Great Races,” pitting a top northern and top southern horse, held. Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York established. New York Yacht Club founded in Newport, Rhode Island. New York Rules of Base Ball codified by Alexander Cartwright. First intercollegiate rowing race, Harvard versus Yale, takes place on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. National Association of Base Ball Players established. National Trotting Association established in Rhode Island. Cincinnati Red Stocking established as first professional base-ball team. First intercollegiate football game played (Princeton vs. Rutgers) in New Brunswick, New Jersey. National Association of Professional Base Ball Players organized. Kentucky Derby established at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletics of America (IC4A) formed for track competition. Ice hockey invented at Victoria Arena, Montreal, Canada. National League formed with teams in Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Louisville, Hartford, and St. Louis. U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) established. Cuban Giants black baseball team formed in New York. The Sporting News is first published.

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1887 1889

1890

1891 1892

1893 1895 1896 1900

1900 1902 1903

1904

1906 1908

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, featuring the shooting of Annie Oakley and Lillian Smith, travels abroad. Walter Camp and Caspar Whitney select first collegiate football All Americans. Moses Fleetwood Walker is last African American to be on a major-league roster until 1947. Players’ League (also called Union League or Brotherhood League) is established. John Owen of Detroit becomes first to break 10 seconds (9.8) in 100-yard dash. Basketball invented by James A. Naismith in Springfield, Massachusetts. Senda Berenson introduces basketball to the female student population of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. First heavyweight boxing champion, John L. Sullivan, recognized under the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Sullivan is defeated by James Corbett for heavyweight championship. First eighteen-hole golf course created in United States, at the Chicago Golf Club. Volleyball invented by William G. Morgan in Springfield, Massachusetts. Under the leadership of Baron Pierre de Coubertin the modern Olympic Games are revived and staged in Athens, Greece. Western League renamed as American League and emerges as major league under leadership of league president Ban Johnson. First franchises are located in Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Second Olympiad held in Paris, France. First Rose Bowl Game played as Michigan defeats Stanford 49-0. First World Series of major-league baseball is played between Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League and the Boston Americans. Boston wins. Jack Chesboro of the New York Highlanders (later the Yankees) wins forty-one games, still a record. Buffalo Germans win all of their games at the Olympics in St. Louis and become known as first great basketball team. Chicago Cubs win 116 games (of 154 played), still a record. Fred Merkle fails to touch second base at the end of the game and the Giants lose, necessitating a playoff with the Chicago Cubs for the National League title, lost by the Giants. The inaction is known as “Merkle’s Boner.” Olympics held in London.

TIMELINE

1909 1910 1911 1912 1913

1914

1916 1917

1918 1918

1919

1920

1921

1922

Jack Johnson defeats Tommy Burns in Australia to become first black heavyweight champion. Cork-center ball introduced into major-league baseball, increasing offensive production and power hitting. Jack Johnson defeats Jim Jeffries in “The Battle of the Century” and retains his heavyweight title. First Indianapolis 500 automobile race held is won by Ray Harroun in a Marmon Wasp. Jim Thorpe wins decathlon at Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, and is declared the world’s greatest athlete by King Gustav V. Notre Dame University finishes the football season undefeated for the second year in a row, led by quarterback Gus Dorais and receiver Knute Rockne and their use of the forward pass. Francis Ouimet becomes first amateur to win U.S. Open golf tournament. World War I begins in Europe. Federal League forms and begins play as third major league, siphoning players from the other two leagues. Professional Golfers Association (PGA) formed in New York City. United States enters World War I. National Hockey League formed with three founding teams—the Montreal Canadiens, Montreal Wanderers, and the Ottawa Senators. New York Celtics reorganized as Original New York Celtics by James Furey. Eight Chicago White Sox players are offered bribes to throw the World Series, though some do nothing but fail to report the bribe offer. Sir Barton becomes first horse to win racing’s Triple Crown by winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes. Potential club owners meet in automobile showroom in Canton, Ohio, to form what will become the National Football League (NFL), called the American Professional Football Association. National Negro Baseball League is founded by Rube Foster. Man o’ War is retired after winning twenty of twenty-one races in which he was entered. U.S. Supreme Court declares that baseball is not an illegal monopoly. Paul Robeson joins Fritz Pollard as the first two African Americans in the American Professional Football Association (APFA). APFA changes its name to the National Football League.

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1923 1924

1925 1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931 1932

1934 1935 1936

Bob Douglass forms the Harlem Renaissance professional basketball team. Harold “Red” Grange of the University of Illinois scores five touchdowns and passes for a sixth as the Illini rout the University of Michigan and the Grange legend is born. First modern-era Winter Olympics held in Chamonix, France. Grange debuts as a professional player with the Chicago Bears and the game is the first to be broadcast nationally. Bobby Jones is first American golfer to win both British and U.S. Open in the same year. Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim the English Channel and sets a record time. Babe Ruth hits sixty home runs to break his 1921 record of fiftynine homers in one season. Gene Tunney defeats Jack Dempsey in the famous “long count” fight to retain the heavyweight championship won from Dempsey the year before. Johnny Weissmuller retires from swimming, not having lost a freestyle contest in eight years, and after winning five gold medals and setting sixty-seven world records. Philadelphia Athletics score ten runs in the seventh inning of game 4 of the World Series to defeat the Chicago Cubs, 10-8. The A’s win the series in five games. Stock market crash begins the Great Depression worldwide. Bobby Jones retires from golf after winning thirteen major championships in the 1920s. First World Cup soccer tournament held in Uruguay. Uruguay defeats Argentina, 4–2, in finals. Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne dies in airplane crash in Kansas. Winter Olympics held in Lake Placid, New York, and Summer Olympics held in Los Angeles. Mildred “Babe” Didrikson wins two gold and one silver medal at Olympics. Franklin Delano Roosevelt becomes president and initiates his New Deal programs. Major-league baseball holds its first All-Star game in Comiskey Park, Chicago. Carl Hubbell strikes out five American Leaguers in a row in AllStar game. Babe Ruth retires. Baseball Hall of Fame founded in Cooperstown, New York. New York Yankees win first of four straight championships.

TIMELINE

1937

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942 1944 1945

Olympic Games held in Berlin, Germany, where Jesse Owens wins gold medals in the long jump, 100-meter dash, 200-meter dash, and the 400-meter relay. He also is named Associated Press Athlete of the Year. National Basketball League (NBL) begins play. Joe Louis wins heavyweight boxing championship. Brooklyn Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds play first televised baseball game. National Invitational Tournament (NIT) begins play in New York with Temple University the first champion. Helen Wills wins her fifth Wimbledon tennis title of the decade. The first National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) postseason tournament is played with the finals in Evanston, IL. The University of Oregon is the first champion. World Tournament of Professional Basketball is inaugurated in Chicago with the New York Renaissance the initial winners. It will continue until 1949. World War II begins in Europe. Little League Baseball begun in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Lou Gehrig removes himself from New York Yankee lineup after 2130 consecutive games, a record. He dies in 1941 from ALS, popularly called “Lou Gehrig’s disease” after that. New York Yankees win fourth straight world championship. Alice Marble wins her fourth U.S. Open tennis tournament in five years. Chicago Bears defeat Washington Redskins 73-0 in the NFL title game, the most lopsided defeat in history. Whirlaway wins horse racing’s Triple Crown. Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees hits in fifty-six straight games. Ted Williams becomes last hitter to exceed .400 batting average in a season (.406). Chicago Studebakers and Toledo Jim Whites integrate the NBL by signing African American players. All American Football Conference formed as second pro league. Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signs Jackie Robinson to a contract, the first African American to be signed by majorleague baseball in the twentieth century. Robinson debuts at Montreal in 1946 and enters the majors in 1947 with the Dodgers. George Mikan, the greatest basketball player of the first half of the twentieth century, leads DePaul University to the NIT basketball title.

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1946

1948

1949 1950

1951

1952 1953

1954

1955 1956

Byron Nelson wins eighteen consecutive professional golf tournaments. World War II ends. Basketball Association of America (BAA) begins play as a professional basketball league. Glenn Davis (“Mr. Outside”) of the U.S. Military Academy (Army) wins the Heisman trophy, following the 1945 triumph of his running back teammate, Felix “Doc” Blanchard (“Mr. Inside”), who won in 1945. Citation wins Triple Crown of horse racing and later becomes first horse to win $1 million in prize money. First postwar Olympics are held in St. Moritz (Winter) and London (Summer). National Basketball League and Basketball Association of America merge to form the National Basketball Association (NBA). The All American Football Conference merges with the National Football League Civil War breaks out in Korea, leading to the Korean War. City College of New York (CCNY) wins both the NIT and NCAA basketball championships, first and only time that this has been done. New York Giants come back from 131=2 games back in August to win National League pennant. College basketball betting scandals are exposed, involving many of the nation’s top teams. Summer Olympics held in Helsinki, Finland, and Winter Games in Oslo, Norway. Boston Braves relocate to Milwaukee and set off a chain of franchise shifts during the 1950s that mirror the population shifts of the country. The New York Yankees win their fifth world championship in a row. Don Carter named Bowler of the Year for first of six times in the next ten years. The U.S. Supreme Court declares school segregation by race illegal in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Minneapolis Lakers, led by George Mikan, win four NBA titles in the first five years of the league. Brooklyn Dodgers win their first and only world championship. First Olympics held in Southern Hemisphere (Melbourne Australia). Rocky Marciano retires as heavyweight champion, undefeated in his career.

TIMELINE

1957

1958

1959 1960

1961

1962

1963 1964

1966 1967

Don Larsen pitches first, and only, perfect game in the World Series. Babe Didrikson, greatest female athlete of the half-century, dies of cancer. Notre Dame ends Oklahoma’s forty-seven-game win streak, the longest in college football. New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers announce that they will move to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, beginning with the 1958 season. Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants in overtime, 23-17, to win the NFL championship in a game dubbed “the greatest ever played.” Althea Gibson wins second consecutive U.S. Open singles and double tennis titles, as well as Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year. The Chicago White Sox win their first pennant in forty years and end the Yankee string of pennants at four. Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. Summer Games in Rome. American Football League begins play with teams in Boston, Buffalo, New York, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Dallas. Washington Senators move to Minnesota and become the Twins. New franchises are awarded to Washington, DC, and Los Angeles as major-league baseball expands for the first time in the century. Roger Maris hits sixty-one home runs to break the record of Babe Ruth set in 1927. New baseball franchises are awarded to New York (Mets) and Houston (Colt 45s). Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors scores 100 points in a game. A week after fighting Emile Griffith for the welterweight title, Benny “Kid” Paret dies from injuries he sustained in the fight. Beatles begin the first of the “British band invasion.” President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. The Olympics are held in Asia for the first time when Tokyo hosts the Summer Games. Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston for heavyweight title. Clay changes name to Muhammad Ali to reflect his Muslim faith. Texas Western University becomes the first NCAA champion to start five African Americans as they beat Kentucky for the title. American Basketball Association begins play with eleven franchises: Anaheim, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Orleans, Oakland, and San Diego.

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1968

1969

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975 1976

1979

National Hockey League expands from six to twelve teams, adding Oakland, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, in the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, later renamed the Super Bowl. Mexico City hosts first Olympics held in Latin America. Bob Beamon jumps twenty-nine feet, two inches in the long jump and Dick Fosbury wins high jump with the “Fosbury Flop,” which revolutionizes the event. Tommie Smith and John Carlos stand in a “black power” salute during the playing of the American national anthem. Arnold Palmer becomes first golfer ever to have $1 million in lifetime winnings. Open era in tennis begins, allowing professionals to play in all major tournaments. Bill Russell retires after leading the Boston Celtics to eleven championships in thirteen NBA seasons. “Miracle Mets” win World Series of baseball. World Hockey Association with twelve franchises, though number and franchise locations change by 1972 when league begins play. Education Amendments Act signed by President Nixon. Contained therein is Title IX, which will change women’s sports forever. Killing of members of the Israeli Olympic team puts pall over Munich Olympic Games. Major-league baseball players go on strike for first time. UCLA wins seventh consecutive NCAA men’s basketball championship. Miami Dolphins win Super Bowl VII, completing the only undefeated season in the modern NFL. Hank Aaron hits home-run 756, breaking Babe Ruth’s lifetime mark. Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight title bout in Zaire. Ali beats Joe Frazier in heavyweight title bout, “The Thrilla in Manila” (Philippines). Four American Basketball Association teams (Denver, Indiana, San Antonio, New York Nets) join the NBA and the ABA ceases to exist. World Hockey Association ceases to exist with four franchises (Edmonton, Hartford, Quebec, Winnipeg) entering the NHL.

TIMELINE

1980

1981 1984

1986

1988

1989

1990

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

1998

Moscow hosts Summer Olympics, but United States and other countries boycott the Games over Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bjorn Borg wins fifth consecutive Wimbledon tennis title. Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) begins broadcasting Major-league baseball players strike for fifty-one days. Michael Jordan is drafted by Chicago Bulls and signs $2.5-million endorsement contract with Nike. The NFL Colts abandon Baltimore for Indianapolis in the middle of the night. Los Angeles hosts the Summer Olympics, boycotted by most countries of the Soviet bloc. Len Bias, number 1 draft pick in the NBA draft dies of cocaine overdose, days after the draft. NCAA gives Southern Methodist University (SMU) the “death penalty,” forbidding them from playing football in 1987, as a result of recruiting violations. At Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Ben Johnson, 100meter champion, is disqualified for steroid use, the first track and field athlete to be found guilty of such practices. The Loma Prieta earthquake in the Bay Area disrupts the World Series between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants for ten days before the A’s complete a four-game sweep. Wayne Gretzky named Male Athlete of the Decade by Associated Press. Edmonton Oilers win their fifth Stanley Cup hockey title in seven years. Don Shula wins 325th game as NFL coach, surpassing the record set by George Halas of the Chicago Bears. Winter Olympics held in Lillehammer, Norway, the first Winter Games on a new four-year cycle. Cal Ripken breaks Lou Gehrig’s streak of 2130 consecutive games and goes on to play in 2632 consecutive games. Summer Olympics are held in Atlanta. Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) begins play. Carl Lewis retires after winning nine Olympic gold medals in track in four Olympics. Tiger Woods wins his first Masters golf tournament by twelve strokes. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battle to break Roger Maris’s record sixty-one home runs in a season and both do. Sosa ends up with sixty-six, McGwire with seventy. The Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, win their sixth NBA championship in eight years.

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TIMELINE

1999

2000 2001 2002

2004

2005

United States wins Women’s World Cup in soccer. Serena Williams becomes first African American since Althea Gibson to win U.S. Open Tennis tournament. Tiger Woods wins U.S. Open golf tournament by fifteen strokes. Barry Bonds hits 73 home runs to break the record of seventy set only three years before. Winter Olympics held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Pete Sampras retires from tennis with fourteen Grand Slam titles and is later named Outstanding Tennis Player of the period 1965– 2005. NHL lockout goes 310 days, a record for a North American pro sports league. Boston Red Sox break “The Curse of Babe Ruth” and win first World Series title since 1918. Between 1995 and 2005, the University of Tennessee (3) and the University of Connecticut (5) win eight NCAA Women’s Basketball championships. Lance Armstrong wins seventh consecutive Tour de France cycling race.

CHAPTER 1

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1607–1860 Nancy L. Struna

OVERVIEW Few citizens of the United States today would recognize many of the sporting practices known to their predecessors before 1860. Some of the names assigned to the activities were the same, of course: hunting, fishing, racing, and cockfighting, for example. Even the word sport had different meanings, as its etymology suggests. The word itself may have derived from the Middle English disport, which in turn derived from the French desporter, meaning “to carry away from.” In ordinary language from at least the fifteenth into the nineteenth centuries, people sometimes used sport as a noun to mean diversion, or display, or amusement. At other times, they also used it as a verb: to divert, to display, or to amuse. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.) even identified “amorous dalliance and intercourse” as one definition for sport. Between 1607 and 1860 sport gradually moved away from disport and began to acquire its contemporary attributes: rationalization, rule-bound, organization, specialization, and quantification (Guttmann 1978, 15–55). This process was part and parcel of the larger economic, political, demographic, and cultural transformation of the British colonies that had become an independent nation, the United States. Originally a land shared by native Americans and European colonizers, by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become an independent, industrializing country to which people from many of the world’s countries had migrated and which was about to be torn apart by civil war. These two stories are deeply entwined and are the subject of this chapter. Until 1783 the Atlantic coast, populated by thousands of English men and women, remained under British control, the Declaration of Independence (1776) notwithstanding. Thus, it is not coincidental that colonial sports often resembled British forms and drew on British (including English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh) conventions, rules, and formats, even as they were being adapted to fit local North American conditions and interests. It is also not coincidental that many early national and antebellum (before the American Civil War) sports continued to

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reveal linkages to Britain. On the eve of the Civil War, and beyond in some cases, the specter of Britain and especially England weighed heavily on sports in the United States in many ways. This is not to suggest, however, that early American sports were simply mirror images of British sports. They were not. Throughout the roughly 250 years this chapter covers, distinctive demographic, geographic, and economic conditions also affected the shape of sports and the emerging nation. Native Americans inhabited what became the United States long before the British appeared. Africans arrived by 1618, and thousands upon thousands of them were forcibly shipped from their homelands late into the eighteenth century. Other European ethnic groups also migrated to the New World, and all of these peoples and their traditions affected the forms and forums of early American sports. Then, too, until the Civil War the gender ratio was rarely equal, and in the early years, especially in the South, there were six men for every woman. To this day, the consequences of this uneven gender ratio and the gendering of sport and society are not fully known, but what is clear is that the male definition and domination of modern American sports took root in these early years. The geography and economy of the British colonies that became states also affected and were affected by early American sporting life. Compared to Britain, and the rest of Europe for that matter, North America was vast and had many more mountains, lakes, and rivers, all of which could be obstacles or avenues for sporting contests. Land was always a lure, and its availability continued to seem vast even after the Civil War, with colonial and early national Americans using the land for sports in distinctive ways—for expansive race courses, for base-ball diamonds, for long-distance running and race-walking. Although equality of access for all social and economic classes was never achieved in the United States, the land underlay a predominantly agricultural economy, as well as sports that drew from rural and agricultural lives and lifestyles, through the 1860s. Sports figured prominently at festivals and fairs through the middle of the nineteenth century, and until then as well, horse races, fistfights, and field sports were the dominant forms, in contrast to our contemporary dominant trilogy of football, basketball, and baseball. The seeds for these forms only gradually rooted after the transition to capitalism and the gradual urbanization it both spurred and was fueled by had begun.

SPORTS AMONG NATIVE AMERICANS On the eve of the seventeenth century, the “New World” was new only to Europeans active in overseas exploration, trade, and, gradually, colonization. For thousands of years, people had inhabited North America—roaming the plains, plying the rivers and lakes, seeking harmony with nature, warring with each other. As did people on other continents, they lived in clans, tribes, and, eventually, nations. Different groups of Native Americans had also developed extensive patterns of exchange, of trade, both among themselves and with others. Some nations produced agricultural products that Europeans would envy, like tobacco and maize, and for most, religion figured prominently in ordinary life. They also had specialized roles for particular individuals, such as chiefs and shamans, in what were hierarchically organized societies. Indeed, Amerindian societies were as complex as were those of Europe.

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Much of our information about Native Americans was filtered through the cultural lenses of Europeans. Consequently, what they said they saw among the indigenous people may tell us more about the observers than the observed. Moreover, the English adventurers apparently recorded what they recognized, including cultural relations and practices that resembled their own. One pattern, for example, revealed different tasks performed by men and women. In 1610 William Strachey, the secretary for the London Company at its outpost in Jamestown, recorded that Amerindian men “fish, hunt, fowle, goe to the warrs, … and such like manly exercises,” while the women “sow their Corne …, dresse the meat brought home, and … beare all kyndes of burthens, and such like” (Strachey 1612, 114). Twenty years later, Edward Winslow, a member of the Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts, recorded a similar observation. The men “employ themselves wholly in hunting, … except at some times they take some pains in fishing.” The women, in contrast, “carry all their burdens” and “have all household care lying upon them” (“Winslow’s Relations,” in Young 1844, 363). White observers also commented on specific Native American recreations, which they recognized and occasionally approved. The indigenous people approached hunting and fishing very seriously, John Smith concluded, and “they esteeme it a pleasure and [are] very proud to be expert therein” (Smith 1986, 2:118, 1:164). Numerous European travelers identified gambling as a practice common to Native Americans, both men and women, and saw that recreations and sports were central features of rituals and community celebrations. In Native spiritual ceremonies, for example, women and men danced for hours at a time, while harvest festivals and victory celebrations included foot races, lacrosse, dancing, and singing—all “much like ours heare in England.” Football was another game included in Native rituals and festivals that Capt. Henry Spelman, who lived in Virginia for a decade and a half, recognized. He also noted, however, that the

Sioux Indians racing horses, near Fort Pierre. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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La Crosse. (Bodmer, pinx. ad. nat.; engraved by Rawdon, Wright & Hatch. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

football players were women and young boys, who scored goals just as did players at home but who “never fight nor pull one another doune” (Smith 1986, 1:cxiv). Strachey also recognized a ball game similar to English bandy, a wooden ball and curved bat contest that eventually influenced the development of cricket.

An old-time buffalo hunt. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Until about 1630, sports were a kind of common ground between Native Americans and some Europeans, a fact recognized by local leaders in the English outposts. The governors of Plymouth, for example, invited to marriages and harvest festivals “many of the Indians … whom for three days we entertained and feasted.” When colonists went to Native villages to trade, they participated in celebratory feasts and an occasional contest. In 1623 Edward Winslow and his companions even challenged the tribesmen of King Massasoit “to shoot for skins.” The Indians refused, proposing instead that “one of us shoot at a mark.” The event ended, Winslow concluded, with the Native Americans left in a state of wonderment “to see the mark so full of holes” (Young 1844, 231, 210–11). The significance of contests and matches and displays of physical prowess among Amerindians, as well as between Native Americans and Europeans, during the early seventeenth century seems clear. Physical feats were important to both peoples; they formed the core of work and play, reputation and ritual, and survival. As was the case among the English migrants, the cultural styles of the original nations in America were largely defined in and by physical acts, and it is probably not an overstatement to say that Native American popular culture was largely a physical culture. Not too many years down the road, however, this physical culture would also open them to domination by Europeans. Diseases would wrack their bodies, battles would decimate their ranks, skin color would key their subordinate status. And once the Amerindians were too weak to resist, European Americans incorporated Indian sports within their own repertoires.

SPORTS AMONG THE ENGLISH COLONISTS Among Europeans, the British were not the only colonizers of the New World in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Spain and Portugal had extensive claims in South and Central America. Spain also claimed much of what became Florida, the land along the Gulf Coast, and from what became Texas westward through California. Holland sent Henry Hudson to explore what became eastern Canada, and his successors constructed estates and trading posts in New Netherlands, or New York. Eventually as well, Swedes sent colonists to the region surrounding the Delaware River, where they struggled in what became the colony of Delaware. British colonists were the dominant group on the east coast of North America, however. After 1607 English trading companies sent thousands of working men and, eventually, some women, to secure outposts or establish what they hoped would be permanent plantations along the Atlantic. The early colonists transferred some British sports, just as other Britons did to places like India and Africa in subsequent centuries. Field sports were relatively common endeavors, partly because some colonists carried muskets and carbines, had string to use as fishing lines, and could make poles from saplings. The need for food also encouraged hunting and fishing, as did exchanges with the native inhabitants. As was the case in other nonindustrial societies, including those of Native Americans, ordinary English people constructed few boundaries between work and play. From the beginning, the men commissioned to govern the colonies discovered that the transfer of Old World sporting practices conflicted with the goals of the trading companies that financed the settlements. At Jamestown, Virginia, the

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first permanent outpost established by these companies, some of the migrants who had been sent to build shelters and plant food rejected such tasks in favor of hunting gold, bowling in the streets, gambling at other games, or escaping to live idly among the Natives. In 1608, when John Smith arrived to take command of the small and barely surviving village, he divided all the men, gentlemen included, into teams that spent “4 houres each day” in work. The rest of the time, Smith admitted, they devoted to “pastimes and merry exercise.” He could get no more from them, he later explained, because the laborers “were for the most part footmen” and the “adventurers brought to attend them … never did know what a dayes worke was” (Smith 1986, 1:258–59, 2:225). What the colonists had brought to the shores of Virginia was the traditional English leisure preference, and the pattern was not limited to Jamestown. In 1615, when Capt. Samuel Argall traveled to a nearby village, he concluded that only about half of 400 inhabitants were “fit for husbandry and tillage.” The others continued “to wait and play than worke” (Smith 1986, 1:262). Seventeenth-century English hunter with crossC Eon Images) bow. ( Even in the early plantations in Massachusetts, also established by trading companies, the preference for recreations was visible in the 1620s. At both Cape Ann, a fishing post, and Plymouth, the colonists who were company employees played games and enjoyed customary revels and alehouses and did not work regularly enough to produce a profit for the companies. Two of the most famous incidents from this phase of English colonization also show the preference for play over productive work among the colonists whom the companies had sent to labor. One occurred in Plymouth, which was a plantation jointly funded and populated by the London Company and some dissenting Protestants, the “Separatists” led by William Bradford. In 1621 on Christmas Day, which the Separatists did not celebrate, Bradford and his followers were about to go to the fields to work. They expected the company’s servants to accompany them, but the men, who were not co-religionists, claimed that it was “against their conscience” to work on Christmas day. So Bradford permitted them to stay behind. When he returned, however, he found the laborers “in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball and such like sports.” Bradford immediately ended their recreations and turned their argument on its head: it was “against his conscience that they should play and others work” (Bradford 1952, 97). The other incident occurred a few years later, near the end of the period of trading company control. Not far from Plymouth in eastern Massachusetts was a private fur-trading post known as Mount Wollaston, where Thomas Morton, a well-off English trader, held sway. Morton was an avid hawker and had found five kinds of hawks in the wilds of New England, which he “reclaimed, trained, and

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1607–1860

made flying in [a] fortnight.” He also eagerly celebrated traditional English festivals, including May Day. So he and his men brewed a “barrell of excellent beare” and erected an eighty-foot-high may pole that was a focal point for traditional festive practices “with the help of Salvages” (Morton 1632, 49, 89–90; Bradford 1952, 204–5). Around it, Morton, his men, and their Native allies danced and drank, and, according to their critics, engaged in “great licentiousness.” They continued to do so long past May Day—until the Naumkeag planters cut down the pole. Eventually, Puritan authorities at Boston arrested Morton and shipped him back across the Atlantic. The removal of Thomas Morton marked a turning point for the history of English sports in New England. Had Morton lived in Virginia, both he and the freewheeling ways he relished might have met the same fate. By the late 1620s and through the 1630s, more people who either opposed or were ambivalent about traditional English labor-leisure patterns and sporting practices migrated to both regions. They did not eliminate all traditional sports and recreations, but they did abandon some forms and adapt others. In both the North and the South, the onetime outposts became permanent colonies, inhabited by more planters, people who moved their families, servants, and stock to North America. The wealthiest planters also signed single people, both female and male, to indentures, or contracts that had the servants working a set number of years (four to seven) for the employer in exchange for freedom, a suit of clothes, and land—should the servant manage to survive. Land was plentiful, but labor was scarce, and one consequence for many was hard physical labor, as the words of an indentured servant suggest. Since she had arrived in Virginia from England, she began, “the axe and the hoe have wrought my overthrow.” For five years she had known only “sorrow, grief and woe.” Each dawn brought a common routine: “so soon as it is day, to work I must away,” and what play she had was only “at Plow and Cart.” In all, her record ended, “in misery I spend my time that hath no end” (Cott 1972, 31–33). As did this servant, other colonists generally were less able—some were even unwilling—to reproduce the rich sporting traditions they had known in Britain in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, a pattern explainable by two sets of factors. First, much that had supported Britain’s rich sporting canvas was absent. There were few nobles and landed gentlemen to serve as patrons of popular sports. Except for carbines, muskets, and an occasional sword as well, little of the equipment that the colonists might have used in English-style games, contests, and festivals existed. A similar statement was true for animals; horses were few, and bulls were far too valuable as breeding stock to be used in baits. Second, whether for survival or to establish a freehold, the colonists had to make accommodations—with the climate and environment, with each other, and with superiors in what remained a master-servant, or governor-governed, social structure. Masters expected servants and wage laborers to work, as the servant’s words above make clear. Those who chose not to work or make other accommodations deemed necessary by superiors faced a spate of laws, such as those seen in Puritan New England and in other reformed Protestant-influenced civil societies along the Atlantic coast. The Puritans—or, at least, the ruling Puritans—have taken an unfair and inaccurate rap from some sport and social historians, and the mythology that they rooted out most sports persists. In reality, Puritan leaders specifically and colonial

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authorities more generally opposed only some practices, especially ones that wasted time and money or encouraged social disorder and what they considered immorality. They forbade gambling and blood sports. They also legislated against some contests in some contexts, such as horse racing in towns—not because racing was inherently bad but because such events occasionally injured passersby. Further, they disapproved of sports on the Sabbath, which stretched from sundown on Saturday to the same time on Sunday, in part because authorities wanted people to rest so that they could work when the week began anew. Through much of the seventeenth century, New England colonists upheld a strict Sabbath, as did officials in other North American colonies, including the Dutch settlements in New York. The relatively strict Sabbath was one of the legacies of the colonists to later generations of Americans, and it persisted into the twentieth century. Another legacy was the association of particular practices with utility, usefulness, and positive outcomes. Sports that could be productive, as well as those that benefited workers, were not only permitted but also gradually became more widespread. In New England, the Puritan-influenced legislature and local town governments—as well as assemblies in other English colonies—defined such practices as “lawful” sports. These forms included hunting, fishing, horse races away from towns, and almost any matches, contests, or displays of prowess that produced a physical training or relaxation effect. In Massachusetts, the ball games favored by youths were not unlawful as long as they did not endanger nonplayers, and at midcentury among the responsibilities assigned to freshmen at the recently established Harvard College was that of providing upperclassmen with balls. Then, too, by the 1660s merchants and ministers from Boston, the largest town in the English mainland colonies, had begun to take trips to nearby hot springs where they not only bathed in the warm waters but also walked for exercise. Puritans knew well the rejuvenating and relaxing effects of physical exercise. Field sports also benefited from the Puritans’, and more generally, Protestants’, emphasis on utility and gain. By the middle of the seventeenth century, legal hunting was probably more widespread than it was in Britain. Expanded land ownership was partly responsible for this fact, but the reality that hunting supplemented tables and incomes also mattered. So Chesapeake servants had muskets, and especially on holidays and in the winter they could “hunt the Deer, or Bear, or recreate themselves in Fowling” (Beverley 1705, 308–10). In Massachusetts Bay small farmers incorporated field sports—fishing, fowling, and hunting—within their daily regimens. Here, too, law guaranteed hunting and fishing rights, even on public lands, as early as 1641. Eventually as well, legislatures and some town officials in all the colonies offered bounties for the hides and heads of vermin, those destructive or dangerous animals such as wolves, squirrels, and deer. In time, the bounty system encouraged commercial hunting. This process of adapting sports to the New World context quickened as the seventeenth century lengthened, and one result was that sporting practices proliferated. Men who were engaged in the cloth-making industry in the coastal town of Rowley, Massachusetts, for example, played a version of English football (soccer) on a beach in their bare feet against their rivals from a nearby town. Colonists of Dutch and Swedish ancestry in the middle colonies—New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania—pursued skating and sleigh races. Large landowners

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1607–1860

in Virginia, in the fashion of British gentlemen, organized cricket games, occasional foot races, and a particular form of horse racing, quarter-mile racing, that owed both to the spread of native horses and the fact that they were still relatively small. Their common planter neighbors borrowed from Native Americans a field sport known as fire hunting in which they herded deer into a thicket, set the bushes on fire, and then shot the animals as they tried to flee the flames and smoke. Enslaved Africans brought from Africa or the Caribbean to work the rice fields in South Carolina produced a distinctive combination of swimming and hunting. According to one observer, they “swim and dive well … go naked into the Water, with a knife in their hand, and fight the Shark, and very commonly kill him” (Lawson 1709, 158). Throughout the colonies as well, community gatherings and celebrations proliferated after 1680, in part because a critical mass of women emerged. Raisings in New England villages, harvest festivals in the plantation society of the Chesapeake, and fairs in many festivals owed much to the presence of women, who assumed their traditional roles as providers of food and drink and for whom these affairs provided opportunities for contacts with neighbors and relatives. In small towns such as Annapolis and Williamsburg, as well as larger ones such as Charleston, New York, and Boston, women also triggered changes in the content of public celebrations for military victories and royal anniversaries. These and other sporting practices resulted from a number of changes in colonial life in the final decades of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century. The demographic transformation was particularly critical and dramatic: people were living longer and there were more people, primarily from natural increase. The British and Anglo-American population alone expanded from approximately 35,000 in 1640 to more than a quarter of a million by 1700, a figure that included greater numbers of women and colonists from Africa and other countries in Europe. Coupled with broader transatlantic economic forces, the population growth and diversification stimulated geographic expansion, as well as an increase in trade and commercial activity. Simultaneously, trade and commercial activity also expanded, and the consequences for sports were evident in a number of places. More tavernkeepers sold food and drink for customers in more places, and they frequently provided sports such as animal baits in back lots and bowling alleys or greens. Merchants, who not only were aware of what was happening in Britain but also wanted to expand their inventories and their customer base, imported more goods for recreations not seen before, such as cricket, lawn bowling, and billiards. Especially in the largest towns and cities, local government officials and entrepreneurs responded to the demands of their citizens and patrons for commercial entertainment options. People could now fish from public docks in New York City and hunt ducks in a public marsh near Boston.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPORTING STYLES Sports proliferated in the eighteenth century, but not all sports were for all people. More visibly than had been the case earlier, sports were badges of rank, among the gentry, merchants, and large landowners, and the increasingly vast and diverse ordinary folk. We can make sense of practices and patterns of both groups by

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focusing on two styles. Gentlemen and women produced a sporting style in which particular sports, the equipment required, and the times and sites for sports resembled the style of the European and especially the British upper rank. The sporting style of ordinary people was less cohesive, in part because of the variability and diversity of the people, but it did present some similar behaviors and expectations.

Sports for the Upper Ranks: Horse Racing, Billiards, and Fishing The dominant Anglo-American upper-rank sporting style resembled that of the British upper rank. Sports had long been requisite practice among the British upper rank, which many of the colonial gentry aspired to be like. A British gentleman was literate, witty, and relatively well-mannered, at least in public, and he was a man of grace, power, and agility. His female counterpart, though physically different from and considered inferior to men, was to be healthy, gracefully mobile, and conversant in the rules and conventions of the arts of physical improvement and refinement. To be cultivated, men and women needed to acquire skill in and knowledge about sports such as fishing, sailing, dancing, cards, and races. Both sets of expectations made their way across the Atlantic. Colonial gentlemen and women pursued sports and recreations throughout the year. Winter was the time for balls and dances, indoor card games, ice skating, and club dinners—at least once every two weeks. Early spring, when rains swelled the rivers, marked the beginning of the fishing season, which lasted until early fall. Cockfights, ball games, and horse races began about the same time and peaked between April and June. By the 1770s one could attend a race virtually every week in a different town in Virginia and Maryland, and a calendar of sorts ensured that races did not occur in two areas at the same time. July and August were for cricket games in the South, swimming, and the beginning of the hunting seasons that, with different animals and fowl in turn, lasted through early winter. By September the fall races began, and when they ended in November, they overlapped with hunts and the beginning of the dancing season. Little if any of this activity occurred by chance. Another distinguishing characteristic of gentry life was organization, and organizations known as clubs emerged. Some clubs built from existing local networks of gentlemen, as was the case with the Schuylkill Fishing Company, which formed outside Philadelphia by 1732 and whose members constructed rules and regulations for fishing. About the same time, jockey clubs in Maryland and South Carolina organized and then reorganized in these colonies and elsewhere at mid-century. In the 1740s merchants and lawyers established a “Physical Club” in Boston to “strengthen and render active their Bodies,” while merchants and rice planters around Charleston organized two hunting clubs (Hamilton 1948, 116). Club members, as well as other upper-rank colonials, also ordered sport-specific equipment, either from abroad or from colonial artisans. From Europe they imported a range of goods, including battledores for an indoor version of badminton, stopwatches to time races, ivory billiard balls, and quail and dog calls. Provincial craftspeople supplied other equipment, especially card and billiard tables, swords and foils, sleds and carriages, and an assortment of leather goods. These specialized goods and animals in turn came to be used and housed on distinctive

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1607–1860

Depiction of a tennis match from Johann Commenius’ Obis Sensualium Pictus, 1658, one of the earliest known illustrations of a form C Eon Images) of the modern game of tennis. (

Colonial dancing pavilion, Put-in-Bay, Ohio. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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sporting facilities. On the grounds of plantations and estates, for example, stables housed the thoroughbred race horses that improved one’s stock, earned stud fees, and transported the owner quickly and gracefully from place to place. Bowling greens, which were sites for entertainment and parts of the symmetrical pattern of the outdoors, spread across expanses of grass between estate entrances and great houses. Game preserves stocked with deer covered hundreds of acres of meadows and woods and served as experiments in land conservation and arenas for the chase. A particularly visible and socially significant sport formalized by the colonial gentry was thoroughbred racing, which drew from but did not replicate racing in the homeland. The British form was a distance contest on a straightaway, and it probably emerged first among civil servants, military officers, and large landowners in New York. But as was so often the case, colonists eventually adapted the British format, by running on a round or oval course, in part so that other colonists could see the races and so that the genteel race men could be well seen. The particular history of oval racing possibly began in the Chesapeake. In the 1730s, once some men had acquired large amounts of land, from 10,000 to 300,000 acres, they also needed larger, stronger horses to ride. So they began to import fullblooded stock from England to improve their small native stock, and by the 1740s these bigger horses required a different kind of sporting test, one of endurance rather than short bursts of speed. Thoroughbred races consisted of several heats, each of two, three, or four miles, depending on the age and gender of the steed. The most important races, however, were usually twelve-mile contests, or three heats of four miles apiece. By the 1760s thoroughbred races were vibrant public affairs from New York to Georgia. Occasionally the races matched an owner-breeder from one colony against his peers from another. Even New Englanders knew enough about the sport to attend contests in towns in other regions and to praise or criticize a victorious rider. Significant as well, the races were so important that few people left anything to chance. Some planters kept meticulous breeding and foaling records, as well as accounts of stud fees, club dues, prizes won, and wagers won and lost. Newspapers announced race meetings, as well as the formula by which pairings for match events (between two horses) and the entries for both subscriptions (races to which all entrants contributed) and sweepstakes (winner-take-all contests) were determined. The two variables in this formula were the “bloodedness” of the horse and the weight of the jockey. Full-blooded horses had to carry the heaviest weights, while one-eighth-blooded horses carried less. The basis for modern handicapping, these predetermined equivalencies were important to setting up fair races. More than any other sport perhaps, thoroughbred racing expressed much of what gentlemen and -women wanted to believe about themselves and to have others believe about them. It was an adapted and complex British sport with written rules and specific procedures. Race men and women—and women did race, though not as frequently “in public”—displayed physical prowess as well as the cultivation and refinement that bound the colonial upper rank to the contemporary British gentry. Racing among themselves, too, they distinguished or set themselves apart from ordinary colonists—without excluding the small farmers, servants, and slaves who remained so important in and to the gentry style of life.

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Sports for the Lower Ranks: Fishing, Hunting, Fighting, and Other Pastimes For their part, ordinary colonists, who were the large majority of early Americans, also had access to many sports. They represented many ethnic and racial groups from Europe and Africa, and many occupational groups, including artisans and small farmers, slaves and seamen, housekeepers and shopkeepers, and more. Some people lived in towns or cities, while others spent their entire lives on family farms, small plantations, or isolated cabins in the backcountry. None was rich, and more than a few were poor, surviving on the economic margins. Specialized equipment was rare, and even the horses and boats used for racing doubled for travel and transport. Fields, forests, lanes, rivers, docks, taverns, and houses remained common sites for sports, and the practices themselves often drew from and occurred within the tasks and rhythms of farming, fishing, trapping, trading, and domestic chores. Matches, or events that pitted one person against another, were common, as were small group and communal events. Numerous sports were similar in form and format to those earlier generations of colonists participated in. This was particularly true of field sports such as hunting and fishing. There was also a broad array of centuries-old gatherings in which sports and recreations often figured prominently—weddings, fairs, frolics, holiday celebrations, and evening gatherings. Dances were traditional practices at weddings, although the precise forms varied from group to group. Africans favored jigs and individual rhythmic performances to the accompaniment of fiddles, while New Englanders of British stock performed variants of reels known as country dances. Fairs in Pennsylvania and Maryland featured races, both on foot by white and black runners and on horseback. Frolics begot relatively simple games, drinking and eating, and sexual license—the practices of carnival. Ball games also reappeared with some regularity, albeit for a short time, in community festivities in Georgia, the final British-claimed colony on the mainland of North America, established in 1732. Georgia’s migrants initially consisted of a few English men and women of means, Austrian religious dissenters, and tenants and laborers from north of London. This latter group brought with them games they had known in England—cricket, football, and quoits—and which they participated in on holidays, royal anniversaries, and other days of remembrance. Yet ball games had no staying power in Georgia or anywhere else, among Anglo-American and African American adults. By the 1760s and 1770s cricket play was rare, limited primarily to British soldiers, officers, and merchants, while boys engaged in football. Several factors may help to account for the short life of ball games. First, many of the gatherings of ordinary people included both men and women, and sports that were meaningful in these settings often appealed to and incorporated both genders—as the traditions of ball games did not. Second, during the middle decades of the century, the number of traditional holy days continued to diminish in the wake of the Great Awakening. Finally, and especially in the South, the skills and the structure involved in ball games simply had no fit in the experiences of southern males. The physical skills of throwing, catching, and batting were not the actions one took to obtain food, to settle a dispute, or to gain renown. Ball games also involved men participating in groups, if not teams, and such groups and gangs, though not unknown, were not the norm, except in the

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Deep South among enslaved African and African American field hands. White male Southerners worked in pairs or small groups—a father and son and a slave or servant or two, for example—or they worked alone. There was, however, one sport that flourished among southern small farmers and working men: fistfighting. “Rough and tumbling,” as it was known locally, regularized and acquired distinct conventions primarily among farmers, laborers, and itinerant trappers and traders who lived near the Appalachian Mountains during the second half of the eighteenth century and were both literally and figuratively on the margins of society. Theirs was a predominantly male, oral, face-to-face culture, and fistfighting appealed. As Elliott Gorn has so aptly written, rough and tumbling contests were affairs of honor among intensely competitive individuals (Gorn 1985, 1986). Contestants used any and all of their skills—kicking, slugging, wrestling, and gouging—until an opponent could no longer continue. Other sports, too, were primarily meaningful to and practiced by distinct groups of people. In Philadelphia, for example, one of the characteristic recreations of laborers was bull baiting. Either near taverns or just outside the city limits, butchers provided the bulls and staged the baits in the evenings when dockworkers, servants, and apprentices could steal some time for themselves. There were also spinning contests of some New England townswomen in the 1760s. Spinning was a traditional female skill, and competitive spinning was a female equivalent to male contests with ordinary skills such as riding (racing) and shooting (hunting). It seems likely, too, that contemporary politics shaped the events. Participants in the pre-Revolutionary boycott movement, the women refused to continue to import cloth and clothing from Britain and so they resurrected spinning. Dividing themselves either by neighborhood or by skill level, they raced to see which group could produce more yarn. The boycott to which the Massachusetts spinners contributed was a harbinger of things to come in the British colonies. A decade later, legislative leaders in all thirteen colonies cited multiple British injustices and, urged on by their own provincial assemblies and some citizens, declared independence from Britain. Their Declaration of Independence (1776) was followed by what subsequent generations dubbed the Revolutionary War (1776–81). Unlike most subsequent wars in which Americans fought, this War for Independence did not substantially alter the course of sporting life, although it was bitterly contested and brutal for the combatants. Indeed, the war itself directly affected the daily affairs of only about 10 percent of the colonial population, according to historians’ estimate. Both the Continental Congress and some state legislatures railed against waste and, thus, gambling. Areas subject to battles or British and Continental army intrusions suffered substantial property damage, including the thoroughbred stock in the South especially. But observable changes in Americans’ sporting experiences were relatively few and gradual through the end of the eighteenth century and owed less to either the war or the immediate political consequences of American independence than they did to ongoing demographic, economic, geographic, and cultural changes.

SPORTS IN THE EARLY NATIONAL AND ANTEBELLUM YEARS Natural increase and immigration expanded the population of the United States markedly after 1800, from 5.3 million to 33.4 million in 1860. Much of this increase concentrated in urbanizing areas: one of twelve people lived in urban areas

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by mid-century, compared to only one in 100 in 1800. For other people, cities were simply places where individuals and families outfitted themselves for the westward journey. Via newly completed canals and railroads, by foot and horseback, or in wagon trains, thousands of people made their way through the land acquired from France through the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican Cession (including California, 1848), and the Oregon country (1848). Before the Civil War, in short, the United States stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The economic and commercial picture was more complex, as were the patterns of peoples’ lives and livelihoods. On the one hand, after 1780 the United States rapidly industrialized, fueled by an increasingly complex capitalist economy. Some people acquired substantial wealth from this process, while unskilled urban laborers, both men and women, struggled to make ends meet much as had their laboring predecessors. Agriculture, which markets had always shaped, generated different produce, expanded markets, and persisting inequality. Many small farmers worked their fields and, depending on the vagaries of the weather and the environment, either managed or failed to eke out marginal livings. Southern planters, as well as some Northerners, retained slaves, and slaves in turn tried to maintain some degree of control over their lives via families and religion. Not coincidentally, too, there was considerable resistance both to forces of control and to the changes that were beyond individuals’ control. Slave rebellions occurred, urban laborers sought refuge from the rigors of work in taverns, and native-born citizens mobilized against immigrants. Eventually, of course, the most striking incidence of resistance resulted in the War Between the States, or the Civil War. Not surprisingly or coincidentally, after 1780 American sporting life resembled a quilt with multiple and often starkly contrasting patterns. Some scenes revealed the persisting social power of traditional sports. In both the North and the South, for example, thoroughbred races revived in the second decade of the nineteenth century and became significant, mostly urban-centered commercial spectacles, some of which had crowds of 70,000 or more. Racing drew some energy from its ties to agricultural “improvement” and from the developing sectional controversy. In industrializing urban centers, fistfighting retained its appeal among laboring men, and ethnic tensions provided a new source of social fuel for the fights. On southern plantations slaves and slave owners maintained many of the sports, as well as the fit of sports in the rhythms of ordinary life and work, that were common to their forebears. Migrants to the Midwest and beyond—across the Mississippi River and then the Rocky Mountains—transported and then adapted practices that their ancestors had known. So did Latinos who continued to populate Texas and other Mexican-controlled territory, including California. Their ancestors had introduced matches and displays derived from their work with cattle and horses, many of which remained vibrant in the nineteenth century and by mid-century began to shape the sport of rodeo. But the early- and mid-nineteenth-century sporting quilt captured another set of scenes as well, especially in urban centers. The ongoing capitalization and commercialization of sports propelled the nascent sporting goods industry well beyond its base in the work of individual crafts people, and by the 1830s and 1840s one could purchase many kinds of goods and equipment in stores and from mail-order houses in eastern cities. Newspapers covered events as never before, especially those that featured violence, and new migrants expanded the period’s sporting repertoire with

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practices such as gymnastics and track and field. Class competitions emerged in the still small and elite private and church-run colleges, while educators, medical doctors, and popular magazines encouraged some sports and physical exercise as methods of improving or maintaining health. They also encouraged middle-class women to participate in exercises and “amusements,” even as middle-class men took to “athletics.” By the 1850s entrepreneurs were renting facilities and grounds to sportspecific clubs, and urban spectators were willing to pay fifty cents to see base-ball “all-star” games. In the next decade, first the telegraph and then the transatlantic cable made possible once unimagined possibilities for communicating the results of sporting events. The timing was propitious: competition between American clubs and teams and their counterparts in other nations was already underway. This other style contained behaviors and meanings that Americans today will recognize as emergent modern ones. Many of the physical skills incorporated in games and other contests had little to do with the tasks of ordinary life in its ordinary settings; they were skills like throwing and catching balls on diamonds, lifting dumbbells in gymnasia, and running around a track with a cinder surface. Written rules often governed what one could and could not do with these skills, although some degree of training and invented strategies could enable one to, if not circumvent the rules, use them to one’s advantage—to win. In short, and in contrast to traditional sports, modern ones were consciously rationalized and specialized. They were also about winning and leisure and any beneficial end that players could conjure up for them. In time as well, they would be structured and promoted via complex bureaucracies and sold as reflectors of the dominant culture’s conception of what was American.

Traditional Sports before the Civil War Traditional sports such as fistfighting flourished throughout the United States and territories that would become states before 1860. Indeed, a traveler could have seen events that resembled eighteenth-century practices almost anywhere in what was an increasingly broad canvas. Between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, many villages and towns had courses on which horses ran, and for the express purposed of improving the breed. In Ohio and Indiana farmers hunted “vermin,” especially bats and deer, in the fall after the harvest was complete and before the snows came, much as had their ancestors in Maryland and Virginia. Women from the Deep South who migrated with their families to Texas continued to spin and quilt in groups and occasionally competitively, both for enjoyment and to produce needed goods, as had New Englanders nearly a century earlier. Fur trappers played cards, gambled, and drank at their rendezvous and during the long winter nights in their cabins in the Rocky Mountains. On the northern Great Plains, Native Americans persisted in tests of individual physical skills, games and gambling, and hunts, all of which maintained traditional linkages between religious rituals and sports and between work and play. Two sets of experiences enable us to view in some depth the forms and the fit of traditional sports in rural, agrarian America before the Civil War. One set derived from below the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as Texas. Here hundreds of thousands of African Americans endured the rigors of the “peculiar institution,” slavery. Some of them worked in the fields and houses of wealthy planters who raised

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Extra, Extra!! The Fight That Almost Wasn’t! Hyer defeats Sullivan in 16 rounds in a field, after narrowly escaping authorities. Hyer wins $10,000; Sullivan grievously injured. Mythical newspaper headlines? A script for a slapstick comedy? Today perhaps, but not in the mid-nineteenth century. The “fight that almost wasn’t” really did occur—in Kent County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore on February 7, 1849. Six months of planning preceded this match, which was to take place on Poole’s Island in the Chesapeake Bay. The principals, New York butcher Tom Hyer and James “Yankee” Sullivan, an immigrant from Ireland by way of Australia, were already there. Hundreds of spectators were also departing from Baltimore by steamer when local law enforcement authorities learned about the event. As was the case in other eastern states, prizefighting was illegal in Maryland, and officials intended to stop this one. So a local militia seized a privately owned boat and set off across the Bay toward Poole’s Island, where they hoped to capture the fighters. Once they arrived, they did arrest two men, who turned out to be stand-ins for Hyer and Sullivan. Embarrassed and frustrated, the militia returned to their boat and restarted the chase—only to run aground. Meanwhile, the fight party had moved east to the mainland of Kent County. Here on a snow-covered field they hastily erected the required twenty-four-square foot ring out of locally cut pine, ropes, and halyards from their steamers. The match proceeded without any more hitches, and within eighteen minutes it was all over. Hyer knocked Sullivan out and left with the $10,000 purse. Sullivan, unconscious and injured, was taken to a hospital. Hyer retired two years later, and Sullivan, now thoroughly recovered, proclaimed himself the new champion of fistfighting.

cotton, rice, or indigo for markets at home and abroad. Many more labored on the farms or as artisans for small landowners, shopkeepers, and merchants. All, however, shared a common legal status; they were considered the property of their owners. They also commonly experienced the vicissitudes of hard work and poverty and the struggles to construct families and communities. In this largely agrarian region, the rhythms and traditions of agricultural life and the traditions of the people affected the content and opportunities for sports and other recreations among the slaves. As did many whites, for instance, African Americans continued to order tasks concurrently rather than sequentially in time, to link necessary and recreational tasks. When they hunted or fished, for example, slaves were both acquiring necessary food and enjoying themselves. Then, too, tasks and demanding taskmasters and mistresses, rather than clocks, drove time. Consequently, although slaves might steal a few minutes for recreations between tasks, they often obtained substantial blocks of time between the seasons, at night, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, or during holidays. Traditional activities, in turn, filled these minutes and hours. A cockfight on a Saturday afternoon, a foot race on a path back to the cabin, a horse race when two slaves met on a road—all were common.

Rodeos in the Southwest Another set of traditional experiences flourished farther west among people who lived and worked in what would become the states of Texas, New Mexico,

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Arizona, and southern California. Originally inhabited by Native Americans, much of this great land mass had been claimed and colonized by Spain and then Mexico. Especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people of Hispanic descent had migrated north and established ranches and villages. They also transported displays of prowess and contests derived from their work with cattle and horses. Eventually many of these skilled physical performances would be collected in the sport of rodeo. Before rodeo, however, there was charreria. Charreria incorporated activities invented by the Spanish conquistadors who brought horses and cattle from Europe to the New World. As early as the sixteenth century, roping, riding, and taming wild horses and bulls were important tasks among ranch owners and hands in New Spain. Thereafter, as ranching spread, these tasks retained their economic significance, and men especially practiced and refined their roping and equestrian skills. In time, as a hierarchically structured society emerged in New Spain, these skills also acquired considerable social significance. For the charros, the ranch hands, small farmers, and others among the native-born Mexicans who comprised a middle rank, skilled performances with ropes, in races, and against wild bulls and horses enabled them to display their prowess and compete with one another for prestige and place in emerging communities. These displays and contests in turn became badges of rank and dimensions of the traditions that simultaneously expressed what it meant to be a charro and distinguished the charros from both the wealthy Europeans who stood at the top of Mexican society and the Native Americans who had been reduced to the bottom. During the final decades of Mexican rule in the Southwest, the displays and contests of the charros persisted. The seasons of cattle ranching and the Roman Catholic calendar produced numerous festivals, holidays, and Sundays, all of which were enlivened by charro events. Fancy roping, bull riding, and wrestling were common, as were many forms of racing, including the traditional chicken race, the goal of which was for a rider to pull a chicken suspended from a tree or half-buried in the ground as he was galloping at full speed. Even more dangerous, and thus a more telling test of one’s skill and courage, were the paso de muerte, or pass of death, and the colear, a residual work skill, both of which had become a sport. In the former event, riders galloped alongside wild horses, leaped onto their backs, and then rode them until they calmed down. In the latter, a group of charros took turns riding into a corralled herd of bulls; then each rider grabbed a bull’s tail, pulled it under his leg, and literally twisted it until the bull fell to the ground. (These events are still performed today in Mexican American rodeos.) The Anglos who first witnessed these affairs watched in awe; there were no precedents for most of these Latino practices in their own histories. Between 1835 and 1848, however, a series of military and political confrontations between Mexicans and the ever more numerous Americans resulted in the eclipse of colonial rule and charro hegemony. Yet neither the charros nor charreria passed from the southwestern sporting scene. Anglo ranchers and hands, a few African American cowboys, and martial groups such as the Texas Rangers adopted charro practices and invented additional events. By mid-century the amalgam of customary practices that would comprise rodeo was in the making. Traditional sports also persisted in the burgeoning urbanizing areas in the United States before the Civil War. From Boston to Savannah on the eastern

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seaboard to as far west as Chicago and St. Louis, towns and cities were bustling places capable of sustaining a variety of practices. People were continually coming and going and invariably available as consumers and producers of both prearranged and impromptu displays of prowess, races, and games. Owing to both the natural and built environments, there was also a good deal of space available for sports. The rivers and streams around which many towns had built up made fishing possible, either with homemade or manufactured gear. Roads, large parcels of undeveloped land, and taverns were the sites for both impromptu and prearranged animal baits, ball games, shooting contests, and foot and horse races, while bustling ports provided access to lakes or the ocean for swimming, rowing races, and yachting. About the only specialized venues for sports were bowling greens and race courses, and both served multiple sports. The demography and economic activity of many towns and cities also were conducive to traditional practices, especially traditional male practices. Women were less visible outside the home or in dark and dingy factories than they had once been, displaced by the economy, law, and male immigrants. Men thus continued to control many sporting sites and opportunities, although they occasionally welcomed women as spectators or as partners in the sexual escapades associated with taverns. Then, too, these men either saw themselves or were seen as members of the traditional ranks, even though a nontraditional segment, a middle class, was emerging. Substantial wealth from land, commerce, shipping, and industry placed one in the upper rank and afforded one time, money, and incentives to invest in horse racing, yachting, gambling, club formation, and, on occasion, to reprise their roles as patrons. There were also laborers aplenty who worked in the factories, or served as seamen, carters, and street cleaners, or toiled in the shops and crafts that fed the market economies and role specialization of capitalizing, urbanizing areas. Although their work was regularizing, many laborers still had slack times when the mills stood idle, or the ships were out, or machines were down for cleaning. There were also patriotic holidays such as Independence Day, Saturday afternoons, and evenings. As well, taverns and saloon visits provided leisure time for meals, drink, and camaraderie. The context of antebellum urban settings thus ensured that sports traditionally popular among men, such as horse racing, fistfights, animal contests, and a variety of tavern games, not only survived but also thrived. With entrepreneurs willing and able to capitalize on the new industry of public entertainment, particular events became commercial spectacles that drew several hundred or many thousands of people, especially from the ranks of the landed and mercantile elite and the laboring classes. Whether they gathered together or separately—at a club or tavern, on a track or road, respectively—both wealthy and poor reveled in the displays of prowess that traditional sports provided, as well as the excitement and wagers they inevitably generated. Two sports in particular captured the imaginations and reinforced the traditions of these segments of the antebellum urban male population. One was horse racing, especially the thoroughbred form, which was probably the most visible organized public sport in towns and cities, at least once it revived early in the nineteenth century. The Revolutionary War had destroyed many horses, and for some years races had diminished in frequency. Gradually, however, jockey clubs and track owners in the South arranged more races in towns and cities, the traditional sites

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The Great Foot Race Gambling accompanied virtually every sporting practice before the Civil War especially the one in 1836 that contemporaries billed “The Great Foot Race.” In January of that year, a possibly bored John Cox Stevens, eldest son in a New York family known for its agricultural and engineering prowess, bet his friend Samuel L. Gouverneur that a man could run ten miles in under an hour. Gouverneur took the bet, and Stevens organized and advertised the race. Set for after the thoroughbred race season on Long Island’s Union Course, this “great trial of human capabilities” drew nine contestants, all farmers, artisans, and laborers. A tenth man, Francis Stevens, tried to enter, but the judges ruled that he hadn’t registered in time. That Stevens was the only athlete of African descent likely did not escape the judges’ scrutiny. The promise of $1000 to the winner, along with the possibility of an extra $300 if only one person met the challenge, likely enticed some of the contestants. Some runners either had completed races before or had trained, more or less systematically, for the event. For example, John Mallard (50 61=200 , 130 pounds), a thirty-five-year-old farmer from Otsego County, New York, had a personal best of sixteen miles in one hour and forty-nine minutes. This time, however, he “was not sober” when he started, and he fell in the fifth mile. The local favorite was Isaac Downes, a twenty-sevenyear-old basketmaker from Suffolk County, Long Island, who “had been well trained under his father.” At 50 500 and 150 pounds, Downes wore blue and white colors, but no shoes and stockings, and he “gave in” in the next-to-last mile. Before the race, George Glauer, a Prussian-born rope-maker (50 61=200 , 150 pounds), had run from New York to Haarlem and back (24 miles total), and backed his belief in his own ability to win with a $300 bet. Spectators lined the roads and the ferries from 9:00 A.M. onward for the early afternoon race. The day was windy; the crowd large (estimates offered a range of 16,000– 20,000 people), well lubricated, and eager to bet not only on who would win but who would finish, in what order a contestant would finish, whether someone would finish, and so on. In the end, Henry Stannard, a twenty-four-year-old Connecticut-born farmer, finished the distance sixteen seconds short of an hour. He, too, had trained before the race, and he might have completed the ten miles in two minutes fewer had the wind not been so strong. Stannard had a tag-a-long patron, however, John Cox Stevens himself, who rode beside the runner, keeping him apprised of his and others’ times at each mile mark and cheering him on. In keeping with sporting customs of the elite, Stevens also accompanied Stannard to the host Jockey Club dinner and fete. The “Great Foot Race” ended as it had begun, a traditional performance of patrons and athletes and white, male privilege on display (“The Great Foot Race” 1835).

for organized thoroughbred racing. A similar movement in the North proceeded more slowly, in part because moral societies opposed to gambling succeeded in having state legislatures illegalize the sport. The laws remained in effect until just before 1820 when propertied men, including many who lived in towns and cities, formed agricultural societies to promote agrarian production and interests, including racing. Their members appropriated the old colonial rationale for racing, improving the breed, and offered it now as a national interest. Once they successfully lobbied legislators to repeal antiracing laws, they resumed subscription and match events that blended old and new. The traditional format of multiple heats

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each two to four miles in length prevailed, but they often took place on mile-long tracks built in or on the outskirts of urban areas by entrepreneurs who wanted to cash in on this “national interest.” The quarter century after 1820 was something of a golden age for traditional thoroughbred racing. Many towns and cities east of the Mississippi River had tracks on which spring and fall racing occurred, much as had been the case in the eighteenth century. In many places agricultural interests were certainly apparent; people came to watch, wager, and arrange for winning animals to stand at stud on their farms. Yet, the popularity of thoroughbred racing was not simply the result of powerful rural interests. The sport also appealed to urbanites, rich and poor alike, and in cities such as New York and New Orleans, they transformed races into significant public celebrations, akin to modern Super Bowls. Wealthy men and women purchased the best seats where they were comfortable and easily seen by the crowd. For laborers, the races were an excuse to miss work for a day or more, to meet and drink with friends, and to wager. Newspapers sent reporters to the tracks, local politicians made appearances, and owners of transport companies and tavern owners both eyed the crowd expectantly, awaiting the dollars they stood to make.

The Great Races But it was neither rural, agricultural needs nor urban commercial interests that helped to account for the emergence of a racing series that lived up to the sport’s billing as a sport of national importance. Sectional politics did; they fueled a series that began as a personal challenge by a Northern breeder to any counterpart in the South and quickly became the partisan “Great Races.” Run between 1823 and 1845, these contests matched the “best” horse of the North and its counterpart from the South, usually on Long Island’s Union Course. The first race featured one of the most famous horses in American history, Eclipse, who defeated a southern steed financed by a syndicate in the best of three four-mile heats. Thereafter, the races occurred irregularly but with a vengeance, as first Southerners and then Northerners tried to redeem the honor of their region. Through 1836 the matches also focused on two men, John Cox Stevens, from a wealthy industrial family in New Jersey, and William R. Johnson, a planter from Virginia. Each man consistently selected his region’s horses and organized the syndicates that funded the training and the wagers, usually $10,000 aside, which comprised the purse. By 1836 as well, it was also clear that the outcome of a given match hinged not only on a syndicate’s ability to find the best horse in a region but also on the training of the horse and the strategy employed by the jockey. By any standards, the Great Races had no parallel in the contemporary American sporting scene. Throughout the South hundreds of people traveled to see a given year’s chosen horse, as the train that transported it to New York stopped for fuel or for another rally. At the Union Course estimates of the crowds ranged from 60,000 to 100,000 through 1845, although the latter figure was probably high: 100,000 people was about one-third of the population of New York City in 1840. The matches also drew visible state and national political leaders from both regions, and on occasion Congress adjourned so that senators and representatives could journey to Long Island. Finally, no sporting event—and few other

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John Cox Stevens: Sporting Patron, Promoter, Owner, Athlete Twentieth- and twenty-first-century sports fans around the world are used to seeing (a) wealthy men operating as owners of sport teams and clubs and (b) usually clear boundaries between players and owners, promoters, and so on. Athletes today can, of course, acquire considerable wealth during their careers, and some use the money and their renown to become coaches, owners, organizers, and promoters. A brief look at the career of one man, John Cox Stevens, makes clear both the similarities and the differences between his time and our own. John Cox Stevens (1785–1857) came of age in the early national period when a dominant ideology among eastern elites focused on internal improvements. Three prior generations of Stevenses had accumulated substantial capital from agriculture, land sales, and shipping and trade ventures in the southern New York–northern New Jersey area. John and his brothers committed their wealth to promoting “improvements”—in horse breeding, steamship engineering, and railroad construction. His sporting endeavors thus were neither accidental nor coincidental. Early national and antebellum thoroughbred, yacht, and foot racing were about “improvement”—of the breed, the fleet, and the man—at least among those who could afford this line of thought. Stevens was what one might call a working sportsman; he was not one of the much-maligned (and later in the nineteenth century) “leisure class.” At his estate in Hoboken, Stevens studied bloodlines, the “science” of equine and human physical training, and, eventually, what could be called the aerodynamics of shipbuilding. He sought investors and arranged syndicates to support thoroughbred and yacht racing, and he served as president of the New York Jockey Club and first commodore of the New York Yacht Club. A staunch supporter of national interests, Stevens was the northern driver of the Great Races, which pitted not just northern steeds against southern ones but also native speed against English speed. Steven’s national commitment persisted and, perhaps, strengthened over time. He commissioned and captained the sloop America in what became the first America’s Cup yacht race, and he rented out a portion of his Hoboken estate known as Elysian Fields to clubs that were adapting ball games into “America’s game.”

contemporary events—received the newspaper attention or the partisan rhetorical flourishes that the races did. Long before the Civil War, these dramatic contests pitted the North against the South, and contemporaries knew it. Despite its popularity and significance, however, the series ended abruptly in 1845. There is little evidence to suggest that contemporaries were aware that the match between the northern horse, Fashion, and her southern opponent, Peytona, which the latter won in two heats, was the final event. Several factors combined to forestall other races and, in fact, to undercut thoroughbred racing in the East. First, a series of economic recessions left various members of the thoroughbred industry—breeders, track owners, and jockey clubs—in serious financial trouble. Those who could afford to also had begun to invest in other commercial ventures, including entertainments, a movement that provided more options for one-time consumers of racing. Indeed, by the 1850s urban race courses such as Long Island’s Union Course would offer mule races and ball games rather than thoroughbred affairs, which now centered in Kentucky, Tennessee, and farther west. Finally, the

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sectional politics that had once encouraged the races had become more divisive. Nationally visible debates over the extension of slavery, industrial versus agricultural policies, and states’ rights in the face of union might were the consequences of widening material and ideological differences between Northerners and Southerners. They were also too significant for the proponents of racing to overcome. Except for isolated pockets in the South, the sport and its traditions did not survive the turmoil of the 1850s. A similar fate eventually befell another antebellum urban sport, fistfighting. By the 1850s, it, too, was waning as a popular practice. In its heyday, however, fistfighting was probably as common and popular among its supporters and the keepers of its traditions as was thoroughbred racing. The difference, of course, was that the supporters of fistfighting were a smaller segment of the population. They were urban working men, tavern owners, and a few members of the wealthy elite. As a historical practice, fistfighting had no single point of origin and no linear development. We are quite certain that it had occurred since humans began contesting with one another for place, prestige, or property. On both sides of the Atlantic across the centuries, several versions formalized. One became customary among upper-rank men who believed that they needed to defend themselves; they produced the stand-up, almost sparring “art” of self-defense. By the second half of the eighteenth century, men in the colonial backcountry engaged in “rough and tumbling,” described earlier. Simultaneously, in Britain supporters of the art of selfdefense and practitioners of the occasionally unrestrained fisticuffs entered into a patron-client relationship, which resulted in the regularizing and commercializing of fistfights. Upper-rank patrons thus supported strong young men, including some from the working class, in local bouts for monetary prizes. Newspapers announced the bouts, and a code of conduct that described what one could and could not do governed fighters’ behaviors after 1743. This was Broughton’s code, so named for its author, Jack Broughton. The code negated hits below the belt and when a fighter was down, and it provided for thirty seconds between rounds, “seconds” for both contestants, and referees. It also constructed boundaries for rounds and bouts. A round began with each fighter toeing the scratch line in the center of the ring and ended when one of the competitors went down. A bout concluded when either contestant could not return to the scratch line to start another round. In the early nineteenth-century United States, these multiple forms of fist fighting persisted. “Rough and tumbling” remained popular in the backcountries, the ever-moving western areas of states and territories. The “manly art of self-defense,” also called “scientific pugilism,” appealed to urban and plantation gentry alike, and instructors provided classes in their rooms or the homes of the wealthy. Finally, urban working men and some young gentlemen, also known as the “fancy,” favored the version governed by Broughton’s code. They were one-half of a transatlantic fighting fraternity, at the core of which lay common practices and values. Newspaper accounts of fights, the production of training manuals, journeys by American fighters to Britain, and the migration of Britons to the United States sustained the fraternity through the mid-nineteenth century. These human exchanges energized the fights and the fighting fraternity in another way as well. In 1811 Tom Molineaux, an ex-slave who may have acquired his freedom because of his fighting prowess, traveled to England to challenge the English champion, Tom Cribb. Upper-rank Britons who patronized the fights there,

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including the man on whose estate Cribb had trained, both feared and were awed by Molineaux, as apparently were the working men with whom Molineaux had spent much time in local taverns. National chauvinism and a race bias were both evident, and on the day of the fight, the betting reflected their unease. Round by round, the odds shifted from one fighter to other until the outcome became predictable. Molineaux had not been able to train thoroughly, and Cribb defeated him in eleven rounds. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, dynamic ethnic and race relations fueled prizefighting in the United States, much as they had the Molineaux-Cribb match. Any fraternity is a relatively closed and tight-knit group, and its members are often willing to defend their customs and prerogatives. Certainly this was the case with the urban American fight fraternity of the 1830s and 1840s. Many of its working-class members were of English descent, and their personal economies were marginal at best. Well-paying jobs were scarce, and they feared the competition for those jobs that free African Americans, women, and increasing numbers of Irish immigrants provided. Not surprisingly, then, the fight fraternity constructed an early color line, and it either held women in low esteem or exploited them in sexual, work, and household relations. For English Americans, the Irish were a special challenge; not only did they have to fight them but also they had to beat them, to a pulp if possible. This ethnic antagonism was evident in Tom Hyer’s defeat of James Sullivan in Maryland in 1849. English-Irish tension, which owed much to historical relations of the two groups in Britain, stoked many antebellum fights, especially in New York, the center of organized prizefighting. A case in point was a contest between Christopher Lilly and Thomas McCoy at Hastings on the Hudson River, which had resulted from a quarrel at a tavern in 1842. As was the case in horse racing, the “purse” was actually the product of the two men’s wagers on their own prowess, $200 aside. Unlike horse racing, however, the number of heats, or rounds in fight parlance, was unlimited. Broughton’s code governed the fight, and both men had a distinctive style of fighting, a strategy for besting the opponent. Lilly intended to throw punches at McCoy’s neck and head, while McCoy planned to launch a whole-body attack. Through the first fifteen rounds, neither man gained the advantage. By round 30, however, Lilly’s punches were finding their mark; forty rounds later, McCoy was “a most unseemly object.” His forehead and eyes were black and blue; his left eye swollen and nearly closed. Still the bout continued—until the 118th round. Even then as he lay drowning in his blood, McCoy cried out, “Nurse me and I’ll whip him yet” (Gorn 1986, 76). Another round never occurred. McCoy died on the spot, and the fight ended. Except for its length, the McCoy-Lilly fight was not unusual in the 1830s and 1840s. Many fights concluded after one of the opponents was either too injured to continue or dead, a fact that opponents of prizefighting did not miss. The largely unrestrained physical behavior, as well as the excessive drinking and frequent misbehaviors of supporters, helps to account for the numerous states’ laws passed to outlaw the sport. In the face of its widening illegal status, some supporters did try to justify the fights, the fighters, and the violence. One proponent was Frank Queen, who owned the New York Clipper, which both covered and staged prizefights. Queen argued that fistfighting was a “manly” sport that developed physical prowess, bravery, and heroic qualities. Few of the opponents of fighting, however,

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believed his arguments, even though some of them would eventually offer similar justifications for other sports. Queen’s defense of fistfighting did resonate with the antebellum urban fight fraternity. For many of these men, fighting remained meaningful, which is why they pursued it—even to their deaths. Fistfights were displays of prowess and affairs of honor; they were practices in which contestants achieved fame and status, as well as some income on occasion. Fight “heroes” were honored and so too was the camaraderie of the fraternity. Important as well, much of what the fights involved and were about stood in marked contrast to the values and practices of the increasingly evident and dominant “civilized” classes of urban America, especially the emerging middle class. Working men valued raw physicality, face-to-face confrontations, drinking and gambling, the community of men who lived and died by their rules rather than somebody else’s, and the rhythms of task discipline (and the fight was a task) rather than those artificially imposed by the clock or the workplace supervisor. Prizefighting thus was about freedom and traditions, which insured both continuity with past generations of working men and a place in their history—the history of Anglo-American working men. As such, prizefighting was also a means of resisting, even opposing, an emerging but encroaching cultural style that valued change, looked toward the future, and wrote a very different history.

ANTEBELLUM HEALTH REFORM Opposition to traditional sports such as fistfighting mounted in the decades immediately before the Civil War, especially in urban centers. Civil authorities repressed the practice with laws and, when those failed, they interrupted events or, as the 1849 affair in Maryland indicated, ran the principals out of town. Citizens who exerted considerable local authority—by virtue of their occupations, education, wealth, or even family—also spoke and wrote against fights, races, and baits. They railed against what they saw as brutality in the ring and pit, and they just as vehemently opposed the accompanying drinking and gambling that wasted money and dulled the senses of participants and spectators alike. A loose but discernible collection of these citizen critics of blood sports constituted a group that historians have called health reformers. They were ministers, educators, private citizens, and members of both the orthodox (MDs) and the “irregular” (e.g., homeopathic) branches of the emerging medical profession. They saw first-hand what conditions were like for other citizens in the urbanizing, industrializing urban centers of the East. As the population rapidly expanded, houses proliferated along narrow streets and alleys; demands outstripped supplies of clean water; horse manure and human wastes piled up on thoroughfares. Population density and poor sanitation, in turn, increased the risks of disease, especially epidemic diseases such as smallpox, while contemporary medical practices, including the use of leeches to bleed ill patients, did not always insure recuperation. Poverty, the lack of refrigeration for food, the seasonal availability of vegetables and fruits, and the rapid construction of shops and factories without adequate lighting and ventilation made matters worse. Antebellum health reformers also shared in the ideological legacy of the Enlightenment, a strong belief in the primacy of the physical world and humans’ ability to think rationally about and effect change in it. Fleshed out over time, this

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newer belief system attributed agency to human beings and made possible the construction of individual rights and responsibilities that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution embraced. It also underlay the faith in human perfectibility manifest in often-related arenas of “improvement”: agricultural innovation, the building of canals and railroads, religious revivals, and expanding public education. The people who constructed and promoted health reform conceived of health as a complex state in which two relationships were paramount. One involved an individual’s moral, mental, and physical conditions and attitudes, which not only had to be “proper” but also compatible. In other words, a desirable and appropriate physical condition could emerge only if desirable and appropriate moral and mental conditions also existed. The second relationship was that between an individual and his or her environment. A person’s physical, moral, and mental well-being depended on one’s ability to live in a state of harmony with nature and society. The critical requirement for achieving health thus was living a balanced life, a life of harmony and interdependence. Despite these shared beliefs, health reformers touted a variety of prescriptions and regimens. One early spokesperson for health reform, Sylvester Graham (1794– 1851), embraced a contemporary physiological principle known as vitalism. a theory that tried to explain how and to what effect stimulation occurred. Organs and organisms, this theory maintained, possessed vital forces, which were conceived almost as internal pressure points. Stimulation of an organ’s vital force was critical to its functioning and, hence, the process to which it was central—the stomach for digestion, for example, or the lungs for respiration. Many things could induce stimulation, but not all of them produced beneficial action on the part of an organ. The “wrong” kind or amount of food, for example, stimulated the stomach to reject the food by vomiting rather than to begin the process of digestion. Graham’s embrace of vitalism led him to champion a number of causes, including vegetarianism. He maintained that vegetables, fruits, and a bland diet prevented the stomach from being mis-stimulated and thus less prone to generating gastrointestinal distress. Not coincidentally, of course, vegetarians’ arguments about diet fueled some of the mounting opposition to traditional blood sports—and their red-meat produce. Graham also talked long and loudly about the need to improve people’s diets in other ways. He even promoted a homemade, wheat-grain bread as an alternative to bakery bread, whose makers occasionally used plaster of paris to stretch and reduce the cost of flour. A later generation recognized Graham’s efforts on behalf of improved diets by naming the graham cracker after him. Another significant figure in the antebellum health-reform movement was Catharine Beecher (1800–1878), who took a different approach. Beecher came from a well-known and locally esteemed New England family whose members were famous—or infamous, depending on one’s views—for their support of social “improvement” causes, including abolition. In the late 1850s Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine’s sister, became something of a cause c
elebre among people who favored the abolition of slavery when she published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Catharine never quite achieved the national acclaim that Harriet did, but she was a prolific author. She published numerous articles and books, including Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (1855), and Physiology and Calisthenics for Schools and Families (1856).

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In contrast to Graham, Beecher’s prescriptions stressed moderation as the key to improving health. A healthy diet, for example, was a “simple” diet rather than a strict vegetarian one. A person did, of course, need to abstain from liquor but not from other “strong” beverages such as tea and coffee. Indeed, Beecher suggested, abstinence from food that one enjoyed, as well as other “luxuries” and pleasures, would actually do more harm than good to one’s health in the long run. Beecher’s emphasis on moderate behavioral changes and remedies may have been a function of the portions of the antebellum population about whom and for whom she wrote: women and, to a lesser extent, children. Few, if any, health reformers believed that women could develop the physical strength or mental discipline and astuteness of men, and Beecher was no exception. In the curricula of the female seminaries she organized in Connecticut and Ohio, she incorporated “domestic” exercises, such as sweeping, which were to produce the physical skills necessary for keeping healthy households, as well as moderate walking and riding (never racing) in the open air, simple “amusements” (read nonstrenuous games), and rhythmic gymnastics. She expected women and girls to exercise their muscles, but not because she anticipated strength gains. Exercise was to stimulate internal organs and processes, prevent the holder’s “naturally” weak muscles from atrophying, and decrease the risks of debilitating physical and nervous illnesses to which women were naturally susceptible. Other reformers championed Beecher’s use of exercise and other organized physical activities to improve health in the 1850s. In fact, systems of exercise proliferated, either as training regimens for athletes or as gymnastics, which was also encouraged by the post-1848 migration of Germans who brought their Turnvereins (gymnastic societies) to the United States. Toward the end of the decade, Diocletian Lewis developed a system of lighter gymnastics, which included adaptations of some of Beecher’s exercises, and became a prominent spokesperson for physical training and a promoter of gymnastics in schools. Few antebellum health reformers actively championed the alternative sporting style that was emerging among some of their contemporaries. They did, however, provide one of the enduring justifications for emergent modern sports, health. Before the Civil War, as well, some supporters of what historians have come to call athletic sports, one of the dominant types of modern sports, incorporated both the rhetoric of improvement popularized by health reformers and their linkage of physical health, mental health, and moral health—the body, mind, and spirit trilogy. One such man was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Massachusetts minister and soon-to-be colonel of a Northern regiment in the Civil War. In 1858 he wrote an essay entitled “Saints and Their Bodies” for a popular magazine. He began the piece by lamenting the lack of attention that Christian religious leaders over the centuries had paid to the human body and physical health. Fortunately, in Higginson’s judgment, the current generation of “saints” was beginning to recognize the importance of their bodies and the benefits, including enjoyment, that they derived from active, outdoor sports. He was pleased that both the clergy and their congregations had begun to value the “athletic virtue” on which the ancient Greeks had placed such a premium. Higginson was an early American proponent of the English-defined ideology known as “muscular Christianity,” a set of beliefs that linked one’s moral condition with one’s physical conditioning. The social power of muscular Christianity lay

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Diocletian Lewis and Gymnastics Diocletian Lewis (1823–88) developed an American system of gymnastics, which included adaptations of some of Catharine Beecher’s exercises, and became a prominent spokesperson for physical training and a promoter of gymnastics in schools. A late antebellum reformer, Lewis had a career that is also telling about how receptive to physical training and improvement some middle-class urbanites had become. Not coincidentally, his work contributed to and benefited from the broadening interest in active, athletic sports—the kind about which Thomas Higginson spoke so favorably. Unlike Graham and Beecher, Lewis was not a native New Englander; instead, he was born and reared in New York state and studied homeopathic medicine in Ohio. At one time or another, he advocated temperance, sexual hygiene, improved nutrition, the homeopathic practice of using small doses of drugs to cure diseases, and phrenology, the pseudo-science that maintained that bumps on the skull revealed the conditions of one’s mental faculties. In part because of the illnesses of his wife and other family members, however, he eventually decided to focus on preventing ill health, rather than curing diseases. Gymnastics became his answer. By the 1850s gymnastics had only a short history in the United States, but between 1825 and the 1840s German
emigr
es had introduced to the United States a system of gymnastics that incorporated large pieces of apparatus and had been devised in their country earlier in the century. This system of the German American “Turners” remains the basis for Olympic gymnastics today. Subsequently constructed, both here and abroad, were other “systems” of gymnastics that invariably concentrated on natural movements of the body—running, jumping, twisting, lifting, and so on. Beecher’s “system” of calisthenics and movements to music—her rhythmic gymnastics—was one; Per Henrik Ling’s Swedish gymnastics, also a rhythmic, “natural” system, was another. Lewis’s system incorporated elements from both of these approaches, and he promoted it as an alternative to the German system, which he considered to be too demanding, and thus inappropriate, for women, children, and older or sickly men. The Lewis system of gymnastics provided a series of small apparatus exercises, dancing, and marching. Numerous exercises employed beanbags, which he invented; for example, partners tossed a bag between themselves or one person simply threw it up in the air and caught it with one hand. He also used rings, which were wooden circles about six inches in diameters, in about fifty exercises. These were not suspended rings but hand-held ones used for pulling, either individually or in pairs, and twisting, usually to music. Other exercises used Indian clubs, which resembled bowling pins, and wands. They, too, were accompanied by music, which Lewis believed encouraged enjoyment and provided a rhythmic discipline for the rhythmic movements. He also recommended that all movements take place in a well-lit, ventilated room with plenty of space—a healthy room. Lewis also outlined his system in various articles and books, including what was essentially a how-to manual, The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children. In 1861 he began a school, the Normal Institute for Physical Education, to educate future teachers of gymnastics and physical training; although it operated for only seven years, the institute’s graduates, both men and women, found jobs awaiting them. As had Beecher before him, Lewis also started a school for girls, of whom he required two and one-half hours of gymnasium work daily.

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some years in the future, once it became a cornerstone of YMCA programs of physical training and athletic sports, and it would bear on the rhetorical, even mythological distinction between the amateur athlete and the professional athlete. But its introduction in the late 1850s is telling both about the beliefs and attitudes of people such as Higginson and about the sports they valued, “athletic” sports. These were the sports Higginson admired—sports such as base ball, skating, rowing, and many others eventually. They were also predominantly middle-class practices that employed the body as an instrument and promised physical training, health, and human improvement.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN SPORTS As the previous sections have suggested, an alternative sporting style emerged after 1820, what we recognize as the “modern” sporting style. Like the influential health-reform movement, this style was the product of a distinctive segment of the antebellum population. For the most part, these people were neither the very rich nor the very poor; they were “middling” citizens who lived and worked in urbanizing areas and whose gradually emerging awareness of their shared interests and experiences underlay a class consciousness. They were men and women who saw traditional relations, roles, and identities unsettled by the physical and social experiences of urban life and work. Most had some education or training, and they desired to improve themselves and their stations in life. They knew competition; they counted successes and failures; they made rules to live by and expected others to carry out their special responsibilities to enforce laws and discipline. They also rejected traditional sports as brutal, wasteful, and even destructive. The sporting style they constructed differed from the traditional one in a number of ways. Believing that time rather than tasks determined the rhythms of their lives, they both distinguished leisure from work time and assigned many sports and exercises to leisure. They also moved to impose time limits on some sports, either by directly linking the “end” of a performance to some span of time or by limiting and making more predictable the time an event might consume. At mid-century innings in base ball served this purpose, and after 1870 clocks defined the boundaries of many modern sports. Simultaneously, the tasks of work transferred to modern sports less frequently than was the case with traditional practices. Especially in games and other athletic contests, no one claimed that the central physical acts— batting, throwing, running distances, or jumping hurdles—drew from people’s work. Indeed, middling urbanites came to view leisure sports as practices that compensated for experiences that they did not have at work and redressed conditions from which work and urban living more generally detracted. The makers of the modern sporting style also tended to form clubs and other associations with people whose interests and values were similar, and they intended these virtual communities to take the place of older, more organic communities. At the core of these emerging subcommunities and the modern sporting style were distinctive practices that we today would recognize as “sports.” They were, and are, practices such as harness racing, baseball, track and field, and many others, which share a number of characteristics. In contrast to traditional sports, modern forms are geographically widespread, and they have standard, formal rules that both

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convene and end contests and define the behaviors in which players can and cannot engage. On-field participants invariably have specialized roles, as do coaches, managers, and owners, and individuals and teams compete in or on sport-specific facilities such as diamonds and gymnasia, where they employ preplanned strategies for winning. Athletes’ performances are often described numerically, which facilitates recordkeeping, and both the press and the institutions that claim individuals and teams as their representatives revel in the breaking of records and attribute symbolic significance to athletes’ performances. Finally, complex organizations govern the sports and the performers, and as do fans, bureaucrats often rationalize and justify ordinarily irrational behaviors.

Harness Racing It is probably not coincidental that what one historian has called the first modern sport, harness racing (or trotting), was a horse sport. Equine contests, including those involving horses harnessed to carts, had long been visible and meaningful as popular culture forms in the eastern United States, and they remained so even in urbanizing areas after 1820. Many people continued to rely on horses for personal and business use; in fact, the post-1820 expansion of people and of markets and marketable goods probably underlay interests in and opportunities for harness racing. The horses used in such races, which were initially impromptu, were also relatively inexpensive and of mixed breeds. All a race took were willing competitors and a street or lane, of which eastern urban areas had plenty. At least in the one city where historians have reconstructed its history, New York City, early nineteenth-century harness racing owed much to the traditions and the traditionalness of another horse sport, thoroughbred racing. By 1806 harness racers were contesting on a thoroughbred track in Harlem, and twelve years later some aspects of a prearranged event resembled things that had occurred in thoroughbred racing for decades. The event was structured as a match race (between two horses), and the purse was really the wager. Slightly less than two decades later, the first known club, the New York Trotting Club, reproduced the local, traditional structures of thoroughbred racing. Its members even acted on behalf of their sport as jockey club members had for nearly a century. They regularized harness races on a biannual basis. They built a special harness track on Long Island. They promoted their sport on customary thoroughbred grounds, arguing that racing improved the breed. During the 1830s and 1840s, however, the proponents of harness racing moved to modernize the sport in ways thoroughbred supporters never had. Subsequently, the histories of the two sports diverged in many ways. Eastern thoroughbred racing remained in the hands of relatively wealthy men, and its public visibility peaked in the mid-1840s. Harness racing, on the other hand, began and remained a sport of and for ordinary people, at least through the 1860s. The horses remained relatively inexpensive, fifty to one hundred dollars apiece compared to several thousands or more for thoroughbreds, and many working people were able to acquire and train horses for harness races. Moreover, harness racing benefited from both the acts on behalf of and the rhetoric of “democracy,” which was the byword of Jacksonian America. Improvements to roads, for example, encouraged more people to travel by wagons, carts, and stages rather than individually on horseback; these travelers

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became spectators at, if not participants in, harness races. Urban newspapers and magazines supported and encouraged the races, as did the owners of racetracks, who fairly quickly saw harness races as more than fillers or substitute events for thoroughbred races. By the late 1830s and early 1840s these conditions enabled, and probably encouraged, horse and track owners, spectators, and the press to hasten the modernizing and commercializing of harness racing. The format change to standard, mile-long heats was pivotal; shorter races, even ones with multiple heats, meant not only more events on a given schedule but also the potential for more races by and longer careers for horses. Buoyed by a willing, spectating public, track owners began to offer frequent, even weekly, trotting contests. Relatively small purses ($10–$250) characterized most of these races, but they did not deter horse owners from entering in part because they were running relatively inexpensive horses and running them more often. Some of these owners were also emerging as professional drivers, recognized for their skills, their commitments to racing, and their interests in winning. Budding capitalists, track and horse owners alike operated on small but sustainable profit margins—and the sport benefited. By mid-century harness racing had eclipsed thoroughbred racing as a spectator sport in the New York area. There were simply many more races, betting fans, and press coverage of races locally and in other places across the nation. However, controversies were brewing. Charges of fixed races proliferated, and race fans occasionally took the side of either the accuser or the accused drivers. Of particular concern to some race people was the practice of “hippodroming,” or the arranging and running of a race so that the principals could divide the gate receipts between them. Hippodroming may have affected the competitiveness in given contests, but it apparently did not unduly complicate betting or diminish spectator interest. Indeed, it probably insured that horses and drives renowned for their skills and capable of drawing crowds could find willing competitors, since the gate rather than a purse became the financial goal. Race fixing persisted beyond mid-century and became more problematic after the Civil War, when harness races expanded numerically and geographically. Absent any other means of resolving the issue, the Narragansett Trotting Association in Rhode Island organized a meeting of track people in 1869. The result was the creation of a national governing body for harness racing, the National Trotting Association (NTA), whose members claimed responsibilities not only for writing rules to regulate the sport and horse and track owners but also for punishing people who broke the rules. It also functioned, and probably more effectively so, as a coordinating body and clearinghouse for local trotting associations. The National Trotting Association was a significant step in the emergence of modern harness racing, particularly insofar as it claimed some power over and provided some services to local groups. It clearly stood as a third level of organization, above the clubs and the regional racing associations, and thus extended the practice of hierarchical governance, which traditional sports had never had. But the NTA was not the only thing that signified the modernness of harness racing in the 1860s and 1870s. The breeding of racehorses had become a rationalized, quasiscientific process, and specialized breeding farms had emerged as more and more men of wealth entered the game. Their presence also ensured a modern division of labor, since they were increasingly less likely to drive their own rigs. The owners

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hired professional jockeys, and the jockeys trained for their craft and their tasks and received salaries. The transformation of harness racing was nearly complete.

Base Ball to Baseball The making of another modern sport occurred in the antebellum period: baseball. Like harness racing, it was the product of urban middling people, and it owed much to traditional English and American ball games. Its critical structures were clubs, whose members made the rules, arranged games with other clubs, and even served as umpires. They also rapidly transformed the game from being a means to the ends of socializing and exercising to being an end in itself and, eventually, a business enterprise. And all of this and more occurred in about a quarter century, or the span of a single generation. The precise origins of baseball remain shrouded in mystery. The only thing that is clear is that the man of the great myth, Abner Doubleday, did not devise the game. Baseball was likely an adaptation of traditional games played with bases, balls, and bats. Youths had played “base,” “old-cat” games, stoolball, and rounders since the days of the Stuarts in England and during the eighteenth century in the United States. Of these games, historians generally agree that English rounders most directly bore on American baseball. Its name probably derived from the practice of “rounding” the bases (four of them) after a “striker” (batter) hit a ball thrown (or “bowled” underarm as in cricket) by the “feeder” (pitcher). Strikers were “out” when they swung and missed three feeds, hit a ball to the field that was caught before it bounced twice, or were hit by a ball while they ran the bases. In the East during the 1820s and 1830s, young men and boys played locally specific versions of base ball, including one known as “town ball.” New England villagers, Philadelphians, and New Yorkers had distinctive contests that they played irregularly, with various numbers of participants and varying numbers of bases arrayed in squares, diamonds, or even haphazardly. The collections of players were known as “fraternities,” whose members had shared experiences, values, and expectations for years. Ball playing had been and remained one of those shared, binding experiences. The making of modern baseball began in New York City at some point between 1842 and 1845 as one of these base-ball fraternities organized itself more formally as a club. In doing so, its members again drew on tradition, for clubs had existed in the region for more than a century. They were organizations of like-minded men, especially upper-rank men who shared economic, political, and social interests, including sports. However, the members of this base-ball club, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, were professionals, managers, merchants, and other middling citizens. Consequently, to account for the precise timing of the Knickerbockers’ appearance, we need to look beyond the traditions of ball games and fraternities to what was happening in contemporary New York. The city was undergoing dynamic changes that clearly affected the base-ball fraternity and probably encouraged the emergence of the Knickerbockers. The population was growing rapidly, many men worked away from their homes and neighborhoods, and both factors disrupted traditional relationships and ways of life. Club membership could redress some of the unsettlement people experienced because it afforded them opportunities for face-toface relationships and experiences once common in traditional communities. Clubs were small communities, or subcommunities, of like-minded men who shared

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interests. Not coincidentally as well, clubs also separated their members from other urbanites, some of whom were also forming clubs of one kind or another. In the context of the larger picture, then, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club simultaneously united its members and divided them from others. It thus figured in the reorganization of social relations and society in mid-century New York City. The subcommunity that was the Knickerbocker Club resembled a medieval guild in both structure and function. A written constitution governed the affairs of the club, outsiders could only become members through election, and penalties awaited Knickerbockers who violated club rules. Members also provided themselves with a range of entertainments, including dinners and dances, and they undoubtedly had many opportunities to talk about business and politics. They were committed, as well, to playing base ball, and they constructed the version that first became known as the New York game and then as American baseball. By 1845 the Knickerbockers had formalized and codified their preferred rules, in keeping with their interest in improvement and their faith in the value of regulated activity. Apparently written by Alexander Cartwright, who was then a clerk but later a partner in a book and stationary shop, the Knickerbocker code of rules combined elements from the British game of rounders with practices generated by members. From the British game, they borrowed the shape of the field: four bases arrayed in a diamond surrounded by open space. The areas that lay behind the lines from home to third and home to first they designated as foul territory, which was a departure from the rounders’ field plan. They also defined the distances between bases (90 feet) and between the pitcher’s area and home (45 feet) with a mathematical precision possibly drawn from their workplaces; businesses were increasingly dependent on quantifiable measures. To play, the club members probably either divided themselves into two groups or chose sides, with one to bat and the other to take the field. The pitcher had to throw underarm, and a batter’s turn lasted until he hit a ball or swung and missed three pitches. “Outs” also occurred when a fielder tagged a runner between bases, received a ball and stepped on a base before a runner arrived there, or caught a hit ball on the fly or before it bounced twice (as in rounders). In another departure from rounders’ practices, the Knickerbockers ended one unit’s turn at bat after three outs and a contest after one side had scored twenty-one runs, or “aces” (from cricket). Both sets of limits likely made the length of a game more predictable or at least short enough to fit within the time the men could take from their work. There is little evidence to suggest that the Knickerbockers intended to promote their game or to seek competitors before 1850. In fact, they played primarily among themselves, first on a lot in Manhattan and then on a section of the Elysian Fields rented from John Cox Stevens. Apparently only once did they compete against another club, the short-lived New York Club. However, as the Knickerbockers played, other base-ball fraternities likely observed them, and some of these fraternities organized their own clubs and adopted Knickerbocker rules after 1851. Written as it was, the Knickerbocker base-ball code was accessible and made possible a standard way of playing, which traditional sporting conventions transmitted by word of mouth rarely had. By 1855 base-ball clubs and interclub play existed throughout the city and in northern New Jersey, and the Knickerbocker game had become the New York game. It also moved some distance toward becoming an American game, even though other versions of base ball persisted in some areas. Owing to newspaper accounts and travels by people such as Cartwright, New York base ball made its way to

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The Knickerbocker Rules for Early Baseball The only known original of the Knickerbocker Rules exists in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Below are the twenty rules written out by Alexander Cartwright: 1st. Members must strictly observe the time agreed upon for exercise, and be punctual in their attendance. 2nd. When assembled for exercise, the President, of in his absence, the VicePresident, shall appoint an Umpire, who shall keep the game in a book provided for that purpose, and note all violations of the By-Laws and Rules during the time of exercise. 3rd. The presiding officer shall designate two members as Captains, who shall retire and make the match to be played, observing at the same time that the player’s opposite to each other should be as nearly equal as possible, the choice of sides to be then tossed for, and the first in hand to be decided in like manner. 4th. The bases shall be from “home” to second base, forty-two paces; from first to third base, forty-two paces, equidistant. 5th. No stump match shall be played on a regular day of exercise. 6th. If there should not be a sufficient number of members of the Club present at the time agreed upon to commence exercise, gentlemen not members may be chosen in to make up the match, which shall not be broken up to take in members that may afterwards appear; but in all cases, members shall have the preference, when present, at the making of the match. 7th. If members appear after the game is commenced, they may be chosen in if mutually agreed upon. 8th. The game to consist of twenty-one counts, or aces; but at the conclusion an equal number of hands must be played. 9th. The ball must be pitched, not thrown, for the bat. 10th. A ball knocked out of the field, or outside the range of the first and third base, is foul. 11th. Three balls being struck at and missed and the last one caught, is a handout; if not caught is considered fair, and the striker bound to run. 12th. If a ball be struck, or tipped, and caught, either flying or on the first bound, it is a hand out. 13th. A player running the bases shall be out, if the ball is in the hands of an adversary on the base, or the runner is touched with it before he makes his base; it being understood, however, that in no instance is a ball to be thrown at him. 14th. A player running who shall prevent an adversary from catching or getting the ball before making his base, is a hand out. 15th. Three hands out, all out. 16th. Players must take their strike in regular turn. 17th. All disputes and differences relative to the game, to be decided by the Umpire, from which there is no appeal. 18th. No ace or base can be made on a foul strike. 19th. A runner cannot be put out in making one base, when a balk is made on the pitcher. 20th. But one base allowed when a ball bounds out of the field when struck.

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Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and San Francisco and even to army posts on the Great Plains in the latter half of the 1850s. Base ball also gained acclaim outside the baseball fraternity. Its proponents included people such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson who wrote for popular magazines and were concerned about the ill effects of urban life and living. The New York game, they maintained, was relatively inexpensive and thus available for many people, and it provided the kind of healthy, outdoor exercise that Higginson and his contemporaries in the healthreform movement had been urging urbanites to pursue. In subsequent years, both of these claims—for baseball’s democratic and health-rendering potentials—would become key elements in its modern ideology. Significantly as well, New York base ball gained the interest and support of the press, especially the newspapers. Reporters covered games between clubs and described the action on the field, as well as the social affairs that followed. A few journalists also actively courted base-ball clubs, shaped public perceptions of the game, and contributed to the making of the modern sport. On the New York scene the most influential of these journalists was Henry Chadwick, an English-born reporter who came to be known as the “father” of baseball. Chadwick, who wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Clipper, authored many early guidebooks to the sport and devised box scores to report performance results. Box scores enabled the reading public to follow games more easily, and they encouraged the modern practice of keeping and breaking records. So did another of Chadwick’s innovations: the batting average. From early on, then, the press and baseball clubs forged an alliance that served both parties well over time. The clubs gained visibility; their sport, popular recognition; the papers, a subject that interested readers. Actually, “intrigued” readers might be a more apt term, especially after 1855 in the New York area where much was happening. Clubs proliferated, and games expanded both numerically and geographically. Some of the contests were also exciting. There were high-scoring affairs—42-37 and 51-6, for example—and rivalries developing between clubs. Discussions and debates about rules emerged, as did highly skilled players, position specialization, and even an “all star” series between the best players from New York City and their counterparts from Brooklyn (then an independent city) in 1858. Spectators, including gamblers, turned out in droves for the games and paid the hefty sum of fifty cents admission. A kind of creative tension characterized base ball in the New York City area in the latter half of the 1850s. In part this owed to the appearance of new clubs, only some of which pursued the game as the fraternity had in the 1840s, as a means to the end of socializing. Other clubs emerged from distinct neighborhoods and workplaces. The Eckfords, for example, organized at the Eckford shipyards in Brooklyn, and the New York Mutuals from among the firemen of the Mutual Hook and Ladder Company No. 1. The members of these clubs continued to value the entertainments and conviviality that the base-ball fraternity had long held dear, but they also stressed competition—and winning. As Warren Goldstein (1989) has made clear, players from the ranks of clerks, craftsmen, and skilled laborers brought to the field of play practices and expectations meaningful in their work; they emphasized individual skill, unit cooperation, and “craft excellence.” Even as they enjoyed themselves, members of the occupation-based clubs intended to improve themselves and to gain an edge over the competition. To gain that edge, some individuals and clubs practiced, albeit in scrimmages rather than with scientific

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training regimens, before work, at noon, and after work. Practice improved players’ physical skills and, when combined with another carryover from work, specialization, enabled an individual to become quite good at playing a position and the game. Practice also showed on the field in victories over rivals. A few clubs even began to seek out skilled players to join them, and recruiting emerged. Recruiting was apparently not widespread, let alone universal, but it was controversial. It subverted customary methods of club organization and membership, and the clubs had no system for addressing the practice. Thus recruiting was one of the issues that encouraged the Knickerbockers to call representatives from some New York clubs to a series of meetings in 1857 and 1858. The representatives discussed other issues as well: the length of games, what umpires could do about batters who refused to swing at good pitches, the Knickerbockers’ own “fly rule,” and the rights of junior clubs, or those whose members were under twenty-one. All five practices revealed and contributed to the tension between the social clubs and their more competitively inclined contemporaries. The latter two issues also implicated a question of considerable importance to the base-ball fraternity because it bore on the social identities of the game and its players. Was base ball to remain associated with children and child’s play, or was it to be appropriate for adults and conducive to the development of “manly” qualities? Resolutions to these issues emerged between 1858 and 1863, once the club representatives who attended the Knickerbocker-convened meetings formalized their relationship as a confederation and assumed power over rules and clubs. As was the case in harness racing, the confederation claimed to be a national association, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), although clubs outside of New York did not join until 1859. Like the NTA as well, the NABBP claimed to represent and to regulate the clubs; it thus introduced hierarchical governance to base ball. It remained on top—writing rules, devising and imposing penalties upon offenders, and promoting the game—until 1871, when yet another set of tensions divided the base-ball world. The NABBP did resolve the issues it had initially faced, although perhaps only the advocates of competition judged the resolutions as adequate solutions. Club representatives decided that players had to remain bona fide club members, although they also had to be members for only a month before any given contest. Subsequently, they forbade clubs from paying players and enrolling paid players. The NABBP also determined that a game should conclude at the end of nine innings, rather than after a squad had scored twenty-one aces. The change virtually ensured that games would have ends, as competitors desired but had not always realized with the twenty-one-ace format. Moreover, closure would come before nightfall, which likely pleased spectators and players alike. The NABBP then solved the problem of batters not swinging at good pitches with a nontraditional construction: the “called” strike, which became the responsibility of umpires. It also begrudgingly accorded junior clubs the right to join the association but denied them voting rights. Apparently men who wished to distance their game from the pastimes of children did not realize that some people under twenty-one could play the game nearly as well as, and occasionally better than, those who were older. The longest running debate within the ranks of the NABBP involved the fly rule, which addressed how a fielder put out a batter who had hit a ball. Proponents of the fly rule, beginning with the Knickerbockers, argued that catching a hit ball “on the fly” required more skill than did the traditional method of catching it after

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it bounced. Such a practice was thus more “manly” and could further distance the game from child’s play. Opponents, however, associated the proposed rule change with the emphasis on competition, which they were resisting. In their view, maintaining the traditional out-after-one-bounce rule helped to ensure that the social traditions of the clubs—and the game as a social affair rather than a serious contest—persisted. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the opponents generally came from the social clubs, while those who proposed to substitute the fly rule for the one-bounce rule belonged primarily to the newer neighborhood and occupationally based clubs. The Knickerbockers, of course, were an important exception to this pattern, but they had always had a distinctive history within the history of New York base ball. The struggle over the fly rule within the NABBP lasted until 1863, when enough members voted to adopt the rule as a part of a larger movement to advantage offenses and make games more exciting. By then as well, other things had tipped the scales in favor of competitive clubs that worked as units of physically skilled, strategically astute men to win hotly contested matches rather than “playing at” some children’s game. Grounded in the “improvement” aims of Republican ideology and in capitalist economic goals and relations, contesting with and gaining an edge over others were experiences that many Americans expected by the 1850s and 1860s. The competitive interests and relations that had come to dominate in base ball thus differed little, if at all, from what one saw in politics, business, and, of course, the most dramatic and traumatic event of the period—the War Between the States. Moreover, aided by improvements in transportation and communication, members of competitive ball clubs were able to present their approach to the game to many more people. Visibility, renown, and even a degree of commercial stability and viability resulted. The days of professional base ball were almost on the horizon.

SUMMARY The 250 years covered in this chapter witnessed important transformations in the history of the United States. The land itself originally belonged to Native Americans, who were gradually displaced once British trading companies set up outposts in the Chesapeake and New England, and as other European nations sent their own migrants to other sections of the “New World.” The British outposts became colonies, and after about 170 years, the colonies became states in a new nation, which expanded in virtually every conceivable way until 1860. Recounting the sporting experiences of colonists-become-citizens helps us to flesh out this compacted account. When the British laborers arrived to establish outposts, they brought with them sports common and longstanding in Britain, intricately tied up in erratic work rhythms and traditional festivals. Hunting certainly served multiple purposes, and the many gambling games, including bowling in the streets, might produce a few shillings for one player and certainly status among people for whom the important relations were made face to face. The harshness of life in the “wilderness,” however, along with the arrival of reformist Protestant-led bands of colonists seeking to establish freeholds gradually resulted in more adaptations and some limits, at least through the 1670s. Thereafter, traditional but adapted sports re-emerged as central practices in a rank-divided and geographically and demographically expanded society. Among men and women of significant wealth, sports such as thoroughbred racing, water sports,

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and field sports, along with dancing and gambling games, served as badges of rank and status. Yet, few, if any of these practices lost their ties to things that were important in ordinary life. For many planters, agriculture remained the primary economic activity, and horses and field sports remained necessary to improving agricultural output, to travel, to food stocks. Though fancier and more formalized and fashionable, in short, gentry sports remained traditional at their core. Absent the fancy and fashion, the same statement applied to ordinary people, whose sports, though more numerous and varied in form, remained tied to the “stuff of life.” For the colonists, the 1780s was a crucial decade. A peace treaty (1783) secured the independence gained from the defeat of British forces in the Revolutionary War, and a new constitution defined a national government (1789). Yet, the course of ordinary life, including sports, did not change as dramatically for many citizens as it would after the 1820s. In fact, as some easterners moved westward, as Latinos from Mexico moved north, and as immigrants from abroad moved into eastern cities, they maintained popular traditional practices. This was particularly evident in places where agriculture remained the core economic pursuit, as well as where relatively poor laborers struggled against competitors and capitalists. Hence, both rural America and the urban America of laborers provided fertile ground for traditional practices as late as, and in some cases, well beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. Horse races, fistfights, charreria, and field sports persisted and, in some places, became spectacles. A new sporting style had rooted, unseen, in the 1780s, however. Enlightenment thought that had informed Republican ideology and the subsequent practical ideology of “improvement,” coupled with the transition to a capitalist economy, underlay an emergent modern sporting style, characterized by rationalization, specialization, and the separation of sport (and leisure) from work, among other things. After the 1820s especially, health reformers provided one of the rationales for modern athletic sports, health. Other contemporaries from the urban middle class defined new rules for competing, established organizations (clubs, and eventually associations of clubs), and produced specialized equipment and facilities and thus drew new, modern sports—harness racing and base ball—from older forms. After the Civil War, these forms would become the dominant forms in the United States, and subsequent alterations in other sports would reveal similar characteristics.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Adelman, Melvin L. 1981. The first modern sport in America: Harness racing in New York City, 1825–1870. Journal of Sport History 8 (Spring): 5–32. ———. 1986. A sporting time: New York City and the rise of modern athletics, 1820–1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Beverley, Robert. 1705. The history and present state of Virginia. Ed. Louis B. Wright. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947. Bradford, William. 1952. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620–1647. Ed. Samuel E. Morison. New York: Knopf. Cott, Nancy F., ed. 1972. Root of bitterness: Documents of the social history of American women. New York: Dutton. Dizikes, John. 1981. Sportsmen and gamesmen. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Eisenberg, John. 2006. The Great Match Race: When North met South in America’s first sports spectacle. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

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Fabian, Ann. 1990. Card sharps, dream books, and bucket shops: Gambling in nineteenthcentury America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. “The Great Foot Race.” 1835. American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine 6 (June): 518–20. Green, Harvey. 1986. Fit for America: Health, fitness, sport and American society. New York: Pantheon Books. Goldstein, Warren. 1989. Playing for keeps: A history of early baseball. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gorn, Elliott J. 1985. “Gouge and bite, pull hair and scratch”: The social significance of fighting in the southern backcountry. American Historical Review 90 (February): 18–43. ———. 1986. The manly art: Bare-knuckle prize fighting in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Guttmann, Allen. 1978. From ritual to record: The nature of modern sports. New York: Columbia University Press. Hamilton, Alexander. 1948. Gentleman’s progress: The itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744. Ed. Carl Bridenbaugh. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kirsch, George B. 1989. The creation of American team sports: Baseball and cricket, 1838–72. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lawson, John. 1709. A new voyage to Carolina. Ed. Hugh T. Lefler. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Morton, Thomas. 1632. New English Canaan. In Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, ed. Peter Force. 4 vols. Reprint. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963. Porter, William T. “Fatal Prize Fight Between Lilly and McCoy for $200 a Side at Hastings, N.Y.” Spirit of the Times, September 17, 1842. Ritchie, Andrew. 1975. King of the road. London: Wildwood House. Seymour, Harold. 1960. Baseball: The early years. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, John. 1986. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith. Ed. Philip L. Barbour. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Strachey, William. 1612. The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britainia. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund. Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967. Struna, Nancy L. 1996. People of prowess: Sport, leisure, and labor in early Anglo-America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1993. Sport and the awareness of leisure. In Of consuming interests: The style of life in the eighteenth century, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Cary Carson, and Peter Albert. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Todd, Jan. 1998. Physical culture and body beautiful: Purposive exercise in the lives of American women. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Verbrugge, Martha . 1988. Able-bodied womanhood: Personal health and social change in nineteenth-century Boston. New York: Oxford University Press. Young, Alexander, ed. 1844. Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, from 1602 to 1625. Boston: C. C. Little and J. Brown.

Museums and Libraries Colonial Williamsburg The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation P.O. Box 1776 Williamsburg, VA 23187-1776 (757)229-1000 http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.com Restored eighteenth-century town site, based on years as provincial capital, with walking tours and extensive research facilities.

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Harness Racing Museum P.O. Box 590 240 Main Street Goshen, NY 10924 (845)294-6330 http://www.harnessmuseum.com Extensive historical collections of fine art, photographs, material culture, and books and other print materials. National Agricultural Library Abraham Lincoln Building 10301 Baltimore Avenue Beltsville, MD 20705 http://www.nal.usda.gov More than 3.5 million items, including rare books, manuscripts, and photographs, about agriculture, from the 1500s to the present; includes agriculture-related sports. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum 25 Main Street Cooperstown, NY 13326 (607)547-7200 http://web.baseballhall.org Extensive book and manuscript collections and other print materials, photographs and films, newspapers and periodicals, material culture; recommend appointments prior to research. The National Sporting Library 102 The Plains Road P.O. Box 1335 Middleburg, VA 20118-1335 (540)687-6542 http://www.nsl.org/ Research library with more than 16,000 books, manuscript collections, scrapbooks, photographs, and historical periodicals about horse and field sports. Old Sturbridge Village 1 Old Sturbridge Village Road Sturbridge, MA 01566 (508)347-3362 http://www.osv.org Reproduction of a New England village, 1790-1840, with a focus on everyday life and extensive research collections. Shelburne Museum P.O. Box 10 Shelburne, VT 05482 (802)985-3346 http://www.shelburnemuseum.org Over 150,000 works of art, artifacts, and Americana, seventeenth–twentieth centuries displayed in a walking village setting.

CHAPTER 2

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1861–1889 Gerald R. Gems

OVERVIEW The Civil War devastated American society. All previous wars had been fought against foreign nations, but the Civil War pitted American citizens against each other, ravaged the South, and cost more than 620,000 lives from 1861 to 1865. Regional differences between the North and the South were apparent long before hostilities erupted into open warfare. The North engaged in a commercial and industrial economy, while the South was largely agricultural, with large plantations dependent upon slave labor. As the United States expanded westward throughout the nineteenth century new states entered the union, upsetting the political balance between free and slave states. Abolitionist societies, in which many women took a prominent part, advocated an end to slavery as an inhuman and immoral institution. The new Republican Party pronounced its opposition to the spread of slavery and when its candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election of 1860, the southern states seceded to form their own country. The Southerners felt that the individual states had the right to run their own affairs; while the federal government viewed the Southerners’ actions as a rebellion. Both sides marshaled their forces to impose their will on their enemies. New technologies introduced ironclad battleships, submarines, and machine guns to the conflict with a horrendous loss of life. In 1863 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which legally freed the African Americans from bondage in the rebel states. A year later the overwhelming manpower and resources of the North finally forced the South into submission. Lincoln, however, did not live to repair the damaged nation. John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer, assassinated the president with a gunshot to the head as he watched a play in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. The years following the Civil War were known as the Reconstruction era, aimed at rebuilding the South and the torn nation. Among the major political and social issues were the place of the newly freed slaves in the society and the punishments meted out to the southern political and military leaders. Vice President Andrew

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Johnson succeeded Lincoln as president; but his inability to reach a consensus with the Congress resulted in an impeachment, which he survived by only one vote. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, provided the former slaves with citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which became law in 1870, gave them voting rights. Several African Americans soon assumed political offices at the state and federal levels. They were joined by opportunists known as scalawags (Southerners) and carpetbaggers (Northerners who took up residence in the South), who gained official positions because the former rebels were deemed to be disloyal and unfit for leadership. Ulysses Grant, the general who had led the northern forces to victory, served as president from 1869 to 1877. Although he was not personally dishonest, his terms were wracked by corruption as politicians and their friends enriched themselves at public expense. At the local levels political bosses ruled over entire cities, freely employing patronage and gaining power. The most notable, the Tammany Hall group, controlled New York City and much of the state. In 1881, shortly after James A. Garfield assumed the presidency, he was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker. The Democrats and Republicans had conspired to resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876. The Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, won the popular vote, but was one vote shy of the necessary Electoral College requirements. The Republicans negotiated with the southern Democrats to deliver enough votes to their candidate, Rutherford Hayes, to gain the presidency. In return the Republicans agreed to remove federal troops from the South and allow the whites to regain control of political offices. The Republicans’ abandonment of the blacks resulted in a virtual return to subservient conditions. Whites disenfranchised black voters by introducing literacy tests and property requirements, and through coercion. The Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine white vigilante group organized in 1866, reinforced white dominance by threats, beatings, and lynchings. Legal prohibitions, later known as Jim Crow laws, reinforced the segregation of the races. White landowners introduced the sharecropping system, which provided a small plot of land to the freedmen in return for a percentage of their crops as rent. The black farmers barely subsisted and the white overlords no longer provided the food, clothing, and housing given to the slaves, assuring that the African Americans would remain mired in poverty and dependence. In 1881 Booker T. Washington opened the Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school for blacks in Alabama. The education provided students with industrial skills, but an unequal role in the American society, as they were relegated to workers rather than owners. Washington’s compliance with segregationist attitudes and his willingness to accept a diminished social status for blacks earned him favor with whites, who acknowledged him as the leader of his people.

The Gilded Age While African Americans languished in the economy, white entrepreneurs enjoyed fabulous wealth. The two decades following the Civil War were known as the Gilded Age, due to the enormous fortunes accumulated by ruthless capitalists known as “robber barons.” Capitalism ran rampant during the era and materialism prevailed, as commercial rivals sought to capture or destroy competitors. Rivalries

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extended to the cities as businessmen competed for trade. In Cincinnati businessmen hired the first fully professional baseball team in 1869 for a national tour to generate publicity. Chicago followed with its own pro team a year later. Despite a severe economic depression in 1873, several bankers, financiers, and industrialists flourished. Albert Spalding became a millionaire by forging a sporting goods company that offered diverse products, sponsorships, enticements to athletes, and marketing strategies. Jay Gould’s stock-market schemes, the consolidation of shipping and railroad lines by Cornelius Vanderbilt, the monopolization of the oil industry by John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie’s control of the steel industry produced immense affluence long before the Sixteenth Amendment imposed an income tax in 1913. The continual westward expansion of the country provided opportunities, challenges, and afflictions. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of land to anyone willing to establish a permanent home. The legislation aimed at settling the western frontier; but much of the acreage had been granted to the railroad companies who built tracks across the continent (40,000 miles between 1865 and 1875). The Union and Pacific railways met in Utah in 1869, effectively joining the east and west. The discovery of gold and silver in the western territories brought fortune seekers from around the world, and all of the newcomers encroached on the lands of the Native American indigenous tribes. Despite repeated promises and treaties, the federal government ultimately safeguarded the intruders with federal troops. Such confrontations led to an ignominious defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn, when Gen. George Custer and 265 soldiers met their deaths in Montana. Thereafter the Native American tribes were systematically hunted down, forced to reservations, and subjected to assimilation. In 1879 the federal government founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, the first of many residential boarding institutes that took Native American children from their families and taught them to absorb white standards, values, and styles of dress. Students were required to speak English, cut their long hair, and learn vocational skills for the industrial economy. Sports became a primary means to inculcate the desired values and Carlisle produced one of the top football teams in the country by the turn of the century, as well as its most famous athlete, Jim Thorpe, who played professional baseball, football, and won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics. In addition to the Native American presence, the nativists (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who considered themselves the founders of the country) faced the perceived threat of millions of foreign immigrants who sought a better life in the United States. Nonwhites, such as the Chinese, were excluded from immigration in 1882. Many others, primarily Europeans, settled as farmers in the Midwest. Saddled by exorbitant railroad rates, the farmers banned together in cooperative organizations known as “granges” in an attempt to circumvent the railways, merchants, and bankers that limited their profit. Other immigrants (10 million between 1865 and 1890) flooded the American cities in search of jobs. Often living squalid lives in slums and tenements, workers began to form unions to better their lives. This banding together allowed employees to take collective action against employers. By acting together to confront a boss it was less likely that all would be fired from their jobs. With no minimum wage, employees worked six days per week, ten to twelve hours per day, and had no benefits if they were

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sick or injured. Children worked alongside adults in the factories, and immigrant families counted on their offspring as contributors to family welfare. Workers formed the Knights of Labor in 1869 and began taking collective actions to gain better wages and working conditions. In 1877 workers organized a national railroad strike that erupted in violence and millions of dollars in property damage. Employers reacted to labor conflicts by locking out workers and hiring the unemployed (“scab” laborers) to replace them. Such confrontations led to the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886 when police marched on a crowd of workers. A dynamite bomb, thrown by an unknown person, killed a policeman. The police retaliated with indiscriminate gunfire that killed numerous others. The resultant trial accused eight labor leaders of inciting the riot. Despite an international clemency movement and a faulty trial, four were hung and one was found dead in his jail cell. The others went to prison. Armed conflicts between employers and employees continued for another half century; but employers devised other means to control their laborers’ lives. In 1882 George Pullman, manufacturer of railroad sleeping cars, built a company town outside Chicago complete with an array of athletic facilities to keep the workers busy during their leisure time. The company teams and athletic spectacles brought much publicity to the Pullman enterprise, but when the owner cut wages and maintained rents during a depression in 1893, the seemingly content employees initiated a strike that required federal intervention. In the 1880s social reformers attempted to address the economic, social, and political problems confronting the American society. The economic flows of the capitalist system created periodic recessions, usually in twenty-year cycles, and the depression of 1873, the worst in the United States up to that time, created widespread unemployment and misery. By 1875 half a million workers had lost their jobs and many farmers went bankrupt. The unscrupulous actions of politicians and the “robber barons” contributed to the despair. By the 1880s groups of middle-class moral reformers, known as Progressives, sought to rectify the problems by bringing greater order and efficiency to city governments, supplanting the greed and corruption with charity, and acculturating the immigrants in order to produce better American citizens. Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull House, a settlement house (a social service agency) within a teeming ethnic immigrant neighborhood in Chicago, thereby initiating a new role for women as social workers. In addition to teaching English and civics they, like the Indian schools, used sports as a means to Americanize the local residents. Sandlots provided safe play spaces for small children, while team sports like baseball, and later basketball, taught competition (the basis for the capitalist economic system) and deference to authority (arguing with the referee might end up in expulsion from the game). Players also learned time discipline, teamwork, and social skills, all necessary for success in the middle-class value system. Soon schools and playground supervisors taught the same lessons in physical education classes. The popularity of sports grew decisively during the period after the Civil War. Colleges began taking anthropometric (body) measurements of their students in 1861 and professors prescribed corrective gymnastics for those deemed to be physically deficient. Moralists and clergymen also prescribed gymnastics and wholesome sports as a means to obtain “Muscular Christianity” by making the body a strong housing for the spiritual soul. Wholesome sport became an antidote for the wayward practices associated with saloons, gambling dens, and brothels.

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Technology and the media further popularized sporting ventures. The typewriter, invented in 1867, and the telephone, in 1876, combined with the telegraph to produce instantaneous results of sporting contests. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and patented the electric light three years later, enabling indoor and evening recreations and athletic contests to take place. Night baseball games started as early as 1883. Newspapers carried sports results, and sportswriter Henry Chadwick, a British immigrant, invented the box score and batting average that generated greater interest in ball games. Richard Kyle Fox, an Irish immigrant, took over the National Police Gazette, and his sensationalized coverage of crime, scandals, sex, and sports found a multitude of readers. Fox promoted athletic spectacles to cover in his newspaper, especially boxing matches, and he initiated a system of weight classes and awarded bejeweled belts to the champions to generate interest in the sport. Such publicity spawned the first national sports hero in the United States, heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, and propelled baseball to prominence as the national game.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Baseball had expanded rapidly in the New York City–New Jersey area and in Massachusetts even before the Civil War. The onset of hostilities slowed that development as many players joined the army. Still, club rivalries persisted throughout the era and some teams even paid players for their abilities. They did so by constructing enclosed fields, which enabled them to charge admission fees to spectators. Both James Creighton, who pitched for the Brooklyn Excelsiors in 1860, and Al Reach, who played for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1865, became acknowledged professionals. In 1861 Brooklyn (which did not become a part of New York City until 1898) and New York fielded all-star teams in a match for regional pride. The following year two top New York teams, the Eckfords and the Atlantics, played a charity game with the proceeds donated to soldiers injured in the war. Philadelphia sent a team to compete against those of New York, Brooklyn, and Newark, New Jersey, in 1862 and drew 15,000 spectators. Brooklyn and New York sent all-star teams to Philadelphia later that summer. Such excursions became commonplace throughout the war, with some games designated as fundraisers for the sick and wounded. While such charitable affairs espoused a noble purpose, they also symbolized the growing urban rivalries that were played out in sport. The war helped to spread baseball beyond the Northeast as soldiers engaged in the game during their leisure hours in camps. They introduced soldiers from other regions to the sport, which consisted of competing sets of rules. The Massachusetts version utilized an irregular rectangular field, with home plate located midway between the first and third bases. The New York rules, which had been codified by Alexander Cartwright, secretary of the Knickerbockers club (and considered the “father of baseball”), as early as 1845, designated play on a diamond-shaped infield with equidistant bases. The New York version gradually displaced the Massachusetts system as the predominant choice. The original rules had allowed fielders to catch the ball on a fly or a bounce, or to hit a runner with a thrown ball (called “soaking”) to achieve outs. By the 1860s pitchers had to deliver the ball

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underhanded from a designated box located only forty-five feet from the batter. Despite such restrictions the curve ball began to baffle batters, and hitters adopted the bunt. Fielders had to catch the batted ball on the fly, rather than a bounce to gain a put out. Fielders did not begin wearing gloves until the mid-1870s, and the earliest gloves had no padding, resulting in many errors each game. As catchers moved closer to the batter they developed more protective equipment, such as the chest protector and catcher’s mask in 1875. The ball consisted of loosely wound yarn, which did not travel a great distance. Home runs were rare. In 1879 Charley Jones led the league with only nine home runs and sixty-two runs batted in. Batters could still designate if they wanted the ball pitched above or below the waist until 1887. As soldiers returned to their homes they formed town teams, and local rivalries soon developed. Even women’s teams appeared on college campuses by 1865. Baseball quickly became the national pastime, superseding the British game of cricket, as the eastern teams from New York and Philadelphia competed with teams as far away as Chicago and Cincinnati. Chicago featured forty-five local teams by 1867

Cincinnati Red Stockings The first fully professional team started out as an amateur contingent in 1867 and claimed the Midwest championship the following year. But rivalries with other midwestern cities led Aaron Champion, a young Cincinnati lawyer and aspiring politician, to assemble a group of businessmen as financial backers to field a fully salaried team in 1869. They hired Harry Wright, a British-born (1835) former cricket player, as player-manager. Wright’s father had been a professional cricket player and his eldest son assisted him as an instructor. Wright worked as a player and teacher at cricket clubs in New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati before finally concentrating on baseball. The financiers raised enough money to fund a national tour and provide $9,300 for salaries. Harry Wright hired his younger brother, George, as the star shortstop for a salary of $1,400. A substitute player got only $600 (still twice the annual income of a typical worker), and only one of the newly hired professionals was from Cincinnati. The tour first traveled east and proved phenomenally successful. They did not lose a game, but had to settle for a tie with the Troy, New York, team when the latter’s financial backer, the gambler John Morrissey, started an argument with the umpire (probably to protect the wagers) and the game was terminated. The team returned to Cincinnati triumphant and then embarked on a western tour to California. Its combined record was 57-0-1. Continuing into the 1870 season the professionals won sixty-three consecutive games until losing 8-7 in eleven innings to the Brooklyn Athletics. The team’s success led midwestern rival Chicago to form its own professional team. Despite the success on the field, the national tour generated a profit of only $1.25 and the businessmen of Cincinnati jettisoned Champion. The Wright brothers and other players left for the Boston franchise in 1871. Cincinnati entered a new professional team in the initial National League of 1876, but they were expelled in 1880 for selling beer and playing games on Sunday. From 1882 to 1889 the Cincinnati team competed in the American Association, considered to be a second major league at the time, and in 1890 it returned to the National League.

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and had more than fifty company teams in local leagues three years later. Henry Chadwick, an English-born sportswriter for New York newspapers, helped to generate interest for the game with his book, Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player (the dime referred to the cost of the book), which provided instruction for players from 1860 to 1881 when publication stopped. Chadwick also introduced the American public to baseball statistics, such as the box score, the batting average, and a scoring system that tabulated home runs, hits, and total bases. The new cities of the Midwest not only competed with the East for athletic supremacy, but competed with each other for the frontier trade. Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee all desired to be the commercial center that supplied the farmers and townspeople of the Midwest. The merchants of Cincinnati decided to promote their city by creating a fully professional baseball team (the Red Stockings) in 1869 as a marketing strategy. Professional players earned salaries between $600 and $1,500 for their services. They sent the team on a national tour from the East Coast all the way to California, and the value of professional players became readily apparent, as the team went undefeated (57-0-1). Chicago businessmen quickly assembled their own professional team, known as the White Stockings (later to become the Cubs), in 1870. The White Stockings traveled down the Mississippi River Valley, defeating Memphis 157-1, and later beating archrival Cincinnati. The expanding railroad network crossed the continent by 1869, which made long-distance travel possible and relatively fast. Baseball became more like a commercial business for some city teams as they built specialized sites and paid contracted players, just like employees. The differences between amateur and professional players caused the latter to split from the National Association of Base Ball Players, which had been organized in 1858. Professional teams posed an unfair competitive advantage over amateurs. Gamblers infiltrated the game, corrupting some players, and portraying a negative image. In the heated rivalries even fans of amateur teams bet heavily on their club and they needed assurance of a legitimate contest. In 1871 the paid players organized the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP) to administer and regulate the game and their annual conventions brought greater standardization to the rules. A loosely organized league endeavored to determine the national champion. Franchise fees cost only ten dollars and numerous small cities (at least twenty-five between 1871 and 1875) joined the league. The NAPBBP players earned salaries between $1,300 and $1,600 (about four times greater than average workers), although the best players got as much as $2,500. Several issues continued to confront the practitioners, however. With numerous teams soliciting the best players for their big games, athletes often reneged on their contracts by leaving their original clubs for better offers at any time during the season. Such players became known as “revolvers” because they continually moved from one team to another. The NAPBBP did resolve one issue, that of African American players, by refusing to accept black teams as members of the organization. Although individual African Americans played on some teams, the exclusion of black clubs forced them to organize their own circuits. Black workers at the Adirondack resorts in upper New York formed talented teams that put on exhibitions for their wealthy patrons; while other black teams competed against white town teams and amateur contingents. The Dolly Vardens, an African American

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team, organized as early as 1867 in Philadelphia. The Chicago Unions, another black team, became a dominant force among amateur clubs in that city by the mid-1880s. The NAPBBP attempted to introduce baseball abroad on a tour to England in 1874. The champion Boston Red Stockings played exhibition games with the Philadelphia Athletics players and engaged in cricket matches with local British teams. The English were not impressed, referring to the American national pastime as a boys’ game, similar to the rounders played by schoolchildren. The denigration hurt American pride, as the United States strived to establish its own national identity apart from British culture. Years later an American commission would falsely claim (the Doubleday myth) that baseball was an American invention, established in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. In 1876 William Hulbert, a Chicago coal merchant and owner of the White Stockings team, resolved to earn greater profits and solve the problems of the professional association by reorganizing the league. Teams had previously arranged their own schedules, and noncompetitive teams simply refused to play. In 1872

Moses Fleetwood Walker (1857–1924) Moses Fleetwood Walker was born on October 7, 1857, to mulatto parents in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio. One of five children, he attended Oberlin College and the University of Michigan. He played on the baseball teams of both institutions. By 1881 he played semipro baseball for a company team in Cleveland. In 1882 he married an Oberlin classmate, Arabella Taylor. He joined Toledo of the Northwestern League as a catcher in 1883. The following year the Toledo team joined the American Association, at that time recognized as a major league. Walker’s brother Weldy also played for Toledo that year. White players, most notably Adrian “Cap” Anson, captain of the Chicago team, refused to play against blacks and Walker was released after the 1884 season. He continued to play for minor-league teams through the 1889 season. In 1891 he patented a new type of artillery shell but never enjoyed any profits. He was soon arrested, but acquitted, in the stabbing death of a white man. Walker’s wife died in 1895, leaving him with two sons and a daughter. He married another acquaintance from Oberlin in 1898, Ednah Jane Mason, but later that year he was arrested and sent to prison on charges of mail robbery. When released after a year he moved to Steubenville, Ohio, and purchased a hotel. By 1902 he edited a newspaper dedicated to African Americans. He bought an opera house in Cadiz, Ohio, in 1904, where he promoted stage plays and motion pictures. Four years later he wrote a book entitled Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America. Increasingly agitated by the racism that he experienced in the United States, he advocated a return to Africa. Walker gained other patents that improved movie reel projectors in 1920, the same year his second wife died. He sold his business and retired to Cleveland, where he died of pneumonia in 1924. Light-skinned African American players masqueraded briefly as Native Americans or Cubans in order to play professional baseball. But eventually they were exposed and banished from the major leagues. In 1920 Rube Foster, owner of the black Chicago American Giants, formed the Negro National League, a professional circuit that paralleled the white major leagues. It was not until the advent of Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 that black players reentered the national pastime.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1861–1889

First Nine of the Cincinnati (Red Stockings) Base Ball Club. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

only six of the eleven teams finished the season. The Boston team, which had hired away manager Harry Wright and most of the Cincinnati team, added star pitcher Albert Spalding from the Rockford, Illinois, team and easily won four pennants from 1873 to 1876. Hulbert acquired Spalding as player-manager for his Chicago team and invited representatives from only the top franchises to form the National League in 1876. Only cities of greater than 75,000 in population were permitted as members in order to ensure an adequate fan base. The original members consisted of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Hartford, Brooklyn, St. Louis, and Louisville. The league office scheduled all games to ensure an equal number for all teams and paid official umpires five dollars per game for the

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contests. It banned gambling, alcohol sales, and Sunday games to gain greater respect and promote the league as wholesome middle-class entertainment. It recruited a former U.S. senator to act as league president to provide further credibility. In 1877 four Louisville players were banned for life for throwing games, and the Cincinnati team was expelled for selling beer and playing on Sunday. Such actions reinforced the league’s moral image. The owners wrested control of league affairs from the former players’ operation and asserted their authority in 1879 with the adoption of the reserve clause in player contracts. The maneuver “reserved” players to the team that originally signed them to a contract unless that team offered to sell or trade them. The owners rationalized the strategy as a means to prohibit the richest teams from buying all the best players; but it also removed the players’ options and restricted their salaries to whatever the team owners offered them. The reorganization of the league and team owners’ control thus represented a model for all future professional sports leagues. Hulbert died shortly after founding the National League and Spalding assumed the club presidency and league leadership in 1882. Disgruntled owners of teams

Albert Goodwill Spalding (1850–1915) Spalding was born the eldest of three children on September 2, 1850, in Byron, Illinois. When his father died in 1858 Albert was sent to Rockford, Illinois to live with an aunt and there he took up baseball as the star pitcher for a local team. He gained fame in 1867 when he defeated the barnstorming Washington Nationals, perhaps the best team in the country. By 1871 he was pitching for the Boston Red Stockings in the professional league, winning four championships from 1872 to 1875. He married Sarah Keith in 1875, a union that produced one son. The next year Spalding pitched and managed the Chicago White Stockings team and, along with his brother, opened a sporting goods company. As principal shareholder, he became president of the Chicago team in 1882 and the acknowledged leader of the National League owners. By that time his business produced “official” baseballs and a booklet touted as the “Official Base Ball Guide.” Spalding expanded his product line to include football, basketball, golf, bicycles, hunting, boating, and skating equipment. He not only diversified his product lines, but he also consolidated the industry by buying up rivals. Although headquartered in Chicago, he maintained a branch office in New York, and stores in Denver and Philadelphia. By 1909 the Spalding Company boasted of thirty stores in America and another six in foreign countries. Not all of Spalding’s marketing strategies proved successful, however. Before players adopted numbers to distinguish them from one another, Spalding promoted different-color socks for each position, an innovation unappreciated by the fans. His world tour of 1888 failed to impress the British, and their denigration of baseball as a children’s game eventually led to the formation of the Mills Commission (1905–7) that, heavily influenced by Spalding, perpetrated the Abner Doubleday myth as the originator of baseball. When Spalding’s wife died in 1899 he married Elizabeth Churchill. In 1900 he was appointed the U.S. Commissioner of the Olympic Games. He moved to California and unsuccessfully ran for that state’s U.S. Senate seat in 1910. He died in California on September 9, 1915, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him as an original member upon its opening in 1939.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1861–1889

that had not been invited to join the National League formed their own circuits. The American Association, established in 1882, served as a second major league during the decade. The banished Cincinnati team and several others that were also owned by brewmasters formed the new league, and they agreed not to raid players from the established National League clubs. The agreement and the success of the American Association led to a postseason series in 1884, a forerunner to the World Series that started in 1903. Baseball teams also introduced new marketing strategies in the 1880s that would become standard procedures in the twentieth century, such as doubleheaders, night games, and ladies’ days, which allowed free admission for women. The latter tactic had a dual purpose, for owners believed that the presence of females would curtail the rowdy behavior of the ballplayers. While the early players were largely American-born urbanites, increasing numbers of German and Irish offspring began to appear on professional teams. The most popular player of the era, Mike “King” Kelly, played for the Chicago White Stockings. Kelly’s swiftness on the basepaths engendered a popular song, “Slide, Kelly, Slide,” but Kelly’s success was not due to speed alone. Kelly was known to cut corners when rounding the bases as the lone umpire was distracted by other matters. On one occasion he allegedly took the shortest direct route from first base, across the pitcher’s mound, sliding in to third while an umpire argued with a fan. In another game Kelly patrolled the outfield in a thick mist. When the ball was hit over his head, he ran and leaped into the fog with an outstretched glove, depositing the ball on the pitcher’s mound for the umpire to see. Fans and teammates went wild over the miraculous catch, until Kelly informed the latter by stating “nothin’ to it, boys. I always keep a spare ball in my back pocket.” Kelly’s nighttime sojourns, however, often left him unable to play. As he languished in a hungover state on the bench one day, a pop fly was hit down the line. Realizing that neither the catcher nor first baseman would get to it, he jumped up and announced, “Kelly now substituting for Chicago,” and made the catch. Despite such ingenuity Albert Spalding was dissatisfied with Kelly’s lack of playing time and had a detective follow him on his nightly adventures. The detective reported that Kelly had kept the younger players out until the wee hours of the morning drinking lemonade. When Spalding confronted Kelly with the report, the guilty player offered only one amendment. “I was definitely not drinking lemonade,” he stated. Kelly, like others of the working class, asserted his masculinity through physical prowess and he assured Spalding that he drank whiskey, not the more feminine lemonade. Spalding promptly sold Kelly to Boston for the astronomical sum of $10,000 in 1887. While a host of ethnic immigrant groups found some social economic mobility and status through professional baseball, African Americans found only temporary acceptance. Moses Fleetwood Walker, a catcher for the Toledo team in the American Association in 1884, lost his future opportunities at the highest level when white team mangers refused to play against him. Rather than forfeit game receipts, the Toledo manager acquiesced. Walker was forced to play with lesser teams and in Canada thereafter. Such “gentlemen’s agreements” would affect baseball until 1947 when Jackie Robinson finally broke the color line. The baseball rule-makers continued to adapt the game to enhance its attraction to fans throughout the 1880s. Over the course of the decade the base on balls was gradually decreased, with nine balls required in 1879 to only four by 1889. The

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Michael Joseph “King” Kelly (1857–1894) Kelly was born on December 31, 1857, in Troy, New York, to Irish immigrant parents. Upon his father’s death the family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, where he dropped out of school to take work in a textile factory; but by 1873 he returned to Troy as a member of the city baseball team. He turned professional with the Paterson team two years later. While playing for Columbus, Ohio, in 1878 he was recruited for the Cincinnati Red Stockings, and transferred to the Chicago White Stockings in 1880 where he blossomed into a star and fan favorite. Kelly spent seven years with the Chicago team, usually as a catcher or outfielder, during which they won five league championships. Kelly led the National League in batting and in runs scored in 1884 and in 1886. Kelly’s salary of $2,500 in 1886 was still well below the top stars. His unhappiness over his salary and disagreements with team president Albert Spalding and team captain Adrian Anson over his drinking habits led to his removal to Boston in 1887. Kelly stole eighty-four bases for Boston in his initial season with the team, including six in one game. In 1890 Kelly joined the Players League as a player-manager and his team won the league championship. With the demise of the league he led a Cincinnati team for a year before returning to Boston in 1891. He played briefly for the New York Giants in 1893 and retired the following year. In retirement he ran a saloon in New York and took to the vaudeville stage in a baseball play. In November 1894 he contracted pneumonia and died on November 8 in Boston. More than 5,000 fans showed up to view his remains. The Baseball Hall of Fame inducted Kelly in 1945.

pitching distance was lengthened to fifty feet in 1881 and overhand pitching was permitted in 1884. Three years later the batter was no longer allowed to call for a high or low pitch. In 1887 more definite balk rules were established and a batter hit by a pitch was granted a base. In addition to the rule changes, The Sporting News first appeared in 1886. Known as the “Bible of Baseball,” it offered in-depth coverage of the sport and became essential reading for fans. In 1888 Albert Spalding determined to spread the game and his equipment to a global market. He organized a world tour with his White Stockings and a group of all-stars that traveled across the North American continent to California, and then to Hawaii, Australia, Egypt, and Great Britain. Once again, the English rebuffed his efforts. Chicagoans, however, did adapt the game of baseball in a way that had dramatic effects in the twentieth century. In 1887 some wealthy socialites gathered at the Farragut Boat Club to listen to the telegraphic results of a big football game in the East. During a lull in the action one listener tied up a boxing glove and threw it at one of his companions. His friend grabbed a nearby broom handle and swatted it, and they soon figured out that they could play baseball indoors. The game eventually became known as softball, and a specialized ball and electric lighting allowed for indoor games. By the 1890s numerous “indoor baseball” leagues flourished in the city. By the turn of the century playground supervisors adapted it to their restricted spaces in order to teach immigrant youth the American values inherent in the game. Despite the growth of baseball, its labor relations mirrored the problems of the larger society. Baseball players, like factory employees, were dissatisfied with their

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1861–1889

John Montgomery Ward (1860–1925) Ward was the second of two sons, born on March 3, 1860, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. His father died in 1871 and his mother in 1872, leaving him an orphan by the age of fourteen. A precocious student, he entered Agricultural College of Pennsylvania (now Penn State University) in 1873. There he was a founding member of the baseball club as a pitcher. After he was dismissed from the school for stealing chickens in 1877, he spent the remainder of the year traveling and offering his services as a baseball player to numerous town teams. In July 1878 the Providence, Rhode Island, team hired him and he began his career in the National League. As a pitcher with an excellent curve ball he won forty-seven games and struck out 239 batters in 1879, leading his team to the championship. The next year he pitched a perfect game, retiring the entire Buffalo team in order. Ward transferred to the New York Giants team in 1882, but by 1884 injuries ended his pitching career. He switched to shortstop and led the league in stolen bases with 111 in 1887. Ward earned a law degree from Columbia College while playing for the Giants in 1885. He increasingly became involved in the labor disputes between players and team owners thereafter. With Ward as a primary force, the players formed their own labor union, known as the Brotherhood, in 1885. In addition to an instructional book on baseball, he wrote several articles for popular magazines that expressed the players’ point of view, in particular, their disfavor with the “reserve clause” in their contracts that prohibited their ability to seek a new team and a higher salary. By 1889 Ward and his co-conspirators had found enough disgruntled financiers to establish their own league. The financial backers had sought, and been denied, franchises in the National League. They organized the Players League and began play in 1890 with players and owners sharing any profits over $10,000. There was no reserve clause and players were guaranteed their salaries. Two hundred players joined the new organization, while only thirty-eight remained loyal to the National League. Albert Spalding managed to bribe some players and the financial backers of the new league. The stockholders accepted Spalding’s offer to merge with the National League, ending the short mutiny, and reasserting owners’ control over the rebellious players. In 1892 the National League co-opted the American Association in a similar fashion, putting it out of business. Such consolidation left the players with few choices. Ward returned to the National League as a player-manager in Brooklyn and New York; then retired after the 1894 season. He represented players in their disputes through his New York law practice and in 1912 he became owner of the Boston Braves. He relinquished that role and became the business manager of the Brooklyn franchise in the new Federal League, a third major league that lasted only two years. He died of pneumonia on March 4, 1925, in Augusta, Georgia.

minimal salaries and the conditions imposed by their employers. Baseball players referred to themselves as “wage slaves” and in 1885 the National League players formed their own labor union, known as the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players. In 1889 they organized a full-scale revolt by forming their own league based on socialistic principles in which players and financial backers shared in the profits. The Players League, sometimes referred to as the Union League or Brotherhood League, opened play in 1890. The defection of American Association players

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to the new league eventually led to the demise of the American Association, but Spalding proved more successful in his opposition. He scheduled National League games at the same time as those of the Players League in cities where both had teams, forcing baseball fans to make a choice. He threatened to banish all players who defected to the new league but then bribed star players to return to the National League. He then coerced the financial backers of the more-successful Brotherhood teams to desert their confederates by offering franchises within the senior circuit. The National League, with money in its coffers, sustained the losses of head-to-head competition, but won the war. Spalding’s tactics forced the players to succumb after only one season. Some historians have theorized that baseball grew so rapidly to become the national pastime because it replicated American business values. Baseball taught and reinforced particular characteristics in its adherence to teamwork and specialization, similar to the assembly line process in factories. The game also allowed for individualism when each batter faced the opposition. But as the American society became more urban and more commercial throughout the nineteenth century, baseball, played in open air parks and unregulated by the clock, still retained a nostalgic rural sentiment for many Americans. It would retain that feeling throughout most of the following century until superseded by professional football in the 1960s.

Football Football had already surpassed baseball as the favorite sport on college campuses by the 1890s. Like baseball, it went through a multitude of rule changes to evolve into a distinctly American game, espousing particular American values. Football appeared in the earliest American colonies as the transplanted European folk game in which two sides kicked a ball to the opponent’s goal. Similar informal and annually staged games took place on college campuses between intramural factions. At times upperclassmen challenged the lower classmen, or two classes combined to form a team against two others. The games provided an excuse, much to the chagrin of school authorities, for rival students to pummel each other and establish bragging rights. Such affairs crossed intramural lines in November 1869 when Princeton traveled to Rutgers for the first intercollegiate match in the United States. Both sides used twenty-five players in a soccer-style game that allowed players to advance the ball by kicking or hitting it with their hands. Rutgers won the initial contest 6-4, but Princeton won the following game, 8-0, a week later. Columbia joined the competition with Rutgers a year later. Like baseball, different versions of the rules proliferated. A New York convention in 1873 aimed at resolving the matter. Harvard declined to join the conference and Yale maintained that batting the ball would make the American game distinct from British soccer. In 1874 Harvard agreed to a series of matches with McGill University, a Canadian school in Montreal. Both sides agreed to use eleven players per side. McGill introduced Harvard to the rugby style of football, which allowed players to run with the ball. Harvard defeated Yale in a rugby match the next year as approximately 1,200 paid fifty cents each to witness the match, setting football on the same commercial path established by the baseball teams. Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton formed the first intercollegiate league in 1876 under the rugby rules; but disagreements over the number of players per side continued to

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mar relations between the colleges. Harvard disputed Yale’s claim to the championship in 1876, and the rivalries between the elite schools that eventually came to be known as the Ivy League led the New York Polo Club to offer a national championship trophy for a New York game that year. Such sponsorship for an athletic spectacle in the nation’s media center assumed a commercial bonanza and created a model for future contests to be played on Thanksgiving Day. The championship game of 1880, played in the snow between Princeton and Yale, resulted in a tie, but the thousands of spectators adorned in team colors, yelling, cheering, singing school songs, waving pennants, and blasting horns throughout the game exhibited the rowdy behavior expected of modern football fans. Large bets were placed on the rival teams and police had to eject some onlookers from the premises. The danger was much greater on the field. As early as 1876 opponents complained about Yale’s “win at all costs” attitude and accused the team of trying to cripple the best players of their foes. The rules allowed for throttling (choking) and slugging an opponent three times before being ejected from the game. Both Princeton and Harvard adopted canvas jackets in 1877 and Yale added canvas pants the next year. The canvas could be smeared with grease to make ball carriers harder to tackle. Frederic Remington, who later became a famous American artist, played on the Yale team in 1878; and he allegedly dipped his canvas jacket in slaughterhouse blood before the game with Harvard to make it more “businesslike.” In 1880 Walter Camp, captain of the Yale team and a member of the rules committee until his death in 1925, proposed an innovation to the rugby scrum that initiated every play in a free-for-all. Camp suggested the use of a line of scrimmage with each team maintaining the ball for a half. The introduction of a scrimmage line clearly distinguished the evolution of American football from British soccer, but the disadvantages of the new rule became apparent in 1881 when both Princeton and Yale played defensively in a boring championship game. Each team controlled the ball for a half, giving ground, but safeguarding the ball in a scoreless tie. Camp rectified that condition by requiring teams to gain five yards in three tries (downs) or relinquish the ball. Over the next two years the rules committee continued to deviate from soccer; but the emphasis remained on kicking, as field goals counted for five points and kicks after a touchdown earned four points. The game, like baseball, spread quickly to the Midwest and the West Coast. In 1881, and again in 1883, the University of Michigan traveled east to confront the eastern powers, sparking an ongoing debate between the regions. By the turn of the century the midwestern teams favored a fast style of play that featured end runs and reverses; while the East maintained its conservative approach toward mass plays and brute power. By 1882 football had reached Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, and even Colorado. College football teams appeared on campuses in Kentucky as early as 1880, and schools in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina adopted the sport before the end of the decade. A Chicago high school football league initiated interscholastic play in 1884. Like baseball, football players became more specialized in their roles. By the mid-1880s tackles, guards, a center, and backs were identified by their particular assignments. The brutality of the game, the loss of school time for away games, and the recruitment of players greatly concerned faculty members at the colleges. There were no distinct eligibility rules and the team captain or football club officers

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Walter Chauncey Camp (1859–1925) Walter Camp, born in New Britain, Connecticut, on April 7, 1859, became known as the “father of American football.” An only child, Camp attended Yale University and played for six years on its football team (1876–82) at a time when there were no limits on years of eligibility. (He played both as an undergraduate and then graduate student.) In 1883 he secured employment at the New Haven Clock Company and eventually became its president and chairman of the board. He married Alice Graham Sumner, the daughter of a famous Yale professor, in 1888; but gained his greatest renown in football. As Yale’s team captain he proposed many of the rule changes at the annual conventions that transformed football from a sport akin to soccer to a distinctly different American game. Among the changes were the reduction of players from fifteen to eleven on a side, the introduction of a line of scrimmage, a system of downs and distance required to retain the ball, allowance for tackling below the waist, and the scoring system that eventually transformed football from a kicking game to a running game. After his playing days Camp stayed engaged with the football team as an advisor, akin to a head coach. His later duties assumed those of an early athletic director. His systematic administration of the football club produced an excess of funds that were used to recruit players and provide benefits for the team, providing the model for modern football programs. Yale amassed a phenomenal record between 1876 and 1910 with Camp at the head of the program, winning 95 percent of its games. It lost only fourteen times during those years. Other schools clamored for former Yale players to be their coaches, resulting in a national network of Camp prot
eg
es. In 1914 the university constructed the Yale Bowl, the largest stadium in the United States at that time with 70,000 seats. Camp remained on the football rules committee until 1925, but he also initiated the first All-American team, along with sportswriter Caspar Whitney in 1889. Camp published more than 200 newspaper articles and authored over thirty books promoting the sport of football. During World War I the U.S. government enlisted him to direct the navy physical training program, for which he developed the “daily dozen,” a series of exercises. He died of a heart attack on March 14, 1925, while attending a meeting of the football rules committee in New York.

decided on the acceptability of players. Sometimes faculty members joined their students on the teams. The school administrators moved to take greater control of the athletic clubs that were organized and operated by students. Cornell president Andrew White refused to let the football club travel to Cleveland for a game with Michigan by stating, “I will not permit 30 men to travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind [the football].” Rule revisions for 1884 intended to decrease the brutality of the game. Still Harvard faculty formed an investigative committee that observed four games. They found slugging occurred in each and reported that in the Wesleyan–Pennsylvania game a man was unfairly thrown out of bounds by an opponent. “Then, as he was rising, but before he was on his feet, his antagonist turned, struck him in the face and knocked him down, and returned in triumph with the ball.” The committee recommended a ban on football, causing Harvard to temporarily resign from the football association.

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In the initial games, the team captains arbitrated disputes between contestants, sometimes causing prolonged interruptions in the game. They were replaced by alumni who acted as judges; but as alumni became more involved in the fortunes of their individual teams some became less neutral, with consequent charges of favoritism. The alums were replaced by a single referee in 1885. An umpire was added to the game in 1888 and hacking, throttling, and tripping were eliminated. A touchdown, however, required a player to literally touch the ball on the end zone ground and declare a score. If one or more opponents could wrestle the ball away before he did so (called a “maul in goal”) the score did not count. School rivalries and school spirit kept alumni involved in the progress and success of their schools. After playing six years (as an undergraduate and then graduate student) on the Yale team Walter Camp remained as the coach and unofficial athletic director. As the dominant team of the nineteenth century, Yale players were sought after as coaches at other schools, forming a vast network. They and other alums informed Camp of top football players throughout the country. With the large sums accumulated from gate receipts Yale could offer substantial inducements to football recruits. Perhaps the most grievous case involved James Hogan, an Irish-born athlete who captained the Yale team in 1904 and made the AllAmerican team three times. Yale not only provided free room, board, and tuition; they gave him a Cuban vacation, as well as a commission on sales of baseball programs and cigarette sales in New Haven. Other teams followed the Yale model to pursue success and obtain the national publicity garnered by the powerful eastern teams in the newspapers. Some schools used faculty members, graduate students, or even nonstudents as players for big games, others used “special” students, who attended only part-time or enrolled only during football season. Such students might enroll for only one class; but still be eligible to play on the team. Tramp athletes traveled the country in search of the best offers, similar to the revolving professional baseball players. In 1889 Harvard introduced spring football practice to better prepare the team and gain an advantage versus its chief rival, Yale. Many teams employed professional coaches, who served only during the football season. The new University of Chicago tried to gain control over the student athletic enterprises in 1892 when it hired Amos Alonzo Stagg, a former Yale star, as a faculty member and coach. By granting him a year-round position and faculty status as a professor, the university effectively took control of the students’ athletic clubs as well as the income that they generated. In 1905 college administrators formed a national governing body to control such events, which became the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The 1887 Thanksgiving Day game between Yale and Harvard at New York’s Polo Grounds drew 17,000 spectators, further establishing the commercial possibilities of college football. The national media attention provided the two schools with invaluable publicity. The game of football and its individual players received further recognition in 1889 when Walter Camp combined with sportswriter Casper Whitney to select the first All-American team from players at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Such selections established an arbitrary standard of excellence, providing fans with further reason for discussion and debate. The choices also idealized athletic heroes and tied them to patriotism as “All-Americans.” Such heroic figures populated novels and boys’ literature over the next century as role models for youth.

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Football thus presented contradictory messages that persist today. Detractors abhorred the game’s violence, lack of sportsmanship, win-at-all-costs attitude, commercialization, and use of ineligible players. Supporters claimed that it built character and required courage, self-sacrifice, teamwork, and an aggressive, martial spirit. They deemed the latter qualities extremely important for several reasons. American males had not experienced the opportunity to test their mettle and prove their bravery since the Civil War ended in 1865. If the United States was to achieve its place among the international powers of Europe the warlike qualities promoted by the game would be a necessity. The United States was already challenging Great Britain in its economic output and many Americans felt it their duty to spread democracy, capitalism, and Christianity around the world. The USA embarked on such a mission in the Spanish-American War of 1898, which made it an imperial power equal to the Europeans. Psychologists and social critics also decried the increasing feminization of the American culture. Young boys were coddled by their mothers, taught by female teachers in elementary schools, and generally under feminine influences for much of their early lives. Women increasingly called for greater roles in the American society, the right to vote, and the right to education. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, established in 1873, sought to ban alcohol, a traditional male pleasure. Women also accounted for one-third of all college students by 1880, threatening males’ traditional leadership roles. Perhaps more disturbing to some men was the females’ incursion into the traditional male bastion of sports. By the 1880s women expanded their sporting interest beyond the recreational pastimes to include tennis, golf, archery, and cycling. The engagement of women in a sport devalued that activity as a marker of masculinity. Football, however, remained and still remains a refuge for men.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing Boxing gained virtually no benefit from science or technology; yet it held great popular appeal until the 1890s, perhaps due to its primitive nature. Rounds were fought until one contestant fell or touched the mat with no limit set on the number of rounds. Wrestling holds allowed opponents to throw as well as hit each other. Boxers fought until one opponent could no longer come to scratch, a line at the center of the ring, to start the next round or until one admitted defeat. Unlike the amateur associations that regulated other sports, boxing had no singular governing body to enforce standard rules. Individual promoters, often saloon owners, staged bouts for the pleasure of the bachelor subculture that frequented their establishments. Boxing became especially popular in the western mining towns with a preponderance of young men, as females were in short supply. Few women braved the hardships of the frontier and the rough mining towns, so young men were largely left to entertain themselves. In the industrial cities of the East and Midwest as well, men congregated in saloons, which became the poor man’s athletic club. There they found recreation by drinking, gambling, and playing cards and billiards. Some saloons offered food and even showers or other amenities. The saloon became the social and political headquarters, where one might find a job or pick up mail.

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Prior to the Civil War many boxers, particularly Irish Americans, emerged from the ranks of political parties. The Democrats, in particular, employed “sluggers” who stood at the polls on election days to convince voters to pick a particular candidate. In 1860 Irish American John Heenan traveled to England to take on the British champion, Tom Sayers. The fight engendered much interest and nationalism on both sides, but ended in a draw. The Civil War interrupted professional boxing matches; but soldiers took up the sport during their leisure time in camp in order to amuse themselves and to gamble on the outcome. After the war the sport faced the moral concerns of reformers who objected to its brutality and the gambling that it inspired. The reformers succeeded in banning boxing, or prizefighting as it was called, which relegated boxers to clandestine bouts in secret locations to avoid arrest. The fighters earned most of their money from side bets rather than large purses offered by the promoters. In such cases the boxer and his supporters might wager against an opponent and his friends, or his financial backers might supply enough money to cover any debts if he lost, so that he would not incur financial ruin. In 1867 the Marquis of Queensbury, a Scottish nobleman, promoted a new set of rules to make boxing more humane and more acceptable. The new rules required the boxers to fight with padded gloves for three-minute rounds. The new rules forbade wrestling holds and declared one the winner if his opponent could not continue the fight within ten seconds after being hit (a knockout). The new rules took some time to gain acceptance in the United States (the first heavyweight championship under the new rules didn’t take place until 1892), but promoters found other ways to circumvent the boxing laws. In the 1880s they offered bouts as “exhibitions” for club members, who paid an admission fee at the front door to become a member. The exhibitions were not judged, so there was no official winner or loser. Many of the early boxers thus had records with numerous “no decisions,” amounting to a draw. In 1880 Paddy Ryan, an American, knocked out Joe Goss, an Englishman, in a bare-knuckle fight that lasted eighty-seven rounds to be acknowledged as the heavyweight champion of the world. The heavyweight championship symbolized the world’s toughest man and held great value in the Social Darwinian belief of the survival of the fittest. The nationalistic promotion of the fight helped Richard Kyle Fox, the publisher of the National Police Gazette, sell 400,000 copies of his lurid newspaper. Fox’s promotion of boxing resurrected the sport, and his running feud with John L. Sullivan raised the latter to celebrity status and increased sales throughout the 1880s. Sullivan knocked out Paddy Ryan in a bare-knuckle fight that lasted only nine rounds in 1882. Sullivan held the title for ten years, during which time he became the first national sports hero in the United States. A working-class Irish American, Sullivan built his reputation on his physical prowess by walking into saloons and challenging anyone in the house to a fight. His backers wagered and won by betting on him. Sullivan even offered $1,000 to anyone who could last four rounds with him. Once he became the champion he fought few fights other than exhibitions, but joined the vaudeville circuit as a performer, earning $1 million. Newspapers covered Sullivan’s exploits on a regular basis, elevating him to celebrity status, and creating a cult of personality. His picture hung in virtually every saloon and even the wealthy admired his strength and physicality in an age that feared the

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John Lawrence Sullivan (1858–1918) Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on October 15, 1858, John L. Sullivan became the greatest sports celebrity of the nineteenth century. His parents were born in Ireland, and his father worked as a laborer in the United States; nevertheless, Sullivan completed elementary school and even attended a business college. His physical prowess, however, outshone his mental faculties. A skilled baseball player, he allegedly turned down a professional contract in that sport. Known as “the Boston Strong Boy,” Sullivan gained a reputation by his feats of strength and by challenging saloon patrons to fight with him. He barnstormed the country, defeating local brawlers and professional boxers in the process. His victory over the former British champion Joe Goss in 1880 brought him to national attention. In 1882 he knocked out Paddy Ryan, the American champion, at a clandestine site in Mississippi due to the illegality of boxing at the time. After the Ryan fight Sullivan toured the United States, challenging anyone to earn $1,000 if they could last four rounds with him. Only one did. In 1883 Sullivan battered the British champion, Charlie Mitchell, until police stopped the encounter. Sullivan bought a saloon and led a dissolute lifestyle, but enjoyed the acclaim of boxing fans throughout the country. In 1888 Sullivan traveled to France for a rematch with Mitchell. Fought in the rain, the contest ended in a draw after thirty-nine rounds. The next year Sullivan engaged in the last of the bare-knuckle (without gloves) championships when he met Jake Kilrain. Richard Kyle Fox, publisher of the Police Gazette newspaper and Sullivan’s nemesis, sponsored Kilrain for the bout in Richburg, Mississippi. After seventy-five rounds Kilrain could not continue. After the Kilrain bout, Sullivan embarked on a vaudeville tour and a series of boxing exhibitions. He held the heavyweight title for ten years and was the first athlete to earn more than $1 million for his efforts; most of which he dissipated on alcohol and women. During that time he refused to fight any black fighters, retaining the championship for whites only. In 1892 Sullivan defended his championship against “Gentleman” Jim Corbett in a gloved bout under the Marquis of Queensbury rules in New Orleans. The younger, better-conditioned Corbett knocked out Sullivan in the twenty-first round. Sullivan published an autobiography in 1892 and again turned to the stage after his defeat. His marriage ended in a formal divorce in 1908. After years as an alcoholic he attempted to reform his life by becoming a temperance lecturer. He eventually retired to a farm in Massachusetts and died of a heart attack on February 2, 1918.

feminization of culture. Sullivan insured that the title would rest with whites by proclaiming a color ban once he became the champion, thereby refusing to fight any black fighters. Sullivan defeated Jake Kilrain in the last bare-knuckle championship bout, held in a clandestine location in Mississippi, in 1889. The fight lasted for seventy-five rounds in 100-degree heat, further establishing the toughness of the competitors. Kilrain had been a junior rowing champion under his real name of Joseph Killion. But when the National Rowing Association was informed of his professional boxing adventures, under an alias, it promptly revoked his championship title and his amateur standing. The interpretation of amateurism at that time dictated that once someone became a professional in any activity, he was tainted for all future

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The John L. Sullivan–Jake Kilrain boxing match at Richburg, Mississippi. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

contests. Such rulings carried specific connotations for relationships between social classes in a republic that claimed to be a classless society. The values of sport were dictated by middle-class standards of decorum and propriety, just as owners continue to enforce their own standards of dress and behavior on athletes (their employees) today.

Horse Racing As noted in the previous chapter, horse racing had been one of the primary sports of the early European colonists. Even in Puritan New England racing horses was rationalized as a necessary and utilitarian activity for breeding better stock. The breeders of the northern colonies bred their horses for endurance, while those in the southern colonies favored speed. In the antebellum period before the Civil War the two regions met in a series of national contests to determine the American champion. The war, however, destroyed much of the South, and the most famous of the southern race tracks, the Metairie Course in New Orleans, was forced to close in 1872. Another form of racing (harness racing) involved trotters and pacers, horses that ran with a particular gait and pulled a sulky (a small cart with a driver). The sport had developed well before the Civil War as farmers raced their wagons to market in the urban areas. The first one there enjoyed at least a brief monopoly on the sale of crops with no competition to force lower prices. Sport historians claim that harness racing developed into the first modern sport in America in the New York area by the 1820s. After the Civil War, however, harness racing faced a transition as it

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began to lose its working-class roots. Wealthy owners began to breed trotters as a commercial enterprise. They formed the National Trotting Association in 1870 to standardize rules and registered such horses a year later. Sulkies, small two-wheeled carriages, replaced wagons, and races were run over shorter distances instead of the best of three heats over distances as long as four miles. The innovations, as well as bigger purses, increased fan interest as the sport spread from its eastern origins to the Midwest. Thoroughbred owners followed the same pattern as the trotters. In addition to shorter races and more prize money, a system of handicapping rated horses according to their age, gender, and ability. Superior horses were given greater weight to carry in order to equalize the chances for others. Such procedures enhanced interest and led to greater betting on the outcome. Professional gamblers recorded their bets at the track and became known as bookies. The bookies set the odds on each horse before the race and collected bets at their appointed locations. In the larger cities gambling houses, known as poolrooms, operated somewhat clandestinely (corrupt police were paid off not to close them down or arrest patrons). At such places bets could be placed without attending the racetrack and telegraphic results gave almost instantaneous results to winners and losers. During and after the war thoroughbred racing made substantial gains. In 1863 a group of wealthy New Yorkers founded the Saratoga Springs Race Track under the leadership of John Morrissey. Born in Ireland, Morrissey gained fame in the United States as a boxer. He opened a casino at Saratoga, which made him wealthy, and he turned to politics, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. His career promoted the belief in sport as a meritocracy and one that provided social mobility for the poor and uneducated. Thoroughbred racing reached the West Coast with the founding of Bay View Park in San Francisco in 1863. The success of the Saratoga venture led the richest New Yorkers to establish the American Jockey Club in 1865. Two years later they built Jerome Park, limiting membership to 1,300 elites. The grand clubhouse offered a dining room and ballroom for social occasions. In 1867 Jerome Park initiated the Belmont Stakes, still one of the most prestigious horse races in the United States. In 1870 the wealthy residents of Baltimore founded the Pimlico Race Track in Maryland. That same year they initiated another of the Triple Crown races, the Preakness Stakes, naming the race after the original winner in 1870. The third of the Triple Crown races was instituted in 1875 as the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs Race Track in Louisville. It drew 10,000 spectators. It also launched the career of Isaac Murphy, the first great black jockey. Murphy won the Kentucky Derby three times (1884, 1890, 1891) and earned substantial sums of money before he succumbed to the pressures of racism and alcoholism at the age of thirty-five in 1896. He was the first jockey inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1955. Perhaps the most ostentatious of all racetracks was built in Chicago in 1884. Known as Washington Park, it hosted the American Derby, first run in 1884 and the premier event of the era. The luxurious, private clubhouse separated the wealthy members from the middle and working classes, who had to sit in the 10,000seat grandstand. Box seats allowed for those with the means to distance themselves from the general public. On race days the social elites arrived in their finery in horse-drawn carriages attended by liverymen. They sat symbolically above the

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masses or paraded on the promenade that ran around the clubhouse. Their affluence marked them as different, and presumably better than others. There they could be viewed in what sociologist Thorstein Veblen called an “ostentatious display,” a means to establish and showcase their status not only among the onlookers, but among their peers as well in a form of competition. In a country that proclaimed a classless society, the wealthy used sports like horse racing, polo, and yachting (and golf until the advent of public courses) to create social boundaries and prescribed ranks. The glory of Washington Park was short-lived, however, as social reformers succeeded in closing down many of the tracks in the United States. While New York legalized betting at its tracks in 1887, moralists in Chicago and other big cities who opposed gambling in general, and the corruption that accompanied the poolrooms, found success. The gamblers at many tracks had bribed jockeys or drivers of the trotters, doped horses, and even murdered owners. Some outlaw tracks operated in suburban areas outside the jurisdiction of local authorities, resulting in the moral crusade that led to the laws that banned racing. In the 1890s the wealthy then turned their attention to the new game of golf, one that needed a large parcel of land. They constructed courses on their private estates or formed private country clubs, where they could gamble in a variety of ways without interference from the government.

Rowing Like harness racing, rowing contests developed among the boatmen who unloaded goods from ships in a harbor and transported them to shore. By the 1840s college students formed rowing clubs with sleek vessels purely for exercise and competition. The first intercollegiate athletic contest occurred in 1852 when a railroad company invited the clubs at Harvard and Yale to row against each other on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The railway had built a resort on the lake and wanted to draw attention to the location. They offered expenses and a $500 pair of silver oars as a prize in an early example of the use of sport as a marketing strategy. The rivalry between the two schools led to systematic training and special diets for the rowers by 1859, and by 1864 Yale hired a professional coach in order to defeat Harvard. Harvard traveled to England to race the Oxford crew in 1869. Oxford won due to a Harvard blunder and Americans called for a rematch on American soil. The interest in rowing races led to a $4,000 prize in a five-mile race between James Hamill and Walter Brown for the American championship in 1869. The Empire City Rowing Club offered a two-mile race for women in 1871. Yale had introduced the sliding seat in 1870, a technological advancement that provided further advantage. Yale later pioneered the use of an indoor practice tank for its rowers. Professional oarsmen emanated from the working classes and the best gained fame and a measure of social mobility. Both the Ward brothers and the Biglin brothers distinguished themselves throughout the 1870s. The Biglins gained fame as national champions and were rewarded with more lucrative jobs. They won even greater prominence when Thomas Eakins, a famous American artist, portrayed

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them in a series of paintings known as the “Rowing Pictures” that depicted the changing nature of American society. The popularity of rowing led to a series of international matches with greater cultural comparisons drawn between the participants and their countries. The spreading belief in Social Darwinism promoted the idea of the survival of the fittest and that some groups had more enduring qualities and strengths than others. In 1878 Canadian Ned Hanlan defeated American Charles Courtney for $2,500 per side in Canada. In such races each rower, or the rower’s financial backers, provided the stakes by each contributing an equal share. Hanlan also defeated the British champion in England and claimed the world championship until his defeat by an Australian, William Beach, in Sydney in 1884. Rowing thus became one of the first globalized sports. The amateur rowers of the college teams considered professionalism to be demeaning and in poor taste. They raced for exercise and the glory of their schools. The National Association of Amateur Oarsmen was established in 1872 and a national amateur championship occurred the following year. The rowers at Cornell began using rowing machines in their practice sessions during 1874–75 as sport fostered new advances in technology. The competitions, known as regattas (from the early gondola races in Venice, Italy), received a great deal of publicity in the newspapers. By the 1880s the regattas attracted 30,000–50,000 spectators and the female students at Wellesley College formed their own rowing club and began adapting specific athletic uniforms for more active lifestyles. Like Harvard and the professionals, the Cornell rowers traveled to England and Europe in 1881, but lost all of their races. Undeterred, seven schools formed the Intercollegiate Rowing Association in 1883. By the late 1880s the Yale crew members trained as much as two to three hours per day and both Yale and Harvard used rowers and other athletes as subjects in their scientific schools, conducting experiments on nutrition to try to determine the best fuel for human bodies to produce the greatest performances. Rowing clubs persisted, especially in the colleges of the Northeast; but they lost their previous popularity with the ascendance of football on the campuses.

Shooting Sports Early colonists found firearms a necessity for hunting and protection and colonial muster days were scheduled to have local men form militias and meet for military training. Such training included shooting practice. At frontier taverns men often engaged in shooting contests, and by the nineteenth century turkey shoots became common forms of entertainment. In such contests a live turkey was staked to the ground at a distance from 110 to 165 yards. The first shooter to kill the turkey won it as a prize. Competitive target shooting emerged in New York City as early as 1833, and the Swiss and German immigrants of mid-century brought their shooting interests from Europe. They especially formed clubs in the Midwest, where they engaged in target shooting at bull’s eyes 200 yards away. Rifled guns allowed for greater distance and accuracy. During the war New York City hosted a shooting fest in 1863 and national competition, lasting ten days, ensued in 1868. The shooting of live pigeons became popular after the Civil War, until continued protests by concerned citizens and the American Society for the Prevention of

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1861–1889

Cruelty to Animals curtailed the activity. Trap shooting with clay targets eventually replaced the live birds. The National Rifle Association organized in 1871 and built a ninety-acre rifle range on Long Island in New York. It held its first of annual matches that same year. Its founding members consisted of wealthy socialites, but it developed into and remains one of the most powerful political lobbying groups for gun owners of all classes. In 1874 a New York gun club met the challenge of an Irish shooting club that had won the British championship. On their home soil the Americans defeated the Irishmen, then traveled to Ireland in 1875 to win the return match. The international competition proved more than a contest between clubs or individuals as the Remington and Sharps companies, U.S. manufacturers, supplied the American competitors with their latest products and backed them with the $500 stakes fee. Such sponsorship was meant to challenge the British leadership, not only in sport, but in product quality. Over the remainder of the century the United States would surpass the British in economic output to assume world leadership. The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 offered an opportunity to showcase American wares and American technology. The fair featured the Corliss engine, the world’s largest steam engine, and it also hosted an international shooting competition. Australia, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, and the United States entered competitors for the Palma Trophy, with the Americans triumphant. United States’ marksmen successfully defended their international title in 1877 and 1878. The growth of rifle clubs elicited concern among nativists, however. Many of the immigrant groups were closely allied with the labor movement and sharpshooters greatly alarmed employers. In Chicago, the center of labor unrest during the period, the German Lehr und Wer Verein (education and defense society) amounted to a workingmen’s militia. When the group held a shooting contest in 1885 the entire police force and two regiments of the National Guard were alerted in case of an uprising. A year later the U.S. Supreme Court declared paramilitary groups to be unconstitutional. The workers fixed bayonets to their guns and marched in armed protest. Chicago soon erupted in the Haymarket Massacre, leading to fears of anarchists and, ultimately, the establishment of Labor Day on May 1, throughout the world. In a more peaceful manner, women had also taken up the sport. Some, like Annie Oakley, proved more proficient than men. She and other female trick-shot artists traveled around the country giving exhibitions of their skills by the 1880s. Annie Oakley and her rival, Lillian Smith, attracted national attention. As members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show they traveled throughout the country and became international celebrities when the tour began traveling abroad in 1887.

Track and Field Intercollegiate track and field competition originated as a sideshow to the regattas of the crew teams. But, like rowing, it had precedents in the working-class sport of pedestrianism. Pedestrianism implied walking, but the rules allowed competitors to “go as you please,” meaning they could run or walk as a matter of choice, depending on their endurance capabilities. In 1861 Edward Payson Weston drew national attention when he attempted to walk from Boston to Washington, D.C.,

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in ten days. He failed in that venture, but did manage to cover the distance between Maine and Chicago in twenty-six days, six years later, to win a prize of $10,000. Such commercialized tests of human endurance began as early as 1835 when wealthy promoter John Cox Stevens offered $1,000 to anyone who could run ten miles in less than an hour. Henry Stannard, a farmer from Connecticut, covered the distance with about fifteen seconds to spare. Track and field events evolved out of the Scottish Caledonian Games of the 1850s. Desirous of maintaining their ethnic culture the Scots met on prescribed dates to compete with one another in running races, hurdles, jumping, pole vaulting, shot putting, hammer and weight throwing, caber (pole) tossing, and a tug of war. They offered cash prizes and eventually opened their competitions to nonScots. By 1870 the Caledonian Games drew 20,000 spectators. That same year a Native American who competed under the name of Deerfoot lost to a Canadian Indian in a three-mile race for $400. By that time Deerfoot was forty-five years old and past his prime. He had earned a good living as a professional pedestrian in the 1860s, competing in England and setting a record for the one-hour run of eleven miles and 790 yards in 1863. Such races inevitably made racial comparisons between the competitors with consequent stereotypes attributed to whole groups based upon the performance of an individual. For example, Deerfoot’s accomplishments led whites to believe that all Native Americans possessed innate endurance. Deerfoot and others considered to be of low birth were not welcome as members of the New York Athletic Club (NYAC), founded in 1868. The NYAC admitted only the socially elite and soon set the standards for track and field competition in the United States. It constructed the first cinder running track in the United States, introduced the innovative spiked running shoe, established and standardized rules for competition, and produced the first national championships not only in track and field, but swimming, boxing, and wrestling as well. The NYAC championships, however, were limited to amateurs and excluded any working-class competitors who were deemed to be professionals because they worked as manual laborers or competed for prizes of value (cash or goods) that might be pawned. The upper classes assumed that such competitors could be bribed by gamblers and that they would not succumb to such temptations because they did not need the money. In 1873 James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher of the New York Herald newspaper, presented a trophy, rather than a cash prize, for the winner of a two-mile race at the college regatta that year. The contest promoted greater interest in intercollegiate competition and helped Bennett to sell more newspapers. The following year the competition expanded to include a 100-yard dash, 120-yard hurdles race, a one-mile and a three-mile run, and a seven-mile walking race. Eight colleges competed for the trophies, and even more events were added for 1875. The colleges formed the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America (IC4A) in December of that year and track and field competitions soon divorced from the regattas to organize their own contests at the New York Athletic Club. The organization provided a bureaucratic governing body with rules, regulations, and records for competition, and the NYAC hosted the first national track and field championship in 1876. The sport now known as cross country developed during the same period when runners, known as hares (rabbits), got a head start. They then dropped pieces of

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paper along their route for the hunters, known as hounds, to follow in the game of chase. Today cross-country runners are still sometimes referred to as harriers. By the 1880s cross-country running had developed into a sport of its own. The interest in human endurance had popular appeal and numerous distance races attracted large crowds, especially from 1876 to 1880. The professional pedestrians engaged in six-day endurance races, resting intermittently on cots, with the one covering the greatest distance (by running or walking) declared the winner. Sir John Astley, an English nobleman, offered a silver and gold belt for an international championship race to be held in London in 1878, which was won by a Chicagoan, Daniel O’Leary. O’Leary lost the title to a British walker the next year; but Edward Payson Weston soon reclaimed the prize for the United States. An 1879 match for the Astley belt, held at Madison Square Garden in New York City, featured an English competitor, an African American, and several white Americans. Bookies set up shop within the arena and spectators placed bets as if at a horse race. A scoreboard tallied the distance covered by each participant. The contest proved so close that fans even stayed overnight, as three athletes covered more than 500 miles. The pedestrian events made Madison Square Garden a center for sports events and promoters offered as much as $20,000 in prize money for such affairs. Women, too, took part in the pedestrian contests held in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. By 1879 more than 100 women competed in the tests of endurance. Mary Marshall even defeated male contestants in a best of three races held in New York. Others, like German immigrant Bertha von Hillern, became celebrities, preaching the values of exercise. Ada Anderson, from England, competing in Brooklyn, covered 675 miles in 675 hours. Her record was extended by Madame Exilde La Chapelle, who walked 750 miles in 750 hours in a Chicago race. Amateurs, however, distanced themselves from such professional meetings. In 1879 the New York Athletic Club joined with six other athletic associations to form the National Association of Amateur Athletes of America. The new organization adopted the rules of the NYAC, which held jurisdiction over amateur contests in the United States until 1888, when factions of the New York clubs formed the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which wrested control of amateur competition throughout the United States. The AAU soon initiated national championships in track and field, swimming, boxing, fencing, and gymnastics and became the governing body for amateur sport for nearly a century. The rivalries between the athletic clubs revolved around the issue of amateurism and prestige. The athletic clubs, with their restrictive memberships, were status symbols, much like the racetrack clubhouses were for the wealthy. The NYAC built a five-story clubhouse in downtown New York at a cost of $150,000 in 1885. It included sleeping and dining rooms for members, as well as a gymnasium, swimming pool, billiard tables, a bowling alley, and a wine cellar. By 1888 the club acquired land for a country club with a running track, boathouse, and tennis courts. Other clubs spent even more to project their social status. The Boston Athletic Association doubled the cost of the NYAC structure at $300,000. The athletic clubs argued over the definition of an amateur because it not only affected status but competition. For example, the Manhattan Athletic Club, a rival of the NYAC, provided an “athletic” membership to Lawrence “Lon” Myers. An athletic membership was not a full membership (possibly due to Myers’s Jewish

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James Gordon Bennett Jr. (1841–1918) James Gordon Bennett Jr. was born in New York City on May 10, 1841, the son of a Scottish-born immigrant who became editor of the New York Herald newspaper. His father’s boldness in that venture and the possible repercussions led him to send his son to Europe, where he was largely educated in France. In 1857 Bennett Jr. joined the New York Yacht Club at the age of sixteen and eventually became its youngest commodore. He served briefly (1861–62) in the Union Navy during the Civil War but first gained fame in 1866 when he won a transatlantic yacht race, a victory that claimed six lives at sea. The younger Bennett assumed control of the New York Herald thereafter and increased sales by a combination of salacious and outrageous coverage of events as well as the use of technology. He utilized railroads, the telegraph, the transatlantic cable, special assignments, and teams of reporters. He created the news as well as reported it. Among such ventures, he funded the successful 1869 expedition of Henry Morton Stanley to Africa in search of the presumably lost British missionary doctor David Livingstone. Another adventure attempted to reach the North Pole (twenty expedition members died) and the quest for a Northwest Passage to Asia. His sponsorship of sports events made him perhaps the greatest sports promoter of the era. They included the support of Daniel O’Leary’s pedestrian feats, the first intercollegiate track and field meet, horse races, boxing matches, the establishment of the first polo club in the United States (1876), and the building of the Newport Casino (1880), which hosted the national tennis tournaments from 1881 to 1914. Bennett was also a member of the American Jockey Club and promoted fox hunting in Virginia. Bennett’s brash and vulgar behavior at his fianc
ee’s party in 1877 caused him to be ostracized from elite society and he fled to Europe, where he established the International Herald Tribune. He was a founding member of the Associated Press and a cofounder of a cable company that challenged the transatlantic cable controlled by Jay Gould. Bennett maintained his interest in sports and established an eponymous trophy for yacht races. With the advent of new technology he awarded similar trophies for balloon races and auto racing. His lavish lifestyle and seemingly constant presence made him an international celebrity. At the age of seventy-three he married Baroness de Reuter, the daughter of the founder of the European news agency. He died in France on May 14, 1918.

ancestry); but entitled one to use the club training facilities and compete in the name of the club. Myers, a frail man of 50 800 , afflicted with tuberculosis, and only 115 pounds, nevertheless held all the American running records from fifty yards to one mile at one time or another. The Manhattan A.C. sent Myers to England to compete against British runners, starting in 1881. Myers’s victories brought much publicity to him, the club, and the United States. The Manhattan A.C. provided Myers with full-time employment at the club and in 1885 members raised another $4,000 in a benefit for him. Myers pawned hundreds of the trophies and medals that he won, yet managed to retain his amateur standing. Myers finally declared himself an open professional in 1886 so that he could compete against (and defeat) Walter George, the British middle-distance champion, in a series of stakes races worth thousands of dollars.

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Such machinations drew the ire of other clubs that held to a strict definition of amateurism. With the advent of the AAU, greater enforcement of such policies banned recalcitrant athletes. Anyone who competed in an open meet (amateurs and professionals) or accepted anything more than a nominal prize could be branded as a professional and banished from all further competition. The quest for records and victories, however, did not preclude the aid of experts, science, and technology. College students began hiring professional coaches in the 1880s and Charles Sherrill, a Yale sprinter, introduced the crouch start in 1888. Photographic studies helped athletes to refine and better their technique and by 1890 John Owen of Detroit finally broke the record of 10 seconds for 100 yards, which had stood since 1868, when he ran 9.8, verified by six timekeepers with stopwatches.

ISSUES IN WOMEN’S SPORTS In the period following the Civil War women made great strides in sport, but not without confronting social, physical, psychological, and medical issues. The myriad controversies ensued as women began to escape the traditional roles of wife, mother, and homemaker that had been assigned to them. By the Civil War women assumed the additional roles of nurses and teachers, but such positions did not upset the nurturing responsibilities accorded to them. Women dissatisfied with their plight and desirous of equal rights (such as voting and the ability to own property) organized a national women’s convention in New York as early as 1848. They became increasingly active in national affairs thereafter, including suffrage, temperance, and abolitionism. The courting (dating) etiquette of the second half of the nineteenth century, known as the Victorian Age, required formal introductions, approval by family members, and chaperoned dates. Young women began to depart from such expectations in their recreational activities. During the winters young women had long skated openly in the presence of men on frozen ponds, but a croquet craze in the 1860s raised new concerns about relations between the sexes. The large lawns of middle-class homes allowed enough space for mixed groups of men and women to engage in games in public view, without the necessity of a chaperone. The dynamics of the game, however, questioned the traditional psychologies attributed to women. While men were expected to be competitive in their capitalistic business enterprises, such qualities were seen (by men) as undesirable in women. The female croquet players, however, often cheated to win by moving or hiding the balls with their hoop skirts. They also relished the occasions that allowed them to knock the males out of play. Such competitive tendencies were apparent in the formation of women’s baseball teams in the 1860s as well. Women desired to be educated, but male physicians assumed that their delicate brains could not handle the stress of complicated study. After Vassar College for women opened its doors in 1865 the students soon formed baseball teams. At other women’s colleges in the Northeast women organized rowing clubs and engaged in intramural competitions. The competitive desires of women were further exemplified with the introduction of tennis to the United States. Mary Ewing Outerbridge traveled to Bermuda where she witnessed the game being played by British colonials. In 1874 she returned to the United States with some equipment and received permission to set up a court at the Staten

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Annie Oakley (1860-1926) The most famous female athlete of the nineteenth century was born Phoebe Ann Mozee (various spellings) to Quaker parents on an Ohio farm in 1860. One of seven children, she had no formal schooling and her father died in 1866. Her mother was widowed three times. At age six Annie began shooting small game for the family’s sustenance; still her mother had to send her to a county poor farm. She was also indentured to a cruel farmer and his wife before running away. At age sixteen she traveled to Cincinnati for a shooting match, where she defeated and so impressed the male star, Frank Butler, that they eventually married. She assumed the stage name Oakley, and the couple joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1885. Oakley’s expertise with pistols, rifles, and shotguns as well as her trick shots soon made her the star of the show. Buffalo Bill’s entourage traveled throughout the country, drawing huge crowds as it tried to recreate the vanishing frontier of the American West for city dwellers. The show was a major attraction in the biggest cities and towns, and in 1887 the troupe began excursions to Europe. Among the stunts that Oakley used to thrill the crowds were shooting a succession of glass balls tossed in the air. She shattered 4,472 out of 5,000 on one occasion. She’d also shoot a lit cigarette out of her husband’s mouth. When a crown prince of Germany asker her to shoot one out of his mouth she requested that he hold it in his hand rather than his mouth. She also shot targets backwards while looking through a mirror. Such skills won her international fame. In 1901 she suffered a serious back injury in a train wreck, which limited her travel and resulted in retirement from the Buffalo Bill show. She and her husband continued their own exhibitions and at the age of sixty-two she still managed to hit all 100 clay targets from a distance of forty-eight feet. She died on November 3, 1926, in Greenville, Ohio, but remains an American icon.

Island Cricket Club managed by her brother. By 1881 the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association organized and established a national championship at Newport, Rhode Island. Richard D. Sears won and held the singles title throughout the 1880s. The Philadelphia Cricket Club sponsored a women’s championship by the end of the decade, and a professional tournament began in 1889. During the 1870s and 1880s a roller-skating fad replaced croquet as a recreational pastime. Conducted in indoor roller rinks, skating, like croquet, allowed young people to mingle in a public sphere without a chaperone. During the 1870s women also joined archery clubs, which developed specific physical skills. A National Archery Association formed in 1879 through the initiation of Albert Spalding and others and a national tournament and women’s championship was held at White Stockings Park in Chicago that year. While working-class women experienced greater physicality in their lives, the skaters and archers were middleclass participants, indicating that such interests crossed class lines. The accounts of female pedestrians have already been detailed, but in the late 1870s women also took up cycling. By 1882 Louise Armaindo claimed the distance riding championship of America, covering 843 miles in seventy-two hours. She competed against men and embarked on an international tour across the United States to Australia and England. Most women, however, were content to join local cycling clubs, hundreds of which formed in the decade. A national organization, the League of American Wheelmen, was established at Newport, Rhode Island in

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Bird’s-eye view of tennis courts on Ladies Day. Staten Island ladies’ lawn tennis club. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

1880 and soon gained political influence. The large number of cyclists lobbied their representatives for paved roads, even before the advent of automobiles. Paved roads proved much safer for the high-wheeled cyclists, who might take a “header” and suffer serious injury if their big wheels hit a stone in the unpaved roads. The middle-class cycling clubs engaged in long excursions, sometimes of 100 miles, called century runs. Bicycle rides enabled young couples to outdistance their assigned chaperones, perhaps occasionally stealing an illicit kiss. By the mid-1880s a new “safety” bicycle was developed, with two equal-sized tires, making the sport even more popular. Mass-produced cycles brought the cost down and even the working classes were able to afford used bikes. The new technologies enabled people to travel faster and cyclists were fascinated by speed. Both men and women racers became known as “scorchers,” but their velocity raised bigger issues. Speeding disrupted regular traffic and scared the horses ridden by many others. Parading cyclists also disrupted church services on Sunday; but the biggest controversies ensued over women riders. Women wore fashionable bustle skirts during the cycling craze, but the long fabrics easily caught in the bicycle spokes, causing damage to the dress and possible injuries to the rider. In lieu of the skirts women adopted bloomers or pants to ease their difficulties. Such costumes, however, raised the ire of conservative males who feared that women who usurped male clothing would soon want to usurp men’s privileged roles in the society. Women were already clamoring for the right to vote. Political leaders denounced female cyclists and some communities even passed laws to ban them from the streets. Preachers claimed that female cyclists were possessed by the devil. Adding to the concern, physicians worried that the

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female cyclists would damage their reproductive organs by bouncing on the seats, while moralists saw the practice as sinful. Men, and some women, became perplexed by female participation in sport, particularly speed or power sports that they saw as suitable only for men. In the 1890s basketball quickly spread throughout the women’s colleges and in 1895 the Vassar College women initiated a field day that included track and field events. Such activities opened new vistas for women and educators, and physicians continued to debate the proper role of exercise and competition for females. In the ensuing decades female educators would develop the play day concept, bringing schools together but mixing the teams, to avoid the social and psychological stresses that they saw in men’s competitive activities. That decision had repercussions throughout the twentieth century and beyond, as administrators, coaches, and athletes continue to wrestle with the ramifications of Title IX, the 1972 law that attempted to provide equal opportunities for all.

SUMMARY The Civil War both disrupted and curtailed sports; yet it also promoted and expanded some. While many athletes went off to war, soldiers learned to box and play baseball during their leisure hours. During the Gilded Age sports in general became more organized with bureaucratic associations serving as governing bodies that standardized rules, kept records, set eligibility guidelines, and resolved disputes. The practice of sport became more specialized as athletes began to assume particular roles and fashion specific equipment. Technological advances aided performance and reporting of sports events. The best athletes became professionals, earning a salary for their physical skills. In order to pay such salaries the athletic clubs and their events became more commercialized. Sport became a business with contests taking place at enclosed sites where spectators had to pay admission fees. Such operations required a large fan base, resulting in the concentration of professional teams in the larger cities, and the relegation of smaller locales to minorleague status. Both baseball and football began to assume modern forms. The National League achieved owner control over the players and became the model for succeeding professional sport franchises. Intercollegiate football even surpassed baseball in popularity on college campuses and initiated the team spirit and revelry that continues to mark student life. Boxing resisted, and continues to resist, organization in any one unified governing body. Through the efforts of Richard Kyle Fox, however, it did distinguish separate weight classes to equalize physical mismatches. The adoption of the Marquis of Queensbury rules brought a measure of acceptability, and boxing produced the first great American sports hero in John L. Sullivan. The gambling and corruption that accompanied both boxing and horseracing left both in disfavor by the end of the period. Rowing also declined, as popular interest swayed to baseball, which assumed the status of the national pastime. Track and field maintained its attraction and even increased in interest with the introduction of the modern Olympic Games in 1896. Track and field held particular attention for scientists because it allowed for the measurement of human potential. Perhaps the greatest gains in sport were made by women, who found in its practice a liberating experience. Sport became a vehicle for transcending the

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prohibitions of the Victorian world. Recreational activities allowed women to challenge the formal courting rituals and patterns. Sport spawned dress reform. As women adapted and adopted new clothing to fit their particular needs and discarded the restrictive corsets, hoop skirts, and bustles that limited their movement. Sport allowed women to experience a new physicality, revel in their bodies and their abilities, and disprove the stereotypical notions of female debility. By the 1890s the newspapers acknowledged in cartoons and essays the “new woman,” who was athletic, self-assured, confident, and desirous of change.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Gems, Gerald R. 1996. Sports organized, 1880–1900. Vol. 5 of Sports in North America: A documentary history. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Gems, Gerald R., Linda Borish, and Gertrud Pfister. 2008. American sport: From colonization to globalization. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Gilfoyle, Timothy J. 2006. A pickpocket’s tale: The underworld of nineteenth-century New York. New York: W. W. Norton. Gorn, Elliott. 1986. The manly art: Bare-knuckle prize fighting in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gorn, Elliott J., and Warren Goldstein. 1993. A brief history of American sports. New York: Hill and Wang. Hardy, Stephen. 1982. How Boston played: Sport, recreation, and community, 1865–1915. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Isenberg, Michael T. 1988. John L. Sullivan and his America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Currently published at Department of History, Illinois State University, Normal, IL. Kirsch, George B. 1995. Sports in war, revival, and expansion, 1860–1880. Vol. 4 of Sports in North America: A documentary history. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Levine, Peter. 1985. A. G. Spalding and the rise of baseball: The promise of American sport. New York: Oxford University Press. Mrozek, Donald J. 1983. Sport and American mentality, 1880–1910. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Riess, Steven A. 1989. City games: The evolution of American urban society and the rise of sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1995. Sport in industrial America, 1850–1920. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson. Sage, Henry J. 2005–6. Politics in the Gilded Age. Sage History. http://www.sagehistory. net/gildedage/GildedAPolitics.htm.

Web Sources Andrew Carnegie. The Gilded Age. The American Experience. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/ amex/carnegie/gildedage.html. A Classification of American Wealth, pt. 2, America in the Gilded Age. http://www.raken. com/American_Wealth/Gilded_age_index.asp. The Gilded Age (1878–1889). America’s Story from America’s Library. http://www. americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jb/gilded. Sage, Henry J. 2005–6. Politics in the Gilded Age. Sage History. http://www.sagehistory. net/gildedage/GildedAPolitics.htm.

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CHAPTER 3

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1890–1899 Matthew Llewellyn

OVERVIEW The 1890s proved to be a decade of remarkable change in American history. As the western frontier gradually closed following the conclusion of the Indian Wars, the industrial revolution transformed the United States into a world economic leader. American corporations dominated the global heavy industries such as iron and steel. Though American workers enjoyed some of the fruits of industrial prosperity labor unrest was widespread, while women entered the workforce in growing numbers. With an expanding economy, millions of new immigrants arrived onto American shores in search of a new life and prosperity. The newcomers were met by nativist hostility. American race relations also reached a new low. Through a series of discriminatory laws and practices, white society segregated African Americans, treating them as second-class citizens and often brutalizing them. Away from the domestic scene, the 1890s also witnessed the acquisition of American territories abroad following success in the Spanish-American War. Moreover, considerable advances were made in many areas of American life including science, technology, education, and medicine. In this era of rapid change and sweeping transformation, sport established itself as a popular American pastime. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the United States, blessed with booming population growth and abundant natural resources, emerged as the world leader in total manufacturing output and annual economic growth. In an age of giant corporations, pioneered by capitalists such as John Pierpont Morgan (1837– 1913), Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), and John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), the United States became the top producer of iron and steel in the world. New companies emerged, including General Electric and Carnegie Steel (later U.S. Steel), and American goods flooded international markets. Nevertheless, American economic growth was temporarily halted. In 1893 a financial panic due to the decline of American gold reserves sagged into the worst economic crisis in the country’s history. Lasting over four years, the “Panic of 1893” pushed unemployment rates to an unprecedented high. Hundreds of American businesses, including railroad

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companies and steel mills, failed. Turbulent workers’ strikes gripped the country. In spite of the depression, late nineteenth-century economic advances contributed to the development and popularity of sports throughout the United States. Higher wages and more structured workdays offered many Americans both the free time and the money to attend or participate in a wide spectrum of sporting activities. In the midst of the nation’s economic growth and depression, an influx of new immigrants, mostly from southern and eastern Europeans nations, swarmed into major American cities. Agricultural depressions and peasant uprisings had forced many Europeans to abandon their old homelands in search of a new life and prosperity in the United States. In order to process the large numbers of Italians, Russians, Hungarians, Slavs, Greeks, Jews, and others entering the country, the U.S. government opened Ellis Island in New York harbor on January 1, 1892, as the main receiving station for immigrants. As 3.6 million people poured into the United States in the 1890s alone, New York City (and Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco) emerged as the melting pot of immigrants from around the world. The arrival of immigrants from various ethnic and religious backgrounds fueled an intense American nationalism throughout the decade. Considered a threat to both American institutions and native interests, epidemics of violence broke out repeatedly. In this period of high ethnic tensions, sport emerged as both a positive Americanizing force and an avenue for immigrants to fulfill the American dream of increased wealth and social mobility. In the 1890s American race relations reached a new low. Born out of contemporary notions of black racial inferiority, and fueled by economic, political, and social frustrations, de jure and de facto segregation spread throughout the nation. Racism took its most extreme form in the South as demonstrated by the increased prevalence of lynchings of blacks. Supported by “Jim Crow” segregation and discriminatory statutes, African Americans were excluded from active citizenship and were segregated in almost every area of southern public life, including railways, hospitals, living areas, and sports. De facto segregation also permeated throughout the North, where African Americans were treated as second-class citizens, prohibited from entering white restaurants and hotels, and were forced into living in all-black urban ghettos. African American educational elites such as Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), were strongly divided on the issue of black advancement in American society. Washington, a Southerner, believed that blacks should focus on improving their economic skills in order to win white acceptance, while Du Bois, a Northerner, issued a direct challenge to the legal, political, and ideological injustices suffered by blacks throughout the country. For African Americans, sport served as both a positive and negative force. Even though successful black athletes enjoyed some luxuries and freedoms not available to other members of their race, sport reinforced racial stereotypes and, in certain instances, established a color-barrier preventing black participation. As the nation’s economy continued to grow, the boundaries of traditional gender relations gradually began to shift at the end of the century. Women began entering the workforce in increasing numbers, working predominately in the teaching and clerical professions. Supported by the political demands of women’s rights advocates, American women enjoyed greater social freedom and challenged traditional definitions of femininity. Although the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment would have to wait until 1920, women were granted suffrage in Colorado (1893), Utah

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(1895), and Idaho (1896), following Wyoming (1869). The expansion of the female labor force, however, was met by vocal opposition throughout the country. Based upon Victorian notions of womanhood, opponents of the “new womanhood” argued that American women were abandoning their domestic responsibilities and jeopardizing their physical well-being. In this contested environment, women’s sporting participation was frequently limited, as many sports were deemed too dangerous and unsuitable for women. Despite these gender restrictions, American women searched for avenues in which to participate in sport. The conclusion of the nineteenth century also witnessed the expansion of American territories abroad. Signaling a move away from the nation’s traditionally isolationist role in world affairs, the United States went to war with Spain in 1898 over her oppressive treatment of Cuba. Led by future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and his gang of “Rough Riders,” the military conflict proved to be short-lived. After only 109 days, the United States achieved resounding military victories. The Spanish-American War proved to be an overwhelming success for the United States in many ways. Under the terms of the Treaty of Peace signed in Paris on December 10, 1898, the Spanish renounced all of their rights to Cuba and granted the nation independence. Cuba quickly became a U.S. satellite. The treaty also witnessed the United States’ emergence as an imperial power. Aligned with the formal annexation of Hawaii in July 1898, the United States acquired the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Within these new territories, American colonizers introduced sports such as baseball, football, and boxing as a means of solidifying colonial relations and teaching their new subjects important American values. Back on home soil, advances in science, technology, education, and health care gradually improved the lives of countless Americans at the turn of the century. Electric trolleys and mechanical bicycles steadily replaced horse-drawn carriages as the most popular modes of urban transportation. Railroads connected far-flung American cities into a national grid. Improvements in technologies such as the printing press and the telegram contributed to the growth of the mass-media. These developments in transportation and communication proved pivotal to the spread of sport throughout the United States. The field of medicine slowly modernized as well, placing a renewed focus on caring for and improving the human body. A growing number of medical specialists advocated increased physical exercise, while pioneers such as John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) trumpeted the benefits of a strictly vegetarian diet, including his own whole-grain cereals. In the 1890s, education also became more available as the number of public high schools steadily increased. Physicians and other theoreticians who banded together in the newly formed American Physical Education Association (1886) pushed the expanded school system to include physical education and sporting activities. Higher education also experienced similar gains as more students sought advanced degrees. Sport flourished on campuses. A new environmental movement also rose to prominence during this period. Political and social thinkers believed that they could counteract the adverse effects of industrial and urban living, such as disease and pollution, through the preservation of national parks and the creation of urban green spaces. As a growing awareness focused on improving the lives and health of Americans, sport transformed into a positive force in the attainment of national well-being.

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TEAM SPORTS Baseball: A Decade of Conflict In a decade in which America experienced dramatic transformations, one thing remained consistent—the nation’s affinity for baseball. The 1890s proved to be an era of unprecedented change and dissension within professional major-league baseball. Following the dissolution of the separatist Players League (PL) in 1890, the National League (NL) faced a renewed threat from rival professional circuit, the American Association (AA). Tensions quickly developed after a national board was established to determine which teams owned the contracts to specific players before they “jumped ship” to the PL. In an effort to clear up this confusion, clubs in both leagues were asked to provide a list of the players for which they held contracts. For reasons unknown, the AA franchise from Philadelphia failed to submit their list to the national board, leaving their star players Harry Stover and Louis Bierbauer available as free agents. Acting quickly, the NL’s Pittsburgh team swooped in to sign Bierbauer, much to the chagrin of the AA, who labeled the Pittsburgh team as “Pirates,” a name that has stuck ever since. Despite an immediate appeal from the AA, the national board ruled in favor of Pittsburgh. Infuriated by the ruling and the NL’s stranglehold over professional baseball, the AA sought revenge. Collectively, AA teams began raiding NL rosters, recruiting additional financial support, and planting franchises in rival cities including Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. In the coming months, as the two leagues wrestled for control, the “Second Association War” plunged professional baseball into a state of decline. The rivalry between the two major-league circuits had an enervating affect on professional baseball. Already reeling from the financial losses incurred during the player revolt of 1890, both leagues faced an economic crisis as competition for the best ball players drove salaries up to a record high. As both leagues continued to struggle, a truce seemed the only plausible solution. Subsequently, the “National Agreement” of 1892 proposed the formation of a revised National League. Composed of the eight original NL teams plus four from the AA, the new-look National League saved professional baseball from a seemingly certain economic collapse. The rights to the five remaining AA teams were paid for at an estimated cost of $130,000. With peace restored, the National League entered the 1892 season rejuvenated and financially solvent. More important, with the absorption of the American Association, the National League asserted a complete monopoly over the highest level of professional baseball in the United States. As in the previous decades, the players were the ones to suffer under the new system. The absence of a rival major league eliminated competition between teams and drove player salaries down to an uncomfortable level. Reports indicated that in some instances player salaries were slashed by a staggering 40 percent. In the next few years, player salaries continued to decline as NL owners imposed an “unofficial” $2,400 salary cap. Remarkably, to cut costs further, the league also reduced squads to twelve players as opposed to fifteen. Seemingly overnight, the National League had wrestled power from the players, putting down their insurgency and reasserting complete dominance over professional baseball.

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Rule Changes Beyond the battles taking place for control of baseball off the field, the sport underwent a series of dramatic changes on the field. The 1890s witnessed the introduction of a number of rule changes that revolutionized the way that baseball was played. Over the course of the previous three decades, a fine balance had existed between offense and defense. Teams frequently struggled to record high scores and home-run hitting proved to be a rarity. In 1893 this pattern of impotent hitting began to change, due in part to the introduction of new pitching rules. The National League extended the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate to an astounding sixty feet, six inches, ten feet further than the previous distance. Further rule changes also required pitchers to deliver the ball with their back foot fixed to a rubber slab, eradicating the “softball” like skip-step delivery that had beleaguered NL offenses for the past few decades. Seemingly overnight, teams witnessed a remarkable upturn in offensive prowess. Home runs were witnessed in NL parks throughout the country, average team scores increased, and a new expansive style of the nation’s favorite pastime had emerged. For instance, whereas in 1892 only seven players hit .300 or above, in 1893, following the rule changes, an unprecedented twenty-six players achieved this feat. In fact, over the course of the entire decade seven players hit a whooping .400 or better average. In an effort to offset the prodigious hitting of NL offenses, managers throughout the country began to develop a new “scientific” or “inside” style of baseball. Managers placed a new emphasis on field positions, ensuring that their smartest players held the most crucial positions, such as shortstop. This new attention to detail also pushed coaches to continuously drill into their players the fundamentals of effective defense. Subsequently, over time, attributes such as throwing to the correct base and backing up the thrower became a regular feature of a team’s defensive armory. Attempts to temper the dominance of NL offenses, however, were not taken lightly. In response, the number of sacrifice bunts rose dramatically, made easier thanks to the increased distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. Hit-and-run and squeeze plays also rose in prominence, along with more aggressive base running. Led by the example of Boston Beaneaters’ star William “Billy” Hamilton, who amassed a remarkable 987 stolen bases in the 1890s alone, base-stealing became a common tactic in professional baseball.

Baseball’s Tarnished Image As offenses and defenses battled to assert their dominance, NL baseball developed a rather unsavory reputation for the aggressiveness of its play. Throughout the country, players sharpened their spikes in an effort to inflict deep wounds against their opponents when sliding into bases. Infielders tripped or blocked base runners. Catchers threw their masks in front of runners to hinder their progress toward home plate. More alarmingly, the clearing of the dugout became a frequent occurrence as heated rivalries spilled over into full-blown fistfights. No other team captured this bellicose spirit better than the Baltimore Orioles, one of the National League’s most successful franchises throughout the 1890s. Led by their pugnacious player-manager John McGraw (1873–1934), the Orioles used a variety of dirty tricks such as verbal abuse to intimidate opponents and umpires alike.

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The ferociousness on the diamond also transferred to the stands as spectators added to the National League’s increasingly tarnished reputation. Over the course of the decade, the National League relaxed its traditional ban on both Sunday baseball and the sale of alcohol on the grounds. These policy changes, combined with the reduction of general admission to only twenty-five cents, shifted the traditional demographics of baseball spectators. Gradually, the league’s intended middle-class audience was overrun by ethnic and working-class men eager to enjoy a hot Sunday at the ballpark with a beer. Predictably, as the tension reached a fever pitch during the game, drunken fans threw beer bottles and rained foul language on opposing players and umpires. Reports of umpires and opposing players being forced to leave the stadium hastily at the end of the game in fear of physical attack from home fans were not uncommon. Furthermore, the growing presence of people from ethnic groups such as Irish Catholics and German Jews attending ball games contributed to a dangerous spike in ethnoreligious violence. For the nation’s urbane elites and powerful middle classes, the prevalence of player and spectator violence reaffirmed their convictions that professional baseball was a disreputable American sporting pastime. Attempting to regain its middle-class fan base and its reputation as a purveyor of respectability, the National League launched an initiative to curb the outbursts of player and spectator violence. In 1897 the league strengthened the rules against fielders using their bodies to block runners off the bases. The following year, the league produced a new set of guidelines under the title, “A Measure for the Suppression of Obscene, Indecent and Vulgar Language upon the Ball Field.” This initiative, aimed predominately at eliminating the roughhouse tactics employed by the Baltimore Orioles, stated that any player caught addressing a fellow player or an umpire in a “filthy” manner would be subjected to a fine, or worse, a lifetime ban from the game. Despite the threat of hefty punishments, the league’s crackdown on disorderly conduct proved completely ineffective as not one single player was found guilty of violating the new guidelines.

The Rise of the American League As the decade progressed, the National League faced more serious problems than unruly player behavior. The economic depression of 1893 lowered disposable incomes for millions of Americans and drove attendances down to an unprofitable low. In the 1890s the average game attendance across the country plummeted to between only 2,000–3,000 spectators, 500–1,000 less than recorded in the 1880s. Baseball’s economic woes aside, the 1890s also revealed more fundamental problems that undermined the stability of the National League. Most notably, a substantial disparity existed between the top and bottom teams in the league. In addition to the Boston Beaneaters, who claimed five pennants including three consecutive titles in 1891–93, only Baltimore and Brooklyn won NL titles in the 1890s. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the league’s worst team, the Cleveland Spiders, amassed a dismal record of only 20 wins in 154 games during the course of the 1899 season. The absence of both quality teams in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—three of baseball’s historically powerhouse cities (as well as largest in population)—and an adequate playoff system added to the growing litany of problems affecting the National League.

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As the National League continued to flounder, a rival league emerged intent on challenging for baseball supremacy. In 1894 Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson (1864– 1931), a former Cincinnati sportswriter, took over the reins as president of the Western League, a struggling minor-league circuit. Intent on turning around the league’s fortunes and cleaning up baseball’s tarnished image, Johnson implemented a policy of hard-line reform. First, he claimed full control of the league’s scheduling, introduced stricter rules prohibiting unruly player and spectator behavior, and worked to ensure that the league’s struggling franchises remained financially solvent. The indefatigable Johnson also moved to break up the National League’s monopoly over professional baseball. At the forefront of Johnson’s grievances with the major-league circuit was its ability to be able to draft players from the Western League and other minor-league systems for only $500 per player. In Johnson’s estimations, this figure was far too low. He asserted that the National League’s penny-pinching contributed enormously to the failure of a number of minor-league teams who lost many of their star players for limited financial reward. In 1896 Johnson directly confronted the National League, demanding that they pay a higher premium for minor-league players. The Western League president also insisted that players could only be drafted after they had played at least two full seasons in the minor leagues. Both suggestions were unanimously rejected by the National League. Angered at the ruling, Johnson upped the stakes by issuing a direct challenge to the National League. In 1900 Johnson took advantage of the wave of patriotism sweeping the country following success in the Spanish-American War by renaming the Western League the “American League” in an attempt to give it more of a national character. Johnson’s biggest move came, however, when he planted four new franchises in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland, the four cities recently vacated by the National League in 1900. Johnson’s actions laid the framework for a “Great Baseball War” between both the National and American League circuits, a conflict that would consume professional baseball over into the early years of the twentieth century. Apart from the power struggles and rule changes, baseball in the 1890s is perhaps best remembered for the enactment of a “color ban” that barred black players from the nation’s favorite pastime up until Jackie Robinson’s much-publicized entrance into the major leagues in 1947. Unofficial bans had prevented blacks from playing in the National League since 1872. Yet as many as fifty-four African Americans played professional baseball on integrated teams from 1883 to 1898. Nonetheless, most professional baseball teams enforced a “Gentleman’s Agreement,” whereby they promised not to field any black players. As Jim Crow racial segregation swept across the country, situations for black players rapidly deteriorated, culminating in the complete exclusion of blacks from white professional teams just prior to the turn of the century. In response to their exclusion, black players formed professional teams and began touring throughout the country. The most famous of these all-black teams were the Cuban Giants. Formed in 1885 by waiters and porters at the Argyle Hotel in Babylon, New York, the Giants took on all comers, blending showmanship with remarkable feats of baseball prowess. By calling themselves the “Cubans” and talking gibberish on the field, black players attempted to mask their African American ethnicity. By 1900 five major black professional teams were competing throughout the United States, including the Cuban Giants, the Cuban X Giants, and the Columbia Giants.

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Basketball: The Invention of an American Pastime On a cold winter’s morning in December, 1891, James Naismith (1861–1939) invented the game of basketball. He created the new sport in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the School for Christian Workers (later renamed the International Young Men’s Christian Association Training School and still later renamed once again as Springfield College). In an attempt to combat the boredom encountered by students during the long, harsh New England winters, Naismith devised basketball as indoor game. Although primitive by today’s standards, the game spread rapidly within Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA), Young Women’s Christian Associations (YWCA), colleges, schools, and settlement houses throughout the country. Embraced by both men and women, basketball would grow to become one of the most popular sports within the hotly contested American sporting landscape.

James Naismith and the YMCA The game’s inventor, Naismith, was a thirty-one-year-old Canadian immigrant working at the school as an instructor. Born in Almonte, Ontario, Naismith was a graduate of McGill University, where he studied for undergraduate and divinity degrees. Dr. Luther Halsey Gulick (1865–1918), director of the gymnasium in Springfield and president of the college, challenged his faculty to devise a suitable game for students to be played indoors during the winter months. Recognizing the competitive element so firmly entrenched in American industrial life, Naismith moved away from the YMCA’s traditional gymnastic and calisthenics exercises in favor of team-based competition. After experimenting with a variety of games including tag, baseball, soccer, lacrosse, and football, Naismith created basketball by attaching peach baskets, found in a storeroom, onto the lower rail of a balcony at each end of the school’s gymnasium. To the delight of Gulick and the school’s student body, the first game was played in Springfield’s gymnasium on December 21, 1891, with Naismith and his colleague Amos Alonzo Stagg (1862–1965), a future College Hall of Fame football coach at the University of Chicago, captaining the two nine-man teams. Unlike the complex rules that govern the modern game, Naismith’s basketball could be played by adhering to only thirteen simple rules. Players could throw the ball in from any direction, but they could not strike it with the fist, run with it, or hold it to their body. Shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking an opponent in any way was strongly prohibited. Naismith’s original rules also stipulated that any violation of the last rule would result into a foul, with three team fouls between goals counting as a goal for the opposing team. Of further importance, Naismith also assigned an umpire to call fouls and disqualify players who violated the rules. A referee was also designated to arbitrate on matters of scoring, timekeeping, and out-of-bound balls. Divided into two fifteen-minute halves, with a five-minute rest period in between, the game ended with the side with the most points declared the winner. Naismith’s invention of basketball exceeded all expectations. Led by some of Naismith’s earliest students and fellow instructors at Springfield, basketball diffused to university campuses and schools across the country. Naismith himself traveled widely promoting his recent invention in cities including Albany and Troy, New

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1890–1899

York, and Newport and Providence, Rhode Island. Stagg introduced the game to students at the University of Chicago in 1893, only a year after his appointment as the school’s head football coach. In response to the game’s burgeoning popularity, intercollegiate contests soon emerged. In fact, on February 9, 1895, the Minnesota State School of Agriculture defeated Hamlin in the first recorded intercollegiate basketball clash. Over the course of the next few years, colleges formed intercollegiate leagues in different regions of the country such as the New England League, which was comprised of Amherst, Holy Cross, Williams, and Dartmouth. Basketball’s greatest advances took place within the gymnasiums of YMCAs. On January 15, 1892, the YMCA’s leading campus magazine, Triangle, published a detailed description of Naismith’s new game, recommending basketball to YMCA leaders throughout North America. Seemingly overnight, basketball spread like wildfire, with more than 200 YMCAs in the United States and Canada introduc- Dr. James Naismith, inventor of basketball. ing the game to their members. Set predominately (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) on college campuses, especially along the Pacific coast and in the Midwest, YMCA chapters and gymnasiums promoted a specific brand of Protestantism known as “muscular Christianity.” Arriving onto American shores from England in the mid-1800s, muscular Christianity pushed for the development of muscular bodies and moral souls, an ideology that became the seedbed of the YMCA. Basketball emerged as a vehicle for the promotion of muscular Christian beliefs. YMCA leaders believed that supervised athletic competition such as basketball would draw immigrant groups and the working classes away from debased amusements, taverns and saloons, and into a safe, Christian environment. YMCA leaders also trumpeted basketball as a means by which to inculcate the nation’s youth with highly desirable traits such as self-control, discipline, and leadership, all of which were fundamental to being successful in a competitive capitalist society. Alongside the overwhelming success of the men’s game, basketball also proved to be remarkably popular among American women. Contemporary notions of females held that they were fragile and physically inferior to men, and so they were restricted from participating in many popular sports during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Basketball, however, proved to be an exception. Women’s basketball began at Smith College, an all-girls school in Northampton, located only fifteen miles from Naismith’s Springfield gymnasium. In a move led by Senda Berenson (1868–1954), an athletic director at Smith, basketball was first introduced to the students in 1892. Berenson’s version of the game, modified to suit women’s assumed physical capabilities, spread throughout women’s colleges, high schools, and settlement houses across the United States. Despite being dressed in bloomers and thick black stockings, female basketball players quickly developed a reputation for the intensity of their play, much to the chagrin of some early observers who believed that women

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Western High School girls’ basketball, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

belonged only in the domestic sphere. Playing on small indoor courts, away from the critical gaze of men, American women embraced basketball with remarkable zeal. During a period in which Victorian beliefs constrained American women, the sight of young women playing competitive basketball aroused widespread criticism from male and female observers alike. Yet within five years of basketball’s invention the first women’s intercollegiate game was played, on April 4, 1896, between Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.

Teaching the World to Play Basketball Extending beyond the borders of the United States, basketball quickly reached both Asia and Europe before the close of the nineteenth century. Basketball was taken abroad by Naismith’s former students, who held positions as Christian missionaries in far-flung countries throughout the world. Most notably, led by Dr. David Willard Lyon (1870–1949), China’s first YMCA was established at Tientsin in 1895. Serving as the organization’s athletic director, Lyon quickly introduced basketball to the members of the chapter in an effort to promote muscular Christianity, including both physical strength and religious devotion, among the Chinese people. Future missionary efforts in countries such as the Philippines also promoted basketball as a tool for the advancement of the Christian faith. Nevertheless, despite basketball’s positive reception in the Far East, most European nations, especially Great Britain and Germany, rejected Naismith’s invention as a game more suitable for girls than for boys.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1890–1899

Senda Berenson: A Pioneer for Women’s Basketball (1868–1954) In 1892 the appointment of Lithuanian immigrant Senda Berenson to the position of athletic director at Smith College changed the nature of the women’s game dramatically. Berenson, a graduate of the renowned Boston Normal School of Gymnastics—the nation’s first physical education teacher training school—promoted an adapted form of Naismith’s basketball to her all-female student body. Conforming to the prevailing medical, psychological, and social concepts of a woman’s physical capabilities, Berenson introduced stricter regulations for women’s play in an effort to shift the current focus on competition to teamwork and cooperation. Dividing the court into thirds (front, center and backcourt), Berenson confined the six players (forwards, centers, guards) to their respective section of the court so that no player had to dash breathlessly back and forth. Under Berenson’s innovative rules, players were only allowed to dribble the ball one time (later three bounces), and physical contact such as the snatching or batting of the ball from the hands of an opposing player was strictly prohibited. Remarkably, Berenson’s rule changes failed to dampen the enthusiasm of American women. Across the country, students organized interclass basketball contests on a daily basis, events that became the focal point of college life. With class colors and banners, female student bodies cheered as freshman challenged sophomores, and juniors took on seniors. With the game’s burgeoning popularity, Berenson hoped to establish a single set of rules based upon her modifications. In 1899 Berenson organized a National Women’s Basketball Committee under the umbrella of the American Physical Education Association (APEA), a professional society for the promotion of physical education (later termed AAHPERD). Through the Spalding Brothers’ sporting goods company, the nascent committee issued its first official rulebook for the women’s game in 1901. Throughout her lengthy and successful career, Berenson became editor of sport magnate A. G. Spalding’s (1850–1915) Women’s Basketball Guide, a publication that helped promote the women’s game throughout the United States. She later served as chair of the U.S. Women’s Basketball Committee for six years. In 1911, after a career spanning nineteen years, the champion of women’s basketball resigned from her position as athletic director at Smith College. During her tenure at Smith, Berenson redefined Victorian notions of “true womanhood” by encouraging American women to engage in physical exercise and sporting competition in a safe and controlled environment. In 1985, as a fitting testimony to her impact on both women’s basketball and sport in general, Berenson was inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

As basketball continued to traverse the globe, in the United States the game underwent a series of dramatic changes. The peach baskets that served as the goals in Naismith’s original design were replaced by bottomless cord nets in 1893. Heavy wire-screen backboards followed shortly after. Prior to this change, a ladder had been used to retrieve the ball from the peach baskets. The year 1893 also witnessed the introduction of the pivot. In 1894 free throws replaced goals as the standard punishment for rule violations, and a standardized basketball, slightly larger than a soccer ball, replaced the older, heavier ball. Although Naismith envisaged basketball as being a strictly shooting and passing game, the dribble was introduced in 1896 by players trying to obtain better shooting angles. During this period a further rule change mandated that teams would be limited to only five players as opposed

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to the original nine. These changes only served to heighten the nation’s interest in basketball. The Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) soon sponsored regular basketball tournaments, while early professional leagues slowly emerged prior to the turn of the twentieth century. Most notably, barnstorming swept across the country led by premier professional teams such as the Buffalo Germans and the New York Wanderers. Unlike the most popular major American sports such as football and baseball, which have obscure origins in European folk games and evolved for centuries from more primitive forms, Naismith’s basketball had no historical roots. Additionally, basketball did not require a large outdoor space or expensive equipment. Rather, Naismith’s game could be played both indoors and outdoors, in teams or individually, and with the only additional requirement of a ball. Subsequently, as the process of urbanization continued to draw millions of Americans into the nation’s largest cities, limiting the space for play, basketball emerged during the last decade of the nineteenth century as a convenient and affordable sporting pastime. As basketball flourished, one of Naismith’s former students, William G. Morgan (1870–1942), followed his mentor’s lead by inventing another popular ball game— volleyball. A graduate of Springfield College, Morgan took a position as director of physical education at the Holyoke, Massachusetts, YMCA. During the early months of 1895, Morgan invented his new game for his business-class members who found basketball too exhausting. Throughout the remainder of the decade, volleyball followed basketball’s lead as it spread like wildfire across the country.

College Football: The “King” on Campus In the last decade of the nineteenth century, football asserted itself as the king on college campuses throughout the United States. Led by elite eastern schools such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, football evolved from an informal, studentcontrolled pastime into a multimillion-dollar national spectacle. With the absence of a professional league (which was not created until 1920) football spread like wildfire across the country, forging regional styles of play and establishing important football traditions. Nevertheless, the growth of college football sparked renewed calls for its abolishment. Critics condemned the game’s growing violence and brutality, and questioned its place in institutions of academic learning. By the 1890s college football looked remarkably different from the rugby-style game that first emerged in the 1870s on the prestigious campuses of Harvard and Yale. With the exception of the forward pass, which had still not been introduced, radical new rule changes established football as a distinctly American pastime. Divided into two halves as opposed to four quarters, football lasted two hours and twenty minutes as measured by a continuous play clock. Teams consisted of eleven players on a side who often played both defense and offense. Substitutions were limited to such an extent that if a player left the game he could not return. Rather than the present-day four downs to make ten yards, the rules required players to make five yards in three downs. The field was 110 yards long, and end zones did not yet exist. Furthermore, touchdowns counted for only four points instead of six, the kick after counted for two rather than one, and successful field goals earned a team five points.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1890–1899

The Invention of Volleyball During the early months of 1895, William G. Morgan (1870–1942), director of physical education at the Holyoke, Massachusetts, YMCA, invented the game of volleyball. Gaining inspiration from his former teacher, James Naismith, and his recent creation of basketball at the nearby Springfield YMCA College, Morgan set out to invent a lighter recreational activity that would cater to his center’s older, businessclass members who found basketball too exhausting. Blending elements of basketball, baseball, handball, and tennis, Morgan introduced his new, less physically demanding game at a YMCA sports conference at Springfield College. Volleyball, or minonette as it was originally called due to Morgan’s use of a badminton net, received a favorable reception. Under Morgan’s original rules, volleyball was played by two teams who each pushed an oversize ball back and forth over a six-foot, six-inch high net. Morgan also stipulated that each team would comprise nine players, an “out” would be called if the ball landed outside the perimeter of the court or hit the floor after more than one bounce, and the game would be played in nine “innings,” with “three outs” allowed before a team lost a serve. In 1896 Dr. Alfred Halstead of Springfield College suggested that Morgan drop the title “minonette” in favor of “volleyball,” since, in Halstead’s opinion, players seemed to be “volleying” the ball back and forth over the net. With its new name and an official set of published rules, volleyball swept throughout YMCAs, YWCAs, schools, and colleges across the United States. Incorporated in physical education programs, volleyball became a popular sport for both men and women. By 1900 the game’s growing popularity signaled dramatic changes to Morgan’s original rules. Through the Spalding Brothers’ sporting goods company, a new, lighter-weight ball was introduced in an effort to speed up the game and allow for the introduction of more dynamic plays. Under the recommendation of the Physical Directors Society of the YMCA, the first-bounce rule and the use of innings were both eliminated. In its revised form, twenty-one points constituted a game and the net was raised to seven feet. Furthermore, balls landing on the side line of the court were deemed “in” and balls rebounding from the walls were considered out of play. In light of the sport’s early success, Christian missionaries employed volleyball as a vehicle for the promotion of their brand of muscular Christianity. Before the close of the nineteenth century, volleyball spread north across the border to Canada, and as far away as Asia and Latin America. During World War I American soldiers brought the game to Europe.

To some extent, these rule changes transformed college football into a national spectacle. Attracting huge crowds, often as big as 40,000 for games between the big-time eastern colleges, schools were forced into enclosing their playing fields, erecting permanent seating and selling entrance tickets. The reason for this enormous growth can be explained in part by the development of the sports media. Newspaper editors throughout the country viewed college football as a perfect way in which to fill the sports pages in the fall when horse racing and baseball were out of season. Subsequently, with the absence of a professional league, college football became national-headline news. Successful coaches were celebrated, star players were worshipped, and exciting plays were sensationalized. Attracting higher public visibility and widespread acceptance, college football was transformed overnight into an important part of the American sporting landscape.

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As a result of the remarkable growth of the college gridiron, universities began establishing many important football traditions. Organized cheering sections and pep bands were formed, fight songs were composed, and school colors and mascots were chosen. Also during this period, the tradition of homecoming, which included parades, banquets, and dances, was established. The annual Thanksgiving Day football game also rose to prominence in the 1890s. Viewed as the most important date on the social calendar, the event quickly became a grand spectacle for students, alumni, and the local communities alike.

Violence and Brutality in Football On the field, a radical new rule change heightened the violence and brutality of the college game. In 1888 Yale University’s football czar, Walter Camp (1859– 1925), introduced a new rule that made it permissible to tackle the ball carrier below the waist. As a result, colleges abandoned the more open running game in favor of a system of closed formations often referred to as “mass momentum plays.” The heavy concentration of players attempting to move the ball the required five yards in three attempts often brought knees in contact with heads and heightened the prevalence of serious injuries. In 1892 Harvard University devised the most renowned mass-momentum play of the late nineteenth century, the “flying wedge,” an offensive V-shaped formation that would protect the ball carrier and simultaneously deliver a severe blow to the players on the first line of defense. Even with abolition of the “flying wedge” and similar mass-momentum plays in 1894 following widespread public criticism, the game remained extremely dangerous. Concussions, broken limbs, bruised faces, and sprains became routine occurrences as players collided at full speed without the benefit of a helmet or padding. In some instances, the brutality of college football left some students dead or severely maimed. The violence and brutality on the field often transferred to the stands as students from opposing schools often clashed in bloody riots. In some instances, fistfights and the brandishing of weapons left fans severely injured or dead. Alongside the growing violence, another major abuse in college football at the end of nineteenth century was the prevalence of the “tramp” athlete. As universities sought to enhance their prestige through success on the football field, they frequently relaxed their matriculation requirements to such an extent that talented players were able to enroll, star for the college team, and then depart either after a big game or at the end of a semester. During the 1894 season, for example, the University of Michigan fielded seven (out of the eleven starters) who had neither enrolled in school nor attended any classes. Lured by the financial incentives offered by boosters and alumni eager to see their alma mater succeed, tramp athletes emerged throughout the country. Unsurprisingly, the frequency of player injuries, on-campus student violence, and the growing commercialism of the game attracted widespread criticism from reformers, moralists, and politicians throughout the country. Many university presidents aligned with their faculty members in strong opposition to the place of football on college campuses. Led most notably by Harvard University president Charles Elliot (1834–1926), opponents argued that college football jeopardized the health of the student body by glorifying violence and brutality, encouraged habitual violations of the rules, and diverted time from a student’s studies and daily life.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1890–1899

Football U. of M. alumni team ’99. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

By condemning the game’s win-at-all cost commercial spirit and calling for moderation and reform, opponents argued that college football proved incompatible with the educational mission of American universities. Interestingly, in contemporary American society the same arguments continue to be lodged against college football and intercollegiate sports in general. In some instances, faculty took their opposition of the college gridiron to the extreme by abolishing football altogether. In the 1890s alone, schools such as Trinity (later Duke), Georgetown, Columbia, and Alabama abolished football for varying lengths of time. In 1893 even U.S. president Grover Cleveland was forced to abolish the year’s Army-Navy annual football contest due to the game’s escalating violence. Nevertheless, in spite of the widespread opposition toward college football, few university presidents were willing to ban the game from their campuses. Fearing a student revolt, or simply recognizing the importance of the financial rewards and public prestige associated with the game, university presidents turned a blind eye to the evils of college football. More commonly, a growing body of advocates for college football, which included future U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt (1858– 1919), defended the game on the grounds that it supposedly helped built the necessary character and strength needed for a new industrial and urban lifestyle. Based on a belief in Social Darwinism and its “survival of the fittest” ideology, many of the nation’s leaders claimed that college football instilled the masculine and martial virtues needed for American men to govern themselves, their country, and the world.

Geographical Diffusion of Football Despite the frequent clashes over the place of football on college campuses, the game continued to spread rapidly throughout the country during the 1890s. From its

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roots and early development in the prestigious Ivy League schools of the Northeast, college football spread to every region of the country. Throughout the Midwest and the South, college campuses caught football fever. In March 1892 a game between Stanford and California even signaled the arrival of football in the Far West. Colleges large and small took up the game in part due to the demands of the student body and in part as a means by which to emulate the powerful eastern institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. University presidents established football on their campuses simply because they recognized the game’s ability to build a national reputation for their schools, attract new students, and create alumni support. The geographical diffusion of college football led to the development of regional styles of play. While established eastern schools relied heavily on their defense, budding western schools adopted an all-out attacking style. Similar regional differences were witnessed in the South, where schools developed their game around a quick, pass-oriented brand of attack. The growth of college football throughout the country also led to the establishment of regional conferences, the first of which was the Western Conference (predecessor to the Big Ten), established in 1896. As the game continued to grow, the nexus of power enjoyed by prestigious Eastern schools such as Yale was gradually being threatened, namely by the universities of Chicago, Minnesota, and Michigan. Despite the rising democratization of the college game, football remained a predominately white institution in the 1890s. Even though African Americans were in the minority on both college campuses and the college gridiron, a handful of talented black athletes played on some of the leading college teams in the nation. Perhaps the most prominent was William Henry Lewis, a native-born Virginian and son of former slaves, who played for and captained both Harvard University and Amherst College in Massachusetts. In fact, Lewis proved so successful that in both 1892 and 1893 he was chosen to Walter Camp’s prestigious “All-American” team. Football authorities later named him as the most dominating “center rush” of the entire decade. Other black football players rising to prominence during the decade included Lewis’s teammate at Amherst, William Tecumseh Sherman Jackson, and University of Michigan star George Jewett. The last decade of the nineteenth century also witnessed the beginning of college football on black campuses as Livingston and Biddle College of North Carolina competed in the first official game in 1892.

Ice Hockey: The Diffusion of Canada’s Favorite Pastime Prior to basketball’s invention, another popular team sport, ice hockey, was invented and popularized in Canada. Although primitive forms of ice hockey date back to sixteenth-century Europe, scholars have argued that the game was officially invented on March 3, 1875, when a handful of friends gathered at the Victoria Skating Rink in downtown Montreal to play the first recorded indoor hockey game. Following the game’s foundation, ice hockey slowly headed south across the border into the northern United States. During the 1890s hockey developed into an important part of the hotly contested American sporting landscape at the amateur, intercollegiate, and eventually professional levels. A national affinity for team sports, a cold-weather climate, and new opportunities for sporting participation made the northern United States a perfect site for the development of ice hockey prior to the turn of the twentieth century.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1890–1899

The 1894–95 season marked the arrival of an ice hockey craze in the United States. Teams in Baltimore, Minneapolis and a handful of other U.S. cities were reported to be playing organized, competitive ice hockey on a regular basis. In fact, the city of Baltimore built the nation’s first indoor arena with artificial ice. Marking the opening of this new facility on December 26, 1894, Johns Hopkins University challenged the Baltimore Athletic Club in an enthralling clash that ended in a 2–2 tie. Fourteen months later on February 1, 1896, Johns Hopkins, led by their captain, Canadian-born Sam Mitchell, took on Yale University in the first ever intercollegiate ice hockey game. The game also ended in a 2–2 tie. An international contest took place in Minneapolis on February 18, 1895, between the University of Minnesota and the Winnipeg Victorias. International competitions between U.S. and Canadian teams continued to grow in regularity during this period. For instance, on January 23, 1896, a four-team international tournament was held in St. Paul, Minnesota. Comprised of teams from Winnipeg and the host city, St. Paul, the four-team event represented the first international tournament ever held in the United States.

The Intercollegiate Hockey League Following Johns Hopkins and Yale’s lead, intercollegiate ice hockey quickly germinated throughout the country during the 1890s. In fact, prior to the turn of the twentieth century, the University of Maryland, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Harvard all began experimenting with Canada’s newest sporting import. Typically, American students first learned the game by watching and receiving instruction from their more-experienced and better-skilled Canadian neighbors. As the game continued to grow in colleges throughout the United States, an Intercollegiate Hockey League was formed. Comprised of the powerful northeastern schools of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Columbia, the new league officially opened in the 1899–1900 season. This was the first official intercollegiate ice hockey league in the United States.

The Amateur Hockey League Meanwhile, as the intercollegiate game continued to develop, Canadian expatriates living in New York City introduced ice hockey to the Empire State under the auspices of the New York Hockey Club. During the 1896–97 season, the New York Hockey Club played games against the Baltimore Athletic Club, the Montclair (NJ) Athletic Club, and two teams from Montreal. With the development of the game in New York City a local four-team Amateur Hockey League was established in November 1896. Kicking off the 1896–97 season, most of the teams played their games at the renowned St. Nicholas Arena in Manhattan, which officially opened its doors to the public on November 7, 1896. Operating as an exclusive ice hockey arena until 1906, upon which it began holding boxing contests, St. Nicholas served as the preeminent venue for both amateur and intercollegiate ice hockey games in the United States. Throughout the remainder of the decade, up to its eventual decline in 1917, the Amateur Hockey League flourished, eventually adding a number of teams from Boston. During the 1890s, records also indicate that a similar amateur league was in operation in Baltimore.

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As ice hockey prospered, amateur teams began forming across the United States in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and within many small communities in Michigan and Minnesota. By the turn of the twentieth century the game spread to Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Paul, and as far west as San Francisco. In the coming years, however, ice hockey in the United States would shake off its amateur roots and instead thrive at the professional level. Beginning with the creation of the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League in the early 1900s, a small-scale, semiprofessional circuit, and later with the formation of the International Hockey League in 1904, professionalized ice hockey reigned supreme.

The Olympic Games Reborn In 1896 the Olympic Games were revived. Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863– 1937), a French nobleman, led the movement to recreate the ancient Olympics (776 BCE–394 CE). Disheartened by his nation’s defeat and surrender in the FrancoPrussian War of 1871, Coubertin sought to revitalize French society through sport. Based on the German excavations of Olympia, which began in 1875, Coubertin determined that an international sporting event would ignite national popularity for sport and improve the physical fitness of the average French youth. Looking longingly toward Great Britain, the creator of modern sports and the most powerful nation during the late nineteenth century, Coubertin theorized that if France adopted a British sporting culture, it would regain its status as the leading nation in the world. Furthermore, Coubertin also believed that an Olympic revival could help establish peace and understanding among the nations of the world. Coubertin idealistically envisioned a world of nations participating peacefully but competitively in Olympic competition rather than meeting violently on the battlefield. As Coubertin would later learn, however, the forces of nationalism and politics often served to exacerbate, rather than advance, international relations. Coubertin’s efforts to revive the Olympic Games were further inspired by a series of national Olympic competitions held throughout Europe since the seventeenth century. Most notably, the “Much Wenlock Olympian Games” held in Shropshire, England, annually since 1850, served as one of the earliest precursors to Coubertin’s Olympic revival. Comprised of a mixture of athletic and traditional country sports such as quoits, football, and cricket, the Much Wenlock Games fired Coubertin’s heart for creating an international athletic festival. Another important harbinger to the modern Olympic Games also took place decades later in Greece, the true home of athletic competition. Known as the “Zappas Olympic Games” (Greek Games), this event was held on four occasions in 1859, 1870, 1875, and 1889, and was comprised of mainly agro-industrial, cultural and athletic contests.

Reviving the Olympic Flame In search of support for his plans to revive the Olympic Games, Coubertin headed to the United States in the winter months of 1889–90 where he found an ally in William Milligan Sloane (1850–1928). Sloane, a devout Quaker and professor of history and politics at Princeton University, shared Coubertin’s passion for using modern Olympic competition as a tool for promoting international harmony and building moral character. Sloane ensured Coubertin that he could count on American assistance and set out to create the American Olympic Committee (AOC).

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Buoyed by Sloane’s pledge of support, Coubertin left the United States determined to bring his ideas of an Olympic revival to fruition. The first public discussion of Coubertin’s proposal was held at a meeting of the Union des Soci
et
es Francaises de Sports Athl
etiques (USFSA) on November 25, 1892. Unfortunately, Coubertin’s audience proved less than receptive, widely denouncing the idea of reviving an ancient athletic festival. Undeterred, Coubertin traveled widely in an effort to drum up support, including trips to Great Britain and a return visit to the United States in the fall of 1893. Upon returning to his native France, Coubertin presented his proposal at an International Congressional meeting on June 16, 1894, held at the Sorbonne in Paris. After deliberating, the International Congress voted unanimously to revive the Olympic Games and to establish the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Coubertin’s calls for the creation of an international sporting spectacle had finally been answered. Based on the ancient Olympic system of staging competition on a quadrennial basis, Coubertin and the newly established IOC decided that in keeping with the classical Greeks, the modern Olympic Games would take place on a similar four-year rotation. Furthermore, due to a misunderstanding of the nature of the ancient games, Coubertin announced that the modern Olympics would only be available to amateur athletes. In reality, the athletes that participated in the ancient Olympics were fulltime professionals who earned huge sums of money and received widespread recognition. With the Olympic movement restored, only one question remained: where would the first modern Olympic Games be held? After some deliberation, Coubertin made the suggestion that Athens should be awarded the right to host the Games, as a fitting testimony to the city’s obvious historical connections to the Olympics. Following a unanimous vote, the IOC awarded the first modern Olympic Games to the Greek capital city.

The First American Olympics Team Following the announcement of an Olympic revival, on March 2, 1896, a small contingent of American athletes boarded a steamship from Hoboken, New Jersey, and began the long transatlantic voyage to Athens, Greece. Supported by private financial donations, the American team, comprised mostly of Princeton students and members of the Boston Athletic Association (BAA), enjoyed first-class accommodation aboard the North German Lines’ steamer Fulder. The team, determined to demonstrate to the rest of the world the strength of American athletics, engaged in rigorous physical training on the ship’s deck. On April 6, 1896, His Majesty King George I (1845–1913) officially opened the modern Olympic Games in Athens. After a gap of more than 1,500 years (the last Games were believed to have been held in 394 CE) the Olympic Games were reborn, with 241 athletes (all male) from fourteen nations competing over a nineday period. Coubertin’s quaint idea of an Olympic revival seized the world’s imagination; 40,000 fans, including many European and American tourists vacationing in the Mediterranean, packed into the newly refurbished Panatheniac Stadion eager to witness Olympic competition for the first time. In the track and field events, American athletes reigned supreme. Former Harvard undergraduate James B. Connolly (1865–1957) claimed first place in the triple jump. In doing so, Connolly hopped and jumped (he used a two-hops-and-a-jump

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James B. Connolly: The First Olympic Champion (1865–1957) On April 6, 1896, Irish American athlete James Brendan Connolly won the triplejump gold medal at the first modern Olympic Games held in Athens, Greece. In winning the event, Connolly became the first Olympic champion in over 1500 years, since the conclusion of the ancient Games in 394 CE. Born on November 28, 1865, as one of twelve children to Irish-Catholic parents, John and Ann (O’Donnell) Connolly, in South Boston, Connolly enjoyed a remarkably successful career, first as an athlete, and then, in later life, as a novelist and journalist. In his youth Connolly attended Harvard University and studied classics. In his determination to participate in the 1896 Olympic Games, Connolly quit his undergraduate studies. Ranking near the bottom of his class, Connolly was refused permission to compete for his country by the chairman of the university’s “Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports.” When his dean advised him against going to Athens because he might not be readmitted, Connolly declared, “I am not resigning and I am not making application to reenter. But I am going to the Olympic Games, so I am through with Harvard right now. Good day sir.” Connolly’s determination paid off. Representing Boston’s Suffolk Athletic Club, the young Irish American claimed gold in the triple jump using an unorthodox style of two hops and a jump instead of the more commonly used hop, skip, and jump technique (this technique was legal in 1896). Connolly also achieved success in both the high- and long-jump competitions, placing second and third respectively. At the 1900 Paris Olympics, Connolly tried to repeat the success that he had at the 1896 Athens Games. Despite a heroic attempt, the Irish American athlete had to settle for the silver medal, finishing behind his American colleague Meyer Prinstein (1878–1925). When his athletic career came to an end, Connolly focused his energies on cultivating his writing skills. Again Connolly’s hard work paid off, as he went on to become America’s foremost writer of maritime tales. Throughout a lengthy career, the former Olympian wrote twenty-five full-length works and more than 200 contributions to a variety of newspapers and journals, including, reports on the performances of American athletes at future Olympics. In recognition of his remarkable career, Harvard University, the school he briefly attended, awarded Connolly an honorary doctorate degree in 1949. Connolly, however, declined the honor. On January 21, 1957, James Brendan Connolly died in his hometown of South Boston.

technique) into the record books by becoming the first modern Olympic champion. Boston Athletic Association athlete Thomas Burke (1875–1929) won the 100- and 400-meter races, while his club colleague Thomas Curtis (1870–1944) triumphed in the 110-meter hurdles. Other notably American performances included Ellery Clark’s (1874–1949) double-gold winning performances in both the high- and long-jump competitions, and Princeton’s Robert Garrett (1875–1961), who won victories in the shot-put and discus events. With the exception of Australian Edwin Flack’s (1873–1935) victories in the 800- and 1500-meter events, and Greece’s Spyridon Louis’s (1873–1940) climatic victory in the marathon, American athletes swept the track and field events. In total, the United States claimed eleven firsts, seven seconds, and two thirds (medals were not introduced until 1904), demonstrating to the rest of the world the dominance of American athletics. Despite the relative success of the inaugural modern Olympic Games, the International Olympic Committee experienced considerable growing pains during its

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formative years. Most notably, Coubertin and the IOC faced widespread criticism from the Greeks who argued that the Olympic Games should be held on a permanent basis in their country. Supported by King George I, Greece attempted to seize the Olympics for themselves. Nevertheless, a defiant Coubertin persisted in his attempts to share the Games among the nations of the world. Ignoring Greek advances, Coubertin and the IOC awarded the 1900 Olympic Games to the city of Paris. Greece’s disastrous entry into a war with Turkey in 1897 ended Greek efforts to keep the games on their soil.

Paris 1900 Olympics As the second Olympic Games drew near, the United States began preparations for their defense of their self-proclaimed Olympic title. Led by the American Olympic Committee and their leader, James E. Sullivan (1862–1914), the U.S. team began to take shape as athletes from the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Georgetown, and several other universities and athletic clubs committed themselves to compete. Using his experience as secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union, Sullivan primed the American athletes for Olympic competition by scheduling the team to compete at the British Amateur Championships, held in London on July 7, 1900. Following an overwhelming display of athletic talent, the victorious American team headed to Paris for the Olympic Games. In an effort to attract wider international recognition for his Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin decided to hold the Games in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle Internationale (the Paris World’s Fair). Coubertin’s decision appeared to pay off, as a remarkable 997 athletes from twenty-four nations competed. Unlike the first edition of the modern Olympic Games in Athens, the Paris Olympiad witnessed women compete for the first time (22 women). Nevertheless, by the time the track and field events began on July 14, 1900 (the Games officially opened on May 14), the Olympic Games had gotten lost in the midst of the World’s Fair. Limiting Coubertin’s role, the exposition organizers spread the athletic events over five months and deemphasized their Olympic status to such an extent that many athletes went to their graves without ever knowing that they had participated in the Olympics. Despite the organizational problems, American athletes proved unbeatable once again, at least in track and field. Led by Ray Ewry’s (1873–1937) three first-place finishes in the standing high-, standing broad-, and standing triple-jump competitions and Alvin Kraenzlein’s (1876–1928) remarkable four winning performances in the 60-meter sprint, 110- and 200-meter hurdles, and the long jump, American Olympians won seventeen of twenty-two track and field events. When the Games finally concluded on October 28, 1900, the United States had retained its Olympic crown. More joy soon followed, as the IOC awarded the Games of the Third Olympiad to the United States, home of the Olympic champions.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing: The Birth of a New Era As international athletic festivals such as the Olympics began to slowly emerge, at the domestic level the 1890s proved to be one of the most important decades in

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the history of boxing within the United States. When John L. Sullivan (1858– 1918) defeated Jake Kilrain on July 8, 1889, for the world heavyweight championship crown, it signaled the end of an era in professional prizefighting. The Sullivan-Kilrain title bout proved to the last bare-knuckle fight in the sport’s history. The introduction of the Marquis of Queensbury rules, a stricter set of guidelines that governed the sport and mandated the use of gloves, revolutionized boxing, helping to make it a more respectable American sporting pastime. Over the course of the decade, the days of surreptitious, illegal, bare-knuckle fights were gradually replaced by legitimate, highly commercialized bouts that pushed boxing from the periphery to the center of the nation’s sporting interests. Historically, critics of professional prizefighting opposed the sport on the grounds that the sight of two men inflicting physical harm on one another was extremely brutal, an expression of savagery unsuited to the progressive tempo of American industrial life. The high rate of participant injuries and deaths, the dominant presence of immigrants and working-class fighters, and the prevalence of gambling, alcohol, and vice, tarnished prizefighting in the eyes of the nation’s urbane elites and powerful middle classes. Nevertheless, the new rules allegedly sanitized boxing, ushering in a new era of respectability. They prohibited wrestling, holding, gouging, and blows below the belt. Three-minute rounds and ten-second knockdowns also became standard features of professional prizefighting. The introduction of five-ounce padded gloves proved to be the most favorable innovation, as proponents of boxing argued that the gloves would soften blows and limit the risk of physical injury or, even worse, death. Ironically, late nineteenth-century observers failed to notice that padded gloves actual heightened the risk of injury as boxers were now able to throw considerably more punches to the head without damaging their hands.

John L. Sullivan: Heavyweight Champion of the World In the 1890s, boxing’s biggest superstar was the Irish American world heavyweight champion, John L. Sullivan. In fact, the “Boston Strong Boy,” as Sullivan became known, was an American sporting celebrity, and perhaps during the 1890s the nation’s most famous citizen. Following his defeat of Kilrain, the popular champion embarked on an acting career, appearing on stage in both the United States and Australia. He was deplored by critics, but loved by his fans, and his popularity grew. Unfortunately, the popular Irish American champion fell to drinking and this, combined with poor diet, saw Sullivan balloon to a remarkable 250 pounds, a figure considerably over his fighting weight. With mounting financial problems and deteriorating health, the thirty-four-year-old Sullivan planned a return to the ring. On March 5, 1892, the Boston Strong Boy issued a direct challenge to anyone brave enough to try to take away his coveted world heavyweight crown. Looking for another big payday, Sullivan demanded that the fight purse be set at $25,000, with an additional $10,000 side bet. Nevertheless, Sullivan’s offer was not open to just anyone. Maintaining a policy that he had held throughout his entire professional boxing career, Sullivan drew the color line and refused to fight Australia’s black heavyweight champion, Peter “Black Prince” Jackson (1861–1901). Jackson, a native of the Virgin Islands, claimed the black heavyweight crown in 1888 following his defeat of Canadian champion George Godfrey. Sullivan’s stance reflected the prevalence of racism within the United States as Jim Crow racial laws and de facto

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segregation became firmly embedded within the nation’s institutions. Sullivan’s racist beliefs aside, the world heavyweight champion avoided black fighters partly because he feared a backlash from his loyal supporters and also because he was unwilling to jeopardize his reputation by losing to a black fighter. With the fight scheduled for September 7, 1892, at the Olympic Club in New Orleans, American boxer, James J. Corbett (1866–1933) emerged as the likely contender. Supported by bookmakers and sporting men, “Gentleman Jim,” as he became known, managed to raise the necessary funds for the right to challenge Sullivan for the world heavyweight title. In contrast to his pugnacious Irish American opponent, Corbett proved to be somewhat of an enigma in professional boxing. Hailing from a respectable middle-class family in San Francisco, Corbett was a member of the city’s prestigious Olympic Club. Unlike the scores of immigrant or working-class fighters that learned their trade on the streets of the nation’s urban ghettos, Corbett learned how to box at a lavish sparring club in his home city. Moreover, the clean-cut, intelligent, and highly skilled Corbett held a respectable job as a bank clerk before transferring his skills to the ring, a world apart from the laboring jobs that previously sustained most fighters. Despite his comfortable upbringing, Corbett knew how to throw a punch. Over the course of his short career, “Gentleman Jim” had already scored knockout wins against respectable opponents such as Jake Kilrain and Jewish champion Joe Choynski. A grueling sixty-one-round draw against Australia’s “black giant,” Peter Jackson, further enhanced Corbett’s budding reputation. The sight of Corbett competing in a heavyweight championship bout signaled the dawn of a new era in professional boxing, as the “manly art” no longer remained a preserve exclusively for the nation’s immigrant and working classes.

The Modernization of Boxing In the last decade of the nineteenth century, New Orleans emerged as the boxing capital of the United States, similar, perhaps, to Las Vegas in the contemporary era. As the venue for the upcoming Sullivan-Corbett world heavyweight championship bout, New Orleans held a rich boxing history, holding regular prizefights since the 1880s. On March 14, 1890, the New Orleans city council passed an edict that legalized boxing matches fought under Queensbury rules. The ruling was based upon the provisions that no liquor could be served, no fights could be staged on Sundays, and all promoters had to contribute at least fifty dollars to charity. The city’s prestigious Olympic Club soon overcame the final legal hurdle by defeating the old antebellum antiprize-ring statutes in court, establishing the right to hold glove fights to the finish for a purse. With the legal barriers in New Orleans eliminated, the stage was set for highprofile professional boxing matches. On January 14, 1891, Jack “the Nonpareil” Dempsey (1862–96), not to be confused with his more famous namesake, challenged British-born “Ruby” Robert Fitzsimmons for the middleweight crown. Held at the Olympic Club’s new 3500-seat arena, Fitzsimmons easily overcame his haggard opponent to clinch the championship title plus an $11,000 cash purse. The lavish settings for the Dempsey-Fitzsimmons fight proved to be in stark contrast to the muddy fields and floating barges that set the stage for the illegal bare-knuckle bouts of years gone by.

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Following the Olympic Club’s success, a handful of the city’s athletic clubs began promoting professional fights on a regular basis. Seemingly overnight, the competition between clubs to stage fights transformed professional boxing into a business enterprise. Recognizing the lucrative financial rewards, clubs began competing with one another to sign prominent contenders. In the hope of staging the most popular fights, clubs offered sizable purses in the hope that gate receipts would exceed total costs. New Orleans athletic clubs also helped regulate boxing on more a professional, business-like model. The old six weight classifications conceived by press mogul and sports promoter Richard Kyle Fox (1846–1922) became standardized. Unlike the old bare-knuckle era, referees became club employees and were empowered to award decisions if the fight went the distance and stop bouts if a fighter’s life was in peril. Limited rounds were enforced, and the old challenge system, whereby boxers would call out opponents on the pages of the popular sporting newspapers, was eliminated. In stark contrast, club owners now arranged fights, rented or built indoor arenas, and hired agents to finalize contracts. In light of these changes, the demographics of boxing spectators changed dramatically. As boxing became a legitimate form of commercial entertainment, the respectable middle classes, such as doctors, lawyers, and police commissioners, openly announced their support, along with more affluent allies such as press baron Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911).

Sullivan vs. Corbett As boxing took a giant leap toward modernization, the stage was set for the showpiece event of the decade, Sullivan versus Corbett for the world heavyweight crown. In the buildup to the Corbett-Sullivan fight, the Olympic Club held a series of championship bouts including George “Little Chocolate” Dixon’s (1870–1908) September 6, 1892, featherweight-title defense against American challenger Jack Skelly. The 50 300 , 118-pound Canadian-born Dixon was the first black athlete to ever win a world title in any sport after he defeated Englishman Edwin “Nunc” Wallace in 1890 to claim the world bantamweight crown in sensational style. The following day, the prefight excitement reached a feverish pitch as over 10,000 spectators, including a small number of women, converged on the Olympic Club in New Orleans to witness Sullivan and Corbett battle. Weighing in at a hefty 212 pounds, Sullivan appeared overweight, a sharp contrast to his younger and lighter opponent. At the bell, Corbett made this advantage show as he pummeled the world champion with a flurry of well-timed blows. Dominating the fight with his “scientific” style of boxing, one that placed an emphasis on quick jabs, dodging and weaving, Corbett finished off Sullivan in the twenty-first round with a powerful right hand that brought the champion crashing to the canvas. “Gentleman Jim” Corbett was the new heavyweight champion of boxing. The end of Sullivan’s reign as champion put the final seal on boxing’s emergence as a respectable American sporting pastime. The sight of Sullivan and Corbett competing in an electrically lit indoor arena in front of 10,000 spectators from all social classes emphasizes just how far boxing had come in such a short space of time. Shaking off its infamous bare-knuckle roots, boxing developed throughout the 1890s into a legitimate enterprise. Over the remainder of the decade, more and more states legalized boxing. The number of professional bouts skyrocketed. The heavyweight crown continued to change hands as British fighter and former

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Eugen Sandow: The World’s Strongest Man (1867–1925) In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Eugen Sandow (born Friederich Wilhelm Mueller) rose to international prominence as the self-proclaimed “strongest man in the world.” Born in the former Prussian city of K€onigsberg, Sandow traveled the globe as a world-renowned strongman and entertainer. Appearing in circuses and vaudeville houses throughout the globe, Sandow used his intelligence, muscular body, and business knowledge to build a fitness empire. Placing an emphasis on health and physical fitness, Sandow encouraged an American fitness craze by making exercise fashionable to all classes. Along with the heavyweight boxing champion John L. Sullivan, Eugen Sandow was probably the most famous and easily recognizable athletic figure in the United States during this period. Gaining inspiration from the ancient statues of Greek and Roman athletes, Sandow spent his youth chiseling his muscular body with the use of early weightlifting equipment and a diet that included the consumption of over 250 grams of protein per day. By the age of nineteen, the scantily clad young muscleman began performing strongman stunts throughout Europe and North America. In 1893 Sandow appeared on stage at the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. Sandow enthralled the large crowds with his extraordinary muscular poses and weightlifting feats such as the “human barbell stunt,” a one-arm barbell lift of two humans. Sandow’s remarkable performance made him an instant celebrity in the United States. In an era in which prudish Victorian notions of respectability denounced the naked body, Sandow’s revealing muscular displays, in which he often posed in nothing more than an oak leaf, made the natural human form more acceptable. More important, Sandow’s muscular poses and emphasis toward health and fitness helped to focus the nation’s attention on the poor physical condition of American men and women. Rapid urbanization, poor sanitation, pollution, and high rates of alcohol consumption had created a nation of invalids. Fearing America’s physical decline, social reformers promoted Sandow as a standard of bodily perfection. As a result, Sandow’s strongman shows became so popular that he ignited a fitness craze that swept the United States. In an attempt to spread the world’s interest in physical fitness, Sandow organized the first major bodybuilding competition, the “Great Competition,” on September 14, 1901, in London, an event encouraging the growth of bodybuilding as a recognized sport. In recognition of Sandow’s contributions toward the field of health and physical education the German-born strongman earned the title, “The Father of Modern Bodybuilding.” A bronze statue titled “The Sandow” is awarded every year to the winner of the Mr. Olympia competition, the world’s most prestigious bodybuilding contest. Following a successful career, Sandow died of unknown causes in 1925.

middleweight champion Robert Fitzsimmons defeated Corbett on March 17, 1897, in Carson City, Nevada. Fitzsimmons’s success proved to be short-lived. On June 9, 1899, Ohio native James J. Jefferies (1875–1953) scored a stunning upset, beating his British opponent with an eleventh-round knockout. Jefferies ended the decade as the heavyweight champion of the world.

Cycling: An American Craze Unlike the myriad problems facing horse racing during this period, the 1890s witnessed the dramatic growth of organized, competitive cycling. Fueled by the

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bicycle boom that gripped the United States during this period, cycling achieved considerable popularity as a spectator sport at both the amateur and professional level. American sports fans gathered in large numbers in cities across the nation to watch the leading riders battle for supremacy in both road and track contests. Newspapers carried extensive coverage of races on their sports pages, transforming riders, seemingly overnight, into national sports heroes. Under the auspices of the League of American Wheelman (LAW), cycling’s governing body which was formed in 1880, the sport flourished in its local branches in cities across the United States. Unlike the bicycle craze that drove the middle classes toward recreational cycling, competitive amateur and professional events attracted predominately working-class and ethnic Americans. Moreover, even though American women viewed the bicycle as a symbol of liberation, cycling races remained an all-male preserve, limiting female riders to only occasional professional touring appearances.

Road and Track Races Throughout the latter half of the 1890s, the nation’s most popular cycling race proved to be the Pullman Road Race held in Chicago. Established in 1886, the race drew considerable crowds who turned out to watch the fifteen-mile contest on Chicago’s South Side. In 1894 the course was shifted over to the North Side, along a nineteen-mile stretch from Chicago to Evanston. After 1895 the course was transferred back to its original location and distance. The popularity of the Pullman Road Race can be gauged by the sheer number of entries and spectators. The contest of 1893 drew 325 entries. By 1895 the affair attracted 515 entries with thousands of spectators lining the streets in support of their favorite riders. In almost every other city in the United States, road races flourished. The staging of cycling races became viewed as a form of urban boosterism, with cities battling each other to gain the nation’s attention. In spite of their general popularity, road races failed to transfer into an enjoyable spectator sport. Similar to long-distance running events such as the marathon, road races had a logistical problem: spectators were unable to continuously follow the action as riders traversed the lengthy course. Furthermore, with only limited cash prizes awarded to the winners, the nation’s major road races attracted predominantly amateur riders. Alternatively, professional riders focused their attentions on track contests due to the lucrative cash prizes available. Track contests first emerged in the United States in 1883 within the confines of the Worchester Bicycle Club in Massachusetts. Held on a specially prepared track, usually a third of a mile in circumference, track contests gradually sprung up throughout the nation. Originally track races were contested among amateur riders. However, as soon as bicycle manufacturers recognized the lucrative financial rewards that promoting winning riders brought, amateurism began to disappear from the sport. Manufacturers attempted to attract the fastest riders, whom they would generously subsidize in return for the racers’ willingness to ride the bicycle the company made. This marketing initiative highlights the rising commercialism that permeated American sport prior to the turn of the twentieth century. With professional riders at the wheel, spectators flooded into arenas in cities such as Chicago, New York and Philadelphia to witness the nation’s leading cyclists such as the diminutive Welshman “Midget” Michael and African American champion Marshall “Major” Taylor battle for track supremacy.

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As the regulation of cycling races increased and the monetary prizes awarded to riders skyrocketed, the sport underwent fundamental changes. With large cash prizes at stake, riders abandoned their old informal training regimes and unhealthy lifestyles in favor of rigorous physical workouts. Most commonly, riders engaged in weight training to enhance leg strength and muscular body tone, as well as cardiovascular workouts to maximize lung volume. Frequently, riders also hired personal coaches—known as handlers—to design and implement individualized training regimes and to provide assistance on race strategies. Riders also placed a new emphasis on their diet, replacing cigars and alcohol, the palate of some nineteenthcentury American athletes, with more wholesome foods and drinks. Meanwhile, as riders adopted more salubrious lifestyles, the sport of cycling was improved further thanks in part to the revolutionary redesign of the bicycle. Manufacturers replaced the old rubber tires with new pneumatic tires, introduced a new lightweight frame, and made the sprocket larger in an effort to increase gearing and speed. Race organizers also improved the quality of track surfaces. The older, dusty, dirt surfaces, which hindered the growth of cycling as a spectator sport due to the creation of poor visibility as riders zoomed by, were replaced by asphalt and concrete boards. These changes drastically reduced race times and enhanced cycling as a spectator sport.

Six-Day Cycling Marathons Despite the success of both road and track contests, “six-day” marathons emerged as the most popular form of cycling in the United States. As entrepreneurs, sports promoters were eager to find new and exciting ways to sell sport to the American public. Subsequently, in an attempt to maintain spectator interest in professional cycling, promoters conceived the six-day cycling marathon. Held in spacious indoor arenas, such as New York’s renowned Madison Square Garden, riders would ride continuously for six days, or 142 hours (the races started at midnight and would conclude six days later at 10:00 P.M.), stopping only briefly for rest and refreshment. With cash prizes of $10,000 up for grabs, the rider who covered the greatest distance would be declared the winner. Eager to make a profit, sports promoters attracted large crowds by charging as little as twenty-five cents admission, allowing spectators to camp within the arena for the full duration of the race. Due to the modest entrance fee, working-class and immigrant groups made up the vast majority of race fans, turning out in large numbers to cheer on their favorite and, often, ethnically affiliated riders. Six-day cycling marathons were also strongly connected with gambling and vice. Pickpockets and hustlers frequently prayed on unsuspecting race fans. Despite the sport’s tarnished reputation, six-day cycling marathons remained an important part of the American sporting scene until the mid-1930s.

Opposition to Competitive Cycling Despite the continued growth of cycling, the sport came under attack from critics who opposed the rising presence of dirty tactics, violence, and injuries. With large cash purses up for grabs, riders would often elbow and jostle their opponents in an attempt to gain an advantage. More commonly, riders would team together in an effort to hinder the more experienced and more talented riders. Adopting a

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The Bicycling Craze In the early 1890s, a bicycle craze swept throughout the United States. The invention and production of the “safety” bicycle brought an efficient and affordable mode of transportation to most middle-class Americans. With costs ranging anywhere between $50 and $100, and manufacturing companies introducing installment purchasing plans, the number of Americans owning the “safety” bicycle quickly skyrocketed. By 1893 figures estimated that there were over one million cyclists, both men and women, in the United States alone. This number nearly quadrupled just three years later. Americans also formed cycling clubs in great numbers. By 1895, as many as 500 clubs were registered throughout the country. Prior to the early twentiethcentury invention of the automobile and the electric trolley car, the bicycle represented a marvel in modern technological advances, a true testament to the industrial age. Following the invention of the pneumatic tire in 1889, the “safety” bicycle quickly flooded American markets. With equal-sized wheels, chain gear drive, a diamondshaped frame, and efficient coaster brakes, the “safety” proved an immediate hit with American consumers. In an era of rapid urbanization, the “safety” bicycle represented a mode of freedom for most Americans, at least for the middle and upper classes. Urban dwellers frequently used their bicycles to escape the overcrowded and polluted city for the fresh air of the rural countryside. Medical practitioners spoke favorably of the numerous health benefits that riding a bicycle would present. For instance, the bicycle was believed to cure a whole host of illnesses ranging from depression to nervous exhaustion. Aimed predominately at sedentary urban workers and women, physicians and health advocates argued that the bicycle would help increase productivity in the workplace by helping Americans regain their strength and vitality. For women, the bicycle served a more symbolic purpose. In an era in which Victorian social standards restricted American women in many spheres of life, the bicycle represented a form of personal freedom. By riding a bicycle, American women were able to discard their restrictive corsets and feel the invigoration of outdoor exercise. Upholders of older Victorian notions of “true womanhood” strongly opposed American women riding bicycles. Critics claimed that excessive riding could potentially cause women serious physiological damage. The list of potential harms included an unnatural curvature of the spine, pelvic damage, spinal shock, and the damaging of vital reproductive organs. More commonly, critics argued that female cyclists would experience “bicycle face,” a malaise that was distinguishable by a protruding jaw, wild stare, and a strained expression. By the turn of the twentieth century, the bicycle craze in the United States had run its course. By 1900 over 10 million Americans owned bicycles, yet the fad appeared to be over. In the coming years, the market became saturated and innovative manufacturers turned their attentions toward the production of the automobile, an invention that would soon revolutionize American society.

tactic known as “hemming,” teams of riders would work in tandem, slowing down the pace and blocking their opponents on the inside of the track. Unsurprisingly, the use of racing strategies and physical intimidation by riders highlights the dangerous nature of cycling. For example, in 1897, in Danbury, Connecticut, one rider was killed and another seriously injured as the two riders collided at high speeds. The renowned Pullman Road Race also had a reputation for high rates of

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participant injuries, as riders frequently smashed into each other on the winding Chicago streets. Similar to most American institutions, the world of amateur and professional cycling upheld de facto racial segregation. In 1895 the League of American Wheelman (LAW), the sport’s governing body, voted to alter their constitution, excluding “Negroes” from membership in their organization. Nevertheless, this policy did not prohibit some blacks from racing. The remarkably talented African American rider Marshall “Major” Taylor dominated professional cycling, frequently beating his white opponents. In retaliation for their humiliating defeats by blacks, white riders attempted to intimidate their opponents. On numerous occasions, black riders such as “Major” Taylor were the victims of verbal and physical abuse. In contrast, the experiences of Irish and Italian riders differed enormously from their black counterparts. Similar to their success in long-distance running events, Irish and Italian immigrants to the United States dominated the world of cycling. Sponsored by neighborhood organizations and social clubs, Irish and Italian immigrants entered amateur races in cities throughout the United States. Success in the amateur ranks eventually provided an opportunity for the most talented Irish and Italian riders to join the professional circuit. Ultimately, through their participation and success in both amateur and professional cycling, Irish and Italian riders were able to acculturate to American society, whilst simultaneously expressing pride in their own ethnic identity.

Horse Racing: The Battle of the Turf Like boxing, horse racing flourished throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century. Crowds of upwards of 10,000 spectators flocked to racetracks in cities such as Brooklyn, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, and New York City, the leading centers for thoroughbred racing in the United States. Unlike the vast majority of American sports, African Americans became a visible presence in horse racing during the 1890s. Overcoming widespread racial discrimination and de facto segregation, black jockeys such as Isaac Murphy, dominated professional horse racing throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although flat-course thoroughbred racing remained the most popular form of horse racing during the decade, the steeplechase, a long-distance event with fence and ditch obstacles, continued to grow in popularity among American race fans. Led by the formation of the National Steeplechase Association (NSA) on February 15, 1895, the steeplechase contributed to horse racing’s prominence within the United States. Nevertheless, despite the sport’s continued growth and prosperity, horse racing came under a severe attack from social reformers prior to the turn of the twentieth century. Opposing the turf’s connection with organized crime, heavy gambling, and machine politics, reformers mounted a serious challenge to the presence of horse racing in the American sporting landscape. The reformers pushed cities and states to ban the popular pastime.

American Classic Series Undoubtedly the high point of the horse-racing season was a series of races later recognized in the 1930s as the American Triple Crown. The Kentucky Derby, the

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Marshall “Major” Taylor: America’s Greatest Wheelman (1878–1932) In 1899 African American cyclist, Marshall “Major” Taylor rode to victory in the famed International Cycling Association’s one-mile world sprint championship in Montreal, Canada. In doing so, Taylor became the first African American to win a world title in the white-dominated world of professional cycling. Born on November 26, 1878, to Gilbert and Saphronia Taylor, in rural Indianapolis, Indiana, Marshall Taylor developed an immediate affinity for cycling. Given his first bicycle as a child, Taylor worked in a number of bicycle shops throughout his home city where his talent became immediately apparent. In fact, one of Taylor’s bosses paid him to perform bicycle tricks while wearing a military uniform on the sidewalk outside of the owner’s shop. Pleasing customers and passersby, Taylor quickly acquired the nickname “Major.” In the early 1890s, at the height of the bicycle boom, Taylor’s big opportunity came in the form of white bicyclemaker and former high-wheel champion Birdie Munger. Serving as a father figure, Munger supplied Taylor with expensive bicycle equipment and encouraged his entrance into competitive racing. By 1893, aged only fifteen, Taylor had already won numerous road and track races in Indianapolis and Chicago. He joined the professional ranks in 1896, making his debut at a six-day bicycling marathon held at New York’s Madison Square Garden’s. Taylor’s natural ability, clean lifestyle, and dedication to his sport enabled him to soar to the top of the cycling world. Regrettably, Taylor’s success was met with widespread hostility throughout white America. In a sport that requires speed, skill, and intelligence, Taylor’s victories against white competitors challenged notions of black racial inferiority. As a result, white riders detested him and often worked together in an attempt to block him and prevent him from claiming victory. Other riders adopted more severe methods to hinder Taylor, including verbal and physical abuse. In one instance, a white rider by the name of William Becker physically attacked Taylor, choking him into unconsciousness in retaliation for losing to the black champion. Despite this racist opposition, Taylor’s success proved that it was possible to succeed through hard work and talent. At the turn of the century, Taylor broke numerous world records and, in 1900, even won the coveted League of American Wheelman’s championship. In light of these remarkable achievements, Taylor was offered substantial sums of money to compete throughout Europe. These tours established Taylor as a global sporting icon and a hero for blacks throughout the United States. Following a hugely successful professional career, Taylor retired in 1910, but he continued to face the same racism that had hindered his cycling career when he was refused entrance to study at the Worchester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Regrettably, following a series of failed financial enterprises, Taylor ended up broke, homeless, and destitute, eventually dying in Chicago in 1932.

Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes comprised the list of classic races that captivated American horse-racing fans throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century. Inaugurated in 1875, the Kentucky Derby is still held annually in Churchill Downs, Louisville, Kentucky. The nation’s leading jockeys battled for supremacy over the 1.5-mile (2.4-km) track. In 1896, however, the race distance was shortened to its current length of 1.25 miles (2 km). African American jockeys continued their widespread dominance of horse racing during this era, winning a remarkable fifteen out of twenty-eight races between 1875 and 1902. The list of

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Isaac B. Murphy: The “Colored Archer” (1861–96) Considered one of the greatest jockeys in American horse-racing history, African American Isaac B. Murphy (1861–96) rose to prominence as a sporting star in the 1880s and early 1890s. Throughout his short but highly successful career, Murphy held a staggering 44 percent winning record, amassing a remarkable 628 wins in 1,412 races, including four American Derby and five Latonia Derby victories. “The Colored Archer,” as Murphy became known, was also the first jockey in American history to win the coveted Kentucky Derby on three separate occasions. At the height of his career, Murphy earned between $15,000 and $20,000 a year, a considerable amount when compared to the standard $5,000 earned by most jockeys and a prodigious amount for an African American, most of whom earned less than $150 a year. In an era of Jim Crow racial segregation, Murphy’s fame and fortune helped the Kentucky native temporarily realize the American dream of social mobility and prosperity. Unlike the millions of African Americans who resided in slum ghettos in the North or the former slave plantations of the South, Murphy owned a host of luxury properties in white neighborhoods in both Lexington and Chicago. Isaac B. Murphy was born onto a slave farm in Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1861. Following his father’s death, Murphy and his family relocated to Lexington where the twelve-year-old prodigy began his apprenticeship as a prospective jockey in the fall of 1873. Due to his diminutive stature, the young Murphy quickly rose to prominence, winning his first competitive race in 1875. Murphy’s presence in the white world of American sports may appear strange to contemporary observers, but during this period black jockeys were the in majority. For instance, the first Kentucky Derby, held in 1875, included fourteen out of fifteen black riders. Admired for his steady hands and marvelous sense of pace, Murphy quickly established himself as one of the most elite riders in the country, earning a reputation both at home and abroad. A string of quick successes bought Murphy the fame and adulation awarded to American sports heroes during this period. Nevertheless, following his climatic Kentucky Derby victory in 1891 aboard the horse Kingman, Murphy’s career quickly spiraled out of control. In 1892 the nation’s most successful jockey only managed to win a dismal five out of forty-four races. Murphy’s woes continued, as he failed to win even a single race over the course of the entire 1894 season. Because he was struggling to maintain weight and battling alcoholism, Murphy’s career lay in a state of ruin. Murphy’s failure can be explained, in part, by the emergence of de facto racial segregation throughout the United States. Over the course of the 1890s, as racism became more prevalent, black jockeys quickly disappeared from the horse-racing scene. White riders formed “anticolored unions,” pushing the remaining black riders out of the sport altogether. Despite Murphy’s fame, “The Colored Archer” faced a similar fate. Determined to force Murphy out of the sport he had long dominated, officials frequently accused Murphy of riding drunk or not trying. Banned for considerable periods of time during the last decade of the nineteenth century, Murphy was forced to end his decorated racing career in 1895. The following year Murphy died of pneumonia on Lincoln’s birthday. In 1955, as a fitting testimony to Murphy’s contribution to the sport, “The Colored Archer” was inducted to the National Racing Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York.

black victors includes the renowned Isaac Murphy, who won aboard Kingman in 1891, and Augusta, Georgia, native Willie Simms (1870–1927), who won twice in 1896 and 1898 aboard Ben Brush and Plaudit respectively. On May 11, 1892, fifteen-year-old African American jockey Alonzo “Lonnie” Clayton from Kansas

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City, Missouri, became the youngest rider in the sport’s history to win the Kentucky Derby when he stormed to victory aboard Azra. What would become the second race in the American Triple Crown series is the Preakness Stakes, held annually at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Maryland. The Preakness is the shortest of the three American classic races at a mere 13/16 miles (1.9 km). Over the course of the 1890s the Preakness fell into a state of perpetual decline due to changes in the horse-racing industry. Between 1891 and 1893 this contest was not even staged. When it did return in 1894, the Preakness Stakes was transferred away from the Pimlico track to the Gravesend Race Track in Brooklyn, New York, where it remained until 1908. Despite the event’s decline, the decade still brought some breathtaking races. Most notably, in 1898 Willie Simms became the first African American jockey to win all three races when he cruised to victory aboard Sly Fox. Completing the trio of classic American races is the Belmont Stakes, named in honor of its original financier, industrial tycoon August Belmont Sr. (1816–90). Inaugurated in 1867, the Belmont Stakes was originally held at the Jerome Park Racetrack in the Bronx, New York. Throughout the 1890s, however, the race was transferred to the nearby Morris Park Racetrack, where it remained until the official opening of its current home in 1905, Elmont, New York. In its temporary home, the Belmont Stakes staged some terrific races over the course of the decade. In both 1893 and 1894 Willie Simms continued his dominance of racing by riding to victory aboard Comanche and Henry of Navarre. Perhaps more significant in the scope of international rivalries between American and British horses, owners and jockeys, in 1898 a British horse, Bowling Brook, became only the second foreign horse to win one of America’s most prestigious thoroughbred races. Meanwhile, as the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and the Belmont fueled interest in horse racing throughout the 1890s, the sport also witnessed the introduction of new and innovative riding styles. Led by future Hall of Fame American jockey and vaudeville performer Tod Sloan (1874–1933), the traditional riding style of jockeys holding long reins and sitting upright in the saddle with their legs dangling down was revolutionized. In 1897 Sloan experimented with short reins and stirrups while crouching on the horse’s neck, a technique that reduced wind resistance and offered a better distribution of weight on the horse. Across the Atlantic, however, Sloan’s new style of horsemanship was viewed derisively by British racing fans who labeled his unique technique “the monkey-crouch.” In the face of British criticism, Sloan demonstrated the substantial benefits of his new technique, riding to victory in England’s most prestigious thoroughbred races such as the One Thousand Guineas (1898) and the Ascot Gold Cup (1900). Due to his success, Sloan’s technique revolutionized riding styles among jockeys.

Gambling, Crime, and Machine Politics in Horse Racing Despite the aristocratic and affluent appeal of thoroughbred racing, the sport was inextricably linked with heavy gambling, organized crime syndicates, and machine politics. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century social reformers and religious leaders vehemently opposed the sport due to its seemingly total dependence on gambling, its abuse of animals, and its clear connections to political corruption. United together, opponents of the turf stepped up their campaign throughout the

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1890s to collectively ban on-track gambling and to proscribe horse racing in the United States once and for all. In the face of virulent opposition, some of the most prominent figures in horse racing such as industrial elites August Belmont Jr. (1851– 1924) and William C. Whitney (1841–1904) united with machine politicians such as New York City Tammanyites Richard Croker (1844–1922) and “Big Tim” Sullivan (1862–1913). Using their money, power, and political influence, these supporters of the turf fought to preserve the sport’s legal status. In cities across the United States, although most clearly pronounced in New Jersey, Chicago, and New York, a battle ensued over the place of horse racing and gambling in the American sporting scene. In New Jersey the Democraticdominated legislature ignored the cries for the sport’s banishment by passing the Parker Acts in 1893, an edict that legalized on-track gambling. As the state’s racetracks prospered and interest in the sport boomed, opponents of horse racing stepped up their antigambling crusade. Arousing public support, reformers in New Jersey disposed of the Democrats and handed power over to the Republicans. In 1894 the Republicans proceeded to repeal the Parker Acts, banning on-track gambling and simultaneously plunging horse racing in New Jersey into a state of decline for nearly fifty years. Meanwhile, in Chicago, a similar clash was taking place between supporters and opponents of the turf. In 1892 Chicago’s Republican mayor, Hempstead Washburne (1852–1919), closed the Garfield Park racetrack, an outlaw track renowned for heavy gambling. Reformers in Chicago scored further successes when the Washington Park Racetrack closed due to negative publicity in 1894, followed into oblivion by Hawthorne Racetrack in 1895. Despite the success of social reformers in New Jersey and Illinois, New York City set the stage for the most important battle in deciding horse racing’s fate in the United States. Frustrated by the greedy track operators and the accounts of heavy gambling, reformers, clergyman and opponents of Tammany Hall united to ban horse racing in the most prominent sporting city in the country. In September 1894 opponents of the turf persuaded the State Constitutional Convention to adopt an article banning ontrack gambling in New York. In retaliation, racing fans spearheaded a campaign to save the sport. Using their political influence, supporters convinced the state legislature to create a State Racing Commission, an initiative designed to save thoroughbred racing by drawing up national standards of conduct and behavior. Operating in conjunction with the Jockey Club, the nascent committee was fronted by prominent racing supporter and industrialist August Belmont Jr. For the time being, at least, horse racing in New York City continued to flourish under the scrutiny of the sport’s most vocal opponents. In the early decades of the twentieth century, horse racing would be plunged into an even deeper state of despair, as reformers strengthened their attack on the sport and its affiliation with gambling, crime, and machine politics.

Golf, Tennis, Yachting, and the Country Club As organized, competitive team and individual sports continued to gain popularity among the nation’s working and middle classes, America’s ultrarich shied away from institutionalized and democratic sports such as baseball and boxing. Rather, this small coterie of rich Americans, whose wealth was rooted in industrial capitalism, held an alternative sensibility about sport. For these wealthy elites, including such pioneers of industry and finance as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie,

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and J. Pierpont Morgan, sport was viewed as a badge of social status and prestige. Confining themselves to distinctive environments shaped for their pursuits, such as country clubs and leisure resorts, the rich used sport to distinguish themselves from the masses and the respectable middle-classes. Ultimately, their participation in exclusive sports, such as golf, tennis, polo, hunting, and yachting, served as an affirmation of both their wealth and preeminent standing in American society. Following the construction of the Brookline (Massachusetts) Country Club in 1882, the nation’s first luxury leisure destination, a wave of exclusive clubs and resorts appeared throughout the United States. Undoubtedly, the most prestigious was the Newport Country Club, in Rhode Island. Founded in 1894, by industrialist John Jacob Astor, sugar magnate Theodore A. Havemeyer, and three members of the Vanderbilt family, Newport quickly became an elite sporting haven for America’s ultrarich. Adopting a strong amateur approach to sport, the wealthy classes demonstrated less commitment to the disciplined development of their abilities. Rather, viewing sport as a form of recreational leisure the rich moved from sport to sport at whim. Subsequently, the 1890s also witnessed the advent of exclusive sport-specific country clubs and resorts. For example, the Jekyll Island Club, located on the Georgia coast, emerged as the premier resort for wealthy Americans interested in hunting wild game. With a combined membership wealth of over $1 billion, Jekyll Island supplied the best turkey, deer, woodcock, quail, and duck. In an effort to maintain the highest levels of elitism, the nation’s most exclusive resorts and country clubs set both exorbitant membership rates and stringent guidelines. For instance, the renowned New York Yacht Club in Newport, Rhode Island, which was founded in 1844, kept out the lower classes by refusing to register yachts under certain tonnages, prohibiting co-ownership of vessels, and refusing membership to people without the necessary social connections. Moreover, considering that in 1891 the average daily wage of an urban industrial worker in the United States was a meager $1.69 and the average annual income for the poorest classes was only $150, a $1,400 Herreshoff and Gardner racing yacht was an extravagant luxury, affordable to only a handful of America’s ultrarich. The snooty elitism of these clubs forcefully demonstrates how certain sports, such as tennis, golf, and yachting, were largely unavailable to the masses during this period.

Golf The 1890s proved to be a pivotal decade in the development of golf in the United States. Following the game’s arrival onto American shores within the confines of the St. Andrews Golf Club of Yonkers, New York, a golf craze swept throughout the country. Recognizing the sport’s burgeoning popularity among the nation’s ultrarich, exclusive country clubs began adding golf links to their extensive list of sporting amenities. Meanwhile, elite golf clubs were also constructed at a prodigious rate. In 1891 William K. Vanderbilt, railroad and banking tycoon and a member of the prominent Vanderbilt family, invited Scottish professional golfer William Dunn Jr. to Southampton, Long Island, to design the first professionally built golf course in the United States—Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. Vanderbilt’s financial stake was quickly repaid, as Shinnecock Hills became a haven for wealthy New Yorkers. In fact, the establishment of new golf courses was so well established by 1900 that 1,040 courses were in operation throughout the entire United States.

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century, America’s exclusive golf clubs were comprised of four- to nine-hole courses. In 1893 short courses began to be replaced following the construction of the Chicago Golf Club, the first eighteen-hole course in the United States. With the establishment of full-length courses, organized golf began to flourish. In 1894 two unofficial National Amateur Championships were held at the St. Andrews Golf Club and Newport County Club, two of the nation’s most prestigious courses. Nevertheless, under the auspices of the Amateur Golf Association of the United States (shortly renamed U.S. Golf Association), which was founded in 1894 by the Shinnecock, St. Andrews, Chicago and Newport golf clubs, an official U.S. Amateur Championship was instituted. In the first competition, held at the Newport Country Club in 1895, Charles B. Macdonald (1855– 1939), chief architect of Chicago’s eighteen-hole course and a major figure in the early history of golf, romped to victory, thoroughly beating his opponent Charles E. Sands (1865–1945) 12 and 11. Following the success of the U.S. Amateur Championship event, Newport Country Club also hosted the first U.S. Open Championship, a tournament now recognized as one of the four “majors.” Held on October 4, 1895, the Open attracted eleven players, including the eventual winner, Horace Rawlings (1874–1940) an English professional golfer working at the Newport Country Club. Throughout the remainder of the decade and beyond, British golfers continued to dominate the annual event, winning every single year up until 1911. Following the inception of both the U.S. Amateur and Open championships, organized golf continued to boom. In 1897 the first intercollegiate men’s golf championship was held. Princeton’s Louis Bayard Jr. claimed the men’s title, while Yale won the overall team championship. As golf continued to attract global appeal, the sport was awarded a spot on the program for the 1900 Olympic Games held in Paris. In both the men’s and women’s events, the United States took first place thanks to the efforts of U.S. Amateur Championship runner-up Charles E. Sands and Chicago art student Margaret Ives Abbott (1878–1955).

Tennis Within the confines of the nation’s exclusive country clubs, tennis also enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth throughout the decade. Following the formation of the U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association (later renamed the U.S. Tennis Association) and the institution of the U.S. Open Championship in 1881, organized competitive tennis continued to thrive at the both the national and international level. Adopting a challenge system, an initiative whereby last year’s winner would automatically qualify for the final of the next year’s competition, the U.S. Open became tennis’s showpiece event. Held on an annual basis at the prestigious Newport Casino, in Rhode Island—a playground for the nation’s ultrarich— American players such as Oliver Campbell (1871–1953) and Robert Wrenn (1873–1925) dominated the event now recognized as one of the game’s four “majors.” Newport’s hosting of the event lasted until 1915, when the U.S. Open was transferred to Forest Hills, New York. In 1900 the USTA also approved the creation of the U.S. National Men’s Doubles Championship. The success of the men’s event inspired the formation of the U.S. Women’s National Singles Championship in 1887. Held on an annual basis at the

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Philadelphia Cricket Club, the event represented a major boost for the presence of women in the American sporting scene. New Jersey native Juliette Atkinson (1873– 1944) dominated the event throughout the 1890s, winning on three separate occasions. In an attempt to ensure high social standards, the list of tournament participants was determined by invitation only. Due to the long dresses and restrictive corsets worn by upper-class American women during this period, a sport based on quick movements and mobility like tennis became extremely difficult to master. As a result, most female tennis players focused their attention on doubles competition. In fact, to mark the rising popularity of the doubles game, the U.S. National Women’s Doubles Tournament was created in 1889. Remarkably, singles sensation Atkinson also dominated the doubles event, claiming victory with various partners on five occasions throughout the decade. Unfortunately, these tournaments were severely limited to only a small group of affluent American women who played the game according to the rules of female grace and refinement. Isolated in exclusive country clubs away from the critical gaze of American society, upper-class women enjoyed the luxury of participating in gender-appropriate sports such as tennis, golf, archery, boating, horse riding, and walking. For these privileged few, sport became a positive force that promoted good health and cultivated important social values. Similar to their male counterparts, female sports were regarded as much a matter of style as of athletics. By promoting elaborate clothing styles and accessories, wealthy American women turned sport into a means of conspicuous consumption. Subsequently, fashion replaced victory as the primary purpose for female participation in elite sport. For average Americans, however, sport in the 1890s was a pastime reserved predominantly for men. Unsurprisingly, as interest in tennis proliferated throughout the United States, the sport also gained popularity abroad. As a result, the global diffusion of tennis set the stage for the creation of international competitions. In 1891 the French Open (Championnat de France) was established for men, a tournament now recognized as another of the four “majors.” The women’s version of this event was formed shortly after, in 1897. Furthermore, in 1899 four members of Harvard University’s men’s tennis team conceived the idea of creating an international competition between the United States and Great Britain. Harvard’s star player, Dwight F. Davis (1879–1945), designed the tournament format and decided to donate a special cup for the nascent International Lawn Tennis Tournament. Captained by Davis, a future U.S. secretary of war under President Calvin Coolidge, the United States surprisingly defeated their more-experienced British opponents at the Longwood Cricket Club in Boston. In honor of Davis’s contributions, the tournament was shortly renamed the Davis Cup. Unlike its original two-team format, the Davis Cup is currently contested by 137 nations.

Yachting As golf and tennis continued to prosper, America’s ultrarich also actively participated in competitive yacht racing. Indeed, throughout the 1890s the sport proved to be a favorite sport of the wealthy. The America’s Cup, the world’s most prestigious international yachting competition, continued to attract global attention. Undefeated since the advent of the competition on August 22, 1851, American vessels continued their reign of dominance throughout the remainder of

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the century. In both 1893 and 1895, an Englishman, the fourth Earl of Dunraven (1841–1926), challenged for the cup against American yachts. Renowned boat designer Nathaniel Herreshoff built the American yacht that successfully defeated their British opponents on both occasions. Determined to bring the coveted cup to British shores, Scottish tea baron Sir Thomas Lipton (1948–1931) of the Royal Ulster Yacht Club of Belfast, offered a new challenge to the long-reigning American champions. In 1899, despite Lipton’s efforts, his boat, Shamrock I, was no match for the superior Herreshoff-built American vessel Columbia. Despite further British challenges, American dominance of the event would continue long into the twentieth century. Buoyed by the nation’s success in the America’s Cup, competitive yacht racing began to spread throughout the United States. In the Midwest, the Great Lakes became a popular venue for yacht races as cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Toledo held organized events. The annual Chicago to Mackinaw, Michigan, race, established in 1898, provided Great Lakes sailors with their own prestigious challenge. More important, the Canada’s Cup, founded in 1896 and held on the Great Lakes, brought the advent of international yacht racing contests between Canada and the United States. Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest also had its own group of wealthy yachting enthusiasts. For instance, in 1891 Bellingham Bay, Washington, began a prestigious annual yachting contest.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Baker, William J. 1988. Sports in the western world. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cahn, Susan K. 1994. Coming on strong: Gender and sexuality in twentieth-century women’s sport. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapman, David L. 2006. Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the beginnings of bodybuilding. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Davis, Richard O. 2007. Sports in American life: A history. New York: Blackwell. Dyreson, Mark. 1998. Making the American team: Sport, culture, and the Olympic experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gorn, Elliott J. 1986. The manly art: Bare-knuckle prize fighting in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gorn, Elliott J., and Warren Goldstein. 2004. A brief history of American sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Guttmann, Allen. 1991. Women’s sports: A history. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Games and empires: Modern sports and cultural imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. The Olympics: A history of the modern games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2004. Sports: The first five millennia. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. International Olympic Committee (IOC) official Web site. http://www.olympic.org/uk/ index_uk.asp. Isenberg, Michael T. 1994. John L. Sullivan and his America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kirsch, George B., Othello Harris, and Claire E. Nolte. 2000. Encyclopedia of ethnicity and sports in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mrozek, Donald J. 1983. Sport and American mentality, 1880–1910. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

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Rader, Benjamin G. 2002. Baseball: A history of America’s game. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ritchie, Andrew. 1996. Major Taylor: The extraordinary career of a champion bicycle racer. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Riess, Steven A. 1991. City games: The evolution of American urban society and the rise of sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Robert A. 1972. A social history of the bicycle: Its early life and times in America. New York: American Heritage Press. Smith, Ronald A. 1988. Sports and freedom: The rise of big-time college athletics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watterson, John Sayle. 2002. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 4

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1900–1909 Jim Nendel

OVERVIEW The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed both the expansion and contraction of American power, demonstrated through political imperialism, capitalistic growth, industrial development, and the growing pains of national and international sport. Coming out of the 1890s and the American imperialistic conquests of Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, the young nation struggled with the challenges of ruling the land and people it had acquired as territories. Following in the deeply entrenched racist views that continued the practices of Jim Crow and discriminatory traditions throughout the United States, white leaders looked upon these conquered peoples as vanquished natives in need of civilizing. The “white man’s burden” of providing political, social, and moral direction, which U.S. leaders embraced as their calling, included using sport to teach sportsmanship, fair play, and assimilation into the American way of life. Baseball, boxing, basketball, and other sports were introduced in these new territories to smooth the transition from the so-called savage nature to civilized society, with its proper rules of etiquette. However, the struggles of overseeing expanding empires quickly were realized and American leaders pulled back in their expansionist efforts. While American political leaders were busy expanding and contracting their borders with the development of territorial acquisitions, business leaders were doing the same. This decade saw the continued expansion of monopolistic capitalism as powerful, wealthy leaders furthered their stranglehold on competitor’s abilities to challenge them. J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, continued to monopolize railroads and steel during the decade. However, this decade also saw efforts to curb the growing inequities and injustices brought about by such monopolistic practices, as witnessed by literary works such as The Octopus by Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. While business and political leaders struggled to maintain and moderate the rapid expansion that they were experiencing in this decade, industrial leaders began to expand the production of new technological advancements. Numerous

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companies were formed to produce automobiles, and the battle for supremacy between gasoline and electrically powered vehicles escalated throughout the decade. Other technological breakthroughs saw enhanced development of airplanes, helicopters, and cameras. These industrial developments, spurred on by production-line techniques, also helped advance sport, as sporting goods were now more readily available to the public at decreased prices. The start of the twentieth century witnessed great changes in the landscape of sport. This decade challenged previous ideals of sport and set foundations for the future growth and development of many of America’s favorite pastimes. The same patterns of expansion and contraction seen in the political and economic arenas would hamper sport as well. Leagues would begin, develop, and then struggle. The National League tried to assert its monopolistic hold on major-league baseball in efforts to thwart the advent of a rival league. Though this decade would not qualify as a golden age for sport, the lessons learned allowed future decades to experience monumental advances in many areas of participation and spectator involvement. However, some groups within sport did not fare as well. African American athletes, while seeing great hope in the development of Negro league baseball and the rise of world-champion boxers, saw their opportunities severely contracted due to the success of some of their athletes, such as Jack Johnson. Women who realized new opportunities and successes also saw this athletic expansion threatened by male leaders, such as Dr. Dudley Sargent of Harvard University who warned that strenuous sports, such as basketball, were unhealthy for the supposedly weaker sex. The years 1900–1909 became a critical turning point for international sport as well. While wars raged in Russia and Japan, many sporting events witnessed neardeath experiences including the fledgling Olympic Games, the Tour de France, and American collegiate football. However, despite serious challenges to sport in general, most American sporting pastimes not only survived the scares, but established strong organizations to counter future threats. In that respect, sport in the United States grew up and matured in this decade. Far from its infancy, it became a social force used by leaders and politicians as well as a marketing device for businesses and the media. It entered into the public mainstream in ways only dreamed of years before and helped shape American national identity.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball With the advent of a rival league in 1901 in the form of the American League, the major-league baseball landscape altered drastically. The upstart circuit headed by Bancroft “Ban” Johnson had risen from the Western League, a minor league with teams mainly in the Great Lakes region.

The First World Series Games With the success of Ban Johnson’s rival American League (AL), major-league baseball was forced to find a peaceful way for the two rival leagues to co-exist and remain profitable. Possibly the most significant outcome of the peace conference

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The American League 1901 Ban Johnson’s vision of a competitor for the National League in baseball came to fruition in 1901 as the American League declared itself a major league on January 28. The eight original franchises were the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Americans, Chicago White Stockings, Cleveland Blues, Detroit Tigers, Milwaukee Brewers, Philadelphia Athletics, and the Washington Senators. In 1900 the National League had contracted from twelve teams to eight and Johnson seized his opportunity. In 1899 he had gained approval from the National League to locate teams in Chicago and Cleveland for his then-minor league. However, when the National League dropped franchises in Baltimore, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Louisville in 1900 Johnson’s American League filled the gap in Cleveland and established franchises in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., to replace those teams. Johnson had desired a team in New York City but the National League’s New York Giants stopped those plans, forcing Johnson to place the team in Baltimore. The Giants bought stock in the Baltimore team, gained controlling interest in 1902, and began pillaging the team’s talent for their own roster, including manager John McGraw. The American league stepped into the fray and took control of the struggling Orioles so that they could finish the season. The fighting continued and finally both sides sat down and had a “peace conference” to come to a solution. The peace accord included the initiation of a Championship between the two leagues winners called the “World Series,” to begin in 1903. The American League also gained consent for a team in New York City that year. The Baltimore franchise, purchased by Frank J. Ferrell and William S. Devery moved in 1903 to Hilltop Park in northern Manhattan. The Highlanders operated out of Hilltop Park for ten seasons before moving to the Polo Grounds and renaming themselves the Yankees.

between the leagues was the institution of the World Series. The owners agreed to pit their champions against each other at the end of the season. While the top two teams in the National League (NL) had competed for decades in a World Championship series, this would be the recognized beginning of baseball’s “World Series.” In 1903 the NL champion Pittsburgh Pirates, led by batting champion Honus Wagner, played the AL pennant winners, the Boston American League Baseball Club, also referred to as the Boston Americans. The Boston general manager, Joe Smart, realized the potential windfall from the series and doubled ticket prices. Fans would have to pay one dollar for grandstand seats and fifty cents for a bleacher or standing-room-only seat at the Huntingdon Avenue Grounds. Charles “Deacon” Phillippe of the Pirates threw a six-hitter in game 1. Pirate right fielder Jimmy Sebring made history hitting the first home run of the World Series and drove in four runs as the Pirates beat Boston 7-3. Boston answered the next day, behind Big Bill Dinneen’s three-hit pitching performance and “Patsy” Dougherty’s two home runs, to even the series with a 3-0 win. Due to injuries and illness, Pittsburgh had to rely on Phillippe after only one day of rest and the twenty-five-game-winning pitcher responded with a 4-2 win. Back in Pittsburgh three days later, Phillippe would get his third victory and third complete

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game of the series as the Pirates, home at Exposition Park, won 5-4. The Pirates had jumped out to a three-to-one lead in the best-of-nine series. Boston refused to quit, putting Cy Young, their twenty-eight-game winner who had also batted an impressive .321 during the year, on the mound. Young baffled the Pirate hitters, holding them to six hits while he himself drove in three runs in the 11-2 victory. In the game, Boston hit five ground-rule triples due to an overflow crowd that had spilled onto the field. For game 6 Boston went back to Bill Dinneen for a 6-3 victory, tying the series at three games each. The seventh game had been set for a Friday, but due to a clause that the owners arranged before the series started, Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss postponed the game until Saturday due to high winds. The postponement benefited both teams as it promised higher gate receipts, which the teams shared, but it helped Dreyfuss as it gave his ace, Phillippe, one more day of rest. It also allowed Boston’s Cy Young an extra day as well, and player-manager Jimmy Collins decided to pit Young against Phillippe. The decision paid off as Young finally put an end to the undefeated run that Phillippe had in the series as Boston took its first lead in the series with a 7-3 victory. Heading back to Boston, Collins called on Dinneen for the eighth game against Phillippe. After three scoreless innings Boston finally scored two runs in the fourth and one in the sixth to take a 3-0 lead. Phillippe and Dinneen battled, both pitching complete games in the process, but Pittsburgh failed to give Phillippe any run support and Dinneen posted his second shutout of the series. Despite Phillippe’s fifth complete game in the series, Boston triumphed behind Dinneen’s fourth complete game and third victory. The American League won its fourth straight game and the first World Series. Fears of a loss from the NL New York Giants led to the cancellation of the 1904 World Series. The Giants, who wrapped up the NL pennant early, realized the distinct potential of having to play their crosstown rivals, the Highlanders, who were leading the American League. John T. Brush, the Giants owner, had bitterly agreed to the establishment of the Highlanders in New York in 1903, but in 1904 refused to provide a potential stage for his rivals to defeat his club. In July Giants manager John McGraw announced that his club would join with the Chicago team from the National League on a world tour after the season. The teams would contribute ten players each and then travel to the Pacific Coast, Hawaii, Australia, and return via Europe playing exhibition games. The trip eventually materialized as Albert Spalding became involved, and he used the promotion as an attempt to increase the popularity of the game and as a worldwide distribution network for his sporting goods empire. For Brush and McGraw, it became a clever way to resist the reality of facing their AL rivals. McGraw and Brush pulled their team from the series. Brush reportedly gave an ultimatum to his players to not even consider playing in a series set up outside of his authority. Rumors stated that he offered to pay players to go home after the NL season was finished and not take part in any sort of series. To counteract Brush, sport-minded businessmen interested in the game made counteroffers. Joe Ullman offered $50,000 to each team to play seven games at Hilltop Park if the Highlanders won the AL pennant. In addition, if any of the Giant players received inducements to not play, Ullman stated that his group would pay them twice the amount offered to participate in the series. The battle continued as the season played out with both sides pleading their cases through the media.

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Deciding game between the National and American leagues in 1903. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Brush and McGraw claimed that the American League was inferior and that the series therefore proved little. Brush labeled the American League a minor league and stated that he believed that the 154-game schedule of the National League settled any disputes as to who was the best team in the United States. American League president Ban Johnson argued that baseball would benefit by maintaining its standard of skill and sportsmanship in the United States, rather than sending picked teams abroad to popularize the pastime in other countries. Ironically, McGraw’s and the Giants’ fears of facing their New York rivals never materialized, as the Boston Americans rallied late in the year and won the pennant on the final day of the season in a doubleheader at New York’s Hilltop Park. It marked the last time that the Boston team would defeat their New York adversaries in a pennant-clinching game until the 2004 American League Championship Series. In the final weeks of the season both the New York and Boston American League clubs issued public challenges to Brush to play a postseason series. Brush and McGraw declined the challenge, stating there was no mandate for them to play the series in baseball’s constitution. Public outcries against Brush’s move led the owner to call for a meeting to resolve issues raised in regards to the organization of the title series. Brush noted that no formal agreements existed regarding payouts to teams, where games were to be played, and so on. In the off-season owners finally met and agreed on the “Brush Rules.” These rules stipulated that 10 percent of all gross revenues from the World Series would go to a new bureaucratic organization called the National Commission. The two teams would split 40 percent of the remaining gross, but only from the first four games of the series. This ensured that players did not “fix” games in order to make more money by playing an extended series. The winning team received three-quarters of the money while the losers earned one-quarter. Management of the two competing clubs would then split the remaining money. Under the Brush Rules a lottery system determined the host team for the first three games, and if a seventh game became necessary the National Commission held discretionary power to decide where to hold that game. Under this system, the World Series became compulsory and the National Commission organized the event rather than the clubs themselves. Regardless of the failed World Series, baseball enjoyed impressive and unusual personal feats in 1904. Pitcher Jack Chesbro of the New York Highlanders pitched forty-eight complete games out of his fifty-one starts and won forty-one of those contests with his infamous spitball. However, in the first game of the team’s final

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doubleheader against Boston, Chesbro threw a wild pitch that allowed the winning run to score, giving the Boston team the pennant. Chicago Cubs hitter Frank Chance set a major-league record in 1904 by being hit by pitches four times in one day in a doubleheader against Cincinnati. After being knocked unconscious in the first game Chance returned to be struck by pitches in the second game as well. The World Series returned to major-league baseball in 1905. However, even with the Brush rules, the leagues clashed and threatened the series. The National League decided that the 154-game season, which it had implemented in 1904, would continue to be its standard. Under the schedule, the National League season concluded on October 8. Ban Johnson of the American League objected to the length of the season, noting that players’ contracts expired on October 15 and that they could legitimately walk away from the series on that day with no contractual obligation. Johnson favored a nine-game series but noted that even in a seven-game format, the time span allowed no days for travel between the two cities. He asked the National League to shorten its season or start it earlier so that it could conclude in time for a proper series to be played. The National League kept its schedule. In an attempt to appease players who may be asked to play beyond the length of their contract, in case the series went longer than expected, due to weather or other unexpected circumstances, the National Commission increased the amount of proceeds for the players from the previous 40 percent to 60 percent of the gate receipts. With this provision in place, McGraw’s Giants earned the right to play the American League Philadelphia Athletics in the renewed World Series. New York’s Christy Mathewson delivered for the National League, as he won three games in a period of six days, all in shutout fashion. Mathewson, who had won thirty-one games in the regular season, gave up only fourteen hits and one walk while striking out eighteen batters in his twenty-seven innings of World Series action in 1905. The New York team won the series, 4-1, in a series dominated by pitching on both sides. The two teams scored only eighteen total runs in the five games. Nine of those came from New York in game 3 in a 9-0 win, the only blowout of the series. New York had won an impressive 105 games during the regular season in addition to the world championship. In 1906 the NL Chicago Cubs eclipsed that total, winning 116 games, en route to the pennant and a showdown with their crosstown rivals, the Chicago White Sox. One of the questions that remained an issue for the National Commission was the seventh game of the series. Attempting to be fair to both teams the commission preferred a neutral site so as not to favor one team over another. In 1905 they agreed that a game 7 would have been played in Boston at the National League team’s ballpark. In 1906, as the commission met to set dates for the series, the decision remained undetermined. As a result, cities vied for the opportunity to host such a game. Fresno, California, offered $25,000 to host the game. The Fresno bidders promised 40,000 spectators as well as sunshine for the game. While Fresno seemed an odd choice, it was the hometown of the Chicago NL club’s manager, Frank Chance. Fortunately, the National Commission averted such a decision again as the White Sox won the series in six games, 4-2, spoiling the record-setting season of the NL club. The series was a decidedly defensive battle. The AL White Sox won while batting only .198 in the series, enough to outhit the suddenly anemic NL club, who hit only .196. White Sox pitcher Ed Walsh

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emerged as the star of the series winning two games, allowing only seven hits in fifteen innings for a 1.20 era, and striking out seventeen batters. Beyond records and championships, baseball demonstrated in 1906 its connection to American society and its central role as the national pastime in a significant act of charity. After the San Francisco earthquake destroyed that city on April 18, major-league baseball stepped forward. New York temporarily suspended its ban on Sunday baseball, allowing the Philadelphia Athletics and New York Highlanders to play in a benefit game raising $5,900 for victims of the earthquake. The 1906 season started the Chicago Cubs’ dynasty, as they played in four World Series championships in five years. After losing the 1906 series the club would win three of the next four series to finish the decade as the dominant organization in all of major-league baseball. The 1907 Cubs rose to the occasion and defeated the American League’s Detroit Tigers in five games in the World Series. The Cubs had finished the season seventeen games ahead of the second-place Pittsburgh Pirates and rested their star players down the stretch. The Tigers clinched the AL pennant on the last day of the season, causing AL president Ban Johnson to attribute fatigue as a reason for the Tigers’ downfall. The Series started out strangely enough in that game 1 ended in a twelve-inning tie due to darkness. A dropped third strike by Tigers catcher Boss Schmidt allowed the Cubs to tie the game. Many felt it was the turning point of the game, and possibly even the series. The Cubs only allowed the AL team three more runs in the next four games. American League batting champion Ty Cobb only managed four hits in twenty at bats, for a paltry .200 average against Chicago pitchers. The unsung hero for the Cubs became catcher Johnny Kling, who defensively contained the Tigers’ base-running prowess by consistently throwing out Detroit players as they attempted to steal bases. Tickets for the series were priced dramatically differently for the two cities. In Chicago tickets cost $1, $1.50, and $2.00 for the highest-priced seats. In Detroit tickets sold for $1, $2, and $2.50. The difference existed because Chicago’s West Side Grounds held far more fans than Detroit’s Bennett Park; 78,086 fans witnessed the five-game series and gate receipts totaled $101,728.50 to be split among the National Commission, the players, and their owners. Interestingly, the losing Tigers’ share of the spoils ended up being larger than the victorious Cubs, as Detroit president William H. Yawkey added $15,000 of his $18,311.13 team share to the players’ $21,973,36 share, to be divided as a bonus. The Tigers players’ share rose to $36,973.36, as opposed to the Cubs’ share of $32,900.03. The press hailed the crowd size, but due to the small size of Bennett Park, which held around 12,000 fans, the series actually drew fewer fans than the 1905 series at 91,633 fans and the 1906 all-Chicago series, which drew 99,855. Detroit had attempted to deal Cobb prior to the 1907 season because he created undue tension among his teammates due to his feistiness and quick temper. In an attempt to create harmony on the club, manager Hugh Jennings of the Tigers asked for offers from every team in the American League. However, when only Clark Griffith of the New York Highlanders offered a trade for Cobb, and that offer was substandard, Jennings decided to attempt to make peace between Cobb and the rest of the team. The gamble worked as Cobb led the Tigers to the pennant. Cobb would continue to win nine straight batting titles and lead the Tigers to

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three straight unsuccessful World Series appearances. Unfortunately for Cobb, these World Series teams were the only ones he played on in his twenty-four years in the major leagues. Baseball held great allure for gamblers during this decade. In fact, the New York Times reported in 1907 that a Pittsburgh “sporting man” named Shad Gwilliam had won more than $42,000 in the 1907 series from his gambling activities. Gwilliam had bet on other series as well. The newspaper reported that he had lost $29,000 on the 1903 series, won $10,000 in 1905, and lost $30,000 in 1906. New emphasis was placed upon off-season and spring training for baseball players held in the south. Pittsburgh established spring training facilities in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Other northern teams sought locations in the warmer south with adequate facilities to host their teams. With a lack of these facilities, Detroit in 1908 considered building its own facility, also in Hot Springs. Other northern teams took other routes. The New York Giants used a form of cross-training for their young recruits, teaching them skills in handball and basketball, utilizing the YMCA facilities in the city. The Giants eventually found facilities in Marlin, Texas, for their spring drills. With the increased emphasis on competitive levels and staying in shape, many players sought increased contracts, which would give them greater flexibility in training full-time. This led to a growing dissatisfaction among players regarding their contracts. So many were unhappy that media reports in 1908 jokingly claimed that a “Disgruntled League” could start and have plenty of teams. Players’ grievances are understandable in light of the profits beginning to roll in from major-league baseball. New York papers estimated that in 1908 the Giants’ profits could climb to $240,000 after all expenses, with a World Series appearance. The Giants’ payroll stood at roughly $60,000 for players or approximately $3000 per player. Players felt that they should reap more of the profit margin. Players received many extra benefits outside of their paychecks, however. The National Baseball Commission prohibited bonuses paid to players by clubs. However, the commission left open the possibility of individuals rewarding players with presents. Players, therefore, frequently received items from businesses, including suits of clothing, jewelry, overcoats, shoes, gold watches, studs, and lockets. For winning teams, these presents became more elaborate, thus increasing the importance of on-field performance. As baseball continued to grow as a business enterprise, the National Commission realized the need to provide additional oversight to the World Series. Responding to criticism regarding different ticket prices set in the 1907 series, the commission made changes for the 1908 fall classic. They announced that the National Commission would furnish all general admission tickets for the series, one set priced at $1.00 and the other at $1.50. These prices were significantly more than regular-season tickets, which were typically twenty-five and fifty cents for the two types of seats. The commission allowed reserved seat prices to remain the province of the home teams, with the caveat that visiting players were to be given two reserved seats per player for each game. Reserved seating or extra entrance fees for selected sections of the ballpark created one way that teams avoided splitting costs with visiting teams and possibly even the National Commission. During the regular season, teams were obligated to split the proceeds of admissions to the park 50-50 with the visiting team. The New York Giants charged a general-admission fee of twenty-five and fifty cents. Based

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on a daily average attendance figure of 7500 fans, the total take for the season was approximately $300,000. For regular-season games the Giants paid visiting teams half, or $150,000. However, once inside the ballpark clubs charged extra costs for admission into other sections. For the Giants this meant the lower grandstand, which cost twenty-five cents extra, or the upper pavilion that would cost an additional fifty cents per patron. In a given year, the Giants would take in around $67,500 in extra revenue, which they were not obligated to share with the opposing team. Home teams used this same concept in World Series games to withhold certain income from the potential pot, split between players, owners, and the National Commission. Detroit, once again, celebrated winning the AL pennant, and a place in their second consecutive World Championship Series, in 1908. Reaching the series that year sent Detroit fans into a frenzy. Throughout the city people celebrated with bonfires, horns, torches, and drums amidst the cries of “Wee-ah!” made famous by Tigers manager Hugh Jennings. Mayor William B. Thompson and the Common Council issued resolutions for businesses and citizens to decorate their stores and residences for the Series, and employers to make every reasonable accommodation for their workers to be able to get time off to attend the games. While the Tigers won the pennant on the last day of the season, in the National League the race was even tighter. For the first time in NL history a postseason playoff game determined the champion. This occurred due to a series of protests resulting from a legendary play, referred to as “Merkle’s Boner.” On September 23 McGraw’s Giants played against Chance’s Cubs in New York. In the bottom of the ninth inning with the score tied, rookie Giant first baseman Fred Merkle singled to right field with two outs and a runner on first. The next batter, Al Bridwell, singled to centerfield, scoring Moose McCormick from third base. When Merkle saw McCormick cross the plate, he headed for the Giant clubhouse in center field. Cub second baseman Johnny Evers noticed that Merkle had not gone on to touch second base as required by the rules. Evers called for the ball, tagged second, and appealed to umpire Bob Emslie, who did not see whether Merkle had actually touched second base. He appealed to home-plate umpire Hank O’Day, who granted Evers’s appeal and called Merkle out on a force play. The Giants, who had left the field, were celebrating their supposed victory when O’Day declared the game a tie. A similar play had occurred the month before in a game in Pittsburgh, thus making O’Day aware of the possibility of the appeal, and alerting his attention to see whether Merkle had actually touched second base. The Cubs immediately appealed to National League President Harry C. Pulliam that the Giants should have forfeited the game. The Giants then appealed to Pulliam, arguing that they should receive a win and the umpire should not have declared the game a tie because the rule was rarely enforced. On the last day of the 1908 season, that September game had huge implications for the pennant race. The Giants trailed the Cubs by a half game and had one more game to play against Boston. A win meant a tie between the Cubs and Giants. President Pulliam had denied both team’s appeals and both appealed again to the directors for a decision. The board sustained Pulliam’s decisions and ruled that the game must be made up on October 8, the day after the end of the regular season. New York beat Boston, ending the season tied with the Cubs for first. Thousands of New Yorkers tried to get into the game and were turned away because of the enormity of the crowd,

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some even holding tickets. Thousands of other fans watched the ticker at the New York Times’ offices as the scores were posted outside the building. In the extra game, forced by Merkle’s blunder, the Giants lost to the Cubs New York fans reacted to the loss in an ugly manner. Police were called to the Polo Grounds to restore order. Cubs manager Frank Chance was injured by a sodawater bottle thrown from the stands while he was leaving the field. Regardless of their pregame enthusiasm, New York fans left that day disappointed and, in many cases, angry. Fans were ruthless in their treatment of Merkle and his reputation suffered forever. Giant fans and the media hammered President Pulliam in the press, questioning his lack of courage in the affair. The criticism weighed heavily on Pulliam, who the next July would commit suicide by shooting himself in the head at the New York Athletic Club. Such were the passions now associated with the World Series. Chicago fans were ecstatic in celebration of their team’s third straight appearance in the Series. Crowds gathered outside of every telegraph line connected to New York all day, awaiting news of the game as the telegraph operators delivered it. When the team won, a collective cheer went up around the city. In Chicago, the term “repeat” emerged in the phrases of fans, while in Detroit “revenge” became the operative word. Detroit, realizing the great demand for tickets, ordered 10,000 circus seats installed in the outfield area to accommodate fans, increasing Bennett Field’s attendance potential to over 20,000. However, the Tigers were, once again, thwarted by the Cubs, four games to one. The Cubs became the first team to repeat as World Series champions and the game’s first dynasty. The extra bleachers for Bennett Park never got used, however, as crowds for the games in Detroit were small. By the fifth game, when it became clear that Detroit was struggling, the local fans stayed away, creating the smallest crowd in World Series history at 6,210. Detroit recovered and in 1909 once again won the AL title and a shot at the World Championship. The Tigers were led by Ty Cobb, who won the triple crown of hitting and led the major leagues with nine home runs, all of which were insidethe-park home runs. The Tigers were able to avoid the Cubs and played the Pittsburgh Pirates. Detroit fared better against the Pirates, and the Series, for the first time, went the full seven games. In the final game, though, Babe Adams, who had already beaten the Tigers twice in complete games in the Series, shut them out again en route to a World Series record three wins. Chicago’s Cubs ended the decade by returning to a familiar spot, the World Series. However, sports’ first dynasty showed its age when the Cubs met the young Philadelphia Athletics. The A’s had become the first AL team to win over 100 games in the regular season and they carried that momentum through to the Series, beating the Cubs four games to one, signaling the end of one decade’s dynasty and the beginning of a new decade and a new dynasty.

Race in Baseball The 1900s marked the second decade of African American exclusion from major-league baseball. The unwritten color line limited opportunities for black athletes in the United States. While some improvements occurred in race relations, many setbacks continued. Events such as former slave Booker T. Washington’s’

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invitation to visit the White House, as the guest of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, the first for an African American, roused hope. The defeat of black congressman George White of North Carolina in the same year, just after he had proposed the first congressional legislation to ban lynching and make it a federal crime, reminded African Americans that their voices were still restricted. Black baseball players, following Washington’s advice to maintain patience and use industrious activities to fight for civil rights, began a process of developing their own teams. After a decade of exclusion, it became clear that major-league baseball was intent on continuing their policy of exclusion and, rather than waiting for white leaders in the National and American Leagues to have a change of heart, black leaders looked for new opportunities. One came in the Cuban Leagues, which in 1900 permitted black players to play. While the formalization of the Negro Leagues was still decades away, black teams did exist and played for their own world championships. In 1910 these championships even gained the attention of the New York Times. The newspaper highlighted the seventh game between the Royal Giants and the Philadelphia Giants at Meyerrose Park in Ridgewood, New Jersey. During the 1900s the most popular, and arguably the best, black team was the Cuban X Giants. Other teams also had impressive runs as well, including the Philadelphia Giants. In Chicago, the Chicago Unions and Columbia Giants battled in the early part of the decade for supremacy, before both teams ran into financial problems, resulting in the split of the Unions and the demise of the Columbia Giants. Eventually, the Leland Chicago Giants arose as the dominant team in the region. Other areas also had Negro teams, such as the Algona Brownies from Iowa, who defeated the Union Giants in 1903 in a regional championship. Most of these teams played in semiprofessional leagues, many of which consisted of both black and white teams. For black baseball, the 1900s saw the rise of black entrepreneurship. In 1907 Frank Leland attempted to form a black professional league for baseball players. Prospective teams were encouraged in Kansas City, Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Milwaukee, Memphis, Nashville, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Chicago. However, only Indianapolis and Leland’s Chicago team made firm commitments to the league and it eventually died before becoming a reality on the field. Black baseball executives were reluctant to incur traveling expenses in a league that was so much larger, geographically, than the regional schedules they played. Leland, however, believed that traveling teams, which could expand their influence outside of their geographical constraints, held great potential. He hired another man who shared that vision and who would establish the blueprint for such ventures. Andrew “Rube” Foster created the barnstorming model in the years 1907–10, which he would use successfully through the next decade, establishing him as the leading entrepreneur in black baseball. As a player, the 60 400 Foster dominated teams with his pitching. In 1902 Leland had released Foster from the Chicago Union Giants due to a performance slump. Foster joined the Otsego Independents, a semiprofessional team in Michigan whose owner, George Bardeen, was one of the first owners in baseball to allow African American players to integrate white teams. Foster reportedly won fifty-one games on the mound that season. Success followed Foster. In 1903 he pitched for

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Philadelphia’s Cuban X Giants and won four games in their playoff series with the Philadelphia Giants for the Eastern Black Baseball Championship. In 1904 he switched teams and led Philadelphia to victory, winning two playoff games against his former club. The Philadelphia Giants, under the direction of Sol White and with Foster as the star, continued to dominate eastern black baseball. In 1906, White embarked on a new venture, starting the International League of Independent Professional Ball Players. The league consisted of both all-black and all-white teams in the Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware, area. Foster, again, led the Giants to the pennant for this new league. While the Philadelphia team had great success on the field, they still struggled financially. With financial ruin always close at the door in Philadelphia, Leland lured Foster away from White for the 1907 season with the prospect of a potential new league, and by giving the star pitcher the role of player-manager. Foster enticed seven of his Philadelphia teammates to make the move to Chicago with him, including star outfielder Pete Hill. When Leland’s new league failed, the Leland Giants looked to establish themselves as more than just a regional team. Foster took over the booking of games and instituted a new policy that either split gate receipts in half or provided enticing guarantees for visiting teams, which helped attract top competitors for the Leland Giants. The Giants also embarked on a spring barnstorming tour before their season began, becoming the first black-owned and managed club to do so. Traveling in their own private Pullman car, the team played both black and white teams in various cities in southern states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Alabama. After their barnstorming tour, the team went 110-10 during their regular season, including a streak where they won forty-eight straight games en route to winning the Chicago city championship. The Leland Giants continued to barnstorm in the spring and dominate midwestern teams during the season. In 1908 they played for a national championship against Foster’s former team, the Philadelphia Giants, which resulted in a tie, as both teams won three games in the series and no tie-breaking game was played. 1n 1909 Foster and his Leland Giants gained an opportunity to play an exhibition series against the National League’s Chicago Cubs after winning their league title. Foster, who had broken his leg in July of the season, realized the significance of this series and pushed to return to the mound by October for the series. However, he was not in top physical form and ended up losing a 5-2 lead in the ninth inning of the second game of the series. In fact, Foster lost the game on a controversial call when a Cub base runner scored the winning run while Foster was arguing with an umpire over a call. The Leland Giants also lost the western Black Championship to the St. Paul Colored Gophers in 1909. These two key losses inspired Foster, who determined to make changes for the 1910 season. The first change Foster sought was to gain control of the team from Leland, whom he felt was holding back the team’s potential. Foster aligned himself with Beauregard Mosley, who handled the business side of the Leland Giants Baseball and Amusement Association (LGBAA), and they forced Leland out, gaining control of his organization. Leland went to court to challenge the takeover, but lost. With Leland out of the picture, Foster proceeded to put together what he considered the finest team ever assembled. He signed John Henry Lloyd away from the Philadelphia Giants. Foster also signed former teammates Grant “Home Run”

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Johnson, who at age thirty-five would hit .397 for the Leland Giants in 1910, and catcher Bruce Petway, who reportedly threw out Ty Cobb three times in three attempts in a game in Cuba in 1910. The Leland Giants that season compiled an astounding record of 123-6. Whereas the Chicago Cubs in 1909 had answered the Leland Giants’ challenge to a series, winning it in three close games, there is no record of any white major-league teams lining up to play against this 1910 team, which was loaded with players respected by their white peers as great players.

Basketball Basketball, considered the true American game due to being invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, began to develop its organizational structure during this decade, primarily in American colleges. Leagues formed for competition around the country. The first to develop was Connecticut’s Triangle League in the 1900–1901 season with Yale, Trinity, and Wesleyan. Later that season the New England League formed with Dartmouth, Holy Cross, Amherst, Williams, and Trinity creating an alliance. The Eastern League followed, with Columbia, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton as its members. In the early years of league development, it was common for teams like Yale and Trinity to join more than one league. Other conferences also began to establish basketball competition around the nation. The Western Conference, which would become the Big Ten, started a round-robin league in 1905, although many of the teams had been playing for years without conference affiliation. One of the innovations in the college game during this decade was the development of dribbling to advance the ball. Yale was the first to invent the technique but it quickly caught on and was mastered by Pennsylvania’s Charles Keinath and Chicago’s H.O. “Pat” Page. Minnesota dominated play at the start of the decade, recording thirty-four straight victories from 1901 to 1904. As the sport grew, Spalding sporting goods realized the potential profits to be made from the game and, in 1904, introduced their first basketball sneaker, called the “suction sole.” The 1904–5 season also saw fifteen colleges gather in New York and Philadelphia to standardize rules and develop their own governing body. Possibly the most significant impact of this conference was that the colleges gained control of the game from the Amateur Athletic Union. Basketball at this time was a very physical sport without the flow of today’s game. As a result, at times it fell under the same type of criticism that football received. Harvard president Charles Eliot in 1908 recommended the abolishment of basketball, as he believed it to be more brutal than football. To counteract the criticism, rulemakers established limits of five fouls per player in 1908, after which that player earned disqualification from the game. The team of the decade was clearly the University of Chicago. Following the master plan of President William Rainey Harper to build athletic dominance to promote the school, Chicago became the first school to hire a professional coach, Joseph Raycroft, for its basketball team. While the sport’s creator, James Naismith, was the head coach at Kansas University, he was a member of the faculty in physical education at the school, and not solely its coach. Realizing the trend in the sport toward professional coaches, he turned the coaching duties over in 1907 to Forrest “Phog” Allen, who would become a legendary coach at KU. Raycroft at

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Chicago had set the trend, however, and his teams won seventy-eight of ninety games during the decade, including a 21-2 record in 1908. Behind All-Americans Pat Page and John Schommer, the first true center in the game, Chicago won the first national title in basketball in the first national playoff. Chicago, which had won the west regional championship in a playoff with Wisconsin, defeated the east region champions, Pennsylvania, in a best of three series. Schommer won the national player of the year award in 1909, followed by teammate Page in 1910. Schommer would also make his mark in 1910 by inventing glass backboards so that fans could see the game more easily. Other great early players were Wisconsin’s Christian Steinmetz, who became the first collegiate player to score 1000 points in his career (1903–5), and Clemson’s J. O. Erwin, who scored a school-record fifty-eight points in the school’s first intercollegiate game, a record that lasted the entire century. Basketball also made its Olympic debut as a demonstration sport in this decade. At the 1904 St. Louis Games, four different Olympic basketball tournaments were held. In the Olympic College World Championship, Hiram College, Wheaton College, and Latter Day Saints University (now BYU) competed for the Olympic championship, with Hiram winning the title. In the Olympic Amateur Championships, the Buffalo Germans YMCA club won all of its games in the round-robin tournament. The other two tournaments were for high schools, in which the New York team beat St. Louis, Chicago, and San Francisco, and elementary schools, in which the New York team defeated the Chicago and San Francisco teams. Less true Olympic championships than exhibitions of the sport, the events nevertheless furthered the development of the sport in the decade. Basketball was the one sport that gained easy acceptance with women as well. Although the rules had been altered to reflect Victorian standards of propriety to ensure the notions of female daintiness in athletic endeavors, the game grew in popularity around the country. The women played in fixed regions on the court and could not steal the ball from opponents. Regardless of the rule changes, the game proved popular as teams formed in colleges and high schools.

Football Whereas baseball faced its greatest threat early in the decade, with the advent of a competitive major league to the established National League, it grew enormously popular throughout the decade. Football faced a much tougher road. American football existed in a unique cultural position. During this decade, it lacked a professional league and existed only as a supposedly amateur sport. It was the primary sporting vehicle for upper-class elite colleges such as Yale, Penn, Harvard, and Princeton. Yet, for a sport tied to such a seemingly refined population, it suffered from strong connections to brutality and violence. Deaths occurring during games plagued the sport. At the end of the decade football’s place in American sporting life remained tenuous at best and threatened by both rugby and soccer. Football entered the decade increasing its popularity as evidenced by the rising number of collegiate teams adding the sport to their athletic programs. The game, which had started as the province of the older established eastern universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn, had spread to smaller schools in the East and across the nation. Schools as diverse as Oregon, Minnesota, Notre Dame,

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1900–1909

Whitworth, Stanford, Auburn, Chicago, Colorado College, Arkansas, South Dakota, Texas, and Michigan all played the game at their institutions. However, as popular as the game was within these college communities, it also suffered from controversies and scandals. Professionalism, recruiting violations, ineligible players, financial benefits, and slush funds provided ample material for the media to question the game’s popularity. The use of professional coaches challenged some critics’ idealism. Coaches, such as George Foster Sanford at Columbia, had received as much as $5000 to coach teams. However, as the decade began, the pressure to win, which came with these salaries, created increased violations of rules in order to produce results. These infractions led to some, like Foster in 1901, losing their positions amid scandals. However, many university leaders realized that great prestige and notoriety could come to a university through a successful football team. This type of thinking drove University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper to hire Amos Alonzo Stagg. As head of the Department of Physical Culture and Athletics Stagg was to create a top-notch football program at the midwestern school in order to compete with the likes of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton both academically and athletically. By the 1900s Stagg’s teams had become the elite of the Midwest, and other institutions emulated Harper’s model. Former players from the programs at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were in high demand as coaches. By 1901 seventy Yale graduates were coaching across the country. While scandals involving players, coaches, and the financial arrangements of those situations continued from the 1890s into the first decade of the new century, another issue took center stage in the controversies surrounding football: the style of play. As winning became more and more important for schools, a renewed focus on tactics and strategies developed. One of these was the mass play in which teams would line up guards and tackles in the backfield and use their momentum to

A football game in the early 1900s. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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propel the ball carrier toward the first down, which at the time required only five yards in three downs to accomplish. As a result, football became a mass of bodies slamming into one another and, in the close quarters, many illegal acts such as punching, kicking, choking, and biting would occur, out of the officials’ sight. Newspaper reports of deaths and injuries increased, raising public skepticism of the merits of the game. To deal with the organization of the game, schools formed athletic leagues within geographic regions. These leagues began to question the rules established by the eastern elites and developed their own standards of play. One of the most powerful leagues was the Western League, which would become the Big Ten, led by Stagg and Michigan’s Fielding Yost. The Western League adopted a more wideopen style of play, divorcing itself from reliance upon mass-momentum plays favored by the Big Three, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Other western and southern leagues also developed their own guidelines and favored the development of the forward pass. Their games featured less ball control and greater deception in the form of fakes, end runs, and passes. As these leagues matured, claims arose as to “national championship” status. In 1901 Michigan claimed the title by recording an 11-0 record, outscoring opponents by 550-0, and defeating Stanford in the first-ever Rose Bowl 49-0. Harvard, who believed that winning the eastern championship accorded them the national title, contested the claim. Eastern schools sometimes agreed to play western and southern schools, but the stipulation was that those schools needed to travel east to play the contest. The battle over a true national champion played out in the media and between fans throughout the decade. In 1902 Yost’s Michigan team again posted a perfect record in their eleven games but slipped slightly in allowing opponents to score twelve points against them. Once again, they claimed the title of national champions, despite the fact that Yost’s former team, the University of Nebraska, had a 9-0 record. Nebraska would continue its dominance in 1903, posting a 10-0 record. Princeton made its claim as the national champion that season as well, posting an 11-0 record and giving up only six points. Not to be outdone, Michigan, despite tying Minnesota 6-6, claimed it won the national title with its 11-0-1 record. The 1904 season created even more chaos, as no less than five teams finished the season undefeated. Once again, Michigan claimed its fourth straight national title, while fellow Western Conference foe Minnesota also claimed the honor with their 13-0 record. The University of Pennsylvania laid their claim to the crown with their 12-0 record and eastern championship. Vanderbilt University and Auburn University also completed undefeated campaigns and believed that they deserved national championship honors. This debate over national prominence demonstrated that, while the eastern colleges believed that they controlled the sport, others were willing to challenge that status. With their wide-open style of play, western teams felt they were immune to the criticisms of brutality and poor sportsmanship revolving around the eastern teams in the early part of the decade. However, with mounting deaths and serious injuries repeatedly in the media, few members of the press noted differences in playing style. As calls for the abolition of the game grew, those outside of the east felt the sting just as fiercely. In 1905 the crisis hit with full force, prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to summon leaders from the Big Three to the White House in

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an effort to save the game, while reigning in acts of intentional injury, brutality, and unsportsmanlike behavior. Leaders and coaches at the Big Three set about attempts at reform, but could not agree on rule changes necessary to save the game. The 1905 season provided more fodder for those who had railed against the professionalism and commercialism of the game and now challenged it based on its abhorrent brutality. Late in the season Union College and New York University (NYU) played in New York City where Union end Harold Moore died from an injury sustained in the game. Moore’s death spurred NYU chancellor Henry MacCracken to telegraph the presidents of the Big Three, imploring them to begin a process of reform for the game. MacCracken believed that the game could be saved with rule changes. Charles Eliot of Harvard however, believed that the game itself was flawed and felt nothing short of abolishment would help. Eliot declined to assist MacCracken. With no assistance coming from the leading universities, MacCracken found himself at the front of the reform movement. At the end of the 1905 campaign, MacCracken moved forward with discussions on whether to abolish football or to enact reforms. NYU sent letters to its opponents for the past ten seasons to meet in New York to discuss the football crisis. Of the Big Three, only Princeton had been an opponent of NYU, and Princeton president Woodrow Wilson declined the invitation. He told MacCracken that Princeton already had a solution, with a rule that prohibited blocking in front of the ball carrier. Harvard and Yale had both spurned MacCracken’s earlier attempt to engage them, and continued to see the conference as insignificant. In the end, twelve schools came to the conference in December. The questions that MacCracken posed were “did the delegates believe that, in its present form the game ‘ought to be played’?” and if not abolished, then “what should be done to reform it?” One school represented at the conference had already answered that question and acted upon their decision. Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler took advantage of the students’ Thanksgiving break to announce that Columbia would abolish the game and instructed his delegates to vote in accordance to this stance. At this meeting, a vote on whether to abolish football occurred at the onset. Five of the colleges voted in support of the ban including Columbia, NYU, and Union. Palmer Pierce of West Point gathered the support of the remaining schools and stopped what could have been a decisive blow to the game. With the decision to retain and reform the game, the conference members decided to hold a second meeting and invite all football-playing colleges in America to participate. In order to enact reform, the convention also selected a new rules committee to alleviate dangerous, brutal, and mass plays. That second meeting occurred on December 28, 1905. While the new committee was forming, the old rules committee, the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee, headed by Paul Dashiell and controlled by its secretary, Walter Camp, held its regularly scheduled meeting. Dominated by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn, this committee struggled to find common ground for rule changes. Bill Reid of Harvard refused to support many of the changes proposed because Harvard had a special rules committee that was meeting, and Reid wanted to wait for their recommendations. Reid understood the threat that his Harvard president Eliot posed, and heard that the Board of Regents had voted secretly to ban football. Toward the end of

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the season Reid and four other Harvard football enthusiasts met secretly and wrote an open letter to the Harvard Graduates Athletic Association, criticizing aspects of the game and promising that radical reforms could be made with an effective rules committee. They also released the letter to the press. The letter was designed to stave off the political will of the Regents through a grassroots campaign of athletic supporters. It was an internal political move, but Reid and his group also had an external plan. The Harvard group sent Reid to the old rules committee meeting to be held the day after the MacCracken meeting. The sixty-eight schools at the MacCracken convention formed a new organization and elected Palmer Pierce of West Point as the first president of the Inter-Collegiate Athletic Association (ICAA). This new association in five years would change its name to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Two weeks later the two football rules committees met separately but at the same hotel. This provided Reid and Harvard with their opportunity to seize control of the process. Working with both committees Reid manipulated rulemakers to adopt rules demanded by Harvard’s ad hoc committee. These rule changes were sent to these meetings with Reid, under the threat that if they were not adopted, Harvard would drop football. The strategy worked, and the rules committee accepted nearly all of the Harvard proposals. Significant changes included the forward pass, a neutral zone between the opposing teams, and—Camp’s favorite—the extension of a first down to ten yards. Other proposals called for stronger penalties against roughness, brutality, and insulting talk. Harvard had remained in the fold and the game received new life and Harvard greater control, at least in the East. Noticeably absent from the ICAA’s first meeting were midwestern and west coast schools. The Western Conference boycotted the meeting. Other than representatives from Colorado College, South Dakota, and Texas, western schools were not represented. For various reasons, what remained was a northeastern assembly of mostly smaller schools; however, they were strong enough to bring the Eastern powers to their knees. The Western Conference (Big Nine) saw no reason to join the fray over the brutality of the game as they had already adopted a wide-open game that resulted in fewer injuries. However, as the crisis and the national hysteria engulfed the nation, the Big Nine schools found themselves in a crisis over the professionalism, rather than the brutality, of the game. In the final game of the season, in their traditional rivalry game with the University of Chicago, Yost’s Michigan squad, which had gone fifty-eight straight games without a loss, looked to win its fifth national championship. Outscoring opponents 495-0 that season seemed to bode well for Michigan. However, Stagg’s team also was undefeated and had only given up five points to opponents. In front of 27,000 fans in Chicago, Stagg’s team held off Yost’s Michigan men 2-0, scoring on a safety in a classic defensive Thanksgiving Day battle. That game would prove to be the last Thanksgiving Day championship, and the last traditional rivalry matchup for the Western Conference for many years, as reform hit the league with a mighty force. Inflamed through press reports of ineligible or “tramp” athletes, illegal recruiting practices, paying players, and athletic department debt, faculty members and other reformers jumped on the bandwagon to ban the sport. Led by respectable faculty voices such as Frederick Jackson Turner from Wisconsin and William H. Hale at

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Chicago, the call for reform quickly spread throughout the member institutions. In December 1905 Turner proposed a two-year suspension of football in order to discuss the need for balance between athletics and academics. The movement in the Big Nine grew outside of its boundaries as well. Presidents of sixteen Presbyterian colleges in the region met to discuss abolishment or reform. Shortly after the ICAA and the new football rules committee announced their rule changes, Big Nine Conference members met to discuss the issue of football. Responding to faculty accusations that that football impeded academic rigor and that cheer practice and the fanaticism surrounding big games distracted the attention of students, the conference members enacted reforms, rather than the abolishment of the sport. They concluded that the season should be shortened to five games and finish before Thanksgiving, and that traditional rivalry games end. In addition, ticket prices were set at a lower fifty-cent rate, down from the two- or three-dollar price that teams could get for big games. They addressed eligibility issues by declaring freshmen ineligible. They also required the institutions to certify that all of its athletes were full-time students in good academic standing, making normal progress toward the completion of a degree. These reforms set out to curtail the big-time nature of the commercialization of sport. The effect of these reforms would mean the loss of significant revenue for the institutions, over $100,000 a year for some schools. The reformers believed that the publicity and revenue losses were an important sacrifice in order to retain their integrity as institutions of higher learning, which were in the business of education and not of athletic promotion. While midwestern schools approached their reforms, in the West two approaches to the crisis prevailed. The western responses paled in significance, due to distance as well as the relatively small population bases represented in the region. In the largest population area of California (the San Francisco Bay region), Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley were the dominant educational institutions and set the standards for conduct through their actions. The Stanford-Cal rivalry in football had been bubbling since 1892. As it had in the rest of the country this rivalry took the focus off educational concerns and, in the opinions of the school presidents, Benjamin Ide Wheeler of Berkeley and David Starr Jordan of Stanford, had grown to indecent proportions in its importance. While neither wanted to do away with the rivalry, both wanted it downplayed. Neither felt that the game had approached the evil status in the West that it had developed in the East, but both were concerned about the growing zealotry in the sport. Jordan had planned to send a representative, Max Farrand, to the MacCracken conference in December. However, as he and Wheeler watched the crisis unfold, they made a decision far more revolutionary than the reforms in the East or Midwest. Jordan canceled Farrand’s trip and announced that the western schools would replace American football with rugby. While the decision barely made a ripple in the eastern landscape and had no impact upon the reform movements across the country, in California it created a dramatic change. Nearby schools such as St. Mary’s and Santa Clara both made the change, as did Southern California and Pomona. Most high schools in California also decided to play rugby. While California schools made an exodus from the American football fold, other western states did not follow suit. Schools in the Pacific Northwest stayed

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Theodore Roosevelt, a Sporting President President Theodore Roosevelt may have influenced sport during his time in office (1901–8) more than any other American leader in the nation’s history. He created the National Parks System providing space for outdoor enthusiasts, promoted healthy activity and sport, and helped set in motion the development of bureaucratic structures such as the NCAA. He helped craft an image of American identity that emphasized strenuous activity with a competitive will to fight and compete with whomever and whatever would be the challenge. Roosevelt constantly challenged and encouraged American Olympic teams to fight for victory. He interjected himself in sports debates using his authority as the president of the United States to make decisions. He selected James E. Sullivan as the head of the U.S. Olympic team in both 1906 and 1908 and injected his views in the debate between Chicago and St. Louis when both were vying for the rights to host the 1904 Olympic Games. However, he is remembered most for his interdiction with the football crisis of 1905. In October, he gathered the leaders of eastern football powers Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House and demanded that they find a solution to the brutality of the game. Realizing his limited authority over the universities Roosevelt implored the representatives to draft a statement on their train ride home. The statement released by Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee Secretary Walter Camp the next day stated that the schools would carry out the rules of the game in both letter and spirit. Because the season still exhibited numerous violations and examples of unsportsmanlike behavior, Roosevelt continued to press the issue and, in November, summoned Dr. J. William White, professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, to the White House to discuss the subject. White reported that Roosevelt emphatically believed in continuing the game, but that referees should punish the brutality and foul play harshly and, if the referees would not do so, then college presidents should sanction them. Roosevelt loved gridiron and followed his alma mater, Harvard, faithfully. Roosevelt praised the character-building elements of the game and emphasized that the rough nature of the contests were essential to the nature of American strength. To survive in a competitive international world Roosevelt believed that Americans had to develop a tough, manly demeanor and football provided a key venue for that goal. Roosevelt continued to work behind the scenes in order to move university leaders to address the issues of intentional injury, but withdrew from the public debate on the subject, believing that a form of hysteria had developed surrounding the game. Roosevelt’s efforts in initiating discussions among college leaders led to the development of the Inter-Collegiate Athletic Association (ICAA) in 1906, an organization that would change its name in five years to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

true to the American version and easily adopted rule changes as they, like the midwestern teams, had already embraced the more open game that reformers in the East finally approved. Northwest teams adopted the new rules and excelled on the field. Oregon State University would complete a 7-0 undefeated season in 1907 and the University of Washington would begin an unmatched era of excellence at the end of the decade, as their 1907 season was the beginning of an NCAA-record sixty-three-game unbeaten streak that would last until 1917.

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After all was said and done in the reforms, some schools made the decision to drop American football, including Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, and California, but the majority remained in the fold. Football had survived its first major crisis in 1905. However, it would continue to struggle during this decade and would face another momentous crisis in 1909. The reforms around the country, regardless of their results in different regions, also reflected reform movements occurring in business and industry throughout the nation. In that respect, the American public viewed these reforms not as strangely foreign concerns, but as the connection of sport to the culture at large. Abuses needed to be addressed, whether brutality in factory conditions or on the gridiron. Ironically, the abuses in college football that led to reform movements had an unintended effect. The desire to win led teams to recruit athletes who might not have been admitted to the universities under normal circumstances. As a result, many ethnic minorities who possessed great athletic ability had opportunities to play and attend classes in schools where they would possibly not have been welcomed if not for their athleticism. African American athletes, such as Dartmouth’s Matthew Bullock and Ohio University quarterback Arthur D. Carr, were sprinkled throughout college football, whereas they had been banned from professional baseball. Carlisle Indian School developed a competitive team that demonstrated the athletic ability of their teams against the national powers, producing great players such as Jim Thorpe. Hugo Bezdek, born in the Czech Republic, represented the dreams of immigrants, as he starred for the University of Chicago and would move on to coach successfully at Oregon and Arkansas. With the crisis of the 1905–6 season averted, teams returned to the business of playing the game and trying to decide how to play utilizing the new rules. However, after a couple of quiet years in terms of injuries, eleven players died in college football in 1909, and many were at prominent eastern schools. In the winter and spring of 1910, the ICAA committee addressed new rule changes and attempted to foresee what effects potential rule changes might have on game play. A hybrid proposal, called the Blagden Report, passed. In the report, the forward pass was liberalized to make it a more effective play. The pushing and pulling was outlawed. Backs, as well as ends, were now eligible to receive passes. The rules changed the game from the rugby-influenced style of the 1890s into the modern game of American football. The end of the decade was the dawning of a new era for American football. The game had survived two major crises and came through them not only changed but also reinvigorated. Changes in the game included more than the rulebooks and the playing field. The gender roles represented in the game also changed dramatically. While the game had always been a male bastion on the gridiron, females played a prominent role in leading cheering sections. Progressive fears about the feminization of America altered that relationship during this decade. Schools took Theodore Roosevelt’s call for masculine identity characterizing American nationality to heart. Schools with large female populations feared that they would be viewed as women’s colleges. Some banned women from their campuses; others used strong football teams to proclaim their masculinity. Still others banned women from participating in the cheering sections. In 1903 the University of Washington established a separate section for women to sit and cheer, apart from the men’s cheer section.

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The Rose Bowl: The Granddaddy of College Bowl Games In 1902 an American football tradition started, the Rose Bowl. The first postseason collegiate bowl game in history occurred in Pasadena, California, as one of the activities for the Tournament of Roses. The competing teams were Stanford University and the University of Michigan. Fielding “Hurry up” Yost, the Michigan coach, had led his team to an undefeated season and had accumulated 501 points against ten opponents that season. The point-a-minute offense that Yost employed was complemented by the defense, which had not allowed a point the entire year. In the matchup, Michigan fullback Neil Snow scored five touchdowns against an overmatched Stanford team as Michigan rolled to a 49-0 victory. The lopsided game failed to meet expectations of the crowd and the Tournament of Roses committee, who felt that athletic contests would add vibrancy to the festival. Unfortunately, what they received was less a contest and more a public humiliation for the California squad. Faced with the boring nature of what promoters billed as a spectacular event, organizers decided to drop the football game and replace it with other events. In 1903 polo substituted for the football game but drew only 2000 fans. Rather than returning to football however, which had drawn more spectators than polo, organizers went a different direction, implementing chariot racing as the sport of choice. The chariot races drew upwards of 25,000 fans and lasted until 1914 when economic factors and lack of interest eventually led to the reinstatement of football as the premier attraction.

Hockey The development of amateur ice hockey leagues in the United States began in the 1890s, and as many sports in the 1900s, hockey fought battles of sustainability. The American Amateur Hockey League (AAHL), with teams based in the New York City area, became the first amateur league in the United States in 1896. Through the 1900s, the New York Crescent Athletic Club, based in Brooklyn, dominated the league, winning eight championships between 1900 and 1910. To keep unsavory fans at bay the Crescent Club charged one dollar admission, assuring that the lower classes would not be able to attend their games. While the teams were New York–based, the talent came from Canadian-born talent, with only a few Americans on the rosters. This provided quality hockey for New York fans. Other amateur leagues competed during the decade and met with mixed success. Minnesota, a hotbed of hockey, formed the Twin City League in 1902–3 consisting of teams from the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, and, interestingly, had no imports. Amateur leagues existed for short periods in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Baltimore as well. Outside of city or regionally based teams, colleges took up the sport and developed rivalries that grew in the 1900s. In the winter of 1900, the five-team Intercollegiate Hockey League began with Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, and Harvard as charter members. In the early 1900s, Harvard supplanted Yale as the dominant team in the league. After winning the first two league championships, Yale succumbed to Harvard in 1902–3, leading to four straight Harvard league titles, until Princeton broke the streak in the 1906– 7 season. The Princeton team had struggled for years with inadequate training

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1900–1909

facilities and also a scandal in 1902–3. A very successful season came to an abrupt end when, just before a postseason playoff game with Harvard, the faculty disbanded the team because of academic deficiencies. Princeton finished off the decade with its second championship in the 1909–10 season. Besides that championship, Princeton’s other major victory of 1910 would be the recruitment of the one player responsible for their only defeat during that season, Hobey Baker, who entered Princeton in 1910 and would be the impetus for their success into the next decade. Hobart Baker, from Wissahickon, Pennsylvania, began his Hall of Fame hockey career in 1906 when he enrolled at the prestigious St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. While he was a senior at the prep school in 1909–10 Baker’s amazing stick work led to the only defeat that Princeton’s Tigers would face that season. Baker’s freshman year at Princeton in 1910 proved to be uneventful, as freshmen were ineligible for varsity sports, but the skills he developed, both at St. Paul’s and during practice at Princeton, would set the stage for his emergence in the 1910s as one of the greatest hockey players of all time. Other colleges around the nation followed the lead of the charter Intercollegiate Hockey League schools and started hockey programs. Dartmouth College entered competition in the 1905–6 season playing teams from Williams, MIT, and the schools from the intercollegiate league. Dartmouth, in 1908–9, had a remarkable year finishing second in the intercollegiate league to Harvard. They also went the entire season without registering a single penalty. Hockey, like football, had begun to struggle with images of brutality and violence. The Canadian game had turned increasingly violent. In 1907 the sport’s first official fatality occurred. Players began to suffer injuries such as broken limbs, having their faces sliced open by skate blades, and their heads opened up by violent stick play. The media, already alerted to the violence in college football, focused on the violent acts and began to question if hockey would become just another example of unregulated brutality in sport. Dartmouth’s penalty-free season and relative success on the ice provided hope that hockey need not be relegated to a game of senseless violence. Professional hockey had its debut in the United States in 1903 in the form of the Portage Lakers. In 1899 the Portage team played very successfully. On that first team, four out of the eight players were doctors. However, one of the doctors, John “Jack” L. Gibson, became the focus of the team as its captain. “Doc” Gibson was the leading scorer for the Lakers. Their 1902–3 team picture, which included “Paddy” the mascot dog, referred to the team as the champions of the United States. The team’s record that season was 13-0-1 as they scored 132 goals and gave up only 26 goals. In the playoffs, they tied the Pittsburgh Bankers 0-0 in the first game before finally defeating them in the second contest 1-0 to win the U.S. Championship. The next season James R. Dee became the club’s first president and paid his players’ salaries, creating the first professional hockey team. In 1903–4 the Lakers lost only two of twenty-six games, including the playoffs. Their only regular-season loss came at the hands of American Soo 7-6. In the U.S. playoffs, they lost to the Pittsburgh Victorias 5-2. However, the Lakers rebounded, winning the next two matches, 5-1 and 7-0, respectively. After their repeat victory as U.S. Champions, the Lakers hosted Canada’s best team, the Montreal Wanderers at the

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Amphidrome in Houghton. Over 5,000 fans watched as Portage defeated Montreal by scores of 8-4 and 9-2 to claim the title of world champions. By soundly defeating the Canadian team, the Lakers earned the reputation as the toughest team on ice. Integral to the Lakers’ success was the acquisition of Joe Linder. A local high school star in not only hockey, but also in football and basketball, Linder became the key playmaker for Portage. Gibson, who had selected Linder to play for the Lakers, saw early on what others would eventually see. Linder, the first great American-born hockey player, was inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1975 joining his teammate “Doc” Gibson, a charter member of the Hall in 1973. In 1904–5, Portage joined three other clubs to form the International Hockey League (IHL). Since Canada had yet to form a professional league, the IHL attracted many of the best Canadian players. The teams in the league came primarily from the Upper Peninsula region of Michigan but also included a team from Sault St. Marie (Canada) allowing the founders to legitimately claim international status. In 1905–6, a Pittsburgh franchise from the former Western Pennsylvania Hockey League joined after that league disbanded. All of the communities had indoor arenas where the teams played. HoughtonPortage Lakes played in the Amphidrome on Portage Lake; Calumet’s home ice was in the Palestra; Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan (aka American Soo) competed at their local curling rink named the Ridge Street Ice-A-Torium; Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario’s (Canadian Soo) home ice was at the local curling rink; and Pittsburgh found a home in the Duquesne Gardens. Unfortunately, Portage would be the only IHL team to win the championship. The league operated for only three seasons and folded when competition from professional leagues in Canada lured away the top Canadian players. As a professional league, the IHL could not compete for the Stanley Cup. Portage, however, issued challenges after both the 1905 and 1906 seasons to the Stanley Cup Board of Directors in an effort to be able to play the Ottawa Silver Seven in a championship series. Both times they were turned down. Professional teams were not allowed to compete for the Cup until after the formation of Canadian professional leagues in 1908. As a result of the Stanley Cup being given in 1908 to professional teams, a new cup for amateur clubs was established that same year by Sir H. Montague Allan to replace the Stanley Cup. Hockey at the amateur, semiprofessional, and professional levels struggled in the 1900s. Leagues started, had limited success, and then folded with regularity. None could sustain continued growth to catapult the sport into the national consciousness into the next decade. The collegiate game, at least in the northeastern United States, had a little more stability. Regardless of the organizational struggles, hockey developed some incredible players during this period who would go on to earn Hall of Fame recognition and become idols of the game.

The Olympics The Olympic Games allowed U.S. sporting leaders to display American superiority through athletic performances. Most other popular U.S. sports provided little opportunity to create intense nationalistic feelings. Baseball, American football, and basketball were all played nearly exclusively in the United States. Other sports, which did provide international championships such as skiing, figure

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skating, and cycling, were considered minor sports by U.S. fans and media. In addition, most international championships took place in European countries, and travel costs often kept U.S. athletes from participating. However, set within a fouryear cycle, the Olympic Games provided organizers time to raise necessary funds for the expensive journeys. The variety of sports and the focus on track and field also helped U.S. officials justify the incredible effort to compete. The creation of the modern Olympic Games in 1896 coincided with progressive leaders’ efforts in the United States to create a sense of American uniqueness and national identity. These leaders, including James Sullivan, Casper Whitney, Albert Spalding, Luther Gulick, and Teddy Roosevelt, created a sporting republic. As the decade began at the Paris Games, American athletes sought to prove that the young nation could not only compete with traditional powers, but that due to its scientific focus on training methods and American determination, its athletes were superior. American support of the Olympics led the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the nation the Games for 1904. American athletes would have the opportunity to shine without traveling to Europe. American leaders believed the 1904 Games would not only allow America to demonstrate its athletic superiority but also to stake its claim as one of the leading nations in the world. While Americans embraced the Games, the opportunity to demonstrate its superiority, internationally, failed to develop. St. Louis hosted the games in conjunction with the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the second consecutive Games to become a sideshow of a World’s Fair. The St. Louis group, led by D. R. Francis, president of the exposition, hired James E. Sullivan as the chief of the Department of Physical Culture of the Louisiana

President Theodore Roosevelt standing with members of the 1904 U.S. Olympic team. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Purchase Exposition to organize their athletic competitions. Sullivan, as secretary of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), held great power over amateur sport in the United States. Regardless of Sullivan’s experience and expertise, the Games flopped. European nations stayed away. Although more than forty different events gained Sullivan’s Olympic sanctioning, almost all of the 9,476 participants were Americans. Of those 9,000 athletes however, many were involved in mass athletic events including Bohemian and Turner gymnastics with 800 and 3,500 participants respectively. In addition, on the program were public school championships for elementary and high school students, numerous Missouri State high school championships, and college basketball and football tournaments. Missing was the international flavor of the Games. In fact, athletes wore club or school uniforms exclusively rather than U.S. uniforms, making it hard to detect any international competitions. For all of their failings, the 1904 Olympics did offer highlights and innovations. They were the first Games in which gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded, and four new recognized events were included for men in the program: boxing, dumbbells, the decathlon, and freestyle wrestling. For women, archery was added to the Olympic program. Some athletes also took the opportunity to shine in Olympic glory. Archie Hahn, “The Milwaukee Meteor,” won three gold medals at these Games in track and field. In gymnastics, George Eyser won six medals. Competing on a wooden leg Eyser won the rope-climbing, vault, and parallel bar events while finishing second in the Pommell horse and the combined four event. Eyser completed his Olympic feats with a third place in the horizontal bar. The St. Louis Games provided their fair share of controversies. In swimming Hungary’s Zoltan Halmay beat American J. Scott Leary by just one foot in the 50meter event. However, the American judge ruled that Leary had won. Halmay and Leary ended up in fisticuffs over the ruling, and the judges ordered a rematch. In the pool, Halmay once again edged Leary in the second race. In track and field, the marathon provided incredible, if not comedic, drama. Run on a very humid day with temperatures reaching over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the runners left the stadium and embarked on a dusty, unpaved course. Mounted horsemen cleared the trail in front of the leaders. Doctors, judges, and reporters in automobiles followed the horses. The net result was a constant cloud of dust kicked up into the runners’ faces. American physical educators and scientists, including Luther Gulick and Charles Lucas, used the Olympic marathon as a platform to demonstrate science’s ability to improve human performance. Lucas monitored British-born Thomas Hicks, who ran for the American team throughout the race. Using their “scientific” theories Lucas and his team helped Hicks twice during the race achieve his supposedly maximum potential through sulphate of strychnine and egg whites. When Hicks requested water, they sponged his mouth out instead. After twenty miles of running despite the heat, they bathed him in warm water from the boiler of a steam automobile along with the strychnine and a shot of brandy. Whether from the special treatment or despite it Hicks ran the race in 3:28:53. The romantic and strange stories notwithstanding, the 1904 marathon also held significance for being the first Olympic race to include the first two black Africans to compete in the Olympics, Zulu tribesmen Lentauw and Yamasani. Americans

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The Savage Games The 1904 St. Louis Games had a unique sideshow included in the Olympic program, often referred to as the “Savage Olympics.” James E. Sullivan staged what he referred to as Anthropology Days on August 12 and 13, 1904. Working with scientists, physical directors and coaches who had taken a curious interest in the debate concerning which native cultures and races created better natural athletes, Sullivan staged these games under the guise of testing these theories of superiority. He assembled a diverse group of “aborigines,” mostly from the Department of Anthropology’s “human zoo” in which anthropologists William J. McGee and Lewis Henry Morgan had reconstructed native villages on the site and assembled over 2000 occupants for the villages so that visitors could supposedly see the aboriginal people living in their own native environment. The variety of cultures assembled included Pygmies from central Africa, Ainus from Japan, Filipino natives, Tehuelche Indians from Patagonia, and numerous Native American Indian tribes. Sport asserted its own programs of scientific development, which, it claimed, resulted in greater accomplishments for humanity. It seemed natural to test whether these native athletes could compete against the scientifically trained modern athlete. Sullivan and Luther Gulick staged events for the aborigines to perform and recorded their performances. Unfortunately, these events were modern athletic events such as the shot put, the 100-meter dash, and the standing broad jump, all of which were unfamiliar to the native tribesman. Having attained the results, the organizers then set out to explain and categorize the aborigines. Sullivan, Gulick, and McGhee concluded that the myth of the greatest natural athletes existing in primitive tribes had been scientifically debunked. Noting that the times and performances of the natural athletes from the tribes could only compare with the performances of Missouri schoolboys, and not Olympic competitors, they determined that aboriginal athletes had proven to be inferior athletes. Organizers of this bizarre display failed to mention that the contestants were not specially selected athletes from their tribal cultures sent to compete. Instead, they had tested a hastily selected group of aboriginal subjects who happened to be at the exposition for the purpose of demonstrating their cultural lives and dressing up in native costume. Nevertheless, the results supported their racially motivated ideals that civilized environments created superior human beings.

demonstrated their prejudice in referring to the runners as the two “Kaffirs.” This derogatory term, used by the media, Olympic officials, fair organizers, and fans, proved that mainstream white Americans remained unprepared to see blacks from Africa, Cuba, North America, or any place in the world as equals. The two runners were actually on loan to the Olympic race from the fair’s Department of Anthropology, where they participated in the Boer War exhibit. Ironically, both were actually students at Orange Free State in South Africa. The press was much more comfortable placing the “Kaffirs from Zululand” in more traditional roles regarding race.

1906 Athens Games Although not considered an actual Olympic Games in the recognized history of the modern Olympic movement, these Greek games saved the movement from

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near failure. The Athens games were wildly successful, setting attendance records that would stand until the 1912 Stockholm Games. The United States sent a large contingent in order to dispel rumors that their dominance at St. Louis was due to the lack of European competition. For the first time the American Olympic Committee (AOC) and the AAU consolidated control of the American team to ensure that the strongest team possible would go to Athens. Olympic organizers held local fund drives and raised $15,000 to help defray travel costs for the trip. President Theodore Roosevelt named James E. Sullivan to head the U.S. contingent in the hopes that the American team would once again demonstrate the rugged athleticism that Roosevelt advocated. American athletes dominated in track and field events once again, and the American media declared the team the winners of the Games, even though the United States did not win the total medal count. One of the things that the Athenians did in hosting these Games was to limit the program and condense it into a manageable time frame so that the events would not go on for months as they had in St. Louis and were planned to do in Rome. A significant development of these Panhellenic Games saw the Great Britain national team wholeheartedly embrace the Olympic movement. The large contingent sent to Athens performed very well. Great Britain, at the time, was one of, if not the leading, sport nation in the world and their full participation and endorsement of the Games boosted the young movement’s prestige. In addition, they gave U.S. athletes a strong competitive challenge. The British involvement would also change the course of the Games. Later in the year, the Rome organizing committee, which had been planning the 1908 Games, collapsed and it became evident that Rome would not be able to host the IV Olympiad. With their enthusiasm for the Games in evidence, the IOC approached the British about the possibility of London hosting the 1908 Games. They accepted, and the new rivalry between the United States and Great Britain took on renewed significance now that the Olympic Games would be contested on British soil. More than any other nation, the United States sought to distance themselves from the British, due in part to the fact that the United States had always lived in the shadow of Great Britain as one of its former colonies. For American leaders the Olympics provided opportunities to display to the world that they were as good, if not better than, their mother country. To do so in that country’s home provided a great opportunity.

1908 London Games The 1908 London organizing committee set new standards for organizational efficiency. They followed the lead of the Greeks in limiting the scope and breadth of the program to the central Olympic contests. London held the contests in Shepherd’s Bush Stadium, an 85,000-seat venue that held a 100-meter swimming pool surrounded by a five-lap-to-the-mile cinder running track and a 660-yard concrete cycling track. For the opening of the Games, organizers developed a parade of nations where over 2000 athletes and officials representing eighteen countries marched around the cinder running track carrying the flags of their countries. Unfortunately, this parade would begin a series of confrontations between the host nation and its primary competitors, the United States, as they fought for the title of the world’s most vigorous nation.

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In the stadium, the British displayed the flags of the participating nations with one notable exception: no American flag flew. The British explained that no suitable American flag could be found and that no ill will was meant. American athletes and officials, incensed at what they believed to be an intentional slight, decided to break Olympic protocol. The protocol called for each nation’s flag bearer to dip their flag in deference to the hospitality of the organizing nation when passing in front of the host leaders. As Irish American shot putter and designated flag bearer Ralph Rose approached King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in the royal box, Rose and the American contingent refused to dip the colors before the royal family. Rose would later explain, “This flag dips for no earthly king.” The actions set the stage for a bitterly fought Olympic Games between the two nations. The media, fans, and officials representing each nation attempted to explain incidents that would occur as indicative of the weakness of the other’s cultural and moral values, thus increasing their own sense of superiority. The 400-meter track final provided a classic confrontation between the two nations. Three American runners—Robbins of Harvard, Carpenter of Cornell, and Taylor from the Irish-American Athletic Club—met in the final against Lieutenant Wyndam Halswelle of Great Britain. Coming toward the finish Carpenter passed Halswelle and teammate Robbins for what appeared to be the Olympic title. However, British judges ruled that Carpenter fouled Halswelle on the final turn. The judges stepped on the track and cut the finishing tape, thereby ruling the race invalid. When Carpenter reached the finish line there was no tape to cross and the controversy erupted. The British judges ruled a re-run and disqualified Carpenter. In the rescheduled race, the two remaining American runners refused to compete. Halswelle jogged around the track to his unchallenged victory and the only walkover in Olympic history, while the media on each side cried foul against the opposing nation. With this controversy resounding in the press, the marathon provided an escalation of complaints regarding each nation’s perspective on sport. American distance runners held low expectations. American officials believed that distance running benefited sluggish sportsmen and did not represent the vigorous American athlete who excelled in power and speed. The British had been the leading force in distance running and most people believed they would dominate this event. On race day, very hot temperatures proved destructive to the British runners not used to the unusual heat. The British runners faded trying to rein in Italian runner Dorando Pietri, who set a blistering pace. When Pietri entered the stadium, the pace had obviously affected him. He ran the wrong direction before collapsing on the sloping cycling track around the stadium. British officials ran to his aid and gave him a shot of strychnine to invigorate him. Pietri started again but soon collapsed. With officials lifting him he struggled around the track with their help. With Pietri 100 meters from the finish line the crowd roared as American John J. Hayes entered the stadium, running relaxed toward the finish. British officials quickly gathered up Pietri and literally dragged him across the finish before the hard-charging Hayes. Refusing to disqualify Pietri, the British judges placed AOC officials in an awkward position of protesting Pietri’s victory, which many had heralded as a heroic effort. The British officials finally granted the American protest and disqualified Pietri. British officials demeaned the Americans as being too concerned with winning and argued that, had it been an English runner who had finished behind Pietri, there would have been no issue as the British would have honored his

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supreme effort. The British press went as far as to claim that Hayes had forfeited a rare opportunity to become a beloved figure in Great Britain and wipe away the negative images of American athletes that the British people had developed. The British argued that true sportsmanship would let the race finish as it did with no protests. After the 1908 Games American officials claimed that they had won their fifth straight Olympic Championship and heralded their sporting technology and scientific training methods along with American determination for creating the greatest athletic nation in the world. The British took offense to these claims, attacking American attitudes of winning at all costs at the expense of fair play and sportsmanship. They also noted that American claims never reflected medal counts of all events. Americans responded by arguing that they only competed in truly athletic contests and that had they chosen to compete in what they considered nonathletic sports then they would dominate those as well. Americans used new ideas to define themselves during this decade, as well as to separate themselves from Great Britain. Using the image of a melting pot that strengthened the old bloodlines of Europeans, the United States boasted about the racial and ethnic background of their Olympic team that included Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Slavs, Black Ethiopians, and red Indians. While this egalitarian ideal existed on the Olympic team, it did not reflect the reality of American society at the time. Blacks remained barred from baseball, America’s pastime. The Irish, Italians, and other recent immigrants still struggled in ghettoized areas of American cities. The ideal of the melting pot looked impressive on the Olympic roster but it was by no means the reality of life in America.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing At the turn of the century, boxing entered a time of American dominance in sport. The 1900s witnessed the rise of some of the sport’s most famous and colorful characters. It also witnessed American fighters laying claim to almost every world championship title in the professional ranks, and continued growth in the amateur ranks, as the AAU promoted their national championships. Boxing remained a popular sport, although a battle called the “fight of the century” between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries in the heavyweight class challenged the sport’s already questionable reputation. As the century began, boxing had seven weight classifications. By the end of the decade boxing two more classifications would be added: the flyweight and the light heavyweight divisions. Pugilism had always been a vehicle for social integration by ethnic minorities in the United States. While excluded in many areas of American cultural life, new immigrant populations, as well as ethnic and racial minorities, often found boxing to be a great equalizer. While many fight fans were well-dressed, well-educated, wealthy patrons, those partaking in the actual battles typically came from the lower classes of society. It provided opportunities for these marginalized groups to proclaim their equality in at least one avenue of American life. Fighters commonly came from Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, or black communities. In 1901 boxing allowed more opportunities to these typically oppressed groups than any other

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sporting venue. American football was the bastion of middle- and upper-class young men, baseball had become a whites-only endeavor, and other sports struggled to embrace diversity in the same way that boxing did. However, as this decade developed, some of those opportunities diminished as progressive leaders sought to promote a more civilized society. Many black fighters had proven successful in the ring. George Dixon paved the way, dominating the featherweight division in the 1890s, and continued to display great skills into the new century. Abe Attell, “The Little Hebrew,” fought Dixon three times and credited Dixon for helping him become a better boxer. A Jewish fighter who learned to fight on the streets in San Francisco in an Irish neighborhood, Attell decided to emulate Dixon’s graceful, gliding style and used it to claim the featherweight title from Dixon in 1901 and hold onto the crown throughout the decade. In the lightweight division, another black boxer entered the decade as the world champion. Joe Gans from Baltimore became the first native-born African American fighter to win a world championship. In 1901 Gans knocked out Frank Erne in the first round of a fight in Fort Erie, Canada, to win the world lightweight championship. Gans held the title until 1904 when he challenged Joe Walcott, another black fighter, to the welterweight championship title, which Walcott had held since 1901. Officials ordered that in order to fight Walcott, Gans had to relinquish the lightweight title, although many still regarded him as the champion nevertheless. Gans and Walcott fought to a draw, allowing Walcott to retain the title. Gans had an opportunity in 1906 to regain his lightweight title in Goldfield, Nevada. A young promoter named George “Tex” Rickard lured Gans to fight for the title against Oscar “Battling” Nelson. Rickard owned the Northern Saloon in Goldfield and had no previous history with boxing or promotions. Rickard wanted to draw the nation’s attention to Goldfield, to increase his business prospects. In the fight, the two men battled for forty-two rounds before Nelson hit Gans with a left hook to the groin and was disqualified on a foul. Gans regained the world title and Rickard, inadvertently, began a long and storied career as a promoter. Gans defended his title over the next two years before meeting up with Nelson again on July 4, 1908, when Nelson knocked out the champion in the seventeenth round. A rematch, two months later, netted the same result, a twenty-one-round knockout. What no one realized at the time was that Gans had begun to feel the effects of tuberculosis, which would end his life in 1910. Nelson defended the lightweight title until 1910 when he lost to Ad Wolgast in a brutally bloody fight. In the fortieth round Nelson’s eyes were swollen so much that he lined up his fighting stance opposite one of the ring posts. The referee stepped in and awarded the fight to Wolgast to alleviate further injury. Walcott, a welterweight, was born in Barbados but grew up in Massachusetts. His rise to the top took many twists and turns, demonstrating that, regardless of the opportunities seemingly provided to black boxers, there were also prices to be paid for the privileges. Walcott, like Gans, had at times thrown a fight to pacify promoters and bettors. Walcott also fought heavyweights in order to prove himself. In 1904 Walcott defended his title twice against other black fighters. The Dixie Kid–Joe Walcott fight would mark the first time in history that two black fighters would battle for a world championship. In the match, Walcott lost on a foul in the twentieth round. Later that year the two fought to a draw in a rematch. Since the

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Dixie Kid exceeded the weight limit for the fight, Walcott was renamed the champion. The middleweight division had one dominant champion. Tommy Ryan, from Irish descent, claimed the vacant title in 1898 in a battle with Jack Bonner. Ryan retained the title for ten years until he retired and vacated the title. After Ryan’s dominant run, a relative newcomer claimed the vacant title. Stanley Ketchel, son of a Polish immigrant, developed his boxing skills as a bouncer in Butte, Montana. After losing only twice in his first forty-two fights, all in Montana, Ketchel decided to venture out and test his ability. He traveled to California and in 1908 earned a fight with Jack (Twin) Sullivan, knocking him out in twenty rounds and winning the vacant title. Ketchel went right to work in defending the title. In a match with Billy Papke, the two fighters met in the center of the ring to shake hands and Papke punched Ketchel in the head. Ketchel never regained full functionality during the fight and lost in a dazed performance, being knocked out in the twelfth round. Ketchel gained a rematch eleven weeks later and pummeled Papke in a furious eleven-round knockout. With the win, Ketchel became the first middleweight boxer to regain a lost title. Ketchel, while dominating the middleweight class, sought challenges by fighting larger boxers, including heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In the twelfth round Ketchel stunned the much-larger Johnson with a right hand that caught the champ off balance and knocked Johnson to the canvas. After sitting on the canvas for a moment, Johnson stood up and in a rage hit Ketchel in the jaw, knocking the middleweight champion out. Recovering from the Johnson bout, Ketchel continued to dominate the middleweight division. However, in 1910 a ranch hand named Walter Dipley, who believed Ketchel attempted to steal his girlfriend while he was training at a ranch in Conway, Missouri, shot and killed the fighter. As a result, the decade ended with the title vacated. During the 1900s boxing promoter and Chicago newspaperman Lou Houseman believed that a new classification should be added between the middleweight and heavyweight division. He proposed a new classification with a top weight limit of 175 pounds. Houseman’s proposal suited his own interests as he managed Jack Root, a middleweight who outgrew the 158-pound limit, but struggled to compete against much larger heavyweights. In 1903 the light heavyweight division was established in the professional ranks, to be followed by amateur acceptance in 1906. Root fought against Kid McCoy, who introduced the corkscrew punch, for the new title in April 1903. However, the title changed hands three times before the end of the year until Bob Fitzsimmons won the title, holding it for two years. Fitzsimmons became boxing’s first triple-title holder with the victory. He had previously held both the middleweight and heavyweight titles in the 1890s and won the light heavyweight title when he was forty years old. In 1905 “Philadelphia” Jack O’Brien knocked out Fitzsimmons in fifteen rounds to take the title. O’Brien was a successful self-promoter. In 1901 he went to England to build up his record and sent the victorious reports back to the Associated Press. The tactic proved successful as, when he returned, the mayor of Philadelphia and 10,000 fans greeted him at the docks. O’Brien was a living exemplar of the muscular Christianity movement. He traveled with prominent Philadelphian Maj. Anthony J. Drexel Biddle who, as an avid boxing fan, helped promote O’Brien on lecture circuits, so that the fighter could promote his faith and his career. In the 1905 fight with

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1900–1909

Fitzsimmons, he won not only the light heavyweight title, but also was regarded as the heavyweight champion as well. Fitzsimmons had been assigned the vacant heavyweight title at the time of the fight. When he went down, many gave both titles to O’Brien. In 1907 O’Brien fought Tommy Burns for the heavyweight title. Burns won a twenty-round decision over O’Brien in Los Angeles. Burns actually weighed under the light heavyweight limit and could have claimed that title as well but never did. The true superstars of the sport were the heavyweights. Coming off his defeat of Bob Fitzsimmons in 1899, Jim Jeffries entered the decade as the reigning world heavyweight champion. Jeffries continued to knock out opponents in the first part of the decade before retiring in 1904, undefeated. Jeffries then turned to refereeing. Marvin Hart self-promoted a fight in Reno, Nevada, between himself and Jack Root, which he claimed would crown a new champion. With Jeffries overseeing the match as referee, Hart knocked Root out in twelve rounds.

Jack Johnson, Heavyweight Boxing Champion Marvin Hart eventually lost the title to Tommy Burns in 1906. Burns, a Canadian, traveled across Europe defending the title. However, a challenger, Jack Johnson, followed him. Johnson had won the black championship title from Denver Ed Martin in 1903 and desired an opportunity for the world championship. He used the press to hound Burns around the world in an effort to get a title shot. Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, and the son of a former slave, John Arthur Johnson had risen from battle-royal fights in his home state to achieve prominence as a great fighter. Burns traveled to Australia to face Aussie challengers. Hugh “Huge Deal” McIntosh was an Aussie promoter who invited Burns down under for the bouts. McIntosh realized that when President Theodore Roosevelt ordered his Great White Fleet in the Pacific to travel to Australia for maneuvers that the potential for profits from a championship fight when the fleet landed would be enormous. After a couple of successful defenses McIntosh promised Burns enough of a purse that race became a secondary concern. With a guarantee of $30,000, Burns agreed to fight Johnson. On Christmas day 1908 Johnson and Burns fought in an oval-shaped stadium built for the occasion, which would become the model for American football stadiums in the future. Scientific theories of the period held that blacks were inferior to whites in their endurance levels and had weaker abdominal strength. It quickly became clear that Johnson was not inferior physically to the white Burns. From the outset, Johnson battered Burns. Police who entered the ring in the fourteenth round finally stopped the fight and Johnson was awarded the championship, turning the world of boxing upside down. While in lower classifications, black champions, if not accepted, were tolerated. In the heavyweight division, which held much greater prestige, Johnson’s victory brought great consternation. Johnson refused to play the role of the subdued Negro who knew his place as an inferior in society. Whites considered him “uppity” and a threat to the status quo. Immediately, there was a call for white fighters to step up and face the new champion. A series of white hope fighters faced Johnson, including “Philadelphia” Jack O’Brien, Al Kaufman, and Stanley Ketchel. When none of the fighters could

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dethrone Johnson, white promoters enticed Jim Jeffries to come out of his six-year retirement to uphold the dignity of the white race and fight Johnson in the fight of the century. News media coverage of the Johnson-Jeffries fight was like none before. Magazines and newspapers sent correspondents to cover the fight for weeks before the event. These correspondents were often celebrities including Jack London, John L. Sullivan, and Rube Goldberg. Throughout the nation, actors portraying the fighters recreated the fight blow by blow in auditoriums. Crowds gathered outside telegraph offices to hear the play-by-play read by to them. Young promoter Tex Rickard won the bid to host the fight with a promise of a $101,000 purse. Rickard planned to stage the fight in San Francisco, but pleas from reformers around the country and the threat of congressional leaders pulling support for a 1913 Panama-Pacific exhibition, caused California governor J. N. Gillett to outlaw the fight in the state just two weeks before the date. Rickard moved the fight to Reno, Nevada, with promises by city officials that they could build a stadium and stage the fight with only two weeks preparation. Before a crowd of 22,000 fans, in an arena built solely for the bout in downtown Reno, bands played songs such as “All Coons Look Alike,” and the crowd chanted, “Kill the Nigger.” This event became a symbolic battle over racial superiority. Despite racial catcalls, Johnson kept his poise and responded by knocking down Jeffries twice, something the undefeated former champion had never experienced. In the fifteenth round Jeffries’ cornermen called the fight, before their man was knocked out by the much stronger Johnson. Johnson’s victory inflamed tensions, and race riots broke out across the nation. White fight enthusiasts, confronted by the celebratory attitudes of black fans, resorted to violence. Race riots led to numerous deaths and injuries across the nation. Johnson became a larger-than-life hero in the nation’s black community.

“The Fight of the Century”: A Black Man Refuses to Learn His Place Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries fought on July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, in what was termed “The Fight of the Century.” Although fought on a symbolic day of American unity representing the ideals of the Declaration of Independence signed 134 years before, which stated that “All men are created equal,” the circumstances of this fight spoke to the contrary. In 1910 many citizens of the United States believed that the color of one’s skin made one inherently unequal, and in the ring that day was a man who embodied that white sense of hatred toward African Americans, Jack Johnson. Whites regarded his opponent as “The Great White Hope.” Jeffries came out of retirement convinced by American fight supporters that Johnson represented a threat to the reputation of boxing and to American notions of proper society. Jack Johnson won the fight in the fifteenth round. Johnson not only rejected the idea that African Americans accept their low status in American society but also flaunted his opposition. In the ring, Johnson mercilessly pummeled his white opponents, showing no mercy whatsoever and fighting with a seeming rage. Outside of the ring, Johnson dated white women, showed off his wealth driving his prized cars around town, and generally disregarded the racial boundaries of the age.

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Whites saw him as a racial symbol who threatened the American social order. Calls for the abolishment of the sport rang out, even from boxing’s most ardent and famous supporter, Theodore Roosevelt.

Cycling After the bicycling craze of the 1890s, the sport settled down into a comfortable existence. In the wake of the recreational boom came increased interest in competitive racing. Sprints, touring, and endurance events all became immensely popular. An African American led the way in American cycle racing, Marshall “Major” Taylor. The powerful track-racing sprinter won his first world championship in 1899 and collected numerous national and world titles in his career. He proved to be enormously popular on both sides of the Atlantic and won races around the world on numerous tours. He was a devout Baptist, however, and refused to compete on Sundays, which initially proved troubling for promoters. However, when they realized Taylor’s tremendous popularity and the profit potential in the huge crowds he drew to events, they quickly adapted their race schedules to accommodate the young American. (For more on Taylor, see sidebar in chapter 3.) Long-distance races also proved popular. Six-day races at Madison Square Garden drew massive crowds. When in 1898 the New York legislature passed an ordinance forbidding riders from staying on the bike for more than twelve hours at a time, race organizers quickly adapted, making the event two-man team races. The new format proved even more popular as fans could interact with racers while they took their breaks for food and rest. The jams, or quick sprints to steal a lap in a mad dash, kept fans enthralled in the event. Motorpace racing also became popular. Racers would draft behind an automobile, which acted as a pace car. The racers were able to reach speeds of fifty miles an hour in these events and fans loved the speed. Bobby Walthour Sr., the “Dixie Flyer” from Georgia, excelled at these dangerous events. At high speeds, tires were prone to bursting, often leaving riders with broken bones and other injuries. Walthour was an accomplished six-day rider and very popular internationally as well. Cycling internationally grew incredibly and opportunities to compete in international events in cycling outpaced any other sport besides possibly boxing or the Olympic Games. During this decade the world’s most famous international cycling event began, the Tour de France. The inaugural event in 1903 ran flawlessly. Villagers lined roadways to watch the excitement of the race. However, in 1904, the event suffered scandals and riders went to extreme measures to win including spreading nails out on the road behind them, having gangs of thugs mug other riders, and hopping trains to get to the next checkpoint. Fortunately, officials punished offenders and the event recovered and continued to grow in scope and popularity through the decade. Women also competed in competitive cycling events, including modified sixday races, track races, and some tour races . While these races provided opportunities to compete, formal titles and championships were not awarded, however, in keeping with the moral beliefs at the time that the fairer sex should not be subjected to the corrupting influences of win at all cost mentalities, which came with championship titles.

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Cycle racing during this period provided great opportunities for financial gain for both the cyclists and the promoters. Professional cyclists could earn up to $15,000 a year in prize money and appearance fees. Even lesser cyclists were guaranteed $5,000 to $7,000 a year for competing.

Skiing While skiing was seen as the national sport of Scandinavian countries, American enthusiasts developed the sport in the United States during this decade. In the nineteenth century downhill ski racing had flourished in California’s Sierra Mountains, but the sport barely survived the opening of the twentieth. Replacing it were ski jumping competitions, which became popular throughout the country. Jumping competitions used manmade structures that could be built anywhere. Downhill racing relied upon natural features, which were typically far away from major urban centers of turn-of-the-century America. New York’s Central Park was a hotbed, and in Chicago authorities erected running platforms for ski jumping in the parks that had no hills. The downhill races of La Porte, California, remained a popular event, but with the death of the gold-mining industry, the races declined in popularity and eventually stopped completely, with the last race held in 1911. However, these races used techniques that remain familiar today. Using long skis and unique concoctions of “dope,” a type of wax that allowed the skis to glide better, speed was the key factor for these racers. With downhill speeds of eighty miles per hour, the races created great local pride. The festivals held numerous races and provided opportunities for children to race in a Tom Thumb division. Women’s racing style was different from the men’s crouching technique that resembles today’s tuck in racing. The women had to adopt an upright style to keep their skirts from flying up over their heads while racing. Races for Chinese laborers, who were viewed as socially and athletically inferior to the white racers, were included in the program as well. While the La Porte races provided thrills through the pure speed of racing down a mountain, other ski enthusiasts found excitement in regions where mountains were unavailable. Ski jumping became immensely popular throughout the country, attracting up to 15,000 spectators to events. The heart of this craze was Ishpeming, Michigan, where in 1904 members of the local ski club founded the National Ski Association of America (NSA). They held the first National Ski Jumping Tournament that winter. This group would continue to organize and sanction events around the country and host the national championships throughout the decade. The winter of 1904–5 also witnessed the rise of the nation’s first winter sports and ski resort as the Lake Placid Club decided to stay open for the winter season. The resort imported forty pairs of skis and single poles from Norway in order to provide skiing opportunities. The gamble paid off, installing the resort as a leader in the skiing movement. Five years later an avid skier and young college student at Dartmouth started the Dartmouth Outing Club. Fred Harris began the club so that students could take advantage of winter sports and in 1909, the club held its first winter meet, which would be the forerunner to the famous Dartmouth Winter Carnival. From these intramural competitions intercollegiate skiing competitions developed in the next decade.

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Surfing In a new U.S. territory in the South Pacific, surfing—a sport unfamiliar to Americans—emerged. For Native Hawaiians, surfing held religious significance and had been a popular sport for centuries. However, Christian missionaries had made surfing taboo in the nineteenth century due to its religious connections. But the start of the twentieth century saw the loosening of bans on the activity. As the islands developed a growing tourist trade as a U.S. territory, the commercial prospects of the sport became clear to white promoters. Publisher Alexander Hume Ford, while in Hawaii, watched native Hawaiians display their skills at riding the waves on their handcrafted boards. The surfboards, measuring up to sixteen feet long and weighing 150 pounds, were mastered by these young natives on the beaches of Oahu. Ford befriended these young surfers, who helped him learn how to surf. Ford arrived in Hawaii in 1906 just before another famous tourist, Jack London, arrived in the islands. Ford took London to observe the surfers in action and introduced him to the locals. London tried the sport and loved the experience enough that he featured it in his work “A Royal Sport,” which, when published, introduced surfing to the world. London’s article highlighted the surfing abilities of George Freeth, who was of Hawaiian and Irish descent. Ford viewed the sport as a way to promote Hawaii and leased land on the beach at Waikiki to start the Outrigger Canoe Club in 1908, the first club devoted to surfing. He and Freeth organized the beach boys in establishing the club as they held competitions in surfing, canoe riding, and other aquatic events. Ford also started a magazine promoting Hawaii called Mid-Pacific Magazine. On his first cover, he featured a photo of a young surfer named Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, who would become regarded as the father of modern surfing. The magazine regularly featured articles on surfing to promote the sport. Ford took Freeth with him to the mainland United States where Freeth provided demonstrations of surfing at Huntington Beach, California. Rail baron Henry Huntington, after witnessing Freeth’s displays, hired the young Hawaiian to perform exhibitions and teach the sport at his resort hotel at the beach. Freeth consented and began to spread the sport throughout California. Back in Hawaii, Kahanamoku and others formed another surfing club called the Hui Nalu in which they competed against the Outrigger and other surf clubs as the decade ended. Kahanamoku would emerge in the next decade as the world’s premier swimmer, winning Olympic gold medals and introducing surfing around the world.

Tennis Tennis consisted of two styles of play at the turn of the century. The first was court tennis, an indoor game played almost exclusively by wealthy Americans who had the resources to build their own court or belong to exclusive clubs that had courts. The game, played in an enclosed court where the walls and even the roof are in play, is a complex game where the chase is the heart of the game. The greatest court tennis player of the decade was also one of the best ever. Jay Gould, famous financier, won his first singles title in 1906 and was defeated only once in singles in his career spanning from 1906 to 1926.

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The second style was amateur lawn tennis, which contrary to the limited access of court tennis was played by multitudes of people in the United States. Tennis at this time remained an amateur sport, however, with professional status still two decades away. Its international competitions grew stronger with the new century. In 1900 American Dwight F. Davis established a cup in his name for play between England and the United States. In 1907 the competition opened up to other nations and Australia became a formidable foe for the Davis Cup. The winner of the cup from the previous year would act as the host for the Cup championships the next year. Both men and women participated in tennis. It provided an acceptable competitive outlet for women. In fact, at Wimbledon, the greatest international tournament, a woman was the only American to win at the championships. May G. Sutton won the women’s singles title in 1905 and 1907. The U.S. Lawn Tennis Association held national championships in a number of disciplines, including men’s and women’s singles and doubles, mixed doubles and all-comers singles and doubles for men. In addition, they held National Intercollegiate Championships. At the national level, Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman began an Jay Gould II, holding tennis racket. (Courimpressive playing career at the end of this decade as tesy of the Library of Congress) she won singles, doubles, and mixed doubles titles in both 1909 and 1910. Wightman would later donate a trophy for international competition between women, in 1923, as a complement to the Davis Cup.

SUMMARY As the first decade of the twentieth century ended, sport in America saw its influence on culture strengthened. Regardless of the struggles that sport had encountered, it had become a powerful tool used by progressive leaders to develop and construct images of American identity. Through the encouragement of Theodore Roosevelt who, as president, promoted a strenuous life, evidenced through rugged American sport and physical activity, the role of games and play in American society became of paramount importance. Although the decade experienced the constant ebbs and flows of contraction and expansion that growing organisms typically witness, it is undeniable that during this decade sport became entrenched in the mindset of Americans. Baseball as the national pastime grew ever more popular, and the World Series established a tradition for the sport that would continue to build upon its mythical imagery. Other sports, such as football and hockey, while challenged due to the brutality evidenced in the games, still were able to overcome serious threats to their development and build on the foundations that they had established. Basketball continued to grow in popularity as leagues were formed across the nation, and even

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soccer and rugby developed fan bases as they were examined for potential replacements for American football. Individual sports such as cycling, skiing, and tennis built on their growing popularity and established important international competitions during the decade. Boxing became an American stronghold, as many champions originated in or moved to the United States as the young nation developed a reputation for toughness, evidenced by the boxing prowess, especially, of its immigrant and ethnically diverse populations. The Olympic Games, while challenged due to the unhealthy connections to World’s Fairs, not only survived the decade, but developed a competitive stage for American leaders to put forward their notions of the strength of the melting pot of American culture, and prove American superiority through scientific training methods and determination. Track and field athletes and officials, in particular, utilized the Games to challenge other world powers, especially European nations, regarding national prowess. While sport grew and developed in American culture during this decade, not all Americans were included in that growth and development. African Americans and women were the most notable exceptions. African American athletes remained outside of the scope of baseball’s major-league system. Although the development of Negro league teams had its nexus during the decade, the fact that race issues pervaded the opportunities to play sport in America is significant. While African Americans did, at times, find opportunities in sports such as football, it remained a rare event. In boxing, which witnessed a large number of African American world champions during the decade, by the end of the decade opportunities became nonexistent, due to Jack Johnson’s impact in and out of the ring. Women also saw very little growth in opportunities available to them. Olympic venues had minimum sporting competitions for women throughout the decade and colleges saw little growth in the development of women’s sports. Only in figure skating, where a woman won the world title, beating all of the men, do we see women’s opportunities enhanced. American culture still viewed women as the frail sex and sought to protect them from the unhealthy pursuit of savage competition and rugged athletic endeavors. Both women and African Americans would have to wait a few more decades before seeing sporting opportunities develop for them in the same ways that white males experienced during this decade. Sport seemed poised to take a leading role in American culture at the end of the decade. Some people viewed it as the answer for William James’s “Moral Equivalent of War,” that is, a healthy and moral way to determine nationalistic disputes without bloodshed and bullets. Newspaper and media coverage of events blossomed during the decade. Realizing not only the cultural significance, but also the potential profitability of sport, many newspapers developed sports pages and even sports sections in their daily coverage of local and national events. Sport had arrived in the twentieth century and, even in its young developmental stages during this decade, it is easy to see the foundations of what would become a national obsession and love affair with sport through the rest of the century.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Abrams, Roger I. 2005. The first World Series and baseball fanatics of 1903. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Anderson, David. 2000. More than Merkle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Barnett, C. Robert. 2004. St. Louis 1904. In Encyclopedia of the modern Olympic movement, ed. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Baseball Almanac. 2008. http://www.baseball-almanac.com/. Bjarkman, Peter C. 2000. The biographical history of basketball. Chicago: Masters Press. Cohen, Stan. 1985. A pictorial history of downhill skiing. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing. Dyreson, Mark. 1998. Making the American team: Sport, culture, and the Olympic experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Fry, John, ed. 1972. America’s ski book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Guttmann, Allen. 1984. The Games must go on: Avery Brundage and the Olympic movement. New York: Columbia University Press. Heaphy, Leslie A. 2003. The Negro Leagues: 1869–1960. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Henry, Bill. 1976. An approved history of the Olympic Games. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Herlihy, David V. 2004. Bicycle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hietala, Thomas R. 2002. The fight of the century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the struggle for racial equality. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. Hubbard, Kevin, and Stan Fischler. 1997. Hockey America. Indianapolis: Masters Press. Lester, Robin. 1995. Stagg’s university: The rise, decline, and fall of big-time football at Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lomax, Michael. 2004. Black entrepreneurship in the national pastime: The rise of semiprofessional baseball in black Chicago, 1890–1915. In Sport and the color line: Black athletes and race relations in twentieth-century America, ed. Patrick B. Miller and David K. Wiggins, 25–43. New York: Routledge. McCallum, John D., and Charles H. Pearson. 1973. College football U.S.A., 1869–1973. New York: Hall of Fame Publishing. McGurn, James. 1987. On your bicycle: An illustrated history of cycling. New York: Facts on File Publications. Menke, Frank G. 1969. The encyclopedia of sports. 4th ed. South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes and Co. Oriard, Michael. 1993. Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Riess, Steven A. 1995. Sport in industrial America, 1850–1920. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson. Roberts, James B., and Alexander G. Skutt. 2006. The boxing register: International Boxing Hall of Fame official record book. New York: McBooks Press. Roberts, Randy. 1983. Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the era of white hopes. New York: Free Press. Smith, Robert A. 1972. A social history of the bicycle: Its early life and times in America. New York: American Heritage Press. Smith, Ronald. 1981. Harvard and Columbia and a reconsideration of the 1905–6 football crisis. Journal of Sport History 8 (Winter): 5–19. Watterson, John Sayle. 2000. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 5

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919 Sarah Bair

OVERVIEW The 1910s marked a period of economic growth, technological advancement, and rising consumerism for many Americans. Perhaps nowhere was this more visible than in the automobile industry. Led by the Ford Motor Company, which developed the moving assembly line to produce the Model T in 1913, American automakers had produced two million cars by 1920. Economic expansion led to an increased need for global markets and to more international economic ties, a significant factor in U.S. policy regarding World War I. Members of the middle class, who had begun to feel some of the benefits of industrialization and mass production, enjoyed greater freedom and more time for leisure activities. Innovations such as x-rays, airplanes, audio recordings, and moving pictures, as well as advances in medicine and transportation, led to a sense of optimism and possibility. At the same time, rising urbanization, immigration, economic disparity, and social problems created feelings of uncertainty and danger that galvanized reformers. From 1880 to 1920, 23 million immigrants came to the United States and by 1920, 40 percent of New York City residents were foreign born. The 1920 U.S. Census showed that for the first time, the percentage of Americans living in cities outnumbered those in rural areas. In addition, depletions in the labor force due to men being drafted to fight in World War I caused a greater number of women and African Americans, many of whom moved out of the South to northern cities in what became known as the Great Migration, to seek industrial jobs. The social upheaval and urban problems caused by these changes led many Americans to embrace a variety of reform movements that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although loosely connected under the progressive umbrella, reformers in the 1910s had different priorities and used a range of strategies to achieve their goals. Some lobbied Congress and pushed for legislative reforms. In fact, the 1910s saw the passage of four constitutional amendments calling for the direct election of senators, a federal income tax, women’s suffrage, and prohibition of alcoholic beverages. Other reformers,

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such as Jane Addams, formed clubs and organizations designed to help the poor and to provide healthy forms of recreation. Finally, some reformers advanced the social efficiency movement with its emphasis on order, stability, and effective management of public institutions by credentialed experts working for the public good. Both advocates for the welfare of the poor and those more interested in social order saw the potential of recreation, and sports in particular, for alleviating stress and for controlling crime and violence that often erupted due to boredom, despair, and pent-up physical energy. As cities became more crowded and work life more regimented, sports provided an outlet for both middle-class and working-class Americans. Games and contests were something to look forward to and brought a degree of pleasure to what were otherwise bleak daily lives. This same philosophy applied to the newly developing comprehensive high schools. Sports were viewed as a vehicle for social control that would alleviate both adolescent sexual urges and tensions between immigrant groups. High schools became community centers and sources of shared pride, identity, and purpose for neighborhoods. Even as the 1910s were marked by reforms and social upheaval at home, Americans were forced to confront their changing place in the world and to endure a world war and an influenza epidemic that devastated people of all social classes. By the time World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States was already becoming a global economic power, and the war, despite its human costs, provided business opportunities for American banks and companies. It also greatly increased the number of women and African Americans in the workforce, a trend that was not entirely reversed after the war ended and that contributed significantly to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote in 1920. The United States, which did not enter the war in force until the spring of 1918, suffered far fewer casualties—100,000 deaths with half attributed to disease—than most of the other countries involved in the war, but the effects of the war were felt by all. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the largest numbers of American immigrants were from Germany. These individuals, as well as immigrants from the other Central Powers countries, were subjected to constant suspicion and questions regarding their loyalty. The Wilson administration sought to stamp out dissent and criticism of the war through a variety of means, including passage of the Espionage and Sedition acts in 1917 and 1918, which attempted to restrict free speech in opposition to the war. In his efforts to promote nationalism and increase support for the war, Wilson demanded conformity on all fronts and used government agencies to control economic conditions, transportation, and communication. Teaching the German language was outlawed and those who failed to comply with the new guidelines were considered traitors. Sauerkraut was even renamed “Liberty Cabbage.” Although many Americans came to accept an increasing role of government in their lives during the 1910s, Wilson’s wartime policies undermined First Amendment rights and intentionally created fear in the populace. The last two years of the 1910s were difficult ones in the United States. In addition to the war, Americans and people from around the globe confronted an influenza epidemic in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and 20 to 40 million people worldwide. American deaths in a single year were greater than those incurred by Americans in all of the wars of the twentieth century combined. Then, in 1919, just as the epidemic was beginning to wane, President Wilson, embittered from his battles with Congress over the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations,

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suffered a severe stroke from which he never fully recovered. In addition, 1919 brought major strikes by workers who had put their grievances on hold during the war as well as race riots in several major cities around the country. The general fear of uprisings and unrest led Americans in 1920 to elect Warren G. Harding who had run on a platform of healing and normalcy. In many respects, sports during this period of promise and turmoil can best be described as setting the stage for the Golden Age of sports in the 1920s. This does not suggest that the decade did not have its own share of heroes and great athletic moments. There were, for instance, many firsts in American sport in the 1910s, including the first Indy 500 automobile race in 1911, the first American Stanley Cup ice hockey winner in 1917, and the first thoroughbred horse-racing Triple Crown in 1919. More important, many of the trends that fully emerged in the 1920s had roots in this decade. These trends included a greater belief in the social value of sport and in the level of interest and participation among Americans, a growing shift from amateurism to professionalism, and a desire to curb brutality and injury in sport, especially in football and boxing. Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States for much of the first decade of the twentieth century and a great athlete himself, was perhaps the most visible advocate of competitive sports for men and a champion of the idea that sports had value beyond recreation. Roosevelt, like many others of his generation, believed that a latenineteenth century “crisis of masculinity” had diminished the strength, vitality, and competitive spirit that men needed to lead. For Roosevelt, the rigors of organized sport provided the ideal training ground for the kind of mental and physical toughness that he believed men should possess. The notion that sports could be instrumental in developing courage as well as a variety of other physical and mental skills, prevalent throughout the 1910s, reached a peak during preparations for World War I. According to historian Wanda Wakefield (1997, 13–19), sports played an important and tangible role in the lives of U.S. soldiers during World War I. First, athletic training was considered an effective tool for improving fitness and relieving stress. In fact, there was a general concern about the fitness level of military recruits and a belief that improving one’s physical fitness was a patriotic duty. Soldiers preparing at bases around the country for deployment to the war participated in football, boxing, tug of war, volleyball, baseball, and basketball. Raymond Fosdick, chairman of Commissions on Training Camp Activities, argued that participation in these sports before the war made soldiers more effective once they got to the front. Wakefield suggests that military leaders placed special emphasis on sports that encouraged aggression and that had American origins. This emphasis on the connection between sport and military preparedness continued once the troops got to Europe. According to sports historians Elliott Gorn and Warren Goldstein (1993), when American troops were deployed to Europe in 1917, they were joined by 12,000 YMCA workers who were expected to promote health and fitness among the troops. In addition to the physical benefits, military leaders saw sport as a way to help soldiers deal with fear and to promote a team spirit within the ranks. Wakefield suggests that sports helped soldiers cope with fear in two ways. First, they could be used as a distraction. Second, sports provided a way for military leaders to make the tasks of war seem more familiar and, therefore, less frightening. Despite all evidence to the contrary, war became a game. Tactics could be equated to football strategy.

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Throwing a grenade was like throwing a baseball. Relying on one’s fellow soldiers to hold a position was just like relying on one’s teammates to stop the opposition. The link between the language of war and the language of sport greatly expanded in World War I. The use of sports metaphors in war and the subsequent use of war metaphors in sport became, in many respects, the language of “real” men. Finally, sports became a unifying agent for American soldiers who, by World War I, were an extremely diverse group. Men were expected to know and understand the language of sport, whether or not they played sports prior to the war. This provided common ground for men from different parts of the country with different religions, languages, and cultural backgrounds. In order to help them bond with each other and to feel a sense of American pride, U.S. soldiers routinely competed against European teams throughout the war. Military leaders encouraged a feeling of superiority among American soldiers and nurtured the belief that success as a team on an athletic field would translate into success on the battlefield. When soldiers with these experiences finally returned home, many had become hooked on sports. This, in turn, strengthened the country’s emphasis on athletics as a form of recreation. It also opened the sports arena to a broader range of young men. The linking of sport with masculinity and war often had negative implications for women athletes who were seen as a threat to men or as an affront to established gender roles. Despite the fact that women had always engaged in hard, physical labor working on farms and rearing children and, more recently, working in factories, they were still viewed as more delicate than men. This perspective was bolstered by changing economic roles in the early twentieth century. For most of human history, the family formed an economic unit, one in which men and women labored together for the family’s economic well-being. The maturation of the industrial economy, especially the ability of workers to buy many of the goods that they helped to mass produce, created “separate spheres” for men and women. Men went to work and women stayed home. Athletics could help to prepare men for the rough-and-tumble public sphere, but would be unnecessary and inappropriate for women. Doctors gave credence to this point of view by warning that strenuous exercise would endanger women’s reproductive development and health. In addition to being viewed as a preparation for manhood, sports in the 1910s were valued for other reasons, too. At a time when the United States was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly involved with the rest of the world, sports strengthened local communities, created a bridge between different social classes and ethnic groups, and provided working-class men with upward mobility. Average guys, including immigrants in many cases, could, through ability and hard work, make a living and become local heroes if not always national figures. In short, sports were seen as a reflection of emerging American values. One indication of the increasing role of sport in American culture was the level of interest by Americans, young and old. An unprecedented number of Americans were participating in and following organized sports during the 1910s. The growth of the sports pages in newspapers throughout the country contributed to the popularity of sports among fans as they were able to follow their teams’ progress even when they could not attend games. In the decade preceding 1910, some of the largest newspapers reached the one-million mark for number of copies of a single issue. This growth continued through the 1910s, and the sports page became a staple in all major American newspapers.

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Another trend that emerged in conjunction with the growing interest in sport was the shift from amateurism to professionalism. This was especially true in baseball, which had professional national leagues by this period, but it applied to football, basketball, and golf as well. When a football league of national scope emerged in the 1920s, it was partially a result of the success of professional football in Ohio, especially star player and Olympics gold medalist Jim Thorpe’s Canton Bulldogs in the 1910s. In basketball, professional teams and leagues were being formed by the turn of the twentieth century, but there was little stability or loyalty among players to a particular team. The strength and innovative play of a few teams in the 1910s, such as the New York Celtics and the Philadelphia SPHAs, both formed in 1918, helped to set the stage for professional basketball on a national scale in the 1920s and 1930s. In golf, Walter Hagen, who won the U.S. Open Golf Championship in 1914, promoted professionalism by earning money on tours, endorsing products, and hiring a business manager by the name of Robert “Bob” Harlow who became known as the “founder of professional golf.” Not surprisingly, another trend during this reform-minded progressive era was the desire to “clean up” problems that had developed in the early years of sport, especially in baseball, football, and boxing. In the 1890s, baseball games were often characterized by inebriated crowds as well as the use of obscenities and poor behavior among players. Reformers in the 1910s wanted baseball games to be family events enjoyed by the community, and they supported the efforts of managers such as Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics who tried to improve the image of the game by requiring players to dress professionally and to behave appropriately on the field. The primary concern in football, which will be discussed more fully later in the chapter, was the prevalence of violence, injuries, and death among the players. A number of rule changes were put into effect in the 1910s in order to stem the violence and improve the image of the game. Unfortunately, reformers made little progress in this period to reform boxing, which was still illegal in many states and had long been viewed as little more than backroom brawling. Efforts to change this image throughout most of the 1910s were overshadowed by race issues within the sport, and it was not until after World War I that it became more popular and acceptable.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Baseball’s hold on the American imagination grew in the 1910s. The deadball style of play, with its emphasis on power pitching and protecting a small number of runs through short hits and stolen bases, continued throughout the decade, but it was being challenged by a new approach to the game. The innovative cork-centered ball, introduced in 1909, allowed for greater offensive production and the emergence of great hitters. During the 1911 season, for example, fans were treated to Ty Cobb’s astounding .420 batting average and “Shoeless Joe” Jackson’s impressive .408. This shift in style of play coincided with the rise of big-park stadiums and growing attendance. According to baseball historian David Voigt (1983), in 1911 as many as 10 million fans enjoyed games in major-league parks for every team. The success of these parks caused promoters in other cities to follow suit and attendance, with a couple of exceptions, held steady throughout the decade.

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Economic and Legal Issues in Baseball The 1903 Agreement, forged between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL) and credited with bringing order and stability to baseball, gave professional teams more control over their players and created a National Commission to serve as a judicial body that would resolve disputes within the sport. Immediately after this agreement, the owners cut salaries. Although they rose at a slow and steady pace after that, salaries did not go up in proportion to the owners’ profits. In 1910 the average salary for a professional player was $3000. This led the players to form a union known as the “player’s fraternity” in 1912. Counting minorleague players, the union had 700 members and was able to win a number of concessions from the National Commission. Part of the union’s leverage came from the creation of a third league that served as a threat to American and National League owners. Formed in Ty Cobb, Detroit Tigers, American League. 1914 by James A. Gilmore, a Chicago businessman, (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) and other members of the business community, the Federal League offered better salaries than either of the other two leagues. In 1914, one-third of the AL and NL players were enticed to join the new league. Although they were blacklisted in the two original leagues, the defections of these players caused most AL and NL owners to raise salaries. Eventually the Federal League owners were bought out by the major leagues and the players’ union lost some of its bargaining power.

Baseball and Ethnicity The earliest Negro leagues were formed in the late 1860s in response to segregation, but these regional leagues were often transitory, and players, who had no formal contracts, switched teams often. Ironically, most of the early teams were centered in the North even though the vast majority of African Americans still lived in the South. Over the years, there were some efforts to create a national league for African American players, but it was not until 1920 that a viable Negro League on a national level was established. In 1911 two former members of one of the Negro teams, the Cuban Stars, signed with the Cincinnati Reds in the National League, giving some hope that further integration in the major leagues would follow. Outfielder Armando Marsans and third baseman Rafael Almeida were light-skinned and considered Latinos, not blacks, which at that time made them more accepted, but many players and the Negro press hoped that these two would break down the barrier for all African American players. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Almeida played in the major league for three years and Marsans played for ten, but they remained isolated exceptions. By 1915, in conjunction with the Great Migration of African Americans to northern industrial cities, participation and interest in Negro baseball was growing.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

New York Giants manager John McGraw and Chicago Cubs manager Frank Chance, in 1911. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

In the second half of the 1910s, most major cities in the North and West had Negro teams and some, in places like New York and Chicago where there were large African American populations, actually made money. Because there were fewer teams in the South, many players looked to move north where there were more opportunities. In fact, in 1916, one whole team, the Duval Giants of Jacksonville, Florida, moved north and became the Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City. Players on the team believed that they would be paid more, would have more fan support and better facilities, and would have more opportunities for themselves and their families in New Jersey. Negro teams played each other, but they also played local white teams, including some major-league teams. In some areas, such as Chicago, big-league teams were reluctant to play Negro teams because they figured that they had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Major-league teams in the East were more willing to play Negro teams. In 1915, for instance, Negro teams played eight games against big-league teams and won four of them. Two of the most consistently successful Negro teams during the decade were the Chicago American Giants, led by the great pitcher Andrew (Rube) Foster, and the Lincoln Giants of New York. Formed in 1911 by Jess McMahon, a white boxing promoter, the Lincoln Giants played at Olympic Field located at 136th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem. Playing semipro and major-league all-star teams several times per week, the team drew crowds numbering in the thousands. To add to the festivities, McMahon added burlesque to baseball with a pregame show that included juggling and acrobatics. Behind the pitching of Joe Williams (“the Cyclone”), the Lincoln Giants were one of the best independent teams in the East during this period.

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Perhaps the most ethnically diverse team during the 1910s was the All Nations Club, organized in the second half of the decade by J. L. Wilkinson, a Kansas City white man who later operated the Kansas City Monarchs. The team played with considerable success and had players from a variety of ethnic groups. Several African American men played on the team, including two of the best Negro pitchers, Jose Mendez and John Donaldson, along with a Japanese player, a Hawaiian, an American Indian, three whites, and one or two Latin Americans.

Women’s Baseball Baseball first took hold for women in the last half of the nineteenth century at women’s colleges such as Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley, all of which played an important role in the development of women’s athletics generally. Women loved baseball from the start and it did not take long for women’s college teams to emerge. As in other sports, pioneers in women’s baseball struggled to find suitable clothing to perform successfully. Barbara Gregorich (1993), who has written much of the history on women’s baseball in the early period, describes how, after hitting the ball, a female player would have to put down her bat, gather up the train of her long skirt, and throw it over her arm before running to first base. By the 1890s, some women took advantage of Amelia Bloomer’s newly designed trousers for women, but others, wanting to avoid the controversy provoked by wearing “bloomers,” continued to do the best they could in skirts. By 1910, many women’s professional teams, typically known as Bloomer Girl teams, had been established around the country. Maud Nelson, an Italian immigrant who began her baseball career in the late 1890s, played an important role in the development and promotion of these early teams. Remembered for her incredible durability and longevity, Nelson played the game well into her thirties and made a guest appearance for the Boston Bloomer Girls at the age of forty-one. While best known as an outstanding pitcher who rarely gave up more than a couple of hits in any given game, Nelson also played third base in the late innings and contributed to her teams with solid hitting. In 1911, at the age of thirty, Nelson and her first husband, John B. Olson Jr., formed the highly successful Western Bloomer Girls. Nelson sold her interest in the team to her fellow player and co-owner, Kate Becker, in late 1912, but not before ensuring the team’s long-term success—a feat that she accomplished with several additional teams during her long career in baseball. Another outstanding women’s player in the 1910s was Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Murphy, who made her living playing on semipro men’s teams. The daughter of a French Canadian mother and an Irish millworker who also played baseball, Murphy grew up playing the game with her father and brothers in Warren, Rhode Island. She began her baseball career in earnest when, in her late teens, she was offered five dollars a game to play for a semipro team in Warren. After moving up to the more successful Providence Independents, she was ready, in 1918, to sign as an infielder with Ed Carr’s Boston All-Stars, another semipro team. Although he took some criticism from those who thought he was corrupting and exploiting a young woman, Carr exulted in having Murphy on the team and credited her with improving the team’s performance and with selling more tickets. Throughout her years playing in the man’s world of semipro baseball, Murphy earned respect as a tough competitor

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

Bloomer Girl Baseball Bloomer Girl baseball teams existed in the United States from the mid-1890s until 1934. Dubbed “Bloomer Girls” because many of the players chose to wear the loose-fitting trousers designed by Amelia Bloomer when they played, the teams were comprised mostly of women, but they generally had at least one man on the team to play catcher and often two or three additional men. Unlike most men’s teams, the Bloomer Girl teams did not have a set location, but instead played exhibition games against men’s amateur and semipro teams around the country. While there were hundreds of these teams throughout a forty-year period, the Western Bloomer Girls, formed in February 1911 by Maud Nelson and Katie Becker, was one of the most successful. The Western Bloomer Girls began touring in May 1911 with Nelson pitching and playing third base and Becker pitching and playing second base. From the beginning Nelson recruited the best players she could find whether they were from rural areas in Michigan and Illinois or from large cities such as her own Chicago. With some of her later teams, Nelson recruited throughout the country, which was unusual at the time. She was well known for her ability to spot talent among men or women players and also worked as a scout during most of her career. The Westerns fielded six women and three men for games. Nelson typically put the men at catcher, shortstop, and center field, but occasionally she had one of them play pitcher. Over time, she also figured out the best strategy for placing men in the batting order. Nelson sold the Westerns to her partner, Kate Becker, in October 1912 once they had completed their first two seasons, but her departure did not hinder the team’s success. The same could be said of her second team, the American Athletic Girls, when she sold her share to co-owner Rose Figg. Nelson’s ability to build stable and successful teams that continued to thrive after she moved on proved to be one of her greatest contributions to women’s baseball.

and an excellent first baseman. She was the first woman to play for a major-league team in an exhibition game which she did in 1922 and again in 1928.

Baseball and World War I When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, baseball owners decided not to cancel the 1917 and 1918 seasons. The 1917 season was already under way, and for the next several months the season continued normally. Attendance remained high throughout the summer, and baseball owners hoped that the government would consider baseball essential to national morale and would exempt players from the draft. By the end of 1917, however, the situation was bleak and owners worried about the 1918 season. It turned out that baseball was not what Secretary of State Newton Baker meant when he released the government’s “Work or Fight” slogan. Despite arguments used by baseball officials about the importance of keeping people’s morale high during the war, baseball was not considered essential war work. There was also a growing sense that these strong, male athletes had a patriotic duty to fight for their country. A failure to do so was seen, in some quarters, as cowardice. After the 1917 season 227 players ended up joining the armed forces, while others turned to draft-exempt industries such as shipbuilding and farming.

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Star Bloomer Girls’ baseball club, 627 W. Michigan St., Indianapolis. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Eventually more than 500 current or future players served in the military. Not seeing a viable alternative, the owners pressed on with the 1918 season and filled in their rosters with retired players or with ones brought up from the minor leagues, a necessity that greatly weakened the minor leagues during this time. When Secretary Baker declared that after September 2, 1918, baseball players would be officially eligible for the draft, he allowed a two-week delay so that the World Series could be completed, but the Series was poorly attended and marked the end of a dismal financial year for baseball. Baseball’s image suffered for a number of reasons during the war. While teams sought to show their patriotism by holding parades, performing drills before games, giving out free tickets to servicemen, and encouraging fans to purchase war bonds, baseball generally was accused of not sacrificing enough for the effort. Owners tried to deflect some of this criticism by providing equipment to military teams in Europe as well as sending some major-league players to teach baseball skills to soldiers. Few players, however, initially volunteered to serve in the armed forces, and they continued to demand high salaries throughout the period. In fact, during the 1918 World Series, players, knowing that tickets sales were down and fearing that owners would respond by docking their pay, threatened to strike for more money. According to Voigt (1983), it was only after appeals to the players’ patriotism that they were convinced to play the final game of the Series. In addition, baseball was marred by corruption during the war years. In a widely publicized case, Hal Chase of the Cincinnati Reds, in August 1918, was suspended for betting and trying to bribe a pitcher to throw a game. All of these factors, combined with financial losses from the war and the influenza epidemic of 1918, led to a general sense of pessimism in baseball going into the 1919 season.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

The Chicago White Sox Scandal Despite this pessimism, tides shifted and 1919 turned out to be a banner year for baseball. Attendance and profits rebounded as war-weary fans welcomed the return of a more normal day-to-day life. After exciting pennant races, spectators relished the prospect of a World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. No one could have guessed that the series would end in one of the most notorious scandals in sports history. The White Sox, who had been a dominant team over the previous two years, were favored to win based on their overall balance and the strength of their pitchers, especially Eddie Cicotte and Lefty Williams. Chicago’s success, however, did not cure a number of problems that plagued the team going into the 1919 World Series. To begin with, Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner and manager since 1901, managed his team shrewdly and left many believing that he had a greater interest in profits than in his players. Comiskey began his long career in professional baseball in 1882 as a player with the St. Louis Browns, but by 1919 he was known best as a hard-driving owner who took advantage of the no-free-agency rule for players and cut costs wherever he could. For example, most teams allowed players four dollars per day to cover the cost of meals, but Comiskey expected his players to make do with three dollars per day. As a result of his efforts to cut laundry costs, the White Sox often played in filthy uniforms. More significantly, Comiskey’s players earned well below what players of comparable talent earned with other teams. In 1919 owners across the country cut players’ salaries because they feared a continuation of the low attendance that had plagued baseball during 1918. Despite strong attendance in 1919, Comiskey did not raise salaries, a decision that almost caused the players to strike in July of that year. In addition, Comiskey routinely went back on promises for bonuses if the team or individual players reached specified levels of success. Some baseball historians have noted that the general dissatisfaction of White Sox players in the late 1910s, as well as the limited options available to them for having grievances addressed, contributed to a climate that made cheating for money more likely. In addition to their frustration with Comiskey, White Sox players were often at odds with one another and this, too, played a role in conditions leading to the scandal. The low morale resulted in part from class differences among the players. Whereas most of the players were poorly paid, one, Eddie Collins, was awarded a $14,500 annual salary when he came to the White Sox from the Athletics in 1915. This was almost twice the amount paid to any other player on the team, a fact that caused considerable resentment among his high-performing, underpaid teammates. Collins, a graduate of Columbia University, was one of a small group of educated players on the team who tended to live a more refined lifestyle than most of the group. Arnold “Chick” Gandil, who ended up initiating the Series fix, hated Collins and everything that he represented. It was not difficult for Gandil to convince some of his teammates that they, in fact, deserved more money. When the Series actually began, the Reds came out of the gate strong, winning four of the first five games. The Sox came back to win the next two and were scheduled to play the final games of the series at home in Chicago. In the eighth and what turned out to be final game, however, the Reds won by a score of 10 to 5. In the aftermath of the game, rumors spread that the Series had been “fixed,” but the stories

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did not immediately gain strength. Many, including the editor of the respected Spalding Guide, dismissed them and noted the considerable strengths of the Reds. The story may have ended there had it not been for the investigative journalism of Hugh Fullerton, who wrote for the Chicago Herald and Examiner, and Christy Mathewson, the great ex-Giant player and Braves’ manager who wrote for the New York World. Having heard of rumors within the gambling community even before the Series began, both agreed to compare notes on any questionable plays during the Series. In the months following the Series, Fullerton began a relentless effort to dig up the truth. He eventually wrote a series of articles that described the fix and identified the names of those involved as well as their payoffs. Mathewson added to these accounts by providing Fullerton with detailed diagrams of each questionable play throughout the series. Although Fullerton’s accusations were not immediately believed, his work, combined with renewed allegations against the White Sox and other teams during the 1920 season, led to a grand jury investigation in September of 1920. Investigators produced evidence against eight players and seven confessed before the grand jury to receiving from $5,000 to $10,000 to throw the Series. Those implicated in the conspiracy and dubbed the “Black Sox” included the great hitter and outfielder Joe Jackson, pitchers Ed Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams, infielders Buck Weaver, Swede Riseberg, Fred McMullin, and Chick Gandil, and outfielder Oscar “Happy” Felsch. It is generally believed that Gandil, who retired in 1920 and who received the largest pay out of $35,000, was the chief instigator in the conspiracy. Weaver, who never confessed guilt, said that he played no part in the plot, received no money, and exercised only poor judgment by not reporting the scheme. Comiskey, who suspected the plot and actually offered a reward to anyone providing information on it, did not directly punish the players because he hoped to keep his stars for the 1920 season. After the grand jury investigation, a conspiracy trial was scheduled for June 1921 in Chicago. Baseball historians point out that the trial turned out to be a farce for two reasons. First, records of the grand jury testimony as well as the confessions of Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams mysteriously disappeared before the trial began. This sudden lack of evidence allowed all of the defendants to recant their original confessions. Second, both the jury and the spectators at the trial were extremely friendly to the players from the outset. When the jury announced its predictable “not guilty” verdict on August 2, 1921, spectators cheered and shouted praise for their “clean sox.” Although the players were absolved of legal wrongdoing, they soon paid a heavy price for their association with the scandal. Comiskey’s failure to make an example of his players by sanctioning them and by publicly condemning their corruption undermined AL president Ban Johnson’s authority and baseball’s National Commission system of rule. Thus, in 1921, a single commissioner replaced the commission system. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first person to take on this role, considered it his duty to restore honor, decorum, and integrity to baseball, a view that caused him to rule with an iron fist during his twenty-five-year tenure. Landis, deciding that the court’s verdict should not be used to exonerate the players, banned the eight “Black Sox” from professional baseball for life. Today such a ruling would be viewed as a violation of the players’ civil liberties. Even in 1921, there were those who opposed it on these grounds, but Landis had the support of baseball owners and the general public who wanted to restore baseball’s image.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

“Shoeless Joe” Jackson (1888–1951) Born on July 16, 1888, in the mill town of Greenville, South Carolina, Joseph Jefferson Jackson, nicknamed “Shoeless Joe,” began playing baseball at the age of thirteen for the Brandon Mill team, which played in the Textile League. The league was formed by mill owners as a way to keep workers and to build community spirit. Jackson distinguished himself as a great player immediately and by the time he was sixteen had become a local hero. In his early days as a player and later during his professional years, Jackson was known as a great natural hitter, but he excelled in all aspects of the game and thrilled fans with his stellar play both at bat and in the outfield. In 1908, at the age of nineteen, Jackson began his professional career with the Carolina Association’s Greenville Spinners and averaged an impressive .350 for the year. It was while playing with the Spinners that he earned his “Shoeless Joe” nickname. Apparently after developing a severe case of blisters from wearing a new pair of shoes in a game the day before, Jackson decided to play the next day in his socks, a decision that did not go unnoticed by the perceptive fans. He never played without shoes after that day, but the nickname stuck. His success with the Greenville team caused Jackson to be picked up the following year by Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics. After one season with the Athletics, he was traded to Cleveland where he played until 1915 when he joined the Chicago White Sox. Before he was implicated in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Jackson had been a star on every team he played on and was well on his way to gaining legendary status. He hit a total of 54 home runs, had 785 RBIs, and batted a career average of .356, an accomplishment that places him third on the list for Highest Career Batting Average, behind Rogers Hornsby and Ty Cobb. Although evidence indicates that Jackson played no direct role in the Black Sox scandal, a point reinforced by his near-flawless performance in the 1919 World Series, he ended up being indicted during the 1920 grand jury hearings. He was found not guilty during the 1921 trial, but he was still banned from baseball for life by newly appointed baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who said that he should have notified his teammates of the plot. Jackson continued to play in semipro and exhibition games every chance he got and remained popular with the fans, but he was never reinstated into major-league baseball. He stopped playing baseball altogether in 1933 at the age of forty-five and spent the rest of his life working in other industries. Since Shoeless Joe’s death in 1951, fans have continued to push for his reinstatement so that the way might be cleared for him to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. So far, this has not happened.

Some, such as baseball historian David Voigt, have argued that Landis’s ruling, and the willingness of people to accept it, was part of a larger effort to perpetuate the myth that the “Black Sox scandal” was a lone exception in an otherwise pristine and virtuous sport. The evidence does not support such a myth, but the power of baseball as a symbol of America’s emerging values was well entrenched by 1920 and needed to be protected. For the eight banned players, this meant years of trying to play under assumed names for semipro teams. Inevitably, they would be detected and ousted. Most soon gave up the hope of ever playing again. Buck Weaver, however, continued to fight the ban. Maintaining his innocence to the end, he appealed to Landis to be reinstated six different times, including once with a petition containing 14,000 signatures, but each time the commissioner rejected

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his pleas. The eight “Black Sox” were not the only players in the 1910s to risk their careers for financial gain, but they were the ones who paid the price both in their own day and in history.

Baseball Through the Decade The American League dominated the decade, winning eight out of ten World Series from 1910 to 1919. The Philadelphia Athletics won in 1910, 1911, and 1913; the Boston Red Sox won in 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918; and the Chicago White Sox won in 1917. The National League’s most dominant team was the New York Giants. Although they never won the World Series, they won the NL pennant four times from 1911 to 1913 and again in 1917. The Chicago Cubs won the pennant but lost the World Series in 1910 and 1918, the Philadelphia Phillies in 1915, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1916. The only NL teams to win in the decade were the Boston Braves “miracle team” in 1914 and the Cincinnati Reds in 1919.

Basketball Basketball grew in popularity during the 1910s, but the game was still in its infancy compared to baseball. Invented in 1891 by James Naismith, basketball developed in conjunction with the Playground movement in the early 1900s. Urban reformers hoped that city playgrounds would attract idle youth and keep them occupied in healthy recreation. Basketball, a sport well suited to concrete surfaces and requiring little space or equipment, became an ideal city sport. It could easily be played on playgrounds, in churches and schools, and even on rooftops. It also worked well in regions with colder climates because it could be played indoors. As with baseball, reformers and educators viewed basketball as a way to organize and Americanize immigrant youth. It, too, became a sport of choice in working-class, ethnic communities and spread across the United States with amazing rapidity. In many respects, basketball served as an ideal vehicle for urban reformers to reach immigrant children and their families. It gave urban recreation programs structure and staying power that probably would not have existed otherwise. Like baseball, basketball became a tool for Americanization and community building. Ethnic neighborhoods took pride in their teams, and leagues were often organized to allow for the naming of ethnic champions.

College and Amateur Basketball By the turn of the twentieth century, basketball was being played in high schools and colleges as well as in YMCA and American Athletic Union (AAU) leagues and tournaments. Although many men disapproved, the sport caught on almost immediately with women and was played regularly at the high school level and at all-women’s colleges such as Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Mount Holyoke. The first national rules for women were published in 1901. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) assumed control of college rules for men in 1908, and, in 1915 YMCA, NCAA, and AAU representatives formed a joint committee on basketball. In the second half of the 1910s, when the Playground movement was beginning to wane and funding was drying up, as the country prepared to

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

enter World War I, Naismith and others pushed to have basketball incorporated as widely as possible into the newly emerging comprehensive high schools. This push carried the sport well beyond its urban roots. College basketball by 1910 was gaining momentum and had extended to most regions of the country. The Southwest Conference was formed in 1915 and the Pacific Coast Conference followed in 1916. New York teams performed well during the decade with Columbia winning the unofficial national championship in 1910, St. Johns in 1911, and Syracuse in 1918. Wisconsin won twice in 1912 and 1916 and the West Coast team, Washington State, won in 1917. The AAU also sponsored national tournaments through much of the decade and approved the use of the first open-bottom nets for basketball for the 1912–13 season.

Professional Basketball The formation of a professional National Basketball League had been attempted in 1898, but it lasted only two years. Pro basketball in the 1910s still lacked formal organization on a national level. There were, however, many professional teams and leagues, particularly in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions. Often, players played for more than one team in a single season and switched teams when they could earn more money. Owners issued contracts by the game rather than by the season. Early professional teams such as the Buffalo Germans, who turned pro in 1905 and played successfully well into the 1930s, often started out as local club teams. The year 1918 proved to be a turning point in the development of professional basketball because two important professional teams were formed that year: the New York Celtics and the Philadelphia SPHAs. The New York Celtics, or the Original Celtics as they were known at the time, had their roots with a pre–World War I Irish settlement-house team from the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City. The team, which was reorganized under the direction of James Furey in 1918, combined many of the Original Celtics from the settlement-house team with new players from other parts of the city. After a mediocre first year, Furey recruited more talented players and began to build his team around the first of many outstanding Celtics, Henry “Dutch” Dehnert. A 60 100 guard, Dehnert became known for perfecting the pivot play in basketball. In the 1920s, the Celtics recruited more top players and revolutionized the game of basketball by playing as a team, rather than as a group of individuals responsible only for single players on the opposing team. At the same time that Furey was establishing the Celtics as a pro team in New York, Eddie Gottlieb, Harry Passon, and Hughie Black organized the Philadelphia SPHAs. They acquired their name because the team was funded and equipped largely through the efforts of the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association and until the mid-1920s all of the players were Jewish. Although they got their start as an amateur team, early success against top teams in the region earned them a spot, first in the Philadelphia League, and later, in the Eastern League. Like the Celtics, the SPHAs came into their own in the 1920s and 1930s, but they were one of the few longstanding professional basketball teams who got their start in the 1910s. As an institution in Philadelphia, the SPHA team promoted ethnic pride and proudly claimed their Jewish heritage by wearing the Star of David on their uniforms and adorning their uniforms with Hebrew letters (Riess 1998, 27). The team

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Playing basketball at the 1919 Inter-Allied Games, Pershing Stadium, Colombes, France. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

was part of a long line of Jewish teams and players to distinguish themselves in basketball. The 1910s marked a period when Jewish players began to transition from playing on settlement teams in major East Coast cities to playing in college and on professional teams. One of the most successful Jewish players to move from the college to professional ranks in the 1910s was Barney Sedran, who played for City College of New York and then went on to play for numerous professional teams from 1911 to 1938.

Football Prior to 1910 football was an extremely violent game. Players dealt with numerous injuries, and deaths were not uncommon. In fact, eighteen college players died playing football in 1905 alone. With the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose son played for Harvard during these years, many rule changes were implemented between 1905 and 1910 (see chapter 4). Still, football fatalities continued, with 113 between these years. In 1910 additional changes were made. Seven men were required on the line of scrimmage and the flying tackle was outlawed. In addition, teams were no longer allowed to run interference by interlocking arms or to advance the ball by pushing and pulling the ball carrier. To make the game more humane, play was divided into four fifteen-minute quarters with a one-minute

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

Barney Sedran (1891–1964) “The Mighty Mite of Basketball” was one of the early “greats” among little men in professional basketball. Born January 28, 1891, on the Lower East Side of New York City to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Sedran grew up playing basketball on the playgrounds and in the settlement houses of his neighborhood. Despite his small stature—he stood 50 400 tall and weighed 115 pounds as an adult—Sedran chose basketball because it was the one sport that was easy to play in the area where he grew up. As a youngster, he developed his game at the University Settlement House under coach Harry Baum, who encouraged his young charges to develop a new style of play. Sedran and his teammates were expected to master all aspects of the game, to move well with and without the ball, to master man-to-man defense, and to play intelligently on the court. This early tutelage served Sedran well throughout his career. As a student at DeWitt Clinton High School, Sedran failed to earn a tryout for the high school team because he was considered too small, so he continued to play with the settlement house team. He and several of his teammates from this team— the “Busy Izzies” as they were known—went on to play with great success at the City College of New York (CCNY). Although Sedran became a highly respected college player, he was not expected to move on to professional basketball because of his size. His prospects changed when another of the former “Busy Izzies,” Marty Friedman, called Sedran to join him on a professional team in Newburgh, New York. That team went on to win the Hudson River League championship in 1911–12 with Sedran leading the league in field goals. This effectively launched a professional career that spanned close to fifteen years and that included play on a variety of New York teams, on one Indiana team, and, finally, on the Cleveland Rosenblums in the American Basketball League (ABL) formed in 1925. After retiring as a player, Sedran went on to coach professional basketball for another twenty years. A member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, Sedran was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1962 and still holds the distinction of being the smallest player ever inducted.

break between the first and second and third and fourth quarters and a thirty-minute break between halves. Two years later brought the establishment of four downs to achieve a first down, the creation of an end zone behind each goal line, and the increase of five to six points for a touchdown’s value. Finally, a number of improvements in protective gear were introduced during the 1910s. All of these changes eventually led to a decrease in the number of serious injuries and deaths over the course of the decade.

College Football: A Training Ground for Business On college campuses, football was becoming a bit of a spectacle by 1910. Serious recruiting had taken hold and many coaches and players viewed the game with a “win at all costs” attitude. A regimented, military-style approach to practice, perfected by Walter Camp during his many years (1876–1909) as head coach at Yale University, became the norm. Players, viewing the demanding drills as a test of their physical and psychological strength, bonded with each other, seeing themselves as brothers and comrades. These young men had limited exposure to women during their college years because most of the schools that had football were

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all-male institutions. Football, in a sense, served as a measure of masculinity and a training ground for leadership. The ranks of early football teams were filled largely by men from elite backgrounds; they expected to be the leaders and powerbrokers in their communities when they reached adulthood. Successful college coaches, replicating Camp’s approach at Yale, learned to apply business principles to football and to market football as an ideal way to prepare privileged young men for business leadership. Camp, a successful clock manufacturer, climbed to the top of college football at the same time that Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management movement gained momentum in the business world. Camp applied Taylor’s regimented efficiency to football, including the notion that tasks should be broken down into component parts with individuals mastering their assigned parts for the good of the greater whole. In their Brief History of American Sports, Gorn and Goldstein include a passage from one of Camp’s 1920 writings that illustrates this connection. Camp wrote: Finding a weak spot through which a play can be made, feeling out the line with experimental attempts, concealing the real strength till everything is ripe for the big push, then letting drive where least expected, what is this—an outline of football or business tactics? Both of course. (1993, 158)

At Yale, Camp worked with elite young men from all over the country, and he made it his business to mold them into an efficient machine. His efforts resulted in Yale’s complete dominance of college football during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by 1910 other coaches had perfected Camp’s techniques and new powerhouses emerged.

The Geography of College Football In the 1910s the Ivy League continued to reign supreme in college football, but among the Ivy schools Harvard took the mantle from its rival Yale. The transition began with Harvard’s hiring of Percy Haughton in 1908. Haughton used the Camp model to bring order and structure to Harvard’s program. Between 1908 and 1916, Haughton’s team amassed a 71-7-5 record and won the national title in 1910, 1912, and 1913. Harvard and Yale played eight times during the decade (the 1917 and 1918 games were not held due to World War I), and Harvard won five times, tied twice, and lost once. In 1912 Harvard defeated both Yale and Princeton, spoiling their attempts at undefeated seasons, and won the mythical national championship. There was no championship game at the time and there were other undefeated teams, including Wisconsin, which won all seven of its games in 1912 and claimed the Western Conference title. There was a push that year for Harvard and Wisconsin to play in a true national championship game, but the idea never gained sufficient momentum. In 1915 Harvard humiliated Yale with a 41-0 victory and then lost its own bid for a perfect season by losing to Cornell University 10-0. Cornell went on to win the national championship that year. While football teams at elite eastern schools within the Ivy League captured a lot of attention in the 1910s, programs at schools in the Midwest, West, and South continued to grow in strength and prestige during the decade. This was the decade, for example, that led to the rise of Notre Dame, a team that would be a major national contender throughout the twentieth century. In 1913, after completing

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Army-Yale at West Point, October 19, 1912. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

two straight undefeated seasons, Notre Dame earned a secure place in college football history when, under coach Jesse Harper, the team perfected the use of the forward pass. Knute Rockne, who was a receiver on the team in 1913, was a perfect target for quarterback Gus Dorais. Rockne went on to become a chemistry instructor at Notre Dame and an unrivaled coach of the football team throughout the 1920s. Other midwestern teams to excel in college football in the 1910s included Illinois, Minnesota, and Ohio State. In the South, Georgia Tech led by coach John Heisman dominated the decade of the 1910s and emerged as a national power. From 1915 to 1919 Georgia Tech enjoyed a thirty-two-game winning streak that included the most lopsided game in college football history, a 222-0 win over Cumberland College in 1916. Heisman coached at Georgia Tech until 1919 when he became coach of the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater. On the West Coast, the University of Washington, under the leadership of coach Gilmour Dobie who arrived at Washington in 1908, dominated the decade. In fact, during Coach Dobie’s tenure, from 1908 to 1916, the Washington Huskies did not lose a game. During the run, they won fifty-six games and tied three. The team’s total win streak from 1907 to 1917 included sixty-three games. This record still stands as the most wins without a loss for any college football team. Football also became popular in California during the 1910s with a “re-introduced” Rose Bowl being held on New Year’s Day in 1916. The incredible rise in the popularity of college football in all sections of the country in the early twentieth century led to an increased level of tension on college campuses between academics and athletics. The fact that football players saw themselves as special, set apart and united by what they were forced to endure on the field, much as veterans were set apart by their battlefield experiences, caused consternation among many college faculty members. It seemed to them that football was taking precedence over academics with students who often expressed more

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interest in festivities surrounding the next game than in the content of their courses. This perception grew with the increasing influence on colleges of alumni, many of whom were large donors with a vested interest in football and who themselves viewed college more as a socialization experience than as an intellectual pursuit. In addition, as college football began to generate increasing fan interest, even among those who would never attend college, and began to earn significant revenue for colleges, the power and influence of coaches, players, and alumni grew. Many of the tensions between athletics and academics observed in the 1910s could be seen throughout the twentieth century.

Professional Football Although some players began to receive pay for playing football as early as the 1890s, professional football remained unorganized and regional until the 1920s. Most of the early teams were situated in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Illinois and were associated with local athletic clubs. The teams typically played for city championships and sometimes played other teams around the state, but there was no national league and most football fans were inclined to follow college football. In contrast to the ranks of college football, which tended to be filled with privileged young men, many of the early professional teams attracted ethnic and working-class players. A number of problems hampered professional football in the 1910s. Perhaps most important, there were no uniform rules, which made it difficult for teams to compete with each other on fair terms. The leagues that did exist were weak and teams often refused to join them. Because many of the players used football as a means to put food on the table for their families, they switched teams often in search of the best pay. Gambling and related scandals were common. Recognizing the potential of professional football and wanting to tackle the problems at hand, a group of representatives from several of the Ohio teams met in Canton, Ohio, in 1920 to draft a plan for stabilizing, improving, and marketing pro football. It was from this meeting that the National Football League (NFL) emerged in 1922. Although professional football, like the college game, was dominated by white players, one of the best known professional players of the period was a Native American named Jim Thorpe. Thorpe is perhaps best remembered as a track star, but after the 1912 Olympics, he spent many years playing professional sports, including football. In 1915 he was offered $250 per game by the Canton Bulldogs. According to Thorpe biographer Bill Crawford (2005), this was considered quite an enormous sum at the time, especially to play in an informal league that kept no statistics. Thorpe was known for both his running ability and his defensive tackling skills. In order to take advantage of his name recognition, the group who first met in Canton in 1920 named Thorpe the first president of the NFL, a position for which he was poorly suited and only held for one year. In 1923 Thorpe played for a professional team of his own making, “Jim Thorpe’s Oorang Indians,” and then played with various other professional teams until his retirement from football in 1928 at the age of forty-two. Some African American players also participated on the early professional football teams. One of the best known was Fritz Pollard, who was a standout player at Brown University during this decade and who was the first African American player to be named to the first team of Walter Camp’s All-American team. From

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Jim Thorpe (1887–1953) In 1912, Sweden’s king Gustav V, who was serving as host of the Stockholm Olympic Games, called Jim Thorpe “the world’s greatest athlete,” a title used to describe him more than once over the course of his career as a football player and international track star. Born in 1887 on the Sac and Fox Reservation in Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma), Thorpe entered the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1904. Here, under the tutelage of famed football coach Glenn Scobey “Pop” Warner, Thorpe began to make a name for himself as a football player and track athlete. In 1911 he led his team to an 11–1 record, including an 18–15 upset of powerhouse Harvard, a game in which he scored all of his team’s points. The following year, Carlisle won the national collegiate championship behind Thorpe’s 25 touchdowns and 198 points. While football was Jim Thorpe’s favorite sport, he became most famous for his performance in the 1912 Olympics where he won gold medals in both the pentathlon and decathlon and competed for fourth- and seventh-place finishes in the high jump and long jump respectively. His Olympic record of 8,413 points for the decathlon stood for almost two decades. Thorpe had his medals and his official records taken away in 1913, however, after several newspapers published accounts that Thorpe had played two seasons of semiprofessional baseball for which he received wages, albeit meager ones. Although this practice was common among college players at the time, there were strict rules against amateur Olympic athletes playing sports for pay, and Thorpe’s request for an exception on the grounds that he did not know he was doing anything wrong went unheeded. His medals and records were finally reinstated posthumously in 1982. After the Olympics, Thorpe spent the next ten to fifteen years playing professional baseball and football and even spent two years (1927–28) barnstorming with his “World-Famous Indians” basketball team. His greatest success was in football where he played most of his career for the Canton Bulldogs, which won team titles in 1916, 1917, and 1919, and in 1920 joined with thirteen other teams to form the American Professional Football Association (APFA). The APFA became the National Football League two years later. Thorpe played an instrumental role in the formation of the league as well as in developing and coaching the Oorang Indians, an all–Native American team in the early 1920s. Thorpe, who was married three times and had eight children, spent his later years working various jobs and struggling to stay out of poverty. He died of a heart attack in 1953. In 1950 he was selected as the most outstanding athlete of the first half of the twentieth century by American sports writers.

1919 to 1926 Pollard played for four different professional teams and was the first African American to become a pro coach when he served as a player-coach for two different teams, Akron and Hammond. In time, football would become a much more inclusive sport and would shed its more elite beginnings, but this was not yet the case in the 1910s.

Olympics Because the 1916 Olympics were canceled due to World War I, the only Olympic competition held during this decade occurred in 1912 in Stockholm, Sweden, with 2490 men and 57 women representing twenty-eight different countries. By all

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Osage Indian School football team, circa 1910. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

accounts this fifth modern Olympiad was an overwhelming success. This is not to say that the 1912 Games, and Olympic competition in general, did not have detractors. Many were quick to point out a host of problems associated with international athletic competition of this magnitude, but, by and large, the Stockholm games were well organized, and the Swedes showcased outstanding athletic facilities. The host country was especially pleased with its 30,000-seat stadium built in the form of a medieval castle. Athletes from England, the United States, Sweden, and Finland generally outperformed those from other countries throughout the 1912 Olympics. The host country, fielding an enormous team of some 600 athletes, won the largest number of total medals. England and the United States focused most of their efforts on track and field. Both countries competed extremely well in what was becoming the signature sport of the modern summer Olympics, but the fact that American track athletes bested many of their British counterparts increased an already well-developed rivalry between the two countries. American dominance also revealed a growing tension over different ways that one could view the purpose of sport, competition, and training. Throughout the nineteenth century, British athletes performed well in smallscale international athletic competitions and they did so using relatively low-key training methods and traditional techniques. The British valued the notion of the “gentleman amateur” who competed as much for recreation as anything else. The Stockholm Games revealed that international competition, especially at the Olympic level, was no longer considered play. From the British point of view, Americans had made a business out of it. American track and field athletes in Stockholm, referred to by the British press as “professional gladiators,” had in fact reaped the benefits of a major shift in the way Americans were coming to view sport in the

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early twentieth century. The U.S. athletes of 1912 had grown up being coached at the high school, college, and club levels and had benefited directly from a growing American interest in the science of sport and athletic training. According to Olympic historian John Lucas (1980), the entire American team trained three to five hours a day while traveling on board the Finland from the United States to Sweden. They were under the supervision of coaches and specialists throughout the trip. By contrast, British athletes were largely on their own in Stockholm. Just as many British officials were disgusted by the Americans’ newfound training methods and technical innovations, they felt threatened by the racial makeup of the U.S. team. Adding to their argument that Americans would do anything to win, the British press pointed out the “exotic racial mix” of U.S. athletes and argued that the United States was violating the spirit of the Olympic Games by relying on African American and American Indian athletes as well as those from various immigrant groups. The success of individual athletes such as pentathlon and decathlon winner, Jim Thorpe and sprinter Howard Drew added to British discontent and caused some, like writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to suggest that in the 1916 Berlin Olympics all those living under the British Empire should compete under one flag (Lucas 1980). As it turned out, however, neither the British nor anyone else competed in Berlin in 1916 because World War I led to the cancellation of the Games. Olympic competition resumed in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1920.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing Prior to 1910 boxing was illegal in most parts of the United States. Some states passed specific laws that banned prizefighting and others applied existing laws against riots, assaults, and betting to curtail its practice. Despite these legal restrictions, by the late 1800s boxing in many parts of the United States was becoming increasingly popular. Part of this popularity reflected a growing interest in sports and recreation generally, especially among urbanites who longed for ways to escape the tedium of factory work and a more regimented way of life. Boxing also benefited from a growing desire to see American athletes compete against the best sportsmen around the world and an increasing tendency to equate physical strength with power and race superiority. The emergence of John L. Sullivan in the last two decades of the nineteenth century added to boxing’s momentum. (See chapter 4.) Sullivan’s preference for fighting according to the Marquis of Queensbury rules, which required boxers to wear gloves, his support among respectable athletic clubs, and his increased attention from the press made boxing seem more modern and respectable. Even in places where boxing remained illegal, promoters could often work around the laws by disguising prizefights as sparring exhibitions. Despite these gains, boxing continued to have many detractors, both individuals and organizations such as the United Society of Christian Endeavor, who spoke out against the sport and pushed legislation to ban it or to limit its influence. A landmark bout in the history of boxing on July 4, 1910, added fuel to the fire for boxing critics. On that day Jack Johnson, an African American man known for his flamboyant lifestyle, defeated James Jeffries, the former heavyweight champion in fifteen rounds in Reno, Nevada. Johnson’s victory and subsequent actions, until he lost the

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title to Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba, in 1915, dominated the boxing world in the 1910s, and added to the racial tension that engulfed the nation at this time.

Boxing and Race Johnson was not the first African American fighter in the United States. In fact, historians of boxing generally believe that, on some level, slaves participated in the sport. Several lighter-weight African American boxers found success in the late 1800s in matches against both African Americans and whites, but there was considerable resistance to having an African American fighter challenge for the heavyweight crown. Some boxing enthusiasts viewed such a challenge as a threat to white supremacy. For many, the holder of the heavyweight crown symbolized national and racial superiority. That this title might be held by an African American man was unthinkable for most whites in the early years of the twentieth century. For working-class African Americans, Johnson’s success became a source of immeasurable racial pride and inspiration. Like many boxers who moved West around the turn of the century in response to reform efforts in the East, Jack Johnson began to make a name for himself fighting on the West Coast. By 1908 when Johnson was finally allowed to challenge Tommy Burns, the reigning heavyweight champion, in a bout in Australia, he was well known among boxing fans and the press. Many in the press supported the idea of Johnson taking on Burns, some because they believed that sport was sacred and should not be tarnished by racial problems in the larger society and others because they assumed that Johnson would lose and that white supremacy would be symbolically affirmed. Even the prospect of a Johnson victory did not trouble many sportswriters because Burns, a German Canadian, was a lackluster champion, and they knew that a Burns/Johnson bout would bring much-needed publicity to the sport. Johnson’s victory over Burns in the fourteenth round may not have caused as much of a stir as it did had it not been for his demeanor in the ring, his personal lifestyle, and his string of victories over white challengers in the year immediately following his title victory. Johnson taunted and belittled Burns, wanting to make clear his personal superiority, if not the superiority of his race. He celebrated his win, as he would after future bouts, with fancy parties and in the arms of white women, a fact that raised the ire of many whites. Johnson further alarmed racist whites by dominating the American boxing scene in the two years following his 1908 victory. The other heavyweight to gain some notoriety during this period was another African American man, Joe Jeanette. All of these factors combined to create a sense of urgency among white sports enthusiasts. Cries for the return of former champion James J. Jeffries reached a crescendo by the end of 1909. In December 1909 Jeffries, who was promised significant financial rewards, finally agreed to take on Johnson. George “Tex” Rickard, who would become one of boxing’s earliest and most well-known promoters, organized the fight. Rickard, known for his moneymaking prowess and for his willingness to exploit any advantage to sell tickets, billed the fight as a black-versus-white affair. What started out as an athletic event in a relatively minor and still widely criticized sport became front-page news and symbolic of tensions and hostilities that were tearing the country apart. Rickard’s tactics may have raised publicity for boxing but they had also pushed racial conflict to the breaking point by the time Jeffries and Johnson finally met in Reno,

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Nevada, on July 4, 1910. It took Johnson fifteen rounds to knock out the former champion, but the outcome of the fight was never in question (see chapter 4). Not surprisingly, Johnson’s success and the African American pride that it evoked caused many to begin looking for the “Great White Hope”—someone who could defeat Johnson and restore white supremacy. At the same time, Johnson’s lifestyle choices, combined with a desire among many white leaders to find a way to get rid of him, made Johnson a target for criminal investigation. In 1913 authorities charged Johnson with violating the Mann Act, a law passed in 1910. The act, named for James Robert Mann, the Republican congressman who introduced it, primarily targeted commercialized sexual vice, but it was worded in such a way that any man who crossed state lines with a woman other than his wife and had sex with her could be prosecuted. Johnson, who had made many trips between Chicago and Pittsburgh with a woman named Belle Schreibner, was convicted by an allwhite jury and sentenced to a $1000 fine and one year in jail. Boxing historians point out that the prosecutors produced no hard evidence in the case, but that the desire to remove Johnson from the public eye and to quiet racial tensions outweighed the need to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Johnson, who was released on bond, ended up escaping to Canada and then moving to Europe. While pleased to have him out of the country, white supremacists would not be fully satisfied until Johnson’s heavyweight title once again resided on a white man. Johnson, after spending two years in Europe, barely supporting himself by fighting second-rate boxers, agreed in 1915 to fight white challenger Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba. Willard, a 60 700 tower of muscle, trained hard for the fight; Johnson, now pudgy and past his prime did not and was defeated on April 5, 1915 in the twenty-sixth round. Johnson later stated that he had lost the fight on purpose in hopes of receiving a lighter prison sentence when he returned to the United States, but most doubted the truth of this claim. Willard defended his title in 1916 and then did not fight again until 1919 when he lost to William Harrison “Jack” Dempsey who went on to dominate American boxing in the first half of the 1920s, a period when the sport fully emerged as an acceptable form of entertainment for all social classes.

Other Weight Divisions While much of the boxing world focused its attention on Jack Johnson and the heavyweight crown during this decade, other boxers fought for supremacy in the lighter weight classes. In 1909 the Queensbury rules had been modified to define eight traditional weight classes. Thus, the decade of the 1910s saw the implementation of the following competitive weight classes: Heavyweight—176 pounds and over; cruiserweight/light-heavyweight—175 pounds maximum; middleweight—160 pounds max.; welterweight—147 pounds max.; lightweight—135 pounds max.; featherweight—126 pounds max.; bantamweight—118 pounds max.; and flyweight—112 pounds. max. Like today, boxers typically made a name for themselves in one weight class, but it was not uncommon for them to fight in several different classes over the course of their careers. In the bantamweight class, a Danish immigrant named John Gutenko distinguished himself throughout the decade. After spending his early teens in a tough, working-class section of Baltimore, Gutenko fought his first professional match in

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1910 at the age of sixteen. After winning the fight with a knockout, Gutenko took on the name Kid Williams and began a career that included more than 200 bouts over a span of almost twenty years. In 1914 Williams, who stood only 50 100 tall, officially won the world bantamweight title with a decisive victory in three rounds over reigning champ Johnny Coulon. In the decade after his first title win, Williams faced top talent in both the bantam and featherweight classes and only lost seventeen official contests over the course of his career. Considered by many to be one of the top bantamweight fighters of all time, Williams was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1996. The featherweight division in the 1910s was dominated by Johnny Kilbane, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, who made his boxing debut in 1907 at the age of eighteen. Kilbane captured the featherweight world championship on February 22, 1912, when he defeated Abe Attell, a Jewish fighter from San Francisco, in a twenty-round bout. Attell had won the featherweight title in 1903 and, after losing it briefly, put together a streak where he defended the title eighteen times in a row. Attell, who was known for his use of dirty tactics, tried to hold off Kilbane in the title fight by grabbing his arms and butting him with his head, but Kilbane out performed Attell and prevailed when the referee called the fight in his favor. Kilbane fought 140 matches in his career and only lost four of them. He held the featherweight title from 1912 until 1923. No one in any weight class has held a title for that long without interruption or temporary retirement. Kilbane and Attell were both inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, Attell in 1990 and Kilbane in 1995. While he held the featherweight crown, Kilbane also went up against heavier boxers, including lightweight standout Benny Leonard, who captured the lightweight title from Freddie Welsh in 1917. Leonard, a New Yorker who turned pro in 1911 at the tender age of fifteen, defeated Kilbane in three rounds in his first title defense and then went on to defeat several additional challengers. Leonard and Kilbane were also challenged in the 1910s by the durable Johnny Dundee. Known as the “Scotch Wop,” Dundee fought in both the featherweight and lightweight divisions during the 1910s before winning the junior lightweight title as well as the featherweight title in 1923. Over the course of his long career, Dundee fought 343 bouts, including nine against Leonard. In the welterweight division, boxing fans in the 1910s were treated to one of the great boxing rivalries of the period between American Jack Britton and the British great, Ted “Kid” Lewis. Lewis won the world welterweight title in 1915, but lost it to Britton in 1916. Lewis regained the title in 1917 in a twenty-round decision only to lose it again to Britton in 1919 in a knockout. Britton then held the title until 1922 when he lost at the age of thirty-seven to Mickey Walker. He did not retire from boxing until the age forty-four by which point he had fought in a total of 344 bouts.

Golf Despite a growing interest in golf in the United States between the late 1880s and 1920, the American game, particularly the U.S. Open, tended to be dominated by British players until 1910. Spurred on, in part by President Taft’s interest in the sport and the press’s coverage of his many golf outings, Americans began to take to

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the game in earnest in the 1910s and both private and public courses grew in number. The success of American golfers in major tournaments during the decade heightened fan interest and greatly increased the number of average people who took up the sport. According to one estimate there were 350,000 American golfers in 1913. By the early 1920s, there would be close to two million. With its emphasis on etiquette and its elite roots, the sport especially appealed to businessmen who could afford club memberships and who often used golf outings both as a distraction from work and as a vehicle for conducting business with fellow players. In 1911, for the first time since its inception in 1895, an American-born player, former caddy John J. McDermott, won the U.S. Open title. Using his excellent iron play, he repeated the feat in 1912 and thereby ended British supremacy in the event, but his promising career was ultimately cut short by mental illness. Whereas McDermott and others golfed as professionals in the 1910s, most top American golfers in the early 1910s competed as amateurs. One important American golfer in the period was Jerome D. Travers from Long Island, who added a U.S. Open title in 1915 to his five U.S. Amateur championships. The following year, the Open was captured by another prominent American amateur, Charles “Chick” Evans Jr. On route to victory, Evans shot 286, a record-low score that was not broken until 1932. In addition, Evans won the 1916 National Amateur event, and this marked the first time that both tournament titles were held by the same golfer in the same year. Joining Travers and Evans, in what some called the great amateur triumvirate of American golf, was the gifted Francis Ouimet, who actually paved the way for his compatriots by being the first amateur to win the U.S. Open in 1913. Considered one of the greatest U.S. Opens in golf history, Ouimet played at the Brookline Country Club in Massachusetts in front of at least 3000 American fans. He scored an upset victory by defeating two prominent British professionals in a dramatic, eighteen-hole, playoff round. It was also the first year in U.S. Golf Open history that a large number of entrants required tournament officials to schedule a qualifying round. In many respects, Ouimet’s 1913 victory in the U.S. Open marks the real beginning of American golf as it developed in the twentieth century.

Social Class and the Rise of Professional Golf While Travers, Evans, and Ouimet can be credited with strong roles in bringing American golf to prominence, it was another American golfer, Walter Hagen, who had the most lasting impact on the game. Hagen dominated golf in the United States through much of the 1920s, but he made his initial mark at the U.S. Open held at the Midlothian Country Club near Chicago in 1914. He won the Open that year, defeating several outstanding British golfers as well as his fellow American Evans, who was golfing as an amateur. It was not Hagen’s victory, however, that was most significant. Rather, it was the role he played in helping to make professional golf a viable and respectable occupation. Before Hagen, most top American golfers were amateurs and those who did play professionally were not only poorly paid, but they also were considered socially inferior to amateurs who often came from upper-class backgrounds and enjoyed the privileges of memberships in private country clubs. Given the paltry amount paid to tournament winners and the lack of product endorsement opportunities, pro

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golfers struggled in their efforts to gain some level of economic security and social standing. As an added insult, professionals were generally banned from clubhouses during open events. Hagen, a generally well-liked and respected golfer, decided to challenge these social strictures directly during the 1914 Open. In what became known as the “Midlothian Incident,” Hagen, acting as if he knew no reason not to, joined the amateurs in the Midlothian clubhouse and locker room. Noting the ease with which Hagen moved among the more socially elite players and wanting to avoid a showdown with one of the top golfers in the country, the country club failed to endorse its own rules, and Hagen effectively knocked down one of the sport’s strongest barriers. Hagen continued to break through social barriers during the course of his career and revolutionized the pro game by turning to product endorsements in order to supplement low tournament earnings. Hagen’s business manager, Robert “Bob” Harlow, made the most of his golfer’s popularity to ensure Hagen’s financial success through both endorsements and golf tours around the country. Harlow has often been considered the “founder of professional golf.” Hagen and Harlow were not the only ones pushing for the professionalization of golf in the 1910s. Several early professionals who, like Hagen, were interested in improving financial conditions for pro golfers and in building popular support for the sport joined together in 1916 to form the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA). The initial meeting to discuss forming an association was hosted in New York City on January 17, 1916, by Rodman Wanamaker, of the department store family. From this meeting an organizing committee was formed that eventually drew up bylaws and elected a first president, Robert White. Later that same year, the PGA began hosting its first professional tournaments with Wanamaker donating a significant amount of prize money. PGA tournaments, like most other golf events, were suspended after the United States entered World War I in 1917, but they resumed soon after the war ended. Several patriotic fundraising tournaments were held in 1917 and 1918.

No Time on the Course: Women and Golf American women participated in golf from the time the game first came to the United States in the nineteenth century, but their involvement was limited by a number of factors. First, while golf, unlike many other sports, was considered an acceptable ladies’ game and was often promoted by early country clubs as healthy, moderate exercise for men and women of all ages, women were not expected to play competitively. Rather, they were viewed more as occasional companions for their husbands or fathers and as adornments that would make club life more pleasant. In the early years, including the decade of the 1910s, female golfers were clearly considered women first and golfers second. According to golf historian Herbert Warren Wind, “The early golfers liked to find pretty women lounging on the verandas of their clubhouses, but they were not in favor of women playing the game” (Chambers 1995, 12). Throughout the 1910s, women golfers struggled to maintain their socially defined femininity while challenging the widely held view that women were not meant to be competitive athletes. This point of view led to a second factor that limited the development of the women’s game. While husbands, fathers, and brothers were happy to have women occasionally join them on the club’s golf course, they saw no reason for them to golf on their own. As a result, women were often restricted from playing on club

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courses except during a very small number of hours set aside for women (Chambers 1995, 27–41). For instance, at the Garden City Golf Club in New York women could only play on Monday and Friday mornings, and they had to tee off by 11:00 A.M. At the Merion Cricket Club on Philadelphia’s Main Line, rules prohibited any woman from playing on the course unless she could prove a familial relationship to a male member. These types of restrictions were not at all uncommon, and they severely hampered the development of the women’s game. In addition to social proscriptions and lack of practice times and spaces, women golfers, like their counterparts in many other sports, were severely restricted by the accepted female clothing of the day. Even competitive golfers wore long dresses over top of several petticoats. In order to see the ball before hitting it, women had to wear an elastic strap around the knees to hold their skirts out of the way and often elastic around their left arms when fashion dictated voluminous sleeves that blocked their vision. By today’s standards it may seem silly for women athletes to maintain strict fashion guidelines, but for many women in the 1910s maintaining a feminine sense of propriety was extremely important. Female identity and fashion, both in and out of sports, would begin to shift fundamentally in the 1920s. Despite the limitations, women did compete in golf in the 1910s. At the time, there was only one major championship for women, the U.S. Women’s Amateur, but it drew a healthy number of competitors from around the country and large crowds of local spectators. One of the most successful competitors during this period was Dorothy Campbell Hurd. Originally from Scotland, she settled in the United States in 1909 at the age of twenty-six. That year she won the women’s national championship in four countries—the United States, England, Scotland, and Canada. She repeated her win in 1910 and began to write a column on the women’s game for The American Golfer. She offered advice to other women golfers and pushed club manufacturers to make and market women’s clubs. Too often, according to Hurd, women golfed with their husband’s cast-off clubs, which tended to be worn and too heavy for them to be effective. Hurd was one of the few women of her generation to score under 70 on a regulation course. She and other lesser known golfers in the 1910s paved the way for Marion Hollins and Glenna Collett in the 1920s.

Horse Racing Prior to the 1910s, horse racing in the United States was not an especially lucrative sport for the owners. The purse money for races came only from admissions, which meant that it was unpredictable. During this decade, however, major tracks started requiring owners to pay entry fees for stake races which increased the prize money considerably. Races that grew in popularity during the 1910s included the Saratoga Cup, the Belmont, the Champagne, the Alabama, the Preakness, the Withers, and the Kentucky Derby. These races generated excitement within the sport and brought in more fans. At the same time, though, progressive reformers cracked down on gambling, which had a major impact on the sport and its followers.

Economics and Betting By 1910, betting was a firmly established aspect of the horse-racing world, a reality that created widespread concern among reformers who sought to eliminate

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Horse-racing racetrack, Saratoga, July 1913. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

gambling and its related vices. Most racetrack betting was conducted through bookmakers who paid a fee to track owners in exchange for the privilege to handle racetrack betting. Bookmakers, of course, guaranteed themselves a cut of the payouts before distributing the money. In 1908, concerned with the potential problems associated with gambling in general and bookmaking in particular, Kentucky legislators passed a law that prohibited bookmaking. A similar law was passed in the same year in Maryland. Because Kentucky and Maryland were dominant states in horse racing, track owners got around the laws by allowing pari-mutuel betting. In this system, all bets are placed together in a pool and odds are determined by sharing the pool among all placed bets. As a result horse racing actually thrived in these two states in the early 1910s. Pimlico Racetrack in Baltimore, which was already considered one of the top tracks in the East by 1910, became a leader in daily purse distribution by the 1920s. In an effort to capitalize on the popularity of racing in the Baltimore area, several new racetracks were built during this period. These included Laurel in 1911, Havre de Grace in 1912, and Prince George (later Bowie) in 1914. Maryland, Kentucky, and several western states also benefited in the first years of this decade from antiracing developments in New York State. In 1910 antigambling legislators with the support of New York governor Charles Evans Hughes passed an especially strict antibetting law that effectively ended racing in the state for two years. This was especially damaging to the sport because New York had a long and rich tradition in horse racing and boasted one of the best tracks in the country at Saratoga Springs. When racing was reinstituted in 1913, only Saratoga and three other tracks were able to begin holding races right away. In the second

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half of the 1910s, the popularity and stability of the sport grew in New York and around the country.

Great Horses of the 1910s and the Emergence of the Triple Crown Three horses from the 1910s deserve special mention. Horse racing is typically dominated by male horses. This was certainly true during the 1910s with one notable exception. In 1915 Regret became the first filly to win the Kentucky Derby. The Derby has been run more than 130 times, and Regret is only one of three fillies to ever win it. The second victory by a filly did not come until Genuine Risk won in 1980. Born in 1912 in New Jersey, Regret was bred by Harry Payne Whitney, a successful American owner. She was sired by Broomstick, the leading sire from 1913 through 1915, and was out of the Hamburg mare Jersey Lightning. After racing lightly, but making a name for herself, in her two-year-old season, Regret began her three-year-old season with the Kentucky Derby. Picked as a favorite over the outstanding colt, Pebbles, she did not disappoint and led wire to wire. Perhaps most important, Regret’s groundbreaking win focused the attention of Americans on the Derby and greatly increased its popularity. In fact, some have noted that it was Regret’s 1915 victory that established the Kentucky Derby as an American institution. The filly finished her career with nine wins and one second in eleven starts, earning just over $35,000. She retired a legend and became a successful broodmare. In the last few years of the 1910s, Exterminator played a major role in American racing. A gangly gelding who made his three-year-old debut with a win in the Kentucky Derby in 1918, Exterminator went on to race for eight seasons in more than 100 races. He won fifty of those races and became known for his stamina over long distances and for his ability to win carrying heavy weights. Horses who won were handicapped with more weight in subsequent races. Twenty times he won carrying more than 130 pounds, sometimes as much as 138 pounds. Exterminator had several trainers over his long career and won races in Canada and Mexico as well as in the United States. He amassed earnings of $252,996 before retiring in 1924 after seven starts as an eight-year-old. He retired to the stable of Willis Sharpe Kilmer in Binghamton, New York, and died in 1945 at the age of thirty. While Regret made her mark by winning the Kentucky Derby and Exterminator impressed by racing successfully for so many years, Sir Barton earned his place in history by being the first horse to win the American Triple Crown. At the time, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes were not known collectively as the Triple Crown, but each was considered a premiere race. Given how closely together the races were run as well as their varying lengths, no horse had ever won all three in a single season. This feat, along with his five other victories in 1919, made him an easy choice for Horse of the Year honors. Sir Barton and Exterminator, however, were about to be eclipsed by the legendary Man o’ War, who began his illustrious career in 1919 and went on to become one of the greatest racehorses in history.

Tennis Like golf, Americans viewed tennis in the early twentieth century primarily as a country club sport for wealthy families on the East Coast. This was still largely true

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Sir Barton, the First Horse to Win the Triple Crown In 1919 Sir Barton, a Kentucky-bred, chestnut colt won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes to become the first horse to win America’s Triple Crown, an honor that was not formally recognized in the racing world until 1948. Sir Barton had an impressive pedigree. He was sired by Star Shoot, an English stallion who came to the United States to stand stud in 1901 and who had been sired by English Triple Crown winner Isinglass. In 1912 Star Shoot was purchased by John E. Madden, who owned a farm near Lexington, Kentucky. Madden bred Star Shoot to Lady Sterling who foaled Sir Barton in 1916. Madden raced two-year-old Sir Barton six times in 1918 with limited success and then sold him to J. K. L. Ross, a Canadian businessman, for $10,000. Ross employed H. Guy Bedwell as Sir Barton’s trainer and Johnny Loftus as his jockey. Bedwell, who initiated a new training program for Sir Barton, decided on the Kentucky Derby as the colt’s first test in 1919. Rainy weather and a muddy track favored Sir Barton who, like many of Star Shoot’s offspring, suffered from chronic sore hooves. Showing speed out of the gate, Sir Barton led the race from start to finish and defeated his stablemate, Billy Kelly, and the favorite, Eternal. Four days later, Sir Barton bested Eternal again in the Preakness and then came back to win at the Withers Stakes in New York just ten days after that. Ross’s colt completed the Triple Crown by winning and setting a new U.S. record of just over 2:17 for 1 3=8 miles in the Belmont Stakes. In a feat that would be unparalleled today, Sir Barton captured these four stakes victories over the course of thirty-two days. He was rewarded by being named the 1919 Horse of the Year, American racing’s highest honor. Sold to Audley Farm in Virginia in 1922, he stood stud until 1933, but showed only moderate success as a sire. He spent the remaining days until his death in 1937 on a U.S. Army Remount ranch in Douglas, Wyoming.

through the 1910s, but by the middle of the decade tennis was becoming more popular, and asphalt, cement, and clay courts, which were more accessible to average people, began to supplement the traditional grass courts. The U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) governed tennis in the United States throughout the decade. In 1915 the USLTA championships were moved from elite Newport, Rhode Island, where they had been held for thirty-four years, to Queens, New York. This move symbolically began the transition from tennis as a sport for the wealthy to one that was adopted by the middle class and enjoyed by a wide range of fans. Because tennis’s popularity at this time was increasing around the world as well as in the United States, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) was formed in 1913 to serve as a liaison between member countries and to standardize the game worldwide. Thirteen countries joined the ITF in the first year, but the United States did not join until 1923 when it became an affiliated member. One player during this period who helped to raise the profile and popularity of American tennis was Maurice E. McLoughlin. Known as the “California Comet,” McLoughlin took over the reins of men’s tennis in the U.S. from William A. Larned, who had dominated the sport in the first decade of the twentieth century, winning the U.S. Championship singles division in 1901–2 and again for five consecutive years from 1907 to 1911. While Larned was a good all-around athlete and one of the “big three” to win the U.S. Championship seven times (along with Dick

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Sears before him and Bill Tilden after him), he was not a particularly exciting player. Relying on a cautious serve and lob game, Larned rarely scored an ace and seldom ventured into the forecourt. He typified the moderately paced game of tennis as it was played at the turn of the twentieth century. McLoughlin, on the other hand, brought speed, style, and a ferocious serve to tennis. He had developed his game on the public courts in California, and by 1910 he was starting to make a name for himself. When he brought his tennis to the East Coast and to Europe, he impressed fans with his unconventional approach to the game. Unlike most players at the time, “the Comet” followed his powerful serve with a rush to the forecourt and used a smashing overhead shot or a nifty volley to throw his opponent off balance. As his biography in the International Tennis Hall of Fame reads, McLoughlin “opened the eyes of the public to tennis as a demanding game of speed, endurance, and skill.” He won the U.S. Championship in 1912, the first year that the champion was required to play through the tournament rather than just meet the survivor of tournament play in a challenge match, and again in 1913. He also played at Wimbledon in 1913, and, though he lost in the final to defending champ Tony Wilding, he thrilled British fans with his new style of play. William M. Johnston, another Californian with a pleasing personality, succeeded McLoughlin in the tennis arena by winning the U.S. Championship in 1915 and 1919 and by continuing to draw new fans to the sport. If McLoughlin transformed men’s tennis in the 1910s, Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman did much the same on the women’s side. She too grew up in California and brought a unique style of play to the game. Over the course of her long career, Wightman won numerous championships in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles while serving as an outspoken advocate for women’s tennis and as a mentor to younger players. The women’s game was also advanced by the play of Molla Bjurstedt. A Norwegian who captured a bronze medal in women’s singles at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, Bjurstedt was the first foreign woman to win the U.S. Championship. She captured her first U.S. crown in 1915 and then won the next four straight years. By the time she retired from tennis in the mid-1920s, she had won eight U.S. singles championships.

Track and Field When the modern Olympics were revived in 1896, track and field not only became a cornerstone of Olympic competition; it also took on a more central place in national and international athletic competition. Track and field, though lacking the publicity of team sports, especially baseball, was firmly established in the United States and in many other countries around the world by 1910. The International Amateur Athletic Federation was formed in 1912 to govern the sport. The decade of the 1910s saw many American standouts both in national competitions and in international events such as the 1912 Olympics. Several innovations in track and field were also introduced during this period. America’s long reputation for producing outstanding male sprinters can be traced to the 1910s. Since women did not compete internationally in track and field until the 1920s, the emergence of outstanding American women sprinters came later. The dominant American male sprinter in the 1910s was Howard P. Drew. Drew competed consistently throughout the decade in the sprints and lowered the world record for the

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Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman (1886–1974) Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman is the mother of American women’s tennis. A lifelong advocate of the sport, she dominated women’s tennis in the 1910s, winning sixteen titles overall at the U.S. Championships, including four singles titles in 1909, 1910, 1911, and 1919. From 1909 to 1911, she swept the competition in women’s doubles and mixed doubles as well as singles. Wightman was also the key organizer behind the formation of the Ladies International Tennis Challenge between British and American women’s teams. Better known as the Wightman Cup, this annual competition began in 1923 and was held until 1989. Wightman played for the American team for five years and served as its captain every year from 1923 until 1948. Wightman’s future tennis prowess never would have been predicted when she was a child. She was small and physically weak. In fact, it was her doctor who first suggested that she take up a sport in order to build her strength. She practiced hitting the ball against her home in Berkeley and then perfected her game on the courts at the University of California at Berkeley. She practiced first against her four brothers and then played against the Sutton sisters. May Sutton, who went on to win the singles title at the U.S. Championships in 1904, became one of Wightman’s chief rivals. Together, they helped to shape the future of women’s tennis. Although Wightman only reached the adult height of five feet, she moved extremely well on the court and became known for both her strong volleying and her outstanding sportsmanship. She temporarily retired from tennis in 1912 after marrying Bostonian George Wightman and stayed away from the courts during the early days of her motherhood. She returned in 1915 to win the women’s doubles and mixed doubles at the U.S. Championships, but she lost the singles title to Molla Bjurstedt Mallory. After 1919, when she won her fourth singles title, she continued to play for many years, but achieved most of her success in doubles play. This included Olympic gold medals in 1924 in doubles and mixed doubles. Remarkably, she won her last U.S. title in 1943 at the age of fifty-six when she and Pauline Betz Addie won doubles at the U.S. Indoors. Wightman was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1957.

100-yard dash on several occasions. In middle-distance events during this period, Americans were led by James “Ted” Meredith who won an Olympic gold medal in the 800-meter race in 1912. He set a new world record in the event with a winning time of 1:51.9. Meredith also helped the United States to win gold in the 1,600-meter relay and to establish a new world record of 3:16.6. After the 1912 Olympics, Meredith enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania and became a stand-out middle-distance runner throughout the decade. Among many other honors, he won a total of five collegiate titles in the 440- and 880-yard events between 1914 and 1916. While the United States does not have the same strong tradition of exceptional male distance runners as it does sprinters, three strong milers ran for the United States in the 1910s. In 1913 John Paul Jones, a collegiate star who ran for Cornell University, established the first officially recognized world record in the mile run with a time of 4:14.4. England’s Walter George, clocking a time of 4:12.8, had set a professional record in the mile in 1885, but this was not recognized as an official world record. In addition to Jones, the United States boasted two other exceptional milers during this period, Abel Kiviat and Norman Taber. Taber ran for Brown

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

Howard P. Drew (1890–1957) Dubbed the “fastest man alive,” track and field standout Howard P. Drew dominated the sport in the 1910s and began a century of great achievement for African American sprinters on the international stage. Drew first garnered attention in 1910 and 1911 when he won national junior championships in the 100- and 220-yard dashes. Drew qualified for the 1912 U.S. Olympic team and was considered a favorite in the 100 yard event. Unfortunately, he pulled a muscle during his 10.7-second win in the 100 semifinal and never made it into the final. The Olympic committee recognized Drew with an honorary medal and certificate, an honor received by no other Olympic athlete. Howard Drew was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1890. His father, a Baptist minister, did his best to support the family, but money was always tight. The Drews moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, around 1900 and Howard began his track career soon after. According to Drew’s profile in the African American Registry, he won his first race wearing homemade shorts and nonspiked shoes. He later fashioned his own spikes by putting six nails through the bottoms of his regular shoes. By the time Drew reached high school, he had become a national track sensation. His family’s economic circumstances caused him to drop out of high school in order to work, but he eventually re-enrolled and graduated in 1910. After the 1912 Olympics, Drew attended the University of Southern California and excelled as an athlete and as a student. In 1914 he tied the world records of 9.6 seconds for 100 yards and 21.2 seconds for 220 yards. He also won gold in both events at the Tournament of Roses Track and Field Meet in 1914. Drew was one of several runners who lowered the 100-yard record during this period, but no one did it more consistently. He was clocked between 9.3 and 9.5 on numerous occasions. Drew graduated from USC in 1916 and enrolled in law school at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. When the United States entered World War I, Drew enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army. While in Europe, he continued to run when he could and coached the Army track teams in Nice, France. He was honorably discharged from the army in 1919 and returned to law school. Although Drew was unable to make the Olympic team in 1920, he graduated from Drake and passed the bar exam in both Connecticut and Ohio that year. Drew, who married Dora Helen Newcomb and had two children, practiced law in Hartford, Connecticut, and became justice of the peace there in 1924. He died in 1957 after a long career as a lawyer and a civil rights activist.

University and tied Jones in the 1912 collegiate mile. Kiviat, a Jewish runner who competed for the Irish American Athletic Club, dominated the AAU circuit and in 1912 covered the 1,500-meter distance in 3:55.8, establishing a world record. The American team went into the 1912 Stockholm Olympics with three milers who had legitimate chances to win, but to their collective disappointment the gold was captured by Britain’s Arnold Jackson. The 1910s was a great decade for American high jumpers and pole vaulters. Not only did an American, Alma Richards, win the Olympic high jump in 1912 with a leap of 60 400 , but he was joined by fellow American and world-record holder, George Horine, who established the world record earlier in 1912 with a jump of 60 6 1/800 and had improved it to 60 700 prior to the 1912 Olympics. Horine’s place in track and field history was assured by his development and use of the “western roll.” Abandoning

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the scissor’s-style approach, which required jumpers to maintain an upright position while cutting their legs through the air, Horine “rolled” over the bar with his body parallel to the ground. Another American high jumper, Clinton Larson, added to the new techniques available to jumpers by introducing an approach similar to the “flop” popularized by Richard Fosbury in the 1960s. As Larson approached the bar, he turned his body so that he would be back-to-the-bar and went over face up. He used the technique effectively and won the 1917 AAU high jump event. As Horine and Larson revolutionized the high jump during this period, so too did Marcus Wright set a new course for the pole vault. He used a thirty-meter runup, a prolonged swing, a single-hand release, and an arch position over the bar. Wright established the world record in pole vault in 1912 with a vault of 130 21=200 and held it until 1919 when it was broken by Frank Foss. Despite his success throughout the decade, Wright only earned a bronze in the 1912 Olympics. Fellow American Harry Babcock brought home the gold.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT SPORTS: AUTO RACING The growing fascination that Americans had with the automobile in the 1910s carried over into the sport of auto racing. One of the most important events to occur during this period was the first running of the Indianapolis 500 in 1911. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Complex was built in 1909 by Carl Graham Fisher, an automobile dealer and ex-bicycle racer. Fisher envisioned a track that could be used by automobile manufacturers to test the safety and performance of cars at increasing speeds while also serving as a site for occasional races between cars made by different manufacturers. Fisher and his partners, Jim Allison, Frank Wheeler, and Arthur Newby, purchased 328 acres of farmland outside of Indianapolis and built a 2.5-mile rectangular track. Sadly, the first race held on the track, a five-mile event on August 19, 1909, ended in tragedy as the track surface broke up resulting in the death of six people, including two spectators. This rocky start coupled with a few more disappointing events caused Fisher to change plans and focus on one major event per year. In order to prepare for the first running of the Indianapolis 500 on May 30, 1911, Fisher and his partners had the original surface paved with 3.2 million bricks in order to improve safety conditions. More than 80,000 spectators, each paying a onedollar admission, attended the first running of what was soon to become a great tradition in American auto racing. Forty drivers competed in the race, which was officially won by Ray Harroun in a time of six hours and forty-two minutes (average speed of 74.59 mph). While Harroun is listed as the official winner of the first Indianapolis 500, the results have been disputed. Some claim that the actual winner was Ralph Mulford, the 1911 national driving champion. Mulford protested Harroun’s victory, saying that he (Mulford) had been given the checkered flag first, but that he took three extra laps just to be sure that there would be no dispute over his lap total. Mulford’s claims were discounted and Harroun remained the official winner. In some respects, Ray Harroun’s place in auto-racing history was secured as much by his work as an engineer and designer as it was by his racing victories. In 1910 he joined the Marmon automobile company in Indianapolis as chief engineer. Company owners asked Harroun to design a car for the upcoming Indianapolis 500. The result of Harroun’s work was the Marmon Wasp. Up to this point, race

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1910–1919

Auto racing in or near Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

cars were built to hold two people, a driver and a mechanic whose job was to monitor oil pressure and to assist in navigating traffic on the course. Harroun built the Wasp to hold only a driver, which meant that the car would have less weight to carry and could be streamlined in design. To help the driver navigate, Harroun invented the rear-view mirror. He also designed the car with a pointed tail and a stabilizer. After his success with the Wasp at the Indianapolis 500, Harroun went on to invent the carburetor and to develop a kerosene-burning race car in 1914 that became a mainstay on American tracks until the late 1920s.

SUMMARY Although the 1910s cannot match the Golden Age in sports history that came to characterize the 1920s, the decade certainly saw its share of great athletic moments and milestones as it helped to establish athletic trends that characterized much of the rest of the twentieth century. One of the most important of these trends was a significant increase in the level of interest and participation among Americans, both men and women, in a wide variety of sports. Baseball continued to capture the American imagination throughout the decade, and football and basketball, the two other major team sports that generated widespread participation and large fan followings after 1920, began to take hold at the professional level in the 1910s. The shift from amateurism to professionalism, another significant theme during this decade, could also be seen in individual sports such as golf, tennis, boxing, and auto racing. As in all periods, sports in this decade both reflected and influenced the larger culture. Progressive reform movements that characterized the early twentieth century were visible in several sports arenas—particularly in efforts to make football safer, to curtail boxing in many parts of the country, and to outlaw betting in horse racing. The rise in sports participation during this decade also reflected the full

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emergence of an industrial economy and the resultant increase in leisure time for many American families. President Theodore Roosevelt’s emphasis in the previous decade on the importance of strong masculinity and his linking of athletic prowess to fitness for combat and leadership were also manifested in the 1910s. This connection was visible in the way that soldiers were trained for World War I and in the way that male college graduates strived to compete in the growing industrial economy. For women, the tendency to link athletic prowess with masculinity had negative effects as women athletes were often viewed as unnatural and as a threat to established gender roles. Finally, sports in the 1910s, for better or worse, helped to define what it meant to be American. Within athletic clubs, urban settlement houses, YMCAs, and new public high schools, sports teams served as vehicles for assimilation and for community and national identity. In a period marked both by optimism and by uncertainty in the face of industrial growth, urbanization, and immigration, sports provided a means of social control and an avenue for promoting upward mobility, hard work, and competitive spirit as emerging American values. These values continued to be reflected in American sport and culture throughout the twentieth century.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Chambers, Marcia. 1995. The unplayable lie: The untold story of women and discrimination in American golf. New York: Pocket Books. Crawford, Bill. 2005. All American: The rise and fall of Jim Thorpe. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Gorn, Elliott J., and Warren Goldstein. 1993. A brief history of American sports. New York: Hill and Wang. Gregorich, Barbara. 1993. Women at play: The story of women in baseball. New York: Harcourt. Lucas, John. 1980. The modern Olympic Games. New York: A. S. Barnes and Company. Peterson, Robert W. 1970. Only the ball was white. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Riess, Steven A., ed. 1998. Sports and the American Jew. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Sammons, Jeffrey T. 1988. Beyond the ring: The role of boxing in American society. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Voigt, David Quentin. 1983. From the commissioners to continental expansion. Vol. 2 of American baseball. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wakefield, Wanda Ellen. 1997. Playing to win: Sports and the American military, 1898–1945. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ward, Geoffrey C. 2005. Unforgivable blackness: The rise and fall of Jack Johnson. New York: Knopf. Watterson, John Sayle. 2000. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Web Sources African American Registry. http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/category/ 12/sports_outdoors. Includes information on many African American athletes from the 1910s including track star Howard Drew.

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Chicago Historical Society. http://chicagohs.org/history/blacksox/joe2.html. Contains information on the “Black Sox” scandal and Joe Jackson, including several photographs. Eastland Memorial Society. http://www.inficad.com/ksup/landis0.html. Includes articles on the “Black Sox” scandal and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Jews in Sports Online. http://jewsinsports.org/. Uses archival materials from the American Jewish Historical Society to trace the achievements of Jewish athletes including Frank Basloe and Barney Sedran. Jim Thorpe c/o CMG Worldwide. http://www.cmgww.com/sports/thorpe/photo.htm. This official Jim Thorpe Web site includes biographical information, career highlights, and statistics. It also has a nice collection of photos. West, Elizabeth. http://www.eduwrite.com/baseball.html. Includes several Bloomer Girl postcards with captions and brief information on the early women’s leagues.

Films Eight Men Out. 1988. Dir. John Sayles.

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CHAPTER 6

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929 Murry R. Nelson

OVERVIEW The United States had grown to 106 million by 1920, and during the decade the population would rise to just over 123 million. The 1920s were a marked contrast to the decade that had just ended. World War I had been extremely destructive for Europe, but the United States escaped unscathed and was now, clearly, the world leader in economics and was almost as powerful as Great Britain and its enormous empire. With the onset of the 1920s two great social changes took place with the implementation of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which mandated legal prohibition of alcohol for consumption in the United States (Eighteenth) and prohibited denial of the franchise (voting) on the basis of gender (Nineteenth). Prohibition remained in effect for fourteen years, finally being overturned in 1933 with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment. During the 1920s the consumption of alcohol actually rose as its distribution was no longer regulated by the government. Many people turned to distilling, distributing, or selling alcohol, thus making a large number of criminals in the American populace. Alcohol was brewed by some people who did not understand, or care, about safety in the distilling process. As a result many people who consumed this improperly brewed product died. The trafficking in illegal alcohol brought organized criminal gangs into the alcohol business. Such gangs were led by people like Al Capone, who made millions from such illegal businesses, but wound up in jail after being convicted of income tax evasion. Most alcohol was served in speakeasies, secret clubs that were hidden within cities and towns. Since it was hard to keep their locations secret because customers needed to know where to find the clubs, speakeasy owners often had to bribe police or public officials to “look the other way” and pretend that they were unaware of the presence of these drinking establishments. Such scenarios were carried out across the country, creating a whole new breed of “scofflaws,” people who openly failed to follow laws with which they disagreed.

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Though the public consumption of alcohol was illegal, the lack of sales at sports venues, especially baseball games, seemed to have little effect on attendance. Sports were entering what has been termed a golden age in the 1920s since people had peace, leisure time, and more disposable income. Spectator sports, especially baseball, horse racing, boxing, and college football, were the biggest draws and beneficiaries of the new, nationwide interest in sports. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote for the first time in federal elections. Some states had granted the franchise as early as 1869 when Wyoming granted women the franchise. Colorado followed in 1893. The motives of the voters of these states were not totally altruistic. Most of the West was very rough and undeveloped and there was a decided lack of single women. The enticement of being able to vote was seen as an inducement to gain a larger female population in these states. Women had not been given the right to vote in the Constitution when it was first ratified in 1788. Women were not often well educated since only the poorest women would actually have worked outside the home. Women were often idealized by the ruling classes, but that idealization included neither education or decisionmaking. Basically, the society of the time was sexist, denying women almost every basic human right under the pretext of protecting them. It certainly would have been difficult for a woman to be successful on her own at that time, since society was not structured in a way to allow it. As more and more women received basic education, there were more opportunities for women to go on to academies and, for some, even higher education, though these instances were not usual. By 1900 most middle- and upper-class women had completed elementary school and were certainly capable of making informed decisions, at least as informed as many men who might not have attended school at all but were still allowed to vote because of their gender. When female suffrage finally was passed in 1920, it was not without a great deal of resistance. In 1920, the first federal election for which they were eligible, fewer than half the eligible women voted, and in 1924 the estimate was that one-third of eligible women voters had gone to the polls, as opposed to two-thirds of eligible male voters. The percentage of women voting slowly increased throughout the decade, particularly as women began to identify with, and be courted by, the political parties. This initial reticence by many women to go to the polls was also seen in their reluctance to attend major sporting events. Of course, most men were attending such events with other male colleagues and, in the case of baseball, many came to games directly from their places of employment for games beginning at 3 P.M. Horse racing and boxing saw more women attendees, although women were initially barred from the latter events in many states because of the violence. The election of 1920 pitted Republican senator Warren G. Harding against Democratic governor James Cox, both of Ohio. Harding promised a “return to normalcy” (though there was no such word; the proper word was “normality”) and he appealed to people who had grown weary of the war in Europe and longed for a quieter time. Harding won in a landslide, with 60 percent of the vote, but he was not a very engaged president. He appointed some excellent Cabinet secretaries, but he also was largely unaware of corruption in his administration. Many scholars consider him the worst U.S. president and he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1923.

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Harding was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, a former governor of Massachusetts. Coolidge was a laissez-faire president, that is, he didn’t see any reason for the government to be deeply involved in the business of the nation. In fact, he said, “the business of America is business.” Some link this view and practice to the resultant Depression of the 1930s. Coolidge was very popular and seen as a real populist, like one of the “regular” people, and he swept to victory in 1924 with 54 percent of the vote versus 29 percent for Democrat John Davis and 16 percent for progressive Robert M. LaFollette. Coolidge was known as “Silent Cal” because of his taciturn nature. In 1928 he chose not to run for re-election and former Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover became the third Republican victor in a row when he defeated Democrat Al Smith of New York in that year. Many Americans feared voting for Smith because he was a Catholic and they thought that American policies might be subject to approval or scrutiny of the Roman Catholic Church and its leader, the pope. This mistrust was still evidenced until 1960 when John F. Kennedy won the presidency. The prejudice toward Catholics (as well as Jews and African Americans) was widely publicized and practiced by a number of hate groups, the most widely known being the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The Klan had begun in the mid-nineteenth century, but had largely vanished until it was resurrected in 1915. At its peak in the early 1920s, membership was about 15 percent of the nation’s eligible male voters, or about 4–5 million men. The decade also had great technological changes, which altered the way people received information. Most specifically, the radio became a medium for citizens, with the first regular broadcasts during this decade. Radio helped transform many areas of American society, among them sport. The first radio broadcast was on November 2, 1920, when the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election were carried on KDKA, Pittsburgh. Radio usage started slowly but accelerated astronomically in mid-decade. In 1926 the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was formed through the connection of twenty-four stations. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) followed in 1928. Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, which established the Federal Radio Commission, which would create and police regulatory guidelines for broadcasting in the United States. Television broadcasting was first experimented in the late 1920s, but it would not be until after World War II that television would become a common broadcasting medium. The radio became the medium of choice for many sports fans during the 1920s. The radio created new fans and increased casual fans’ interest as play-by-play coverage of baseball, boxing, and college football became commonplace. Certainly the creation of the biggest sports heroes of the period was the result of the adulation by radio announcers, many of whom, like Graham McNamee, became heroes in their own right. Automobile ownership grew tremendously during the decade and this influenced the construction of better roads, subsequently making it possible for Americans to be more and more mobile. Henry Ford’s Model T was an assembly-line model that allowed few deviations, but drove costs way down. This made automobiles affordable to many families and the 1920s became the first automobile decade. By 1927 more than 15 million Model Ts had been sold in the United States. By 1929 nearly half of all American families owned a car. The automobile allowed many fans to attend games more easily; the biggest beneficiary was probably college football. Alumni and other football fans could now

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drive to big games and return in the same day. The best examples were the enormous followings that Red Grange and the University of Illinois squad and Coach Knute Rockne and his University of Notre Dame teams inspired. Fans from Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis (just to name a few urban centers) now regularly drove to the games in Champaign or South Bend, backing up the highways for miles. New stadiums were built, reflecting both increased popularity of sport and the ease of access, such as the University of Illinois’s Memorial Stadium, the University of Michigan’s Stadium, and that of the University of Notre Dame. All were opened between 1923 and 1930 with capacities of more than 50,000 and were filled each football Saturday. Still, trains were the most efficient way to travel any great distance. Railroads criss-crossed the eastern half of the United States; the northeastern quadrant had the most track and rail systems. Long-distance travel was dominated by the railroads since roads were not universally well maintained and commercial airplane travel did not really become established until the 1930s. Most airline companies were formed for and carried U.S. mail. Pan American World Airways began in the 1920s with passenger service, but that was limited. Almost all sports teams traveled by train, which was far more comfortable than other modes of travel at the time. Train compartments were spacious and the food good. Players had room to stretch out and there were cars where they could play cards, eat, and smoke (which many of them did). Not until the late twentieth century, and the onset of charter or privately owned team planes, would teams begin to fly. One of the greatest American heroes of the period was Charles Lindberg, who became the first person to fly solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic in 1927. His feat did not send people clamoring to fly to Europe, but it did show that long-distance air travel did have a commercial future in the United States and the world. Cities had extensive trolley systems that linked much of an urban area and allowed citizens to travel easily within the urban confines to attend various sports events. Most immigrants lived in urban areas and many of their children became caught up in sports, often mystifying their parents, who had little leisure time for sports in their native countries and were unlikely to engage in those in the United States. The U.S. economy seemed to be constantly on the upsurge during most of the 1920s. The early years of the decade saw job cuts and strikes, but as the 1920s continued, the economy grew, corporate profits increased dramatically, taxes were cut, the building trades boomed, and the forty-hour workweek was instituted. The greatest economic gains were by the wealthiest Americans. For the poorest workers, gains were minimal, if seen at all. During this time sports stars’ salaries rose dramatically against that of the average worker and some of the greatest stars like Babe Ruth were paid what were seen as astronomical sums. Ruth’s $80,000 salary in the early 1930s exceeded that of the president and astonished the fans, though most did not begrudge the Babe receiving this enormous amount. Red Grange’s entry into professional football also entailed an enormous amount of money, previously unheard of for a pro football player. Fans flocked to the stadiums to see these superstars who were receiving super salaries. The collapse of the stock market in October of 1929 brought American prosperity to a halt. Unemployment rose from 500,000 in October to more than 4 million in December and it continued to worsen into most of the 1930s.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

Arts in the 1920s were exciting and innovative. George and Ira Gershwin created hundreds of wonderful songs and musicals including Strike Up the Band, Funny Face, Girl Crazy, and Pardon My English. Of more renown were George Gershwin’s fabulous Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris, and the opera Porgy and Bess. Irving Berlin wrote classic songs and Martha Graham produced creative dances. The Harlem Renaissance flourished at this time, which provided for a wealth of innovative African American art, music, dance, and literature. Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Zora Neale Thurston were the bestknown writers, while jazz/blues greats like Bessie Smith, “Jelly Roll” Morton, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong began their careers. The first talkie movie was made in 1927, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. The Gershwins, Jolson, and Berlin were all the children of Russian Jews who had emigrated to escape the pogroms of Eastern Europe and sought the freedom of the United States. Three sports dominated fans’ interest during the 1920s: baseball, boxing, and college football. Horse racing, tennis, and golf also had some significant appeal. Both professional basketball and professional football were in their infancy at this time, but they had some rabid adherents. One general comment on the media is necessary. Radio was new in the 1920s, but was amazingly common in most homes by the end of the decade. There were far more newspapers than today, especially in big cities, where there might have been five to ten daily papers, many of which had three or four editions printed per day. One of the most common sources of information, particularly providing images, was the movie newsreel, short films of various events shown in movie theaters with new films each week. Though the stories were short and sometimes a bit quirky, these newsreels were the only time that most Americans would have actually seen and heard moving images of politicians and sports heroes. Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Bobby Jones, Knute Rockne, top boxing matches, major horse races, and the World Series were all subjects in these newsreels. In addition, short films were sometimes made featuring top sports stars like Babe Ruth. These, too, made such figures more familiar to Americans, often more so than the president.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Without a doubt baseball was “king” in the 1920s. The game had reached stability in that the sixteen franchises had been established for at least a decade, the World Series had become institutionalized since its onset in 1900, and minorleague baseball teams at levels from Class AAA to Class D were located in almost every town of more than 10,000 (or so it seemed) throughout the eastern United States and much of the western. The sixteen major-league teams were all in the Northeast, where the majority of the population was situated. This was also where the major U.S. industries were located. Teams were located from Boston to Washington, D.C. The southwestern limit was St. Louis where two teams, the Cardinals of the National League and the Browns of the American League, were established. The northwest limit was Chicago with its two squads, the Cubs and the White Sox. Major-league baseball was given extensive coverage in one of the newest and most popular sections of daily and weekly newspapers, the sports pages. Local

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minor-league teams were also well covered. Thus, it was easy for most of the nation’s baseball fanatics (shortened to “fans” about this time) to follow the progress of their favorite teams. Baseball maintained its dominance because every lad seemed to have a nearby ball field, whether it was a grassy field or a sand lot. Baseball was both a rural and urban game, though it would have been challenging to play the game in the squalid sections of many of the inner cities populated by the newest, poorest immigrants. Nevertheless, the game was popular in schools and municipal play areas and one that many fathers had played, so there was an intergenerational captivation with the game that could be shared in families. All major-league baseball games were played during the day (the first majorleague night baseball game was not until 1935) and the starting times were usually 3 P.M. Thus, most of the fans who could attend would have not been working class, but rather management or so-called white-collar workers, since they had some latitude in leaving their workplace early enough to attend a game. Men attended games in suits and white shirts, since most had come directly from work and that was the accepted dress for this level of worker. Women were not frequent attendees unless they were accompanied by a male; there were no restrictions as such, but sporting events were seen as not refined enough for women to attend on their own. Most women would have been at home tending to families or at low-paid jobs; there were simply no women in management at the time. Thus, it would have been unlikely that many “respectable” women would have or could have gone to baseball games alone. Seeking more business, many teams promoted “Ladies Days,” where a woman was given free admission (and would have been accompanied by a man, who paid).

Ethnicity and Baseball Organized baseball was segregated. It had not always been so, but no African American had appeared on a major league roster since 1889 when Moses Fleetwood Walker had played in the International League, then considered a major league (see chapter 2). Baseball did serve as a societal entr
ee for many white, firstgeneration immigrants from throughout Europe. Many played under assumed names in order to seem more “American” or, in some cases, to retain their amateur status for college sports. Baseball was a very assimilative sport, that is, there was less tolerance for diversity than in some other minor sports and this was likely the reason that players altered their “foreign” surnames. Shut out of so-called organized baseball, African Americans formed and played in their own leagues, including a few major-league-level leagues, the Negro National League and the Eastern League. Both of these collapsed later in the decade, but in 1924 the first Negro League World Series was held with the Kansas City Monarchs defeating the Hilldale club of Philadelphia, five games to four. Earlier in the decade Negro League teams had played a number of major-league clubs in exhibition games after the regular season ended, but this was stopped by the new commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, in 1924. Games featuring white and black players continued, but the white players could no longer compete in their major-league uniforms and the games were, thusly, promoted as a particular Negro League team against a team of white “all stars.”

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

Andrew “Rube” Foster was considered the “father” of the Negro Leagues. He was a fantastic pitcher in the early part of the century and then formed the Negro National League and helped form the Eastern League. Some of the top players in the Negro Leagues, such as John Henry Lloyd, Oscar Charleston and Biz Mackey (all eventually elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame), played for Foster, but then left his league to make more money in the Eastern League. The Negro Leagues were well covered by the African American press such as the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Amsterdam News. Segregation in the 1920s extended to major- and minor-league baseball and led to the growth of outstanding Negro league teams. The development of a separate group of newspapers that drew mostly on African American readers provided the exposure necessary for the Negro Leagues to succeed.

Economics and Legal Issues Players were not usually middle class, unlike most of the attendees of games, who were. Most players were working class, with few skills and education, happy to be paid to play baseball. There were exceptions, however, with a small, but significant number of players having attended or graduated from college. The owners had all of the power to keep players under contract and prevent their movements to other teams. Salaries were relatively low, just above that of a middle-management wage earner. The owners’ power was legally sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922, in a case that had been brought by a baseball club in the Federal League. This league had operated in the latter years of the 1910s before the National and American Leagues offered financial inducements to some Federal League owners to drive the league out of business and maintain the monopoly that the established major leagues had on players and player salaries. One Federal League owner, instead, brought a lawsuit against the National League under U.S. antitrust laws, claiming, essentially, that the major leagues were an illegal monopoly that restrained trade and led to illegal higher prices for customers. In a case that would have impact for the next seventy-five years or more, the Court decided that baseball was not as much a business as it was a sport or entertainment, and the antitrust laws did not apply to baseball for that reason. Such a finding meant that the reserve clause, which bound players to one club until the team might decide to release the player, was not illegal. Player salaries were artificially contained for more than fifty years until the reserve clause was found to be an unfair restraint of trade. Even with that handicap, there were still a few players whose salaries rose enormously in this period. The most noted was Babe Ruth, the player credited with making baseball more popular than ever and whose name was synonymous with baseball excitement and accomplishment. Ruth’s emergence as a national hero came at the same time that the throwing of the 1919 World Series by members of the Chicago White Sox (often referred to as the Black Sox scandal) became known and led to baseball hiring its first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Since sports have been played, there are references to observers betting on the outcome of contests. The early Olympics in ancient Greece were the subjects of betting, but that did not also involve what was the issue with the 1919 World Series, that is, players taking money from

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Babe Ruth (1895–1948) George Herman (“Babe”) Ruth was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on February 6, 1895. He was a difficult child to control and his parents briefly placed him in St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys School at the age of seven and was incarcerated there from the age of ten until the age of twenty. There he learned to read and write and to play baseball, though he had obvious natural ability. Ruth began as a left-handed pitcher and he was excellent. He was purchased by the Baltimore Orioles, a top minor-league team, in early 1914, where he excelled, before he was sold in July of that year to the Boston Red Sox. In nearly six years with the Red Sox, Ruth won eighty-nine games and lost only forty-six and he was one of the top pitchers in baseball. But it was his astounding hitting that was the talk of baseball and he began to pitch less and play the outfield more. In 1919 he went 9–5 as a pitcher, but hit twenty-nine home runs, an astonishing total for the time. The next highest total was ten. In 1920 Ruth was sold to the Yankees by the Red Sox owner, Harry Frazee, for $125,000, the highest amount ever paid for a player. It turned out to be a bargain as Ruth led the league in home runs numerous times on his way to setting what was the record for career home runs of 714. He also compiled a lifetime batting average of .342. More important was the fact that Ruth led the Yankees to seven pennants and four World Series titles in his fifteen years as a Yankee. He was one of the first five players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936. Ruth also was the most well-known figure in sports and appeared in films, had his own basketball team in the off-season, and was famous for just being himself. He was a prodigious consumer of food, drink, cigars, and good times. In the early years of the Great Depression he had a salary of $80,000, more than the president of the United States, and his overall income was much higher. When questioned about this by a reporter, Ruth said, “I had a better year.” He is still one of the most recognizable of sports figures, sixty years after his death in 1948.

gamblers to influence the outcomes of games. Baseball had had various players who were either known or rumored to have accepted bribes to “fix” games for many years, but this was the biggest, most complex plot ever known. The perceived sanctity of the World Series made the crime seem all the more despicable. The case against the players was not fully investigated and brought to trial until 1921. Because of various errors in retaining evidence, the eight players were acquitted, despite confessions (some of which were retracted or “lost”). The verdict was not convincing to Judge Landis, however. A federal judge, he had been hired by organized baseball to provide order to a nearly anarchic enterprise, largely magnified by the Black Sox trial. Following the trial, Landis banned all eight players from organized baseball for life. The most well known was “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who left the game with a lifetime batting average of .356, the third highest of all time. Because of his banishment from baseball, he has been barred from election to the Baseball Hall of Fame (see sidebar in chapter 5).

Baseball and the Media As noted earlier, sports pages became an integral part of the major newspapers only in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, a few sportswriters had begun to

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

make names for themselves, enhancing the various sports through their reporting. Among the best known were Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, Ed Sullivan, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Walter “Red” Smith, and Alison Danzig. Runyon, Lardner, and Gallico went on to become well-known novelists and short-story writers in other areas besides sports, but their writing lifted the respect given to sports journalism. Sullivan went from sport reporting to “gossip”/entertainment writing (not a huge transition was needed), before moving to radio and then television as the host of a top-ranked variety show, which aired from 1948 to 1971. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1927 Smith covered baseball and boxing. He wrote for the St. Louis Star (and its successor the Star-Times) and the Philadelphia Record before becoming a writer and columnist for various papers in New York City, beginning in 1945. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times writing in 1976 at the age of seventy-one. Rice was more known for his college football coverage and as an early radio reporter. Radio was invented in the late 1800s, but commercial radio did not become cheap enough to make feasible until 1920 and the first station on the air with actual licensing was KDKA in Pittsburgh, which covered the election returns for the 1920 presidential election between Cox and Harding. The next year one game of the World Series between the Yankees and the New York Giants was broadcast; the following year the entire series was broadcast on two stations in Baltimore and Schenectady, New York. Grantland Rice was the announcer. Radio amplifiers were set up in the ballpark, so listeners could hear the sounds of the game and imagine that they were right there. By the end of the decade, every top sports event would be broadcast on the radio as 50 percent of all American households had a radio. The World Series was the most listened-to baseball event, but many major- (and minor-) league teams began regular broadcasts of the teams’ games during this era. At first, it was feared that radio broadcasting would lower regular attendance at games, but, in fact, the opposite occurred. Radio made fans of more people and attendance rose during the 1920s.

Baseball through the Decade The decade began with the Cleveland Indians and the Brooklyn Robins meeting in the 1920 World Series, a series most noted for the fact that Bill Wambsganss of Cleveland made the only unassisted triple play ever in World Series history as the Indians won the series in seven games. During the regular season, while at bat, Indians’ shortstop Ray Chapman was killed by a ball pitched by Carl Mays. Chapman was and is the only major leaguer even to have been killed in a contest. His death was not an incentive to find more protective headwear for players, and batting helmets did not become mandatory for major-league use until 1971. Beginning in 1921, the New York Yankees became the dominant team in baseball. Led by Babe Ruth, they won pennants in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1927, and 1928. The 1927 team is often called the greatest team of all time and the term “Murderers’ Row” was coined to describe their hard-hitting batting order, which featured Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Bob Muesel at the middle of a lineup that led the league in batting average, triples, home runs, and slugging percentage and scored 70 more runs than the next closest team in the league. They also had four of the top starting pitchers in the league and won the American League pennant by nineteen games, then swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series in four games.

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Shown from left: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, circa 1927. (Courtesy of Photofest)

Ruth and Gehrig were seen as the top two hitters in the game, one or the other consistently leading the league in runs batted in and/or home runs. Ty Cobb was just ending his Hall of Fame career, but still hit .357 at the age of forty to finish fifth in the league. Despite the Black Sox scandal being exposed in the early part of the decade, Ruth’s mammoth home runs and the new power-hitting of baseball overall drove attendance astronomically higher, from 52 million in 1910–20 to more than 86 million in the 1920s. The National League pennants were won by the New York Giants more than any other team of the decade (four), but the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates were also outstanding with two pennants each. John McGraw, a short, gruff man, was the Giants’ manager and helped fuel the New York rivalry between the Yankees and the Giants. Until Yankee Stadium was completed in 1923, the Yankees shared the Giants’ home field, the Polo Grounds, from 1913 to 1922. The National League was not without its heroes and great future Hall of Fame players including Rogers Hornsby (nicknamed “Rajah”), Paul and Lloyd Waner (known as “Big and Little Poison”), Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander, and Chuck Klein. In the American League, Walter Johnson (the “Big Train”) was the top pitcher, and Al Simmons, Harry Heilman, and Robert “Lefty” Grove were also future Hall of fame players, among others. Baseball was transformed in the 1920s from a game where singles and adept base running were the dominant mode to one where home runs became the key to success. In 1921 Babe Ruth hit fifty-nine home runs; the next highest total was twenty-four. By 1929 Ruth led again with forty-six, but the next highest totals were forty-three and forty-two. The game was more popular than ever, and baseball players, especially Ruth, were recognized heroes throughout the country.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

Basketball Basketball was a recent invention (1891), but by 1920 it was well established in colleges and professionally. Like football, there were significant differences between the quality of play and the fan base for pro and college basketball. Many of the professionals never went to college and some even eschewed the completion of high school. The result was a much rougher professional game, with mostly lowerand working-class fans thriving on the rugged action. College play did not elicit the same type of excitement that professional basketball did. Many newspapers would not cover pro basketball because they did not feel that their readers would find it appealing. For much of the decade this was true of the New York Times, even though there were many professional leagues in the region and the top pro basketball team was located and associated with the city, the Original New York Celtics. The rules of the game were still in flux and court size, for example, was not standardized. Foul shots were taken by one designated player on a team, though this began to change in the 1920s. During this time, the professional game was

The Original New York Celtics, 1916–1928 The New York Celtics began as a local team in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City and were mostly composed of Irish immigrants or their children. The name of the team indicated their roots. During World War I, the ownership of the team changed hands and the squad was transformed into a powerhouse that attracted the best players of the day. The Celtics’ manager, Jim Furey, got the best players to sign exclusive, high-paying contracts with the Celtics, and they played as many as 200 games per season. The Celtics won almost every league that they played in, so they were often either kicked out or forced to leave because their success brought ruin to the league. They often played throughout the country as an independent squad, playing local teams or other professional squads following the same pattern of traveling, often called barnstorming. The Celtics were led by a number of future Hall of Fame players. Johnny Beckman, sometimes called the Babe Ruth of basketball, the leading scorer in a game that had little scoring, was one of the Celtics from the Hell’s Kitchen area. Nat Holman, was one of the rare college graduates playing professional basketball and he also was the coach at City College of New York (CCNY). He was known as one of the smartest and most fundamentally sound of the pro players. Henry “Dutch” Dehnert was a wide player with deft hands, who perfected a new play called the pivot play, in which he came into the center lane (then only six feet wide) and then received the ball. Teammates would cut by him and Dehnert would move the ball quickly, faking to some and delivering the ball to one of the cutting players moving toward the basket. The last Hall of Fame player was Joe Lapchick, who joined the team in 1923 as a 60 500 center, considered a giant at the time. In a game that emphasized winning tipoffs (one was done after every basket or made free throw and for tie-ups on the court), Lapchick was the master and helped the Celtics dominate play in a time when there was no shot clock. The Celtics won two Eastern League titles, then won two American Basketball League titles, before being disbanded in 1928 because of their superior play.

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played in a cage, usually of wire mesh, to both protect the players and make the game faster, since the ball was always in play, even off the cage itself. The cage had been developed in New York State in the early 1900s, but was phased out in the late 1920s. Retained, however, was the term “cagers” to designate players on a basketball team. The Celtics were the dominant team of the 1920s, winning many league titles and playing games throughout the nation. They brought many regions their first opportunity to see the swiftness of pro basketball and they were real pioneers of the game. Traveling mostly by train, they would often play two games in a day at two different sites, usually winning both contests. They learned to keep games close in order to make sure that there would be interest in their games the next time they came to town. Most pro basketball leagues were regional and many players played in more than one league since only the Celtics had exclusivity clauses in their contracts. Players were able to renegotiate contract terms with teams, sometimes on a daily or weekly basis. Pro basketball was wildly disorganized, but games often drew large crowds of more than 10,000 to armories or arenas where the games were played. The Eastern League, mostly centered around the Philadelphia region, was the longest-lived league, lasting from 1909 to 1923 (then reappearing as a lesser league in 1925–26). Other top leagues were the New York State League, which ran from 1911 to 1924 (with a hiatus for World War I); the Pennsylvania State League, which ran from 1914 to 1921 in the Wyoming Valley area in the northeastern part of the state; the Interstate League, which moved its location and franchises frequently from 1915 to 1923 (with various stoppages), and the Metropolitan League, which went from 1921 to 1928, when it suspended operations for three years. The first truly, national professional basketball league was the American Basketball League (ABL), which began operations in 1925 in nine large cities, stretching from Boston to Chicago. In 1926 the Celtics were “forced” to join the league because the league members would no longer play teams outside the league. The Celtics won the league titles in both 1926–27 and 1927–28, before the league disbanded them and the players were redistributed among other ABL teams. In what was their final season in the league, the Celtics went 40–9, with the next-closest league team having a record of 30–21. In 1928–29 and 1929–30, the Cleveland Rosenblooms, with former Celtics Joe Lapchick, Henry “Dutch” Dehnert, and Pete Barry, won the ABL titles.

Ethnicity in Pro Basketball African Americans began playing basketball soon after its invention, with players in New York and Washington, D.C., the best organized and dominant in most play. Edwin Henderson, an outstanding player in the Washington area in the early twentieth century, became an outstanding coach and promoter of the game into the 1960s. The Harvard-educated leader died in 1977 at the age of ninety-three. In 1923 Robert “Bob” Douglas formed a team that played its initial home games on the floor of the Renaissance Casino in Harlem and became known as the Renaissance Big Five or the New York Renaissance. By 1927 the Rens were the acknowledged top African American team in basketball and they became one of, if not the top, professional team of the 1930s. The top Renaissance stars of the 1920s

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

were Clarence “Fat” Jenkins, James “Pappy” Ricks, Eyre “Bruiser” Saitch (also a top-ranked tennis player), Hilton “Kid” Slocum, and Charles “Tarzan” Cooper. There were a number of excellent African American teams barnstorming during this decade, most notably the Harlem Globetrotters (actually from Chicago) who began in 1927 and rivaled the Rens for success during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s the Globetrotters would become more “entertainment” than a legitimate team, after the National Basketball Association came into being and began signing African American players. The African American squads received excellent media coverage in the black press. The Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, among many others all covered the various teams in the newspapers’ weekly publications. In the 1920s there were many teams composed of players of similar ethnicity and the team names often reflected this such as the Brooklyn Visitation (Irish Roman Catholic) and the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association squad. The latter team was one of the top teams of the late 1920s and 1930s, chief rivals to the Celtics and the Rens. The SPHAs played in a number of leagues, but mostly barnstormed in the 1920s and perpetuated an early stereotype that Jews were good in basketball through their cleverness and sleight of hand.

George “Horse” Haggerty of the Palace Club holding basketball upside down with one hand. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Basketball Transportation Pro basketball in the 1920s was successful largely because of the U.S. railroad system. Most of the top pro players were essentially independent contractors who played for the highest bidder on a regular basis. They were able to do this because of the ability to get to the various sites of games swiftly and easily. Almost every town had a rail connection. The Pennsylvania State League, for example, was composed of cities located on the Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia and Erie, and the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western railroads, which went through the Wyoming Valley and on to Philadelphia, where lines connected to the Eastern League teams around Philadelphia. Heading north from Philadelphia, players could join with the New York Central or the Delaware and Hudson to get to New York City or beyond to the teams of the New York State League. Many players would meet in Grand Central Station in New York City and compare game salaries and destinations with their peers. This made pro basketball a seller-driven economy, in that the players had greater economic leverage than the owners, the buyers of the players’ services. This would change by the end of the decade. Some barnstorming teams, like the New York Rens, purchased a bus and traveled in that manner, beginning late in the decade. This gave them the flexibility to go to any town, even those not on rail lines. It also gave them a place to eat or sleep in case they faced either Jim Crow laws or hotels or restaurants that would not serve African Americans. Basketball was one sport that attracted women early on, and not just as spectators. Shortly after the invention of the game, interscholastic and college teams were formed and women enjoyed the game greatly. Senda Berenson of Smith College created a set of rules that adapted the men’s game for women’s “more delicate” constitutions (see sidebar in chapter 3). Players had assigned areas on the court and could not go to other areas. The game had three zones and players could only play in two contiguous zones. The game became a six-person game with play at each offensive end, three on three. Over time, the playing on a competitive basis was altered to emphasize sportsmanship, exhibited at “play days.”

College Basketball The college game was different from the professional basketball game. It was not as rough and had a limited number of fouls allowed before a player could be disqualified. There were no national tournaments, but there were some top teams. In the Northeast, Nat Holman, the Celtics’ star, was also the coach of the City College of New York team. CCNY was a top squad in the New York region, as was New York University, where Howard Cann starred and later coached. In the Midwest, a number of legendary coaches led top teams. In the Big Ten, Justin “Sam” Barry and his Iowa Hawkeyes won the Big Ten title in 1923, but Barry left at the end of the decade to coach on the West Coast. Everett Dean was a top player and coach at Indiana University, leading them to the 1926 Big Ten title. The dean of these Hall of Fame coaches was at Wisconsin, where Walter “Doc” Meanwell had a twenty-two-year coaching career from 1912 to 1934. During the 1920s, his Badgers won Big Ten titles in 1921, 1923, 1924, and 1929. Because there was no playoff system (the National Invitation Tournament [NIT] began in 1938, the National Collegiate Athletic Association [NCAA]

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

Tournament in 1939), various teams might claim national titles because of strong seasons. The University of Pittsburgh, coached by Cliff Carlson, was undefeated in 1928 (21–0) and was acclaimed as the national champions by most writers and coaches. Pitt received similar honors for 1930. In 1923 and 1924 Forrest “Phog” Allen, another Hall of Fame coach, from the University of Kansas, led his Jayhawks to national championships, as proclaimed by the Helms Athletic Foundation. Allen was also a founder of the National Association of Basketball Coaches in 1927 and served as its first president.

College Football By 1920, just over 20 percent of Americans were high school graduates and only 8 percent were college graduates. Nevertheless, college football was enormously popular with the nation’s populace. People attended games and huddled by their radios to follow the action on Saturday afternoons. The game had nearly been outlawed in the late 1800s because of the high number of injuries and deaths on the field, but President Theodore Roosevelt helped push for needed changes in the game regarding equipment and rules and, by the 1920s, college football was more popular than ever. Many colleges had greatly increased enrollments following World War I and there was a parallel boom in new stadium building on a number of campuses during the decade of the 1920s. The top eastern teams were in the Ivy League like Penn, Yale, and Harvard, as well as services teams like Army and Navy. In the Midwest Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio State were the top squads in their conference, but Notre Dame moved

Georgetown-Navy game, Georgetown bulldog and Navy goat. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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upward through the decade to take top honors in the region and the country. Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee were top squads in the South. The University of Southern California did not begin football until 1922, but became one of the top teams in the country during the decade, going undefeated three years in a row in the early 1920s. Other top teams on the West Coast were Stanford University and the University of California. Most college teams played within their own region, because of the time and money needed to play farther from their own campuses. Beginning in the early 1900s some schools began trying to extend their geographic parameters, but they were still limited by the fact that the only way to travel was by train and this meant more class time would be missed as teams traveled farther than they

Knute Rockne of Notre Dame (1888–1931) The most famous college football coach of the 1920s was Knute Rockne, who was born in Norway and immigrated to Chicago with his parents when he was just five years old in 1893. Rockne’s parents were working class and could not afford college, so after high school he worked for four years for the U.S. Postal Service in Chicago, saving money to attend college. In 1910 he enrolled at the University of Notre Dame majoring in chemistry and intending to play on the football and track teams. He set a school record in the pole vault during his sophomore year, and became a starting end on the football team. He combined with his roommate, Gus Dorais, who was the quarterback, to set passing/ receiving records for the Irish team. Dorais is sometimes credited with “inventing” the forward pass, but that was not the case. He and Rockne perfected the pass play, however, to such a degree that both of them received All America recognition and the Notre Dame team went undefeated for three straight years. Following graduation in 1914, Rockne, who was a top student, accepted a position as a graduate teaching assistant in the chemistry department and helped coach the football team. In 1918 he became the head coach of the Fighting Irish. The first year he was coach, the team played only six games, losing one, but over the next six years Rockne led Notre Dame to fifty-five wins and only three losses, going undefeated three times and winning the Rose Bowl and being named national champions for the 1924 season. Over the next four years, however, Notre Dame went 28–12 and lost four games in 1928, the most losses in a season for an Irish team since 1905. There were some questions about whether Rockne had lost his coaching touch, but in the next two seasons Notre Dame went undefeated and was voted national champions both years. Following the 1930 season, Rockne traveled to California to assist in the film production of The Spirit of Notre Dame. He traveled by airplane, stopping in Kansas City to visit his sons. He boarded a plane for Los Angeles, but it crashed in a wheat field near Bazaar, Kansas, on March 31, 1931. Rockne was just forty-three years old. Rockne’s overall coaching record was 105 wins, 12 losses, five ties, and six national championships. His winning percentage of .881 leads all college and professional football coaches. Rockne was popular because of his great record, but also because of his poor immigrant beginning, similar to so many in the United States. He managed to rise to the top of his profession and was seen as illustrative of the American Dream that anyone could succeed, no matter how humble one’s background.

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normally had done. One school that successfully expanded their schedule and, in the process, became the most popular school in the country, was the University of Notre Dame, led by their dynamic coach, Knute Rockne. With Notre Dame and the Big Ten schools like Michigan and Illinois, the Midwest became a real rival to the northeastern teams for football supremacy in the college ranks. In the battle for better teams, amateur rules were often not followed precisely by many college programs. Professionals were hired to play, illegally, on some college teams and some students on the football team hardly showed up in their classes, belying the notion of “student athletes.” George Gipp, the Notre Dame star, was one such player, but there were many since there was little standard regulation of college football. The NCAA had been formed in 1910, but it had a small staff and few rules, relying on individual institutions to police themselves honestly. It was during this decade that football coaches became stars themselves and most no longer had the additional duties of coaching other sports or teaching a class or two. The coach was only the coach and some were paid more than university professors or the university president, unheard of practices until then. One of those coaches was Glenn “Pop” Warner, who began his coaching career at the University of Georgia when it had only 248 students, then coached at Cornell and Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Jim Thorpe, of Sac and Fox American Indian descent, who went on to be called one the greatest athletes of the twentieth century, was the star of that squad in the 1910s (see chapter 5). In 1915 Warner went to the University of Pittsburgh, leading them to thirty-three straight victories before being hired in 1922 to coach at a salary of over $5000 at Stanford University. He was still employed by Pitt until 1924 and could only help Stanford in the spring until his Pitt contract expired. His 1926 team went undefeated and he coached one of the all-time great football players in Ernie Nevers. He moved to Temple University where he coached from 1933 to 1938. Warner won 313 games and lost only 106, with 32 ties, but his greatest contribution was probably the youth football program that bears his name. He began this in 1929. Now over 240,000 players and 160,000 cheerleaders take part in these programs nationwide.

Economics of the Game Some of the other highly paid and well-known coaches were Fielding Yost of the University of Michigan, Amos Alonzo Stagg of the University of Chicago, Bob Zuppke of the University of Illinois (often credited with inventing the huddle), Andy Smith of the University of California, and Howard Jones of the University of Southern California. The top coaches got from $4000–$7000 and many had no obligations other than coaching the football team. Veteran professors might have gotten as high as $4500 and the average annual salary in the United States, as noted earlier, was about $1500. Tickets for the games might run as high as three dollars, but most were less. Most of the stadiums that were built cost less than $100,000 to complete. Thus, a new stadium could be paid off within the course of a season. Players, of course, were not officially paid, but there were numerous instances where college players were hired by towns to appear in a high school game in order to ensure that the high school would win a game from a bitter rival. Some of the college players would also get $25–$50 a game to play for semiprofessional teams, usually playing under assumed names in order to maintain their amateur eligibility.

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Geography of the Game As noted earlier, most teams played within their region because of the time and expense of travel. Ivy League teams played within the league and would play some eastern independents like Army, Navy, or one of the liberal arts colleges that had a strong program, such as Washington and Jefferson College. The latter team, from Washington, Pennsylvania, played in the 1922 Rose Bowl, but by the end of the decade the larger universities dominated college football, forcing smaller schools to lower their expectations and recruitment efforts. Most of the Big Nine (now Big Ten) schools played six games against other league squads, then two games against nonconference foes from the region, such as other midwestern state schools, not part of the Big Nine, like Western Michigan, Northern Illinois, or Ohio University. The same was true in the South, where most of the top football schools were still not affiliated with a league until the Southern Conference formed in 1922. It consisted of twenty-two teams, stretching from Virginia to Florida and west to the Mississippi River. On the West Coast the Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) had six members at the beginning of the decade and ten by 1929. Leagues were changing almost from year to year, but the core of the PCC remained stable with Oregon, Oregon State, Stanford, California, Washington, and Washington State. The Missouri Valley Conference was based solely in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma with eight schools, but in 1928 that conference was reconstituted the Big Six with Iowa State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Missouri, Kansas, and Kansas State forming that league. One of the biggest exceptions to this regionalism was Notre Dame. They started their football excellence a bit later than other universities, becoming most prominent under Coach Knute Rockne. Most leagues were relatively set and Notre Dame did not want to get tied into a weak league so they remained independent. That made scheduling games a challenge and Rockne ended up scheduling games not only in the Midwest, but in the Northeast and Southeast as well. In 1926 Notre Dame traveled to the University of Southern California and began one of the most storied of intersectional rivalries, still existent today.

The Media and College Football

Knute Rockne in 1930. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

No sport received as much of a boost from the media as college football. Radio became the great communicator for the sport. Some of the greatest sports announcers were identified with college football broadcasts. Nevertheless, newspaper sportswriting was the most popular way to find out about college football in this

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era. Grantland Rice often covered games of the U.S. Military Academy (Army) as well as Ivy League games and, later, Notre Dame. Rice was responsible for giving the nickname “Four Horsemen” to the 1924 Notre Dame backfield in an article for the New York Herald Tribune in reference to the Notre Dame victory over Army. Rice was interested in creating heroes for his readers and the 1920s had many of them. Besides Red Grange, the Four Horsemen, and Frank Carideo of Notre Dame; Benny Friedman and Bennie Oosterbaan of Michigan; Ernie Nevers of Stanford, and Bronko Nagurski of Minnesota were among the most colorful of the college stars of the era. They made for great copy for the eager sportswriters like Rice, Ring Lardner, Walter Eckersley, Paul Gallico, Arch Ward, Shirley Povich, and Red Smith. The first national broadcast of a football game was in 1922 when Princeton defeated the University of Chicago. The Four Horsemen were soon joined by Fordham’s “Seven Blocks of Granite,” which referred to their strong linemen. One of those linemen was Vince Lombardi, a future Hall of Fame coach of the Green Bay Packers.

Harold “Red” Grange, carrying football in IllinoisMichigan game, 1925. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Law, Ethics, and College Football Many of the same issues plagued college football that dogged other sports, including gambling, the legality of players, and contract issues. Player eligibility was difficult to police because many teams operated out of the scrutiny of anyone in the college other than the football coach. Gambling seemed to be less common on college football games because the point spread had not been developed and “perfected” by this time. The “spread” was a number of points that seemed to separate two opposing teams. Gamblers set a point spread and those betting on the favored team would only win if their team “beat the spread.” In the 1920s the betting was mostly straight up, that is, on one team or another, with no points given and that seemed to make football a less attractive sport to wager on for big-time gamblers. The question of who was eligible to play was a thorny one, and it was addressed by different colleges in different ways. There was no question that a player had to be a student at the college for which he played, but the definition of an “eligible” student varied. Was one class enough to be considered a student and what happened if a student failed to pass that class or a number of classes? Who should determine such eligibility, if not the college’s faculty? In some cases college

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presidents overrode the faculty and made decisions, often on the basis of economics rather than academics. Could a school be punished for having professionals on their roster, and who administered such punishment? In the midst of this discussion, a new wrinkle appeared when Red Grange signed with the Chicago Bears immediately after his senior season ended, rather than after graduating from college, which was the accepted norm. There was a great outcry about the notion of professionals raiding the college ranks, and the fledgling National Football League agreed to not sign college players until after their class had graduated, but this would have no effect on players who never attended college. The NCAA, provided with more enforcement powers by its constituent member colleges, tried to address the concerns of an overemphasis on football and the professional impact on colleges. Two of the biggest concerns were illegal recruiting and subsidies to college athletes.

Red Grange Scores Five Touchdowns, Four in the First Quarter, 1924 The date was October 19, 1924, a lovely fall day for football. In 1923 both the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan had been undefeated with records of 8–0, but, despite being in the same league, the teams did not meet that year. Both were undefeated when the two teams met on the third Saturday in October, but within fifteen minutes the game was essentially over. A crowd of 60,000 was in Memorial Stadium to see Harold “Red” Grange (1903–91), the star running back of the Illini, try to break through the rugged Michigan defense. Grange was from Wheaton, Illinois, just southwest of Chicago, and he had worked in the summers delivering ice, often carrying fifty-pound blocks up two or three flights of stairs. At this time the electric refrigerator was quite new, having been patented only about ten years before (in 1913) and most people had iceboxes to keep food cold, but they required regular deliveries of ice. Grange became known as the “Wheaton Iceman” because of his summer job. Soon after the 1924 Michigan game, however, he acquired a new nickname, “the Galloping Ghost.” Grange took the opening kickoff on the five-yard line and returned it ninety-five yards for a touchdown. Michigan took the ball, but turned it over on downs, and the Illini got the ball back four minutes into the game. Shortly after that, Grange broke through the Michigan defense and ran sixty-seven yards for his second touchdown of the day. On their next possession, the Illini began another march, culminating with Grange sprinting fifty-six yards for his third touchdown. Just before the end of the quarter, at the twelve-minute mark of the game, Grange wove his way through the entire Michigan defense to go forty-four yards for his fourth score of the day. At the end of the quarter, the score was Illinois 27, Michigan 0. Coach Bob Zuppke took Grange out for the entire second quarter, but he returned in the second half to score once more, leading the Illini to a rout of the Wolverines by a score of 39–14. The five touchdowns were more amazing because Michigan was one of the strongest defensive teams in the nation and finished the year with a record of six wins and two losses. The game was the first to be broadcast by WGN radio in Chicago, with one of the strongest signals in the country and the largest station in the Midwest. Thus, thousands attended the game, but likely millions heard Grange’s feats as they occurred via the radio.

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During the 1920s, then, a number of schools were often dominant in their play and the recognition that they received from the media. In 1920 many teams went undefeated, but Notre Dame had the most victories and was 9–0 in the regular season. The University of California finished 9–0 after defeating Ohio State, who finished 7–1 with this loss, in the Rose Bowl. (The other major bowls did not exist until the 1930s.) In 1921 California and Washington and Jefferson, who had finished at 9–0 and 10–0, respectively, tied 0–0 in the Rose Bowl. Iowa of the Big Ten, finished at 7–0. Many teams were undefeated in 1922, among which were Princeton, California, Iowa, and Michigan. The next year Yale, Illinois, Michigan, and Cal were again among the undefeated teams. In 1924 Notre Dame went undefeated, defeated Stanford in the Rose Bowl, and was acclaimed the number 1 team in the nation. The next season the University of Alabama went undefeated, including a defeat of previously unbeaten Washington, by a single point in the Rose Bowl. Alabama returned to the Rose Bowl after the 1926 regular season to meet Stanford. Both teams were undefeated, tying 7–7 in the Rose Bowl. In 1927 Illinois, Minnesota, and Texas A&M all went undefeated, but had ties on their records. Georgia Tech, undefeated, untied, and victorious in the Rose Bowl, was the top team of 1928. Notre Dame and Purdue were the only undefeated and untied teams in 1929, with Notre Dame voted number 1. The Fighting Irish refused all bowl invitations because of time away from campus for their students.

Professional Football At the beginning of the 1920s, professional football was viewed as an inferior game to college football in many ways. It was seen as rougher, not as well played, and the players were seen as low-life reprobates, not the educated young men that college football claimed to produce. There was some truth to this, but was also more a stereotype. Pro football teams had begun in the late nineteenth century, mostly out of clubs, but an actual pro league began in 1902, and by 1915 a number of pro leagues had come and gone. The Canton Bulldogs made some headlines in 1915 by signing Jim Thorpe to their team, but in 1919 the long-established Ohio League (begun in 1903) folded and the 1920s began with the birth of the new American Professional Football Association (APFA). The teams were drawn from the old Ohio League cities, plus Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New York. Fourteen teams began the season and the Akron Pros were voted league champion after the end of the season. After the 1921 season, the league changed its name to the National Football League. Initially, most of the APFA and NFL games were played on the weekends and players held other jobs. Practice time was after work and equipment was not great. The league(s) were barely holding on, hoping that professional football would catch on with a larger segment of the population. Despite the disdain with which some people viewed pro football in comparison to college football, a surprisingly high number of pros had attended college. The 1920s were economically a time of growth and it was hoped that some of the “discretionary” money that Americans now had would be spent on pro football. The league had as its first president Jim Thorpe, the Carlisle Indian School football star and Olympic decathlon champion, who was chosen for his name recognition, not necessarily for his administrative ability.

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Ethnicity in the 1920s NFL The 1920 season saw Akron proclaimed league champion and they were led by Fritz Pollard, the first African American in the league. Pollard had starred at college at Brown University; the next year he was joined by Paul Robeson, who had starred at Rutgers. They were a powerful running tandem. In 1923 Robeson played for the Milwaukee franchise, before leaving pro football for endeavors in musical theatre and opera. Pollard became the co-coach of the Akron Pros for the 1921 season, but remained an active player. He remained with Akron through that season, then went to Milwaukee for 1922, Hammond in 1923 and 1925, and back to Akron as player coach before the franchise folded. In 1928 Pollard organized and coached an independent all–African American team, the Chicago Black Hawks, a team that played into the 1930s. Pollard was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame in 2005. By 1926 there were five African Americans in top pro football leagues, but pressure from some NFL management, most notably the New York Giants, convinced teams to no longer sign black players because of the fear that they would “disrupt the game.” There was only one, Duke Slater of the Chicago Cardinals, in 1927, and beginning in 1934 the NFL executed an unofficial ban on black players, which was not lifted until 1946. In 1922 the Marion (Ohio) squad was composed of all Native Americans, led by Jim Thorpe, Joe Guyon, and Pete Calac, all former teammates at the Carlisle Indian School. The players were getting older and only compiled a record of two wins and six losses, but they were highly popular, and came out on the field wearing war bonnets and buckskins over their football pants. The next year, the Oorang Indians went only 1–10 and disbanded. The three Carlisle players remained in the league on different teams.

The Seasons of the 1920s Overall, pro football had a small but loyal following, which meant that most clubs did not make a profit, but managed to eke out an existence, constantly hoping that things would improve. That would not happen until after World War II, however. The new NFL had seventeen teams at the beginning of 1922 and twenty teams in 1923, but the number of league games being played varied. The Canton Bulldogs won the title in both 1922 and 1923. The Chicago Bears were one of the few teams to make a profit and, after the 1922 season, the Green Bay Packers were in financial straits. Their coach and quarterback decided to sell shares to the citizens of Green Bay, who responded eagerly, purchasing shares at five dollars and getting a box seat in addition. The Packers remain the only community-owned professional team today. In 1924 the Canton squad moved to Cleveland because of money problems and won the championship, once again, as the Cleveland Bulldogs. At the end of the 1925 college season, the Chicago Bears signed Red Grange of Illinois to their team and he finished the season with the Bears, only the second-best team in Chicago, as the Cardinals compiled the best record in the league. In 1927 the league was reduced to twelve teams, because of the continual financial losses, and in 1928 the number of teams was reduced further, to ten. The circuit increased back to twelve in 1929 and the Packers went 12–0 to secure the

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league title. Led by halfback Johnny Blood and defensive lineman Cal Hubbard (later a respected major league umpire), the Packer players usually played sixty minutes a game, even though they sometimes played twice a week. Pro football in the 1920s was not a game for the faint of heart!

Professional Hockey The National Hockey League (NHL) was formed and began play in 1917 so the league was in its earliest years during the 1920s. Unlike the other major professional leagues in the United States during that period, the NHL was relatively small and largely Canadian. Not until 1924 did an American team (the Boston Bruins) enter the league, and they were joined by the New York Americans and the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1925. In 1926 the NHL expanded to ten teams with the addition of the New York Rangers, the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Detroit Cougars. The league remained at ten teams, in two sections of five, until 1931. American interest in the league was minimal except in the franchise cities of New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. Even there, coverage was not extensive. Players were almost all Canadian so there was little “hometown” identification for local American fans.

The Olympic Games of the 1920s The modern Olympic movement was begun in the latter part of the nineteenth century and finally culminated in the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896. Eight nations, seven from Europe, sent teams to the Games. Twenty-nine nations participated in the 1920 Olympiad, held in Antwerp, Belgium, with less than a year to really prepare. There had been a hiatus from the four-year cycle because of World War I; the Games had last been held in 1912. There was great excitement in the athletic world with the announcement in 1919 that the Games would be held, but preparation was rather impromptu. Finland was competing for the first time as a completely independent nation, having gained its independence from Sweden in 1917. The Finns won thirty-four medals, fourth highest behind the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden. Paavo Nurmi of Finland won the 10K race and the 10K cross-country race (no longer held). A. G. Hill of Great Britain also won two gold medals in middle-distance races (800 and 1500 meters). Charlie Paddock of the United States won the 100-meter race, giving him the title of world’s fastest man, with American winners in seven other track and field events. Duke Kahanamoku of Hawaii and Norman Ross of Chicago won gold in swimming, Ross with three, Kahanamoku two. American women swept the swim sprints, led by Etheda Bleibtrey, as well as the fancy diving events, and the Americans were strong in shooting events, winning eight golds there and numerous other medals. The American press provided minimal coverage of the Games and there was far less overall publicity for winners than today. Most of the winners returned to regular jobs (if they hadn’t lost them by competing and being away so long). There was little coverage of the athletes upon their return to the United States other than in their respective hometown newspapers. Olympic athletes were true amateurs and any of them who made any money on being an Olympic athlete lost his or her amateur standing and was considered a

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professional. This made them ineligible to compete in further amateur events, which, of course, included the Olympics. This was true of athletes in all sports and nations, so most of these athletes were happy to find jobs that allowed them some flexibility to train for their events. Unlike today, however, when athletes train every day, all year round, most of these athletes just trained “in season” each year. In 1924 there were two Olympic Games, the Summer Games of Paris and, for the first time, Winter Games, held in Chamonix, France. The Winter Games were almost exclusively European nations and the United States and Canada, among the sixteen competing countries. At the Winter Games, the United States won a total of four medals and finished fifth in medal competition, which was dominated by Norway and Finland. There were only sixteen events. There was little interest in the Games in the United States. The Summer Games in Paris, by contrast, had 126 events, 44 countries competing, and over 3,000 athletes. The U.S. team dominated in the games with Finland, France, and Great Britain next highest in medals, but far behind the U.S. total of forty-five gold medals and ninety-nine total medals. The increased number of nations, the longer time for planning, and the increased attention by the American media made some Olympic winners American and/or world heroes. The increased media coverage still pales by comparison to today’s multimedia and, often, live or tape delay broadcasts. Though coverage increased, it rarely, if ever, got off the sports pages to the first page of the papers. The biggest star of the Games was Paavo Nurmi, the “Flying Finn,” who won four gold medals in track at various long distances. American track and field results did have ten gold medal winners (one gold was shared in the pole vault), but no American star emerged in this area. As a team, the U.S. men took first and second in the broad (now long) jump, the high jump, the shot put, the hammer throw, the 200 meter, and the decathlon. Johnny Weissmuller of Chicago took gold medals in both the 100- and 400-meter freestyle swimming events. In the 100, the United States had a sweep with Duke Kahanamoku second and Sam Kahanamoku third. In all, the United States took thirteen gold medals in men’s and women’s swimming and diving. Helen Wills and Vince Richards of the United States took gold medals in singles tennis as well as combining with others to win the men’s and women’s doubles titles. The Americans returned directly after the Games to welcomes in New York and some other smaller celebrations, but most returned to their training or their jobs with little fanfare. Being an Olympic hero was not yet a stepping-stone to fortune, and fame seemed rather fleeting. The final Olympic Games of the decade were held in 1928. The Winter Olympics were in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and again American impact at the Games and interest at home were minimal. Twenty-five nations and 464 athletes competed, a marked increase from Chamonix four years earlier, but there were only fourteen events. Surprisingly, the United States took gold medals in one- and four-man bobsleds and totaled six medals (four in bobsleds) to finish second in medal totals to Norway’s fifteen. Still, the U.S. population hardly noticed. By contrast, the 1928 Games in Amsterdam were much better covered and there was increased interest in the United States and worldwide. There had been strong consideration of awarding the Games to Los Angeles, but finally, that city was awarded the 1932 Games. Countries from South America (Argentina, Chile,

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1920–1929

Johnny Weissmuller (1904–1984) Born in Hungary (though today it is Rumania) in 1904, Johnny Weissmuller and his parents moved to the United States when he was seven months old. They lived briefly in Windber, Pennsylvania, before settling in Chicago where Johnny began his swimming career at the age of fifteen. In 1924 Weissmuller was chosen for the U.S. Olympic team, although he did not have American citizenship. He and his younger brother (who was born in the United States) essentially traded identities and birthdates in order to make Johnny eligible for the Olympic team. Johnny Weissmuller was recognized as an American hero after winning five gold medals in two Olympic Games. He also held fifty-two American swimming championships at various distances from 1921 to 1928. He is credited with inventing the American crawl swimming stroke. Following the 1928 Games, Weissmuller signed an endorsement contract with BVD, manufacturer of swimsuits and men’s underwear. He was paid almost $200 per week, a princely sum in the late 1920s. He also appeared in two motion pictures. In 1931 Weissmuller was asked to play the role of Tarzan in the filmed version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books, but in initially refused. Following some negotiations, he signed a contract for a beginning salary of $250 a week that rose to $2000 per week. This was in the early years of the Great Depression and was one of the largest salaries in the nation. In 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man was released, with Weissmuller as the lead and Maureen O’sullivan as “Jane,” his “mate.” Weissmuller reprised the role through sixteen years of filming. Tarzan swam, swung on vines, and dived off cliffs and Weissmuller was the man to play such a role. Following his Tarzan career, he made films and a syndicated television series as Jungle Jim. The series was shown for many years after its production in 1955. Weissmuller was the founding chairman of the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and was named to the American Olympic Hall of Fame. He was also voted the greatest swimmer of the first half of the twentieth century and died in 1984 at the age of seventy-nine.

Uruguay), Africa (Egypt, South Africa), Asia (Japan, Philippines, India), and Australia/New Zealand competed and won medals. The U.S. victories now were seen as truer world victories, rather than just European and North American triumphs. And the United States did, indeed, triumph in the Amsterdam Games with twenty-two gold medals and fifty-six total medals. Germany, now dramatically recovered from the devastation of the world war, had thirty-one medals, including ten gold. There were repeat winners at these Games, most notably Paavo Nurmi, who took another gold and a silver medal to end his fabulous Olympic career. Following the Olympics, Nurmi toured Europe and the United States, but was deemed a professional for taking too much money for his expenses in Germany. He and the Finns appealed, but he was denied and was unable to compete in the 1932 Games. He finished his Olympic career with nine gold and three silver medals in twelve events. Another repeat winner was Johnny Weissmuller, who won the 100-meter freestyle, once again. The continued American success at the Olympic Games and the anticipation of hosting the 1932 Games created greater interest in the Olympic Games in the

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United States, but the amateur restrictions made it hard for the athletes and the American public to maintain long lasting relationships. One great feat that was connected, somewhat, to the swimming of the Olympics was long-distance swims. The most noted of the decade was the swimming of the English Channel. This was accomplished, initially, in 1895, but no woman mastered the distance until 1926. Gertrude Ederle, winner of two bronze medals for the 100- and 400-meter freestyles and a gold medal as part of a victorious U.S. relay team at the 1924 Paris Games, swam from France to England in 14 hours, 30 minutes, a record for men or women. Ederle, a native of New York City, was welcomed home with a tickertape parade on Broadway in New York.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing The “manly art of boxing,” seemingly ingrained in many cultures and introduced in the original Olympics in about 688 BCE, adopted the Marquis of Queensbury rules in the late 1800s and made the sport less violent. In 1892 gloves were first used in a heavyweight fight and have been standard equipment ever since. There are at least eleven weight classes, which negate the different weights that opponents might have and make fights decided upon skill rather than size. Boxing was done at various levels, both in an organized and less organized manner. Mining camps, lumber camps, and other “rough” places often had contests for the amusement of the workers, who were interested in demonstrations of strength and skill. In cities, boxing was often engaged in by lower-class or working-class youngsters, and it could serve as a way to gain fame and wealth. Until the 1920s, many states did not allow organized bouts because they deemed it too dangerous.

Ethnicity, Sexism, and Boxing Many ethnic groups were prominent in boxing in the 1920s, most notably lower-class groups, often more recent immigrants. At the lower weight classes Italians and Jews were very prominent. Many of these fighters were from inner-city neighborhoods and the young men fought on the street from their early years. Such fights would have been especially common where there was some ethnic “overlap” and more than one ethnic group “claimed” the neighborhood. This still occurs today, but at that time fists predominated, rather than guns. One of the greatest fighters was Benny Leonard, whose actual family name was Leiner. The son of very observant Jews, he used the name Leonard to prevent his parents from finding out about his boxing. Eventually they did so, anyway, and they were hurt and perplexed, noting that Jews were scholars rather than fighters. Nevertheless, Leonard was amazingly successful. He became the lightweight champion of the world in 1917 and held the crown until 1923. Except for a disqualification in 1922, Leonard did not lose a fight for twenty years from 1912 to 1932. He had retired in 1925, but returned to the ring in 1932 after losing his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. Many of Leonard’s top rivals were Irish, indicative of the great Jewish-Irish rivalry in boxing at the time. Despite not being a recent immigrant group, the Irish were often discriminated against in many ways into the twentieth century, and

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their social progress was often impeded by this discrimination. In boxing, however, there was no such prejudice and the Irish were also dominant in heavier weights. From the time of the first American heavyweight world champion, John L. Sullivan, who was champ from 1888 to 1892, Irishmen dominated the weight class. Jack Dempsey (1919–26) and Gene Tunney (1926–28) were the world champions in this decade. (The championship was open after Tunney’s retirement in 1928, until 1930.) Dempsey came out of the West and was “discovered” by promoter George L. “Tex” Rickard fighting in mining towns in Colorado. Before being a fighter, Dempsey, who was from a large Mormon family (ten brothers and sisters) in Manassa, Colorado, was a hobo who found work as a peach picker and a ditch digger, among a number of low-paying jobs. He defeated Jess Willard in 1919 for the heavyweight championship and became an instant hero, particularly to the working class. His rise to fame and fortune made it seem possible for many of the downtrodden, uneducated masses to hope for similar success. Dempsey was a bruising 60 100 and weighed 190 pounds, but could take a punch; he was only knocked out once in his sixty fights, and lost seven total fights. Tunney, by contrast, from New York City, was a nondrinker, quite articulate, and a college graduate. He was also from a working-class family, but served in World War I as a Marine, and also became light-heavyweight champion of the American Forces in Europe. He fought as a light heavyweight upon his return,

The Long Count, Tunney vs. Dempsey, 1927 On September 22, 1927, heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney met former champion Jack Dempsey in a rematch of their fight in 1926 in which Tunney upset Dempsey, who had reigned as heavyweight champion of the world for seven years. The rematch, held in Chicago’s Soldier Field, drew 105,000 fans to the stadium on Chicago’s lakefront. Tunney, an articulate ex-Marine who had fought in World War I, was from New York City, while Dempsey was a rough fighter from the mining camps of the West who had captured the heavyweight title at twenty-four and was still seen as the hardest puncher in boxing, now age thirty-two, though he had slowed a bit. The fight was scheduled for ten rounds, and the first six were largely controlled by the champion. Then, in the seventh round, Dempsey floored Tunney with a combination of punches that had Tunney clinging to the ropes. Dempsey, rather than retreating to a neutral corner, as is required by the rules, hovered nearby, and the referee kept signaling for him to retreat, yet failing to begin the count on Tunney. After at least five seconds, Dempsey crossed the ring and the referee, Dave Barry, began the count. Given the extra time to recover, Tunney was able to right himself and rose at the count of nine to continue the fight, which he then won in ten rounds. The fight was heard by millions on the radio and the exciting account, including announcer Graham McNamee’s pleading for Dempsey to go to a neutral corner, made Dempsey a tragic hero, and this fight one of the most famous in history. Dempsey opened a restaurant across from Madison Square Garden in 1935 and it remained open until 1974, keeping Dempsey’s name and memory in the public eye for fifty more years.

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winning the world title in 1922, then losing it to a middleweight Harry Greb. He then defeated Greb four times in very bloody contests. In 1926 he decided to move up to heavyweight and fought Dempsey, defeating him twice before retiring from the ring in 1928 with a record of sixty-five victories, one loss, one draw, and fortyseven knockouts. Racism in boxing made it difficult for African American fighters to compete for world titles and a so-called Negro circuit developed in which the top African American fighters fought each other, often many times. Sam Langford and Harry Wills, two top African American fighters, battled at least fourteen times over a five-year period. Wills, in particular, was a savage puncher and no top white heavyweight was inclined to face him. Besides the fear of losing and being battered, there was another fear of having another African American champion, like Jack Johnson had been in the previous decade (see chapter 5). Johnson was an outstanding fighter who flaunted his excellence and his blackness, much to the chagrin and anger of many whites. Anything resembling a repeat of that was simply unacceptable to whites who wanted to perpetuate the myth of black inferiority. Reinforcing this fear of black fighters flaunting their “blackness” after winning a championship was “Battling” Siki, born in Senegal (a French colony) as Baye Phal in 1897. After serving with valor in the French army in World War I, he returned to his fighting career and in 1922, defeated Georges Carpentier in Paris for the light-heavyweight championship of the world. Following his victory, in which the referee tried to disqualify him but was overruled by the ringside judges, Siki made a career of partying and carousing. He fulfilled the worst fears of white men by marrying two white women and he soon was woefully out of shape for fighting. He lost his title in 1923 in Ireland, then moved to the United States where he compiled a mediocre record before he was shot in the back and killed in New York City. The crime went unsolved. Women gained the right to vote via ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in the United States in 1920, but that right hardly extended to boxing. There were records of females boxing in the 1880s; there is scant record of this being replicated. In fact, women were prohibited from even attending prizefights until the late 1890s. Some boxing promoters tried to get women accepted as spectators at fights because they felt that it would make boxing look more respectable and would allow it to be publicly allowed in the many states that had prohibited public bouts. These included New York. Tex Rickard, Dempsey’s promoter, made arrangements for a special section for women spectators at the DempseyWillard fight in Toledo, Ohio, in 1919, and this was helpful in convincing New York State to sanction bouts beginning in 1920. This newfound interest of women in boxing led to the first female journalists covering prizefights, often for the reporting of who attended and what they wore, but also for accounts of the fights themselves. Often distinctions were drawn between men and women spectators and what their real interests were in attending and observing fights.

The World Geography of Boxing Because of the various state regulations that sanctioned or allowed boxing, fights, even championship fights, were staged in some very unusual or obscure

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locations. In addition, boxing was, more than almost any American sport, truly international in the nationalities of the participants and fans of the sport. Some weight classes were dominated by men from countries other than the United States, so many championship fights in those weight classes were fought in other countries. Within the United States, the “checkerboard” laws governing the sport led to championship bouts in mining camps, such as the 1908 bout that pitted Jack Johnson against heavyweight champion Tommy Burns, born as Noah Brusso, in Canada. The champion had been avoiding Johnson, but a fight was finally accomplished in Sydney, Australia, where Johnson won and became the champion. Seven years later, Johnson lost the title to Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba. Prior to that he had fought bouts in France, Spain, and Mexico. The first heavyweight champion of the 1920s, Jack Demsey, fought throughout the West before winning the championship in 1919. His first defense was in Benton Harbor, Michigan; subsequent defenses were in Madison Square Garden; Jersey City, New Jersey; Buffalo, New York; Shelby, Montana; Philadelphia and Chicago. The fight in Shelby (against Tommy Gibbons) is known mostly for nearly bankrupting the town, which staged the contest. It was hoped that Shelby, flush with the discovery of oil in the region, would become a destination for tourists and industry as a result of the fight, but the difficulty in getting to Shelby by rail and the expensive cost of seats meant that fewer people traveled there than anticipated and local people could not afford to view the fight. There were fewer than 8000 attendees (in the new 40,000-seat arena) and, as a result of the guaranteed amounts that each fighter received, four banks in Shelby subsequently went bankrupt. Traveling to boxing matches would have been by train, except within the confines of a large city, where trolley cars were generally ubiquitous, i.e. most common. The developed rail system that linked major-league baseball easily in the Northeast also allowed for fights and fans to travel almost anywhere within the country. Two problems in attracting fans were price and time to travel to the designated location.

Media and Boxing in the Decade For those who could not go to the fights, there were two ways to get up-to-theminute accounts of the contests. One was through teletype machines, which used the telegraph/telephone wires to transmit accounts to various places such as Times Square in New York. The accounts of the round, sometimes even the blow-by-blow details, were then posted for large crowds to read and follow the fight. A second way was through radio broadcasting, though that was difficult when the fight was in a relatively obscure location like Shelby, Montana. In that particular case, one station in Minneapolis hooked up teletype contact, then had an announcer broadcast an account of the fight, complete with fake crowd noises and other sound effects like the bell at the end or beginning of rounds. In larger cities, radio broadcast was easier and became more and more common through the 1920s as radio networks were formed and made the broadcasts more available. Graham McNamee, the broadcast announcer for the second Dempsey-Tunney fight became famous for his radio tones immediately recognizable to fight fans. He had begun his career as an actor and singer in New York, but, in 1923 he was chosen as an announcer for WEAF in Newark after a tryout and rose to prominence as the most well-known sports announcer of the decade. He first covered the

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Greb-Wilson bout for the middleweight title in 1924 and also did color for Grantland Rice’s announcing of the 1923 World Series. By 1925 McNamee was receiving 50,000 letters and telegrams a year from listeners. A number of famous journalists were regular boxing reporters, including Ring Lardner, Paul Gallico, and Westbrook Pegler. Gallico, in particular, was responsible for enhancing boxing through his writing. He covered Jack Dempsey for the New York Daily News at his training camp in 1923 and convinced Dempsey to let him spar with the champion. Gallico was knocked out within two minutes, but his account of this was well received and he was then assigned regular sports stories, especially boxing. He was named sports editor of the New York Daily News later that year and had a daily sports column. He also was credited with inventing and organizing the Golden Gloves amateur-boxing competition, which was held throughout the United States. Paul Gallico went on to have a successful career as a writer; among his most famous books were The Snow Goose (1941) and The Poseidon Adventure (1969).

Boxing and the Law From its earliest inception, boxing was the subject of fervent interest on the part of some fans, and they often expressed their belief in their favorites by placing bets on the outcome of fights. These wagers were often followed by various “side bets” on the outcomes of rounds as people, intrigued with gambling, found lots of ways to carry out that interest. Most of the bets were relatively small amounts, but as boxing and gambling became more and more popular, larger amounts were bet and figures from organized crime were often involved in this gambling. The entrance of organized crime and criminals into the mix also altered the entire sport of boxing. As more money was bet on fights, gamblers found it profitable and more “secure” to bribe certain fighters to “take a dive,” that is, to lose the fight intentionally, but not obviously. In some cases, a fighter might leave himself open for a powerful punch from his opponent and then take a full count from the referee and lose. In others, a fighter might not punch as well or not block punches as well and allow punches to hit him, thus losing on a judges’ decision. Sometimes the rumor of a ”fixed fight” would cause the judges to rule a “no decision.” Boxers could be suspended or lose their licenses to fight if there was proof or strong indications of them throwing a fight, so there was a real risk involved. Nevertheless, boxing was notorious for having crime figures involved with the sport. In the 1920s the biggest legal battles for boxing were simply to have the sport legalized in all states. It was recognized that boxing was often linked to gambling, but the prevailing notion was that if the sport was regulated in all states, there might be tighter controls on fights and potential fixes, and the game might have more overall “decorum.” When New York State decided to legalize and regulate professional boxing in 1920, many formerly reluctant states followed and allowed prizefighting. The result was that boxing commissions had tremendous authority to regulate the sport in each state. It was believed that this would make the sport “cleaner,” but that depended on the integrity of the individuals involved, as well as the temptations that they would face in trying to regulate the sport. Promoters and gamblers had vested interests in having top fights in their states. Boxing commissioners also saw the economic benefits for their respective states, so there were

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often times that rumors or incidences of bribery or questionable ethical conduct were ignored, so that a fight might be staged in a particular locale. Legalizing prizefights made a huge economic impact. In 1922, for example, more than $5 million in gate receipts were taken in at prizefights in New York State at a time when the average American income was $1500 per year. Boxing had become an important industry and promoting a fight became significant, especially when the fight was not likely to be very close. In fact, it was great promotion by Tex Rickard that made Jack Dempsey such a big hero to millions of Americans in the 1920s, even though Dempsey had managed to avoid serving in the military in World War I by claiming that he was the sole support of his mother.

Boxing’s Decade in Summary The “glamour” title of boxing, heavyweight, was held by only two boxers during the 1920s, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. African American fighters such as Harry Wills were never allowed to fight for the title. Other top fighters in this decade were Harry Greb, who held both the light-heavyweight and middleweight titles during the decade; Benny Leonard (Leiner) who was the lightweight champion for six years; Mike McTigue of Ireland, who was light-heavyweight champion during this decade; Battling Siki (mentioned earlier), another light-heavyweight champion; Pancho Villa from the Philippines, who was their first world champion when he won the flyweight title in 1923; and Jack Sharkey, a heavyweight who defeated Tommy Loughran in 1928 for the National Boxing Association’s heavyweight title. This match was not universally recognized as a title bout, needed when Tunney retired in 1928. The undisputed title was not decided until 1930 when Sharkey lost to Max Schmeling of Germany for the open title.

Golf Golf was an almost exclusively upper-class sport in the 1920s. There were relatively few public courses and private clubs were too expensive for almost anyone but the rich to join. It would seem that golf was not a sport that resonated with the American public, but that was not entirely true. Three golfers symbolized golf in the 1920s and they were so colorful that millions (most of whom had never played golf) followed their exploits. Two were professionals, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, and the third remained an amateur, Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones. Jones was more typical of the nation’s golfers. He was from a wealthy Atlanta family and began playing golf at a very young age. He won a children’s tournament at age six and played in the top amateur tournaments from his early teen years. He also graduated from Georgia Tech University with a degree in mechanical engineering and later received a degree in English from Harvard. He read for the law and was admitted to the Georgia bar and practiced law while playing in the world’s best golf tournaments. Beginning in 1923 at age twenty-one Jones was the dominant figure in golf for seven years, winning the U.S. Open four times, the British Open three times, the U.S. Amateur five times, and the British Amateur once. He retired from competitive golf after winning the Grand Slam of the time in 1930. Jones was a well-spoken, courtly southerner, who was gracious in his dealings with the public. He came into prominence when weekly newsreels were first being

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shown at the movie theatres each week. With the advent of talking movies in 1927, fans were able to both see some of Jones’s play and hear him speak after winning tournaments, enhancing his popularity. He also made some short films on golf, which were shown in theatres. After retiring as a competitive golfer, Jones practiced law, designed golf clubs, and founded both the Augusta National Golf Club and its fabled tournament, the Masters. He was confined to a wheelchair in 1948 as a result of a rare disease of the central nervous system. Nevertheless, he continued to host the Masters tournament until his death in 1971. Jones’s chief rivals for attention in golf were Hagen and Sarazen, whose lives contrasted greatly with that of Jones. Hagen was the son of a blacksmith in Rochester, New York, and he learned the rudiments of golf by practicing in a field while herding cows. He caddied at an exclusive country club where the professional taught him the finer points of the game. He also worked as a taxidermist. A great natural athlete, Hagen turned down a tryout with the Philadelphia Phillies at age twenty-one in order to play in the 1914 U.S. Open, which he won. At that time there was a stark difference between amateurs and professionals in golf. At some private clubs, especially in England, professionals were allowed on the golf course, but not in the locker room, because they were not considered “gentlemen.” This class distinction was reflective of American society at that time, but Hagen’s success and insistence on better treatment of professionals was a large factor in breaking down some of the class barriers in golf. Hagen wore dashing outfits and was outspoken, but polite. He garnered a huge following among “common people” who had previously had no interest in golf. Hagen won the U.S. Open again in 1919 and the British Open four times in the 1920s as well as five PGA championships (he cofounded the PGA in 1916). He designed golf clubs, played in tournaments and exhibitions well into his sixties. He was one of golf’s greatest ambassadors and died in 1969 at age seventy-six. A rival to Hagen, though ten years his junior, was Gene Sarazen (born Eugene Saraceni, the son of a carpenter), from Harrison, New York. Sarazen won the U.S. Open in 1922 and 1932, three PGA championships, one British Open, and a Masters championship. Sarazen became more Hagen’s rival in the 1930s and was too young to play much against Jones, but Sarazen was a popular player because of his outgoing nature and because he came from such a humble background. Sarazen played golf into his eighties, was a golf commentator on television for decades, invented the modern sand wedge, and, along with Hagen, made golf seem like something for more than just the very rich.

Horse Racing Thoroughbred horse racing became wildly popular at the end of the nineteenth century and that popularity carried over into the twentieth century. Harness racing, in which a driver rode in a small cart, called a sulky, was also staged, but was only very popular in pockets of the United States A number of states, most notably New York in 1913, outlawed legalized gambling, as part of the same reform movement that led to Prohibition. By 1919 attendance at racetracks was at a twentyyear low. By 1922 that trend had been reversed, largely because of the performance of one horse, Man o’ War. In 1920 the Kentucky Derby did not have the exalted

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status that it has today. As a result, the owner of Man o’ War decide to skip that race, feeling that it was too early in the racing season for a three-year-old to race 11=4 miles. That omission cost Man o’ War the opportunity to win what today is called the Triple Crown of racing, the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes, and the Preakness. Man o’ War raced in the latter races and won both convincingly. He also entered nine other races that season and won each of them. That record combined with his two-year-old record of entering ten races, winning nine and losing the one race by one length. His record of twenty victories in twenty-one races charmed the many people who followed racing at that time and also drew thousands into the sport. At the height of his popularity, his owner decided to end his career and put him out to stud. Over the next twenty-seven years, more than 500,000 visitors came to the farm to see him, and at his death in 1947 at age thirty, over 500 attended his funeral, which was broadcast on the radio. No other racehorse had Man o’ War’s dynamism, but both Jolly Roger and Equipoise were outstanding enough in their careers in the 1920s to be elected to the Racing Hall of Fame.

Tennis Tennis was first developed in France, by French royalty, beginning in the 1500s. It was known as the sport of kings and its exclusivity persisted until late in the nineteenth century. In the United States, the game became popular in the 1800s, first as court tennis and later as lawn tennis, though it was still largely a game for the rich. The Olympics included tennis in the first modern Olympiad in 1896 and it was an Olympic sport through 1924, when two Americans, Helen Wills and Vince Richards, won the singles gold medals. In 1900 the first British-American Davis Cup competition was staged with the Americans winning the first two Davis Cups. A similar prize for women, the Wightman Cup, was established in 1923. Men’s tennis was dominated in the 1920s by “Big” Bill Tilden, who was from the Philadelphia area. He won the national mixed doubles title in 1913 and 1914 and became the number 1 ranked tennis player in the United States in 1920, a distinction that he held until 1930. During the 1920s, Tilden, who was also a playwright and actor, won Wimbledon three times and won seven U.S. singles championships. He often defeated “Little” Bill Johnston, who had defeated Tilden for the 1919 U.S. Championship. Tilden and Johnston combined to play as doubles partners, as well as singles players for the U.S. Davis Cup team. They won seven consecutive Davis Cups in the 1920s, a record that still stands. In the early 1920s, Molla Mallory was the dominant U.S. player, but she was overshadowed by Suzanne Lenglen of France. In 1923 Helen Wills won her first U.S. championship, and she was the outstanding female tennis player of the 1920s. Besides her Olympic medals, Wills won six U.S. championships, three Wimbledon titles, and two French championships in the 1920s. She married in 1929 and, as Helen Wills Moody, won five more Wimbledon titles, two French championships, and one U.S. championship in the 1930s. Despite the popularity of Tilden and Wills, tennis was still largely restricted to wealthier classes. There were few public courts and all the championships were strictly amateur; any player who made any money from tennis was considered a professional. The game was international in scope, but few ethnic groups in the

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United States other than wealthy, established Western Europeans could afford to play competitive tennis.

SUMMARY The 1920s were a time of great growth in the United States, economically and socially. This being said, there were also many obstacles to continued social growth, the most obvious being racism and ethnic prejudices. Certainly there was continued sexism, but the granting of suffrage to women allowed for some small admission of the rights of women and recognition of their potential. It would take another generation before that growth and recognition continued, when women became vital cogs in the war effort of World War II. Incomes continued to rise for the wealthy, but the lower classes saw much less economic growth, and that was reversed in the last years of the decade. Immigration, which had peaked in the previous decades, now slowed greatly, though nearly half the American populace was first- or second-generation American. Sport was one avenue for many immigrant groups to pursue and achieve social and economic recognition. Sports were aided greatly by the media, particularly the radio, which became a standard in almost every American home by the end of the decade. Transportation infrastructure continued to improve within urban areas and the railroads provided more flexibility for the travel of fans and teams. The assembly-line process made the auto more affordable and stimulated the improvement of thousands of miles of American roads, another factor in greater travel of sports teams. The media coverage of more events and the increased interest of Americans led to the first great pantheon of sports heroes. These included Babe Ruth, Rube Foster, Red Grange, Knute Rockne, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Johnny Weissmuller, Chick Hagen, Gertrude Ederle, Helen Wills, and Man o’ War. Subsequent stars would have a difficult time measuring up to the greats created in this decade by writers like Grantland Rice, Paul Gallico, Red Smith, and Ed Sullivan. The stock market crash of 1929 plunged America and the world into a deep economic depression from which it took nearly an entire decade to escape. The emergence of sport as a popular diversion would carry into the 1930s as an important factor in Americans finding something “stable” to hold on to in a careering world. The sports heroes of the 1920s created a foundation that American sports continued to build on, even into the twenty-first century.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Allen, Frederick Lewis. 1964. Only yesterday: An informal history of the 1920s. New York: Perennial Library. Carroll, John M. 1999. Red Grange and the rise of college football. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Creamer, Robert. 1974. Babe: The legend comes to life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Evensen, Bruce. 1996. When Dempsey fought Tunney: Heroes, hokum and storytelling in the Jazz Age. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Gallico, Paul. 1938. Farewell to sport. New York: Knopf.

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Gems, Gerald R. 1997. Windy City wars: Labor, leisure and sport in the making of Chicago. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Grimsley, Will. 1971. Tennis—Its history, people and events. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall. Holway, John. 2001. The complete book of baseball’s Negro Leagues: The other half of baseball history. Winter Park, FL. Hastings House Publishers. Inabinnet, Mark. 1994. Grantland Rice and his heroes: The sportswriter as mythmaker in the 1920s. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Jones, Bobby. 1966. Bobby Jones on golf. New York, Doubleday. Neft, David. 1991. The football encyclopedia: The complete history of NFL Football from 1892 to the present. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nelson, Murry. 1999. The originals: The New York Celtics invent modern basketball. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press. Peterson, Robert W. 2002. Cages to jump shots. 2d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Riess, Steven A., ed. 1998. Sports and the American Jew. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Robinson, Ray. 1999. Rockne of Notre Dame. New York: Oxford University Press. Tilden, William. 1948. My story: A champion’s memoirs. Philadelphia: Hellman-William. Voigt, David Quentin. 1987. Baseball: An illustrated history. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Weissmuller, Johnny. 1930. Swimming the American crawl. New York: Houghton-Mifflin.

Films Baseball: Fourth inning, a national heirloom. 1994. Dir. Ken Bums. PBS Video. Galloping ghost. 1931. Dir. Reeve Eason and Benjamin H. Kline. Alpha Video. Knute Rockne, All-American. 1940. Dir. Lloyd Bacon. Warner Home Video. Knute Rockne and the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. 1989. Direct Cinema Limited. There was always sun shining someplace: Life in the Negro baseball leagues. 1989. Dir. Craig Davidson. Refocus Films.

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CHAPTER 7

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1930–1939 Mark Dyreson, Chad Carlson, John Gleaves, and Matthew Llewellyn

OVERVIEW In 1930 baseball, the American national pastime, enjoyed its most prosperous season yet recorded. More than 10 million customers pushed through the turnstiles of major-league baseball stadiums. Just four years later, in 1933, fewer than six million people showed up at major-league ball parks, a 45 percent decline. The huge fall-off in baseball attendance represented just one of the consequences of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1930s an economic disaster gripped the United States of which the calamitous stock market crash of 1929 signaled just the beginning. This collapse of the nation’s financial markets was just one of many causes of the Depression. A litany of other problems, including uneven distribution of wealth, overproduction, inadequate regulation, frenzied speculation, poor banking policies, and a general failure to perceive the nature of the twentieth-century industrial economy at many levels of American society contributed to the downward spiral. Throughout the 1930s every sector of the nation’s vast commercial system faltered. In fact, not until 1940, when the economy began to gear up to fight World War II, did a measurable recovery begin. During the Depression loan defaults reached record highs, credit evaporated, and banks collapsed. Factories shut down assembly lines as the market for consumer goods shrank dramatically. By all key measures, industrial production plummeted. By the winter of 1933 one-quarter of the nation’s workforce had drifted into the unemployment lines. Those still employed faced shrinking paychecks. Massive insecurity wracked the nation. Breadlines and soup kitchens popped up. Millions of homeless people flocked to dingy shantytowns or made epic journeys to find work. The national suicide rate rose. The national marriage, birth, and divorce rates fell. Radical alternatives to capitalism from every ideology on the political spectrum drew growing numbers of adherents. In rural America farmers sometimes took up arms to prevent foreclosures on their lands. In urban America city governments desperately sought to make jobs for the growing numbers of economic refugees. In the nation’s capital

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military veterans of World War I marched on the seat of government to demand aid. The republic, many believed, was in grave peril. Fear of mass starvation stalked the land, a new terror in a nation that for more than a century had been known to the rest of the world for its material abundance. There was a significant rise in the number of Socialists and Communists registered as party members as people turned to these parties in the face of hopelessness. The Great Depression crept into every fiber of the national fabric. Even the national pastime suffered. While major-league attendance fell dramatically, minorleague baseball saw the collapse of entire leagues. By the 1933 season, the nadir of the Depression, several major-league franchises were rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy. Teams slashed salaries and cut roster sizes. Even Babe Ruth, the icon of the American national game, took a pay cut. At the beginning of the Depression the New York Yankees paid Ruth $80,000, a salary that the press gleefully noted was higher than that of U.S. president Herbert Hoover. Ruth, in a probably apocryphal but widely repeated story, allegedly defended making more money than the president by observing that he had enjoyed a better year than Hoover. By 1934 that quip seemed no laughing matter. The voters had replaced Hoover with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth earned just $35,000 from the Yankees. Not only baseball but every other sport in the vast American recreational industry suffered during the Depression. Revenues from intercollegiate football games

Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot” In Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth blasted a home run over the 440-foot wall in deep centerfield of Wrigley Field. The titanic clout, the Yankee star’s second home run of the game off Chicago Cub’s pitcher Charlie Root, quickly became part of American baseball lore as Ruth’s famous “called shot.” Whether or not Ruth actually pointed to a specific spot and then hit a home run to it, as the legend claims, remains shrouded in the mysteries of interpretation, the ground where all good myths flourish. Some of the facts of the “called shot” are not in dispute. Ruth hit the huge home run off Root as the Cubs’ dugout heckled him. The home run proved a decisive blow in the series, leading to a Yankee victory in that game and paving the way for a fourgame sweep by the New York club. Newsreels and an amateur film discovered in the 1970s of the event show that during the at-bat Ruth made repeated gestures toward the Cubs players, or the pitcher, or, perhaps to centerfield. Eyewitnesses all agree that Ruth shouted something at the pitcher before his famous hit. Did Ruth, however, actually call his shot? The films are not clear enough to determine that “fact” with any clarity and the contemporary media accounts of the event vary widely. The “called shot” tale initially emerged from the typewriter of Scripps-Howard sports editor Joe Williams, who in a widely circulated wire-service story claimed that Ruth had responded to the Cubs’ taunting by calling his shot and then delivering the baseball to the very spot in the stands to which he had allegedly pointed. Ruth, in interviews immediately following the game, did not make any such claim. When the story proved popular, however, Ruth later claimed in a host of interviews and in his own biography that he had in fact called his shot. Ironically, Joe Williams, the reporter who started the legend, in later decades came to believe that Ruth had not actually called his famous shot.

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declined markedly. Athletic departments struggled to remain solvent and some cut entire sports to keep afloat. Women’s intercollegiate and interscholastic sports, already under attack in the 1920s by female physical educators who objected to the male model of elite, competitive athletics as an assault on femininity, proved especially vulnerable. The Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Foundation (established in 1923) spearheaded the assault on women’s competitive sports, closing most intercollegiate programs by the beginning of the 1930s. The Women’s Division, dominated by female physical educators from the nation’s colleges and universities who favored gender separatism and eschewed highly competitive athletics for women, continued their assault by turning their attention to competitive interscholastic sports for girls. Aided by the financial crises of the Depression hanging over school systems, fourteen states terminated their girls’ high school basketball tournaments during the decade. Canceled competitions, eroding budgets, salary cuts, and declining attendance each testified to the Depression’s impact on American sport. For some, the maladies of the economic collapse extended beyond fiscal nightmares. As John Tunis (1934), one of the era’s leading sportswriters, lamented, the Great Depression seemed to diminish the luster even of the competitors that the nation loved to cheer. In the 1920s, the “golden age” of American sport, Tunis observed that athletes had been “gods” who stood atop the national pantheon of heroism. In the grim 1930s they became, in Tunis’s words, “just ordinary mortals.” In spite of declining attendance and falling profits, the Depression did not kill the American sports industry. Indeed, in the midst of the economic woes, signs abounded that American interest in sport actually expanded. Sport provided temporary escape from the economic misery and promised that hard times could be overcome. Baseball and intercollegiate football continued to bring in revenue. Prizefighting plugged along as new champions were crowned. The young National Football League built a stronger foundation. Interest in basketball grew. Golf courses, tennis courts, and bowling alleys still drew customers. Most scholastic, youth, and college sports programs, especially for boys, survived. In the midst of the Depression a race horse captured the national imagination and brightened spirits. In this same decade the United States hosted a winter and a summer Olympic Games. Through the Olympic Games and other international competitions, especially prizefights and baseball tours, Americans also made sport into a part of their foreign policy efforts in the decade during which the international community descended toward a second world war. Indeed, so firmly were Americans wedded to the belief that sport could help them triumph over the Great Depression that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected president in 1932, made it a central feature of his New Deal programs. Roosevelt’s recovery bureaus such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Project Administration, and other “alphabet agencies” created not only jobs but vast new networks of recreational opportunities in the nation’s forests, deserts, and cities. Federal laborers built parks and playgrounds in urban areas, constructed camping facilities and cut trails through national parks, and promoted national interest in sport and recreation. According to federal calculations, the U.S. government between 1935 and 1941 spent $941 million on recreational facilities and an additional $229 million to underwrite community recreation programs. The government built thousands of athletic fields, gymnasiums, parks, and playgrounds, and

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dug hundreds of pools. In addition, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) dramatically improved the nation’s outdoor recreation opportunities. The federal agency proudly noted that between 1933 and 1942 it blazed more than 100,000 new miles of hiking and horse-riding trails, and improved thousands of acres of beachfront, campgrounds, and picnic grounds. The CCC insisted it had radically expanded the recreational freedoms of the American public. Roosevelt also used sporting analogies in his famous “fireside chats,” speeches broadcast from the White House over the radio designed to urge Americans to fight the Depression. Following a tradition that dated to the early twentieth century, President Roosevelt sought to restore American spirits by continuing to appear every April on majorleague baseball’s opening day to throw out the first pitch of the season. He not only threw out first pitches throughout the Depression but in 1935 flipped a switch at the White House that sent electricity all the way to Cincinnati to power up the lighting system for the first night game ever played in the major leagues. President Roosevelt clearly understood that baseball could help him connect with American voters and sell his New Deal to the public. In spite of the Depression, sport remained a powerful force in American culture.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Decline and Innovation in Baseball The Great Depression hit baseball hard, slashing attendance and profits dramatically. The national pastime’s economic decline mirrored the general decline of many other American industries, revealing roots that stretched before the Depression Era. During the 1920s baseball lost some of its market share in comparison to other forms of entertainment. Though gross attendance numbers grew a bit throughout the 1920s, the number of paying customers did not grow as quickly as the national population. The 11.5 percent rise in attendance at major-league stadiums paled in comparison to 75 percent rise in attendance at movie theaters during the 1930s. Competition from other leisure industries and a flattening demand for baseball tickets indicated that even before the Depression the baseball business had problems. The Depression exacerbated baseball’s woes, as the plummeting attendance and failing minor leagues illustrated. In 1933, the Depression’s most severe year, only 80,000 fans turned out to see the struggling St. Louis Browns over the franchise’s entire home schedule of seventy-seven games. The Browns and several other teams appeared to be headed toward bankruptcy. To combat the dismal economic conditions several of the struggling franchises suggested a profit-sharing plan. The wealthier clubs rejected the proposal. “I found out a long time ago that there is no charity in baseball,” New York Yankee’s owner Jacob Ruppert scoffed at the failed attempt to enact baseball socialism (Voigt 1983, 251). The major leagues tried other schemes to bring fans back to ballparks. Borrowing an innovation from the Negro Leagues, the Cincinnati Reds introduced night games, with President Roosevelt at the White House flipping the switch to light the major league’s first evening contest. The Reds’ general manager, Larry MacPhail, tried a host of other innovations. He bought bright red uniforms to replace

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the traditional dour pinstripes in shades of white and grey. MacPhail also resorted to marketing sex appeal, employing cigarette girls clad in skimpy satin pants and enticingly garbed usherettes to bring fans back. Other teams quickly followed MacPhail’s innovations, at least in regard to night baseball. The owners took austerity measures as well. They cut salaries significantly. In 1933 major-league salaries averaged $7000. By 1936 that figure had been slashed to $4500. Front offices reduced roster sizes from twenty-five to twenty-three players while the leagues cut the number of umpires so that most games were umpired by two-man rather than threeman crews. Franchises also searched for new sources of revenue. Owners increasingly looked to radio. Most teams initially resisted the new medium when it first appeared in the 1920s, fearing it would cut attendance. The Depression, however, made owners more willing to gamble, particularly as stations discovered they could sell commercials and pay rights fees for broadcasts. The Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals led the way in developing radio markets, building strong regional networks to carry their games to fans. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis signed a huge $400,000 contract for the radio rights to the World Series, a deal that initially garnered sponsorship from the Ford Motor Company and then, after 1936, from Gillette shaving products. Bucking the trend toward beaming games to radio audiences, the three teams in the New York metropolitan area, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers, kept baseball off the airwaves in the nation’s largest market for most of the 1930s through a mutual agreement to a broadcast ban. When in 1939 Larry MacPhail moved from Cincinnati to take over the Dodgers, he broke the agreement and sold the Brooklyn club’s rights for $70,000. The Yankees and Giants then procured their own radio contracts. By the end of the 1930s all sixteen major-league franchises had joined the radio age. Teams discovered other sources of sponsorship money in addition to selling radio rights. Fourteen of the sixteen teams had contracts with General Mills to promote Wheaties cereal. Baseball targeted the male adult audience as well as children’s breakfast habits. When prohibition ended in 1933 and the sale of alcohol once again became legal, reopened beer breweries clamored to sign deals with major-league teams. By the end of the 1930s teams derived approximately 10 percent of their total revenues from radio and other commercial sponsorships. Major-league baseball tried a few other innovations in addition to radio broadcasts, deals with corporations, and night games. In the early 1930s Chicago sportswriter Arch Ward proposed an annual midsummer All-Star game. In 1933 Ward’s idea came to fruition as the major leagues staged their first annual All-Star Game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. The All-Star contest became a fixture thereafter. In 1936 the leagues founded the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, a shrine to the game’s power in the nation’s social fabric. Both innovations heartened devoted fans and intrigued those with less passionate commitments, bringing new customers while increasing the fervor of loyal consumers. The new innovations helped a bit. By 1935 attendance started to climb again, though in very slow increments. By 1941 the number of paying customers at major-league baseball games finally reached the record level established in the 1929 season, before the Depression had fully gripped the United States. On the field, baseball flourished during the 1930s. Continuing a long pattern in the history of professional baseball, teams in the largest metropolitan areas,

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especially New York and Chicago, generally fared better than small-market teams. The one exception to this general rule was the St. Louis Cardinals. Stocked with good players developed by general manager Branch Rickey’s innovative “farm system” of minor-league affiliate clubs—an invention the rest of the major-league clubs soon copied—the Cardinals rose to prominence in the National League. By 1940 the Cardinals had thirty-two minor-league affiliates and more than 700 players in their system. Bolstered by this innovative system, the Cardinals won the World Series in 1931 and 1934. The press labeled the Cardinals the “Gas House Gang” in honor of the many colorful characters who populated the St. Louis dugout, including their stellar pitcher, Jerome “Dizzy” Dean, their great hitter Joe “Ducky” Medwick, and their colorful third baseman, Johnny “Pepper” Martin. In the American League the New York Yankees continued the dynasty that they built during the 1920s. Babe Ruth’s 1935 retirement barely dimmed the Bronx Bombers’ star power as they replaced the “Bambino” in 1936 with the “Yankee Clipper,” the elegant Joe DiMaggio, who would reign, in the estimates of most experts, as the game’s outstanding player of the 1930s and 1940s. The Yankees won five World Series during the 1930s, including four straight from 1936 to 1939. Baseball stars remained national heroes during the Great Depression; the product on the field remained strong, even as Babe Ruth’s magnificent career came to an end in 1935. Though Ruth’s skills declined greatly in his last few seasons, the public continued to adore him. While Ruth proved irreplaceable as the most popular icon of the national pastime, other stars emerged in the decade. Carl Hubbell, Lefty Grove, and Dizzy Dean earned reputations as dominating pitchers during the 1930s. Great hitters such as Hank Greenberg, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, and Ducky Medwick started their stellar careers in the midst of the Depression. In an era of intense anti-Semitism both in the United States and abroad, Greenberg, the greatest Jewish star in the major leagues, served as an important symbol of pride for the Jewish community as well as for opponents of all forms of bigotry. Playing in the same city, Detroit, where the notorious radio commentator and Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin regularly broadcast charges that an alleged international cabal of Jewish financiers had caused the Great Depression, Greenberg slugged home runs and tried to shatter racial and religious stereotypes. Indeed, at least for European ethnic groups during the era, baseball became a symbol of the promises of success and inclusion in American life, with Joe DiMaggio’s success serving as a source of great pride for Italian Americans.

The Negro Leagues In the shadows of the whites-only major and minor leagues, the Negro Leagues struggled through the Great Depression. Just as the economic collapse hit African Americans, most of whom lived at the economic margins of U.S. society, proportionally harder than it hit the majority, so too did black baseball suffer more than its white counterpart. The original Negro National League, founded in 1920, suffered from shaky finances from the beginning and collapsed in 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression. In 1933 entrepreneur Gus Greenlee resurrected the Negro National League from his base in Pittsburgh, a hotbed of African American baseball. While most of the teams in the new circuit rented stadiums from major-league clubs, Greenlee spent

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$100,000 to build a stadium for his own team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords. The second installment of the Negro National League also included teams from New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. In 1938 a second black circuit, the Negro American League, sprang up, featuring teams from the South and Midwest. The Negro National League represented the strongest association of black baseball teams throughout the 1930s. The two dominant clubs in the league were both in Pittsburgh where Greenlee’s Crawfords usually fought for the pennant against Cumberland Posey’s Homestead Grays. The Crawfords had the most famous player in the history of the Negro leagues, Leroy “Satchel” Paige, as their pitching ace. Paige was the one African American player known to the vast majority of white as well as black fans. The Grays also had great players, including outfielder James “Cool Papa” Bell, catcher and Pittsburgh native Josh Gibson, and first baseman Buck Leonard. Negro League players earned much less than their white counterparts. Even the best players such as Bell, Gibson, and Leonard made only about $2500 a season. On such meager salaries they could not afford to support their families and so they played throughout the year, spending the late spring and summer months in the Negro National Leagues, barnstorming the United States, including the segregated South, in the fall and early spring, and spending winters playing in Latin American leagues. While the color line remained firmly in place in baseball’s major and minor leagues, Negro League and white major-league players occasionally squared off in direct competition. Satchel Paige in the 1930s was, by some estimates, next to Babe Ruth, the second-biggest draw in baseball. In 1932 he and St. Louis pitcher Dizzy Dean organized two teams for a barnstorming tour of the American South. The squads, segregated by race, played a series of contests to enthusiastic fans who packed local stadiums and sat in seats segregated by race—neatly mirroring the racial dynamics on the diamond. The tour clearly revealed that African American players could compete with white major leaguers. The African American press, led by Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Frank “Fay” Young of the Chicago Defender, and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, pushed for integration. Some white sportswriters also joined the campaign. Baseball commissioner Kennesaw “Mountain” Landis and major-league owners ignored the cries of the integrationists, however. The efforts to open baseball to all Americans, regardless of skin color, would not bear fruit for another decade. During the 1930s, with the anomalies of a few barnstorming tours, the national pastime remained firmly segregated. Even though baseball divided the United States by race, some promoters of the game thought it the perfect institution for promoting American influence around the globe among peoples of all races, creeds, and cultures. Continuing policies first developed in the 1920s, the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce advocated the spread of baseball to further American diplomatic goals, particularly in Latin America and East Asia. Recognizing that baseball had gained a strong foothold in those regions, federal officials were convinced that the game could increase the success of American foreign policies. Baseball diplomacy played an especially important role in U.S. relations with Japan, the major rival during the 1930s to the expansion of American power in the Pacific. Indeed, baseball ranked as the Japanese as well as the American national pastime. Americans hoped the game might bridge the growing rifts between the two nations.

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Major-league baseball, eager to expand its market as well as to help the federal government, participated in the campaign to spread the game by sending traveling all-star teams to East Asia even in the midst of the Great Depression. In 1931 New York Yankee slugger Lou Gehrig captained a squad of major leaguers who toured Japan and other Pacific Rim nations. In 1934 the biggest star in the game, a legend in Japan as well as in his own homeland, Babe Ruth led an American League AllStar team on another Asian sojourn. The American press applauded both tours, claiming that the ballplayers did more to ease Japanese-American tensions in their brief exhibitions than diplomats had accomplished in decades. Ironically, one of the American players on the team, Moe Berg, a major-league infielder and catcher from 1923 to 1939, surreptitiously filmed Tokyo during one of the tours. His films were used during World War II to plan bombing raids of Japan’s largest city. Shortly after Ruth’s squad returned from Japan, however, major-league owners announced a ban of future tours in response to growing unease with Japanese aggressions in China and other areas of the Pacific. The effort to spread baseball included the amateur as well as the professional versions of the game. In 1936 Babe Ruth, recently retired as a player, led an American committee dedicated to adding baseball to the program of the Olympic Games. The United States succeeded in getting Nazi Germany to stage a baseball exhibition as one of the two demonstration sports at the 1936 Olympics. In Berlin a crowd of more than 100,000, the largest to that point in history ever to witness a baseball game, was, depending on the viewpoint of the observer, either completely enamored or totally befuddled by a clash between two American teams composed mainly of collegians. With the 1940 Olympics scheduled for Tokyo, the Japanese promised to make baseball an even more significant part of their Olympian spectacle. Japan lobbied the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to sanction a proposed multination baseball tournament as a medal sport. Over the next few years the Tokyo Olympic baseball jamboree evaporated as the world lurched toward war. When Japan invaded China in 1937, Americans concluded that although the Japanese had adopted baseball they had failed to learn any of the lessons of “fair play” that the game allegedly taught. The chorus concerning the Japanese failure to adopt the true spirit of baseball grew even greater after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 drew the United States into World War II. In the growing climate of nationalism in the late 1930s, Americans reasserted their belief that baseball was really their own national pastime, even if other nations had taken to the game. The tradition of singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” to begin games started in that era. It spread quickly and became standard practice at every level of the sport, from local summer-league games to the major leagues by 1940. That same year, with U.S. entry into the war appearing increasingly likely, major-league baseball demonstrated its patriotism by encouraging all of its players to register for the draft and promising the nation that it would cancel operations if entry into the conflict required such a sacrifice. At the grassroots level, where baseball flourished during the Depression among children playing on sandlots, an initially little-noticed but very important development in the long-term transformation of youth sport in the United States appeared. The invention of Little League baseball in 1939 rapidly speeded the transformation of the child-organized games of an earlier era into the adult-controlled recreational activities common to the second half of the twentieth century. This new version of

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1930–1939

Hotchkiss School baseball. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

children’s baseball sprang to life in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where a lumber company worker named Carl Stotz created the new organization in response to his own youthful experiences with the anarchy of children-controlled sandlot games. Stotz provided teams with uniforms, diamonds, and drafts modeled on the major leagues. His innovation rapidly spread across the nation, part of a long process of increasing levels of adult control of child’s play that signaled a profound change in twentieth-century American social patterns.

Basketball Innovation and Modernization in Basketball While football and baseball reigned as the American national pastimes, basketball established strong footholds in the 1930s at the local level. In 1939 the “father of American basketball,” James Naismith, a Canadian by birth, passed away. The game he had invented just five decades earlier in 1891 had spread throughout the United States and into the world beyond. The Great Depression did not destroy the enthusiasm the nation held for basketball, as rule changes, innovations in styles, and the rise of two new national intercollegiate tournaments and the expansion of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) championships reveals. Particularly at the grassroots level, basketball remained a powerful force in local American cultures. The game thrived in high schools and on playgrounds in every region of the nation. By the year of Naismith’s death, 95 percent of the nation’s high schools sponsored interscholastic teams. The Depression, however, clearly had an impact on basketball, as it had on American society as a whole. In Indiana, where the game had already become a part of the state’s folklore, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd revisited the site of

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their earlier landmark study of an “average” American town they had dubbed “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana, in reality) in order to see the impact of the Great Depression on the nation. The Lynds discovered that the economic collapse had changed American life. In 1931 “Middletown” had won the state high school boys championship. City officials, in spite of budget shortfalls, purchased gold watches to reward the players. By 1935, however, economic realities caught up even with hoops-crazed “Middletown.” The town struggled to pay off the debt incurred in building a 9000-seat gymnasium during better times. Ticket sales plummeted and what once had been hailed around the state as a cutting-edge basketball palace became Middletown’s “financial white elephant” (Lynd and Lynd 1935, 291–92). (Not even Indiana high school basketball could entirely escape the impact of the Great Depression.) Basketball had a powerful a grip on cities as well as on the small towns of Indiana and other states. Indeed, in urban areas in the Northeast, the game thrived despite the Depression. The city version of the game offered an important venue for the shaping of religious and ethnic identities. The American-born offspring of recent immigrant groups dominated urban play at the highest levels. The Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) was founded in 1930 as an alternative to Protestant sporting institutions such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), where Naismith had invented basketball. The CYO sponsored thriving leagues in Chicago and other cities. The Young Men’s Hebrew Association, a Jewish alternative to the YMCA and the CYO, encouraged basketball in Jewish neighborhoods throughout the nation. Indeed, in New York City and in other major metropolitan areas, the success of Jewish teams made basketball and important vehicle for shaping Jewish identities both within and across religious boundaries. Many sportswriters during the 1930s depicted basketball as a “Jewish game,” simultaneously offering positive affirmations of Jewish masculinity while reinforcing vulgar stereotypes about how alleged Jewish “craftiness” gave the group advantages over players from other backgrounds.

Professional Basketball While local versions of basketball grew more popular in spite of the challenges of the Great Depression, the professional game languished. American professional basketball of the 1930s did not resemble the global enterprise that has developed in the twenty-first century. Professional basketball consisted of ragtag teams playing in leagues that regularly teetered on the edge of financial oblivion. Professional teams toured through eastern and midwestern towns and cities taking on any quintets interested in any gymnasium available. The professional game drew rowdy, mostly working-class fans to crowded, smoke-filled armories and converted warehouses, offering a brief winter alternative to the more popular spectator sports on the national menu. Before the 1930s, the deliberate, ball-possession style of the American Basketball League, dubbed the “Northeastern style” and typified by the “Original Celtics” of New York City, produced a unappealing brand of basketball (the Celtics were deliberate, sometimes dull, and almost always won) which doomed the organization to extinction as the Great Depression began. A variety of professional leagues also came and went during the economic hardships of the 1930s. The American Basketball League, the top conference of the 1920s, succumbed to fiscal instability in 1931 and then reorganized, under the same

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1930–1939

name, as an eastern regional league in 1933. The National Basketball League, centered in midwestern cities, went under after 1933, resurfaced as the Midwest Basketball Conference from 1935 to 1937, and reorganized once again as the National Basketball League in 1937. Professional teams increasingly drew collegiate veterans in the 1930s. Players from working-class backgrounds used basketball to raise themselves to middle-class incomes and status. Businesses looking to promote their products sponsored many teams, such as the Akron Firestones. The Indianapolis Kautskys, named after the grocery store magnate who owned the team, reigned as a top Midwestern Basketball League squad with former Purdue University All-American John Wooden leading the squad. Jewish players dominated the American Basketball League, making up the majority of the roster of that conference’s superior team, the Philadelphia SPHAs, sponsored by the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. Arguably the finest professional basketball team of the 1930s was the New York Renaissance Big Five, or Rens as they were commonly known, a barnstorming

Basketball’s “Barnstorming” Champions: The New York Rens and the Harlem Globetrotters Before the NBA debuted in 1949, the best professional and amateur players displayed their skills in regional, upstart leagues or on barnstorming teams that often sensationalized basketball to draw bigger crowds and make more money. Unlike the modern NBA, professional basketball players of the 1930s often played more than 150 games in a season—in high school gymnasiums, municipal armories, second-floor social halls, and even drained swimming pools—to stay afloat financially. By the late 1930s, arguably the best two teams in the United States made their livings in a very difficult way. The New York Renaissance Five (Rens) and the team that is now known as the Harlem Globetrotters (although originally from Chicago, they played under the guise of a New York name) rose to the top of the professional ranks in spite of the fact that both squads consisted entirely of African American players who were excluded from the existing leagues. To play basketball in an era of intense segregation and strident racism, the Rens and Globetrotters were consigned to barnstorming, traveling constantly to American towns and cities in search of exhibition games against any team, black or white, willing to play them. The Rens and Globetrotters overcame off-court racism, such as being denied housing at public hotels and food at public restaurants, as well as on-court racism, such as blatantly biased officiating, to become the top two teams in the country. From 1932 to 1936 the Rens won at least 120 games each season. They remained dominant through the end of the decade as their victory in the 1939 at the first World Tournament of Basketball in Chicago testified. In 1940 the Globetrotters, although often prone to the chicanery and comedy for which they remain famous to this day, maintained a greater focus on winning games rather than entertaining the crowds. The Globetrotters avenged their 1939 defeat to their unfriendly rival by winning a tight 37–36 quarterfinal game on their way to the tournament title. The Globetrotters squeaked past the hometown Chicago Bruins, 31–29, in the final game. The Globetrotters went on to entertain the world for the rest of the twentieth century, earning global fame for both their basketball skill and their comedic talents. The Rens declined after their world championship, disbanding in 1949.

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squad from the nation’s biggest city led by two great stars, Charles “Tarzan” Cooper and William “Pop” Gates. The organized professional leagues did not allow African Americans on their squads, so black players found roster spots on all-black touring teams such as the Rens and their major rivals, the Harlem Globetrotters. White professional teams regularly scheduled exhibition matches against the Rens, Globetrotters, and other African American squads. Given the Rens’ and the Globetrotters’ sterling records against white teams during the Depression, the barnstorming squads deserved their reputations as the best professional basketball players in the United States. In 1939 a Chicago newspaper, the Herald American, began to sponsor a World Professional Basketball Tournament which allowed both white and black teams to enter. The Rens won the 1939 tournament and the Globetrotters captured the 1940 crown. At the professional, collegiate, and scholastic levels, the Depression era witnessed several rule changes and technological innovations that eventually sparked a much more exciting version of basketball. The limit on offensive players to three seconds in the lane rule unclogged the area around the basket. The rule allowing teams just ten seconds to advance the ball past mid-court sped up the action, as did the replacement of the center jump after every made basket with a simple inbounds pass. A new manufacturing method developed a smaller, rounder, molded ball that allowed for better dribbling, shooting, and passing. New styles of play also enhanced the basketball’s spectator appeal, in particular the one-handed shot and the fast break. The innovations in basketball flair developed mainly in the American West as a lively counterpoint to the staid “Northeastern style.”

College Basketball The best American basketball during the 1930s may not have been played by the professionals, but by intercollegiate teams and by the industry-sponsored squads that battled on a fiercely competitive AAU circuit. The game’s founding organization, the YMCA, also remained a hotbed of quality competition. Though the college and AAU teams sometimes played intersectional matches, they mainly produced strong regional centers of the game. Though the Northeast and Midwest remained important basketball areas, the game also thrived in the South, the Rocky Mountain region, the Great Plains, and the West Coast. Indeed, the regional variations in style made for dramatic intersectional clashes in college and AAU basketball. The regional structure of the game was highlighted in 1936 by the celebrated arrival of Stanford’s great one-handed jump-shooter, Hank Luisetti, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, a building that served as basketball’s mecca. Luisetti’s West Coast flair and creativity thrilled the huge crowd of more than 17,000 as well as the throngs of New York reporters who turned out for Stanford’s matchup against local powerhouse Long Island University, a team that possessed a forty-three-game winning streak. Luisetti’s marksmanship led Stanford to an upset win and demonstrated that the slow, deliberate “Northeastern style” that favored the two-handed set-shot was no longer effective for either winning games or pleasing fans. At the intercollegiate level, while innovative and athletic styles such as Luisetti’s jump-shot advanced the game, a group of legendary coaches known for their strategic genius, typified by Clair Bee at Long Island University, Nat Holman at

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City College of New York, Hank Iba of Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State), Adolph Rupp of Kentucky, and Phog Allen of Kansas remained in charge of the game. The coaches enjoyed great success through their ability to manipulate virtually every move their players made. Although these coaches had terrific players on their teams, the coaches, and not their athletes, were the true icons of 1930s college basketball. Despite some of the best basketball being played in the heartland of the country by teams led by Iba, Rupp, and Allen, New York City, with its extraordinary event facility, Madison Square Garden, remained the hub of American basketball. Collegiate teams from around the nation made the pilgrimage to “the Garden” if they wanted recognition for being among the nation’s best. In 1938 New York’s Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association created the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in the Garden to determine the best college team in the country at the end of the season. Although the NIT still exists (and is now owned by the NCAA), it does not have nearly the prestige it had throughout its first decades. Temple University won the inaugural NIT tourney. Long Island University triumphed in 1939, and a western upstart, the University of Colorado, took the 1940 crown. In 1939 the National Association of Basketball Coaches, led by Kansas’s Phog Allen, created a rival postseason tournament to the NIT. The first NCAA championship final pitted Ohio State University against the University of Oregon in a game played at Northwestern’s Patten Gymnasium in Evanston, Illinois. Oregon won the game and became, without the glitz and glamour that accompanied the NIT, the first NCAA basketball champion. Indiana University beat the University of Kansas in the final of the 1940 tournament. The proximity of the nation’s major sportswriters to Madison Square Garden made the NIT more prestigious than the NCAA championships during the first few years of the rivalry between the two tournaments. When basketball players graduated from college in the 1930s, they did not have many options for full-time employment playing basketball. Professional basketball leagues offered a nomadic lifestyle with little pay and little stability. The most popular alternative was the AAU model. Independent businesses and companies sponsored teams in the AAU leagues and, to avoid the professional label and preserve amateur status, hired basketball players to work for their companies. Although many companies received scorn for supposedly giving their basketball players a high salary for working short hours at cushy jobs, many ex-college basketball players accepted this model as an opportunity to develop a trade or to make business connections while continuing to play competitive basketball. Indeed, perhaps the highest level of basketball during the 1930s was played by AAU teams comprised of ex-collegiate stars. The AAU had begun sponsoring a national tournament in 1921. The event drew some of the best squads in the nation, particularly those from west of the Mississippi River, to Kansas City every March. In 1935 Denver swiped the AAU tournament away from Kansas City. Denver offered a breath of fresh air for the stagnant tournament and became the permanent host thereafter. Industrial teams from the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and West Coast such as the South Kansas Stage Lines and Healey Motors of Kansas City, Missouri, the Globe Refiners of McPherson, Kansas, the Phillips 66ers of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the Safeway

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Stores and the Nuggets of Denver, and the Universal Pictures of Hollywood, dominated the AAU tournaments of the Depression era. The AAU tournament peaked in popularity during the late 1930s and early 1940s before the National Basketball Association, born in 1949, began its slow rise to dominance, luring away many of the great amateur players with more money and fewer responsibilities outside of basketball. During the 1930s the AAU’s model of the player/worker appealed to many excollege athletes for its value to their futures. The scheme also allowed them to maintain their amateur status, making them eligible for the Olympic Games. When basketball won a spot on the roster of medal sports for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, many players found an additional incentive to preserve their amateur status and play for their country. In 1936 the American Olympic Committee (AOC) held an Olympic trials basketball tournament that included the top AAU, college, and other amateur teams to decide which players and coaches would comprise the American team. AAU powerhouse Hollywood Universal Pictures won the eight-team tournament and placed a coach and seven players on the American roster. The runner-up, another AAU squad, the McPherson Globe Refiners of McPherson, Kansas, placed a coach and six players on the roster. A center from the University of Washington was the only collegiate player selected for the team. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics the United States easily dominated competition and took home the gold medal. The American squad won all four of its games and beat Canada in a final matchup played on an outdoor court in a driving rainstorm. The poor playing conditions in Berlin reflected the relative apathy of the rest of the world toward the American-invented game in the 1930s. In spite of U.S. superiority, the seeds of a future basketball boom were sown in other nations. Frank Lubin, a star of the U.S. Olympic team who was of Lithuanian descent, was approached by Lithuanian officials in Berlin. His countrymen asked him to tutor Lithuanians in the intricacies of basketball. The Californian accepted, changed his name to Pranas Lubinas, and led Lithuania to the 1939 European championship title while developing his legacy as “the Godfather of Lithuanian Basketball.”

Adaptation and Expansion in Football College Football American football developed its own adult-controlled youth organization, the “Pop” Warner League, named after the longtime coach of Carlisle Indian School and Stanford University, in 1929, a decade before Little League baseball appeared. Naming the new program after a famous college coach indicated that the intercollegiate version of football served as the most important arena for the game. While baseball declined in the Great Depression, college football actually increased its market share in spite of the dismal economy. The 1920s had witnessed a boom in intercollegiate football as attendance doubled and gate receipts tripled. By the beginning of the 1930s, more than 400 colleges from every locale in the nation fielded teams. During that era every “bigtime” football program had stadiums that sat more than 30,000 and eight campuses boasted coliseums with capacity for more than 70,000 fans. “King football” reigned

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on campuses and drew enormous attention in newspapers, magazines, radio, and the newsreels. Indeed, in the 1930s college football rivaled major-league baseball as the nation’s most popular sport. Public adoration did not, however, make football invincible to the ravages of the Great Depression or to the excesses that plagued the intercollegiate game. Less than two months before the stock market crash of 1929, Howard Savage, a former college English professor and higher education researcher, and his team of investigators released a report licensed by the Carnegie Foundation documenting the prolific rule-breaking and unethical behavior of college football programs. Savage’s investigative squad visited more than 130 campuses across the country, documenting the serious maladies afflicting college football. The report did not mince words, declaring college football programs inherently corrupt. Almost all of the schools Savage’s investigators reviewed had participated in illegal behavior, particularly in the recruitment and subsidization of players. Colleges routinely provided illegal financial inducements, procured jobs for players that involved no work, housed teams in plush living quarters, and built gigantic slush funds. The report concluded that winning football games and making money mattered more than maintaining academic standards and ethical integrity at the nation’s institutions of higher learning. Savage’s report garnered headlines across the nation. University presidents and college football coaches issued irate denunciations of the Carnegie findings. The timing of the report, however, guaranteed it would ultimately have little impact on intercollegiate sport. After a few weeks in the national spotlight the deadly dive on Wall Street extinguished public furor at the revelations. Indeed, instead of encouraging university presidents to take control of their athletic programs to avoid further harmful excesses, the report ended up collecting dust on their bookshelves. Though the Great Depression pushed the Savage report on the scandals that had spread throughout college football into obscurity, the financial crisis itself had a significant impact on the game. Colleges and universities across the country struggled to stay afloat. The economic hard times kept many families from sending their children to college, forcing a sharp decline in enrollment at most institutions across the nation. Administrators made manifold budget cuts. Freezes on professor salaries and reallocations of building improvement funds produced some savings, but, on most campuses, not enough to balance budgets. Many leisure-time activities, including sports, were abolished. The cost-cutting measures generally eliminated less popular sports, especially women’s competitive athletics, while intense pressure from students, alumni, and the media kept football programs a vital part of campus life. Despite the economic hardships, college football survived. Only a few schools dropped their programs. Most responded to the Depression by lowering ticket prices and forcing coaches and athletic directors into better stewardship of resources. Still, college football actually fared much better than professional baseball in the Depression. While attendance fell in the early 1930s it rebounded quickly and rose sharply. In 1937, 20 million fans attended college games, more than double the number who bought tickets for the 1930 season. As college football produced more money for institutions and drew more support from the media, it became increasingly difficult to enact the reforms suggested in the Carnegie report. The cult of the coach, a phenomenon that had developed in the

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“Big-Time” Football and Higher Education at the University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh made a name for itself on the gridiron during the 1920s and 1930s, rising to a status as a “big-time” college power. Off the field the football program was mired in scandals as Pitt’s athletic dreams came into conflict with the school’s academic priorities. During the early 1920s legendary coach Glenn “Pop” Warner built the foundation for Pitt’s football prowess during that decade. Warner was one of the best-known coaches in the history of college football, as his attachment to the youth football organization (founded in 1929) known ever since as the “Pop” Warner League, reveals. Warner’s best player at Pitt, All-American John “Jock” Sutherland, became a coach at Lafayette College after his playing days at Pitt. After a few monumental wins over his mentor, Sutherland in 1924 succeeded Warner at Pitt. Sutherland inherited a strong program and sought to make it even stronger. He won national championships in 1936 and 1937. Sutherland succeeded for more than a decade before claims of illegal payments to his players created a major scandal that led to his dismissal from Pitt in 1938. As Pitt’s football team prospered, the university struggled. Pitt’s academic reputation hardly matched its football prowess. Chancellor John Bowman dreamed of erecting a towering Cathedral of Learning, a skyscraper in downtown Pittsburgh that would house classrooms, laboratories, and offices, but had great difficulty finding donors to complete the project. At the same time, the football program easily found the money to build an enormous new stadium. While Chancellor Bowman’s Cathedral of Learning, which was finally completed in 1937, slowly rose skyward, Pitt’s football program fell victim to illegal payments to players, a scandal that mushroomed after Pitt’s second national title in 1937. Newspaper accounts during the 1930s revealed that Pitt’s gridiron players received illicit financial stipends roughly equal in per-hour wage rates to Pittsburgh steelworkers, even though the mill laborers worked fifty- to sixty-hour weeks in brutal blast furnaces. The revelations rocked the institution that had gained such national fame from its football team. Documentation of illegal payments dated from 1924, the year of Sutherland’s hiring, to 1936. Reporters even discovered that the Depression-induced hard times actually forced Pitt to cut players’ salaries after 1933 as the financial crisis worsened. The resources lavished on the football program at a time when Pitt’s academic mission, as symbolized by the great difficulties in erecting the Cathedral of Learning, highlighted the power of athletic departments in higher education at Pitt and across the nation (Watterson 2000,180–81).

1920s and flowered in the 1930s, made the chief administrator the star of the game rather than the athletes. Though Notre Dame’s pioneering Knute Rockne died in a 1931 plane crash, other long-time field generals such as the University of Chicago’s Amos Alonzo Stagg and Stanford’s Glenn “Pop” Warner continued their dominions, while new field generals such as Dana X. Bible at the University of Texas and Bob “The General” Neyland at the University of Tennessee emerged. Successful coaches became the most recognized public representatives of their schools and wielded enormous power. They often had more clout on campuses than college presidents and earned more money than any other employees in their states, even governors. The Carnegie report, the cult of coaches, and continuing scandals led but a single major football power to get rid of the sport. The story of how Stagg’s university,

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Chicago, dismantled its program in 1939 had as much to do with the team failing to have a winning season since 1924 as it did with President Robert Maynard Hutchins’s long campaign to convince the university trustees and alumni that football was inherently corrupt and had no place on a university campus. In spite of college football’s financial travails, ethical debacles, and endless hypocrisies, no other big-time football school followed the University of Chicago’s course. Instead, most institutions aspired to be more like Notre Dame, the formerly obscure, small midwestern Catholic college that Knute Rockne turned into a national sensation on the gridiron. Notre Dame’s program set the standard for big-time college football success in the 1930s. Notre Dame, Army, and Navy were the only teams with truly national followings during an era in which the United States was still highly “sectionalized.” Football helped to shape local, state, and regional identities, as the growing focus on intersectional games revealed. Notre Dame, under Rockne and his successors, played a national schedule as they traveled from coast to coast playing the best teams in the country. The “Fighting Irish” drew hordes of “subway alumni,” Catholic fans from all over the United States, most of whom never actually attended the institution but found in the school’s football fortunes a powerful force for celebrating their religious and ethnic identities. Many other public and private universities followed Notre Dame’s lead in the 1930s in efforts to raise their national profiles. Radio represented a key component in Notre Dame’s formula for football and public relations success. During the 1930s Notre Dame built a huge audience through regional and national radio networks. While some teams and conferences believed that radio broadcasts posed a financial threat to their interests by threatening ticket sales, others followed Notre Dame’s lead and plunged into the new market. Notre Dame sought wide exposure rather than lucrative payments for its games. Other schools, however, discovered they could make a great deal of money from radio. The University of Michigan sold football broadcast rights in 1934 to WWJ in Detroit for $20,000. In 1936 Yale sold radio rights for the same amount to a consortium of East Coast stations. In 1937 Walter Cronkite, who would later become a legendary American newscaster, began broadcasting football on WKY out of Oklahoma City. Radio broadcasts of college football did, in fact, diminish ticket sales at college games but only at the smaller, less prominent schools that played in the shadows of big-time programs. For Notre Dame, Michigan, Yale, Pennsylvania, and the other football powers in the nation, radio, and later television, only increased public enthusiasm for their product. Public enthusiasm was also generated by new scheduling priorities. Although conference rivalries continued to garner great interest among fans of geographic proximity, intersectional games escalated state and regional pride. While the old “Big Three” of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale had dominated football’s early years, the upsurge of universities with successful teams pulled the locus of power from the Northeast to the rest of the nation, democratizing the nation’s gridiron geography. USC, UCLA, and California-Berkeley proved that the West could field solid teams, while Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio State in the Midwest, and Georgia, Tennessee, and Southern Methodist in the South did the same. A series of victories during the 1930s by these teams over the historically elite programs of the Northeast proved that the South, Midwest, and West could more than hold their own on the football field.

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California-Stanford football game, Berkeley, California, November 22, 1930 (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The hunger for more intersectional games led to the creation of season-ending bowl games staged in newly constructed stadiums in the South. The Orange Bowl (1935) in Miami, the Sugar Bowl (1935) in New Orleans, the Sun Bowl (1936) in El Paso, and the Cotton Bowl (1937) in Dallas joined the original postseason game, the Rose Bowl (1916) in Pasadena, California, during the Great Depression. The bowls flourished in spite of the Depression as southern cities courted tourist dollars to boost their economies and fans across the nation eagerly anticipated the chance to see how their teams stacked up against those from other sections. The growing phenomenon of intersectional play did not take away from the intensity of regional and local rivalries. Georgia and Georgia Tech’s annual matchup, for example, escalated in importance along with many other in-conference battles. During the 1930s college football developed the ability to produce and promote geographic identities like no other American sport. Games between neighboring institutions became more than just football contests. Victories validated a region’s or a state’s pride, power, and identity. Interscholastic football, on a smaller geographic scale, performed the same function, pitting neighboring town against town in contests for local prowess. High school football teams across the country built community bonds on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons. Media coverage of prep football increased markedly in the 1930s as local sportswriters followed high school teams on the road and games began to be aired on local radio stations. Chicago’s Prep Bowl best exhibited the intensity of high school football during the Depression. The championship game, initiated in 1927, pitted Chicago’s top Catholic high school against the city’s top public school (with mainly Protestant enrollments). This championship game reached its apex in 1937 when 120,000 fans jammed into Soldier Field to see the two league champions play. The bowl represented not only Catholics versus Protestants but also showcased ethnic rivalries. Chicago’s Catholic teams consisted of mainly Italian, Irish, and Polish American players while the public school teams fielded more players from English, German, and Scandinavian backgrounds. Ethnicity played a key role in highlighting the increased democratization of college as well as high school football. European ethnic groups took enormous pride in producing nationally recognized college players. By the 1930s football had evolved from the game of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite to a multiethnic scrum that supposedly symbolized a growing American egalitarianism. Notre Dame’s Italian American stars Joe Savoldi and Frank Carideo, Michigan’s star Jewish quarterback Harry Newman, and many others were hailed as ethnic heroes. Bronko Nagurski may have been the most interesting case of all early non-Anglo football heroes. The Minnesota Gopher standout running back was hailed by the Polish American press throughout his career as the greatest representative of the

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nation’s Polish community. However, in 1935 the press discovered that Nagurski was, in fact, not of Polish but of German descent. At the same time that players from new European ethnic groups surged into bigtime collegiate football, African American players gained ground as well. The most notable of these in the 1930s were Oze Simmons of Iowa, and Kenny Washington and Jackie Robinson of UCLA. Robinson, who would become more famous in the next decade when he broke the color line in major-league baseball, starred at running back for the Bruins. Segregation and racism, however, remained embedded on the college gridiron. Throughout the 1930s, many teams north of the Mason-Dixon Line scheduled games against all-white teams in the South. By the terms of the “gentlemen’s agreements” that governed college sport in that era, integrated squads had to leave their black players at home when traveling to play in the segregated South.

Professional Football Racism and segregation plagued professional as well as intercollegiate football in the 1930s. The professional game was dwarfed by the vast college football industry, playing mainly on Sunday afternoons to much smaller crowds than the amateurs drew. Professional football found a niche mainly among the working-class Catholic communities of northeastern metropolises and Great Lakes region cities. The National Football League (NFL), organized in 1922, saw franchises appear and disappear at a rapid rate. The Depression exacerbated the financial instability of the league, killing teams in all the small cities with the exception of Green Bay, Wisconsin. From 1929 to 1932 the NFL shrank from twelve to eight teams. Professional football had historically struggled to attract college stars to play or the media to cover games. While the NFL did sign more collegians and did garner a bit more media coverage in the 1930s, the public adoration for the professional game paled in comparison to the national infatuation with college football. The game itself was plagued by a lack of innovation and scoring. Professional teams generally ran rather than threw the ball, and defense dominated the league. In 1931 half of the NFL’s franchise averaged seven or fewer points a game for the entire season. The NFL also retreated from racial progress during the 1930s. Several African American players, most prominently Fritz Pollard, had starred in the NFL during the 1920s but in the 1930s the owners, led by George Preston Marshall of the Washington Redskins, drew a color line that prohibited blacks from competing. Under Marshall’s leadership the NFL moved backwards and joined major-league baseball, and many other sporting institutions, in prohibiting more than one-tenth of the nation’s citizens from equal participation in American society. A reactionary on racial matters, Marshall proved a great innovator in other areas. He pushed the league to make the game more high-scoring and more exciting by promoting the forward pass. He pushed through the adoption of a more aerodynamic football that was easier to throw. Under Marshall’s leadership, substitution rules were eased, coaches increasingly sent plays directly to the quarterback, and aerial attacks grew more sophisticated. In 1937 Marshall drafted the greatest passer of the era, Samuel “Slingin’ Sammy” Baugh out of Texas Christian University, and made him the NFL’s new star. With Baugh on board the Washington Redskins quickly joined the Chicago Bears, New York Giants, and Green Bay Packers as the Depression era’s strongest teams.

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Off the field Marshall pushed the NFL teams to upgrade the entertainment quality of their product, adding college-style marching bands and scantily attired usherettes to produce more colorful pageants to supplement the action on the gridiron. In 1938 Marshall created the Pro Bowl, an annual season-ending contest that initially pitted the NFL’s champions against a team of NFL all-stars. In 1940, the Mutual Broadcasting System paid $2500 to broadcast the NFL championship to a national audience. The Chicago Bears obliterated Marshall’s Redskins by a score of 73 to 0 in the contest. In spite of the lopsided loss, Marshall’s success in promoting the entertainment and commercial aspects of the NFL allowed the league to survive the Great Depression.

Regional and Immigrant Pastimes—Hockey and Soccer While the American pastime of basketball began to spread around the globe during the 1930s, two team games invented elsewhere developed strong regional and ethnic followings during the decade. Hockey during the Depression era stood as a popular game in the regions bordering Canada, particularly in the Great Lakes and New England. Recreational hockey games thrived on frozen ponds and on indoor and outdoor ice rinks. Interscholastic and intercollegiate teams from Massachusetts to Minnesota played to large throngs of frost-belt fans. Professional franchises from Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis competed in the U.S. and Canadian-based National Hockey League (NHL). During the decade American teams dominated the NHL on the ice. Detroit won the Stanley Cup, the emblem of the NHL championship, in 1933, 1936, and 1937. Chicago earned the 1934 and 1938 Stanley Cup. Boston triumphed in 1939 while one of the two New York teams, the Rangers (the Americans were the other Gotham squad), won the 1940 title. At the box office the Great Depression had a major impact on the NHL, shrinking the league from ten to seven teams from 1931 to 1938. In spite of a loyal fan base in both Canadian and American cities, hockey teams fared poorly in the dismal economic climate. Both Canadian and U.S. franchises struggled financially. The Philadelphia Quakers and Ottawa Senators went under in 1931. The Ottawa squad reappeared a year later but then moved to St. Louis the next season. After just one year in their new American home the St. Louis Eagles went bankrupt and were taken over by the NHL. The league promptly disbanded the squad and dispersed its players to the remaining teams. The New York Americans went into receivership the same year. The NHL also took over the Americans but kept operating them for several more years before finally giving up and folding the franchise in 1942. Even in hockey-mad Montreal the Maroons, along with the Canadiens, one of the city’s two franchises, went under just a few seasons after winning the 1935 Stanley Cup. Soccer had a broader geographic appeal than hockey but also faced serious financial problems at the professional level during the Great Depression. By the 1930s, soccer had become firmly established as the “world’s game,” if not a hugely popular American game. Soccer reigned as the leading sporting pastime throughout most of the globe, especially in Europe and South America. This position was further enhanced with the creation of a “World Cup” tournament, scheduled to be

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held for the first time in Uruguay in 1930 as a fitting testimony to that nation’s gold medal successes in soccer at both the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Games. The United States, a member of the F
ed
eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) since 1913, managed in spite of the Depression to send a team to Uruguay for FIFA’s first world championship. The American team made an impressive run in South America, reaching the semifinals before succumbing to Argentina 6-1. In front of a crowd of 90,000 spectators, the host nation Uruguay became the first ever World Cup winners, defeating their South American rivals Argentina 4–2. Though soccer in the United States did not enjoy the popularity in the 1930s of the American version of football, the “world’s game” did garner fanatical support in many U.S. immigrant communities. As early as 1921, the United States had a professional league. Centered on the East Coast in industrial areas with large European immigrant populations, such as Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Fall River, Massachusetts, the early professional soccer league drew roughly equal numbers of fans as the early National Football League (founded in 1920)—which made both groups minor leagues when compared to major-league baseball or college football. American squads recruited European, especially British professionals, as well as incorporating U.S. born-players on rosters. The Depression wreaked havoc on the professional teams, dependent as they were on the struggling corporate sponsors, such as Bethlehem Steel, which sponsored soccer teams. By 1933 the professional league had failed. Amateur and semiprofessional leagues took its place. In certain urban hotbeds with large immigrant populations such as Chicago, St. Louis, Newark, Trenton, New York, and Philadelphia, soccer continued to thrive even after the collapse of the professional league. The professional league and the amateur and semiprofessional leagues that replaced it provided players for the United States to mount international competitions. Throughout the 1930s the United States sought international matches. An American team played in the second World Cup, held in 1934. FIFA granted the next World Cup to Italy, a nation under the grip of Benito Mussolini’s brutal fascist regime. Hoping to use the 1934 soccer World Cup as a vehicle for projecting a favorable image of Italy to the rest of the world, Mussolini set about ensuring his nation’s success. “Il Duce,” as the Italian leader became known, promised rich rewards for Italian players if they won the World Cup on home soil, while simultaneously threatening them with severe punishments if they were to lose. The U.S. team failed to repeat their earlier success in Uruguay. Though the Americans won an impressive 4–2 victory against their Mexican neighbors in the tournament’s preliminary stages, in their next match the United States was routed 7–1 by the host Italians. The Italian team then swept through the tournament, winning the World Cup final 2–1 on an overtime time goal against Czechoslovakia. The Italian team repeated as champion in the third World Cup, held in 1938 in France, while the U.S. failed to qualify for the 1938 tourney. The United States also sent a team to the 1936 Olympic soccer tournament in Germany. The American team had the misfortune to draw powerhouse Italy in the opening round of the single-elimination tournament. Playing the same basic squad that won the 1934 and 1938 World Cups, the United States turned in a very credible showing, falling by a score of 1 to 0. Italy went on to defeat Austria in the Olympic final. Though many Americans ignored soccer in the 1930s, the United States managed to field some respectable national teams.

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An American, a “Nazi,” and a Canceled Olympic Games During the 1930s the United States managed not only to get basketball included on the Olympic program but also staged Winter and Summer Games. In the midst of the Great Depression the United States hosted the Olympics, an event that by the 1930s had become the world’s most significant sporting competition. Since the inception of the modern Olympics in 1896, the United States had used the games as a test of national superiority. To many Americans U.S. dominance in medal counts during the 1920s had confirmed their new superpower status. The nation eagerly embraced its role as host for the Olympic spectacle. In 1932 the Olympics found a cozy winter home at Lake Placid, New York, and a glitzy summer mansion in Los Angeles, California. Lake Placid beat out several California locales, including Yosemite and Lake Tahoe, and a variety of other American towns including Denver, Salt Lake City, Duluth, and Minneapolis, as well as foreign cities including Montreal and Oslo, to win the Winter Olympic Carnival. The third Olympic Winter Games were the first held outside of Europe. The Lake Placid Organizing Committee, led by Dr. Godfrey Dewey, sought to use the Winter Olympics to boost national interest in snow and ice sports. Dewey and his fellow residents of the Adirondack resort hoped the Winter Games would make them the nation’s foremost skiing, sledding, and skating destination. They were optimistic that Lake Placid might broaden the appeal of snow and ice sports beyond its small base among northern European immigrants and elite dilettantes interested in imitating the winter recreations of European aristocrats. The state of New York, led by Gov. Franklin Roosevelt, saw the Lake Placid Olympics as an opportunity to create jobs and pump an infusion of capital into the region’s depressed economy. The state government provided significant funding for preparations and infrastructure. The third Winter Games opened on February 4, 1932, with Governor Roosevelt, at the beginning of his campaign for the U.S. presidency, presiding. The Depression limited the number of competitors, with only 364 athletes making an appearance in Lake Placid. Seventeen nations, including the U.S. team, dipped their national colors to the governor at the opening parade. Plagued by bad weather, disagreements over interpretations of rules, fears the bobsled was too dangerous, and the general skepticism the American press normally exhibited in that era toward snow and ice sports, the Lake Placid Olympics nevertheless captured for a February fortnight the American public’s attention. The U.S. team turned in an exceptional performance. By the media’s unofficial count, the American team won the medal count over Norway, with Canada, Sweden, and Finland trailing. The United States won all of the speed-skating and bobsledding contests but failed to medal in any skiing event. The U.S. hockey team managed a silver medal, losing to Canada in the final. The fact that the global Depression limited foreign entries certainly tarnished the American triumph. Despite the successes of the U.S. team, the third Winter Games failed to have a major impact on the sporting habits of the American public. The U.S. media mainly portrayed the games as an oddity, focusing on spectacular bobsled crashes and the exotic atmosphere of the events rather than on competition and athleticism. Lake Placid, which spent more than $1 million on the Olympics, failed to sell enough tickets to pay for the cost of the Games, forcing the shortfall onto the region’s taxpayers. The Olympics also failed to transform Lake Placid into the

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Presidential Politics and the Olympic Games Much like today, in the 1930s being associated with the Olympics brought notoriety and public attention. Recognizing the public relations value inherent in the Olympics, the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, used the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid to gain national exposure and public support for a soon-tobe-announced presidential bid. Governor Roosevelt convinced the New York legislature that the Lake Placid Olympics represented an opportunity to start a public works project to stimulate the region’s economy. The New York legislature, spurred on by Roosevelt, unanimously passed a resolution to aid Lake Placid’s bid for the III Olympic Winter Games. Roosevelt’s insistence and the New York Legislature’s speedy action in providing funding for the Olympics revealed the common belief that the Lake Placid games promised a substantial return for the state. The press covered Roosevelt extensively during his Olympic visit to Lake Placid to open the Games. Although the bobsled course had taken on an infamous reputation as one of the most challenging and dangerous tracks in the world and had already sent many athletes to the hospital, Roosevelt decided it would make a great story if his wife braved the run. Guided by the captain of the U.S. bobsled team, “Eleanor’s Wild Ride,” as the media dubbed it, helped to create a favorable image for the first couple from New York. While there was much campaigning left in 1932 for Roosevelt before he would win the presidency, his use of the Olympic Games to launch his presidential campaign illustrates the growing popularity and public interest in the Olympics. By contrast, his opponent in the race for the White House, President Herbert Hoover, refused an invitation to open the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, forfeiting a great opportunity to earn public adulation. Clearly Roosevelt understood better than Hoover that power of sport in attracting voters.

nation’s premiere winter resort, as more spectacular ski areas in the western United States, such as Idaho’s new Sun Valley resort, captured the fancy of most skiers. The Lake Placid Games did, however, stir the public’s interest for Los Angeles’ summer spectacle. The Olympics came to Los Angeles after the city’s aggressive boosters spent years trying to acquire the games to polish the image of the California metropolis. Los Angeles won the Games of the Tenth Olympiad at a meeting of the IOC held in Rome in 1923, a surprising result given that at the time the city was only the tenth-largest urban area in the United States and that it was separated from the major European nations that dominated the Olympic movement by more than 6000 miles. William May Garland, an American member to the IOC and a prominent California real estate baron, led the campaign for the Olympics to return to the United States for the first time since the 1904 St. Louis Games. The effective promotion of Southern California by Garland and the region’s boosters and their construction of Los Angeles Coliseum, the largest stadium in the United States with seating for more than 100,000 spectators, overcame the IOC’s trepidations, including the imposing distance of the site from Europe and the low rank of Los Angeles on lists of the world’s important cities. After winning the right to host the games, Garland served as chair of the Los Angeles Organizing Committee (LAOC). He and his organization sold the Olympics to Californians as a way to boost tourism, encourage migration, and promote business

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throughout the West Coast. The Depression severely hindered their attempt to put Los Angeles on the map. Economic prosperity quickly turned to despair, and the Los Angeles Games faced major problems. Confronted by the global economic decline and record unemployment rates, the LAOC worked tirelessly to protect the games from cancellation. President Herbert Hoover and the federal government refused to offer any financial assistance. Many critics thought it senseless to stage an Olympics as the U.S. and global economies imploded. In spite of the obstacles, the LAOC persisted. Los Angeles’ rapid growth helped insulate the region from the harshest consequences of the Depression—between 1920 and 1930 the city’s population expanded from 576,000 to 1,238,000, raising the metropolis from tenth to fifth largest in the nation. Significantly, the Coliseum, completed in 1924, and some other structures had already been built before the American economy collapsed. The LAOC also enjoyed a $2.5-million bond that California voters approved in 1925, a more prosperous and optimistic time, to underwrite the spectacle. On July 30, 1932, 105,000 spectators converged on the Los Angeles Coliseum for the opening ceremony of the 1932 Olympics. Over the next two weeks of competition, the Olympics proved a remarkable success. Attracting a record field of 1,332 athletes from thirty-seven nations in spite of the Depression, the Los Angeles Games helped establish the Olympics as a truly global sporting mega-event. Connecting the Olympics with the glamour of Hollywood helped draw more than 1.25 million spectators from across the world, leaving Los Angeles with an economic surplus of over $1.5 million after the Olympic bills had been paid. The Hollywood connection allowed the LAOC to license four newsreel companies to film the Los Angeles games. Millions around the world enjoyed the motion-picture footage the newsreels shot. Millions more heard Olympic recaps on the radio, though the LAOC barred live broadcasts of events. In a new innovation, the LAOC housed male athletes in an Olympic Village built on 250 acres in the undeveloped Baldwin Hills section of Los Angeles. The 160 female athletes stayed in the Chapman Park Hotel in the trendy Wilshire district. In Olympic competition, American athletes swept the medal count, winning a total of 103 medals, 67 more medals than their nearest rivals, Italy. Gender and race played significant roles in U.S. media interpretations of their Olympic triumph. The most remarkable performer at the games was Mildred “Babe” Didrikson, a multitalented sportswoman from Port Arthur, Texas. Limited by the Olympic rules for women’s track to only three events, Didrikson won gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles and the javelin throw, and a silver medal in the high jump. While lauding her athletic prowess, the press frequently commented on Didrikson’s supposed lack of femininity, making her a controversial figure in the American understandings of gender during the 1930s. The American women swimmers and divers overwhelmed their competitors. Treating the American “mermaids” much differently than Didrikson, the press turned American swimmers such as Helene Madison and Eleanor Holm into stars both for their performances and for their sex appeal. Ethnic and racial tensions surfaced in a variety of Olympic venues. The Japanese men’s swimmers dominated proceedings in the Olympic pool. With Japan locked in a struggle against the United States during the 1930s for dominance of the Pacific Rim, Japanese dynamism in the Olympic pool made many American observers quite uneasy. In an era where legal segregation still flourished, particularly in the American South, the notable performances of African American

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competitors in track and field stirred a great deal of comment. Edward Gordon won the high jump. Eddie Tolan ran to victories in the 100- and 200-meter sprints. Another African American, Ralph Metcalfe finished second in the 100-meters and third in the 200-meters. The successes of African American men and American women made many white men nervous, as the humorous Will Rogers revealed when he joked that “Every winner is either an American Negro or an American white woman. Wait till we get to golf, bridge or cocktail shaking, then the American white man will come into his own” (Will Rogers Remarks 1932). The Los Angeles Games provided a stunning showcase for both California and the United States, making it clear that the Olympics played a major role in shaping the world’s perceptions of host nations. As the Los Angeles Olympics ended, the world turned its attention to Berlin, the site for the 1936 Olympics. The IOC had awarded the games to the German capital city at its 1931 Olympic Congress when Germany was still under the leadership of the Weimar Republic. The 1933 seizure of power by the National Socialist Party (Nazi) and its leader, Adolf Hitler, placed serious question marks over Germany’s hosting of the Olympics Games. Reports of racial and religious discrimination in Germany led many nations to question their own participation in Berlin. Most notably, in the United States, widespread opposition from religious, trade, and civic organizations created a powerful movement to boycott the Olympics. Attending the 1936 Olympics became a major political issue. In spite of widespread opposition, in December of 1935, against a backdrop of mass rallies and signed petitions advocating a boycott, the AAU, led by its secretary Avery Brundage, who also served as the president of the AOC, narrowly voted to send an American team to the 1936 Olympics. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler embraced the Olympics as an opportunity to promote a favorable image of Germany to the rest of the world while also demonstrating the supremacy of the Aryan race. Pledging his nation’s full financial support, Hitler charged Carl Diem, a German member of the IOC, with the responsibility of making the Berlin Olympics the greatest athletic spectacle in human history. Hoping to exceed the spectacular success of the Los Angeles Games, Diem conceived of the idea of an Olympic torch relay. In a remarkable twelve-day, 3000-kilometer journey, runners carried a flame-lit torch from Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient Greek games, to the newly renovated Olympic stadium in Berlin. Before the Summer Games reached Berlin, however, the towns of GarmischPartenkirchen in the German Alps hosted the fourth Olympic Winter Games. Opening on February 6, 1936, the Winter Games not only provided the Nazi government with an opportunity to showcase the “new Germany,” but also allowed the German government a chance to test their policies and organizations in anticipation of the upcoming Summer Games. Twenty nations sent more than 600 athletes to the winter installment of the Nazi Olympics. Knowing they were under a microscope, the German government prepared to market its “new culture” to the world. In order to make foreign observers more comfortable, off-duty military personal were barred from wearing their military uniforms, anti-Semitic literature was removed from public places, and price gouging was prohibited. Moreover, the German government ensured that local taverns had a good selection of beer, a clear difference from the Lake Placid Olympics where U.S. prohibition laws prevented spectators from having a drink. At Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the U.S. team, which had dominated the previous Winter Games they hosted, did not perform to the same standards. While the

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Norwegian and German teams took control of the events, the United States faltered. Managing just one gold medal and four total medals, the United States finished near the bottom of the standings in the unofficial medal count. The introduction of alpine ski racing at the 1936 Winter Games helped the Germans who were the pioneers of the sport, boost their medal totals; U.S. downhill skiers were hopelessly outclassed. Garmisch-Partenkirchen provided a fitting prelude for Berlin. Despite boycott threats from many Western nations and continued German racial and religious persecution, the Berlin Olympic Games went ahead as scheduled. Held from August 1 to August 16, 1936, the Games proved a great success. Attracting over 3 million spectators and 3,963 athletes from forty-nine nations, Berlin easily surpassed the turnout in Los Angeles in staging the largest sporting event in history to that time. Hitler and the Nazi Party went to extreme lengths to convince international visitors, especially Americans, that Germany was a safe, friendly, and prosperous nation. During the Olympics Jews were no longer openly excluded from restaurants, blacks were allowed to mingle with whites, and churches and synagogues were briefly permitted to operate freely. To Hitler’s delight, German athletes dominated the 1936 Olympics, winning a remarkable eighty-nine medals, followed by the United States with fifty-six medals. The defeat marked the first time since 1912 that the United States had not won the most medals at a Summer Olympics. In fact, many in the world press corps interpreted the results of the Berlin Olympics as confirming the superiority of totalitarian regimes over Western liberal societies since not only did Nazi Germany defeat the United States but Fascist Italy won more medals than France and militaristic Japan beat Great Britain. In spite of losing the overall medal count, many Americans cheered that Hitler’s theories of Aryan racial supremacy had been disproved by African American sprinter Jesse Owens. In claiming four gold medals in the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints, the 4100 relay and the long jump, Owens emerged as the hero of the Berlin Games. Several other African American athletes, or “black auxiliaries” as the German press labeled them, also earned laurels including gold medal performances by Archie Williams in the 400-meter race, John Woodruff in the 800-meter run, and Cornelius Johnson in the high jump. While much of the U.S. press celebrated Owens and other African Americans for triumphing over Nazi bigotry, a few voices in the American media pointed out that given widespread segregation in the United States racism was not exclusively a German malady. They observed that had Owens lived in the American South, he would have been barred from the qualifying meet for determining the U.S. Olympic team. Other notable American performances included Helen Stephens’ double gold medal performances in the 100-meter dash and 4100-meter relay. Thirteen-yearold Marjorie Gestring’s victory in the three-meter springboard diving competition made her the youngest female to ever win an Olympic gold medal. The U.S. men’s team, competing in the first-ever Olympic basketball tournament, cruised easily to victory. In spite of sterling individual performances, the final medal count from the 1936 Olympics disturbed Americans. Shaken by the defeat, the American press attributed German victories to a variety of violations of Olympic rules that went unpunished, including allegations that the Nazi’s state-supported athletic system violated amateur standards and that Nazi athletes were the robotic slaves of a perverted nationalism.

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Jessie Owens (1913–80) At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, African American track star Jessie Owens rose to international fame as the fastest man in the world following his superlative gold medal performances in both the 100- and 200-meter sprints. Owens added to his incredible performance by claiming two additional gold medals in the long jump and 4100-meter relay events. On American shores, Owens’s performances were viewed by the national media as a devastating blow to Nazi myths of Aryan supremacy. Despite his success at the Olympics, however, Owens’s career exemplified the restrictions imposed upon black athletes in the United States during the Depression era. Born James Cleveland Owens in Oakville, Alabama on September 13, 1913, the young “Jesse,” as he later became known, experienced the harsh realities of a nation divided by racial segregation. Following World War I, Owens’s family joined the Great Migration northward and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where young Jesse blossomed into a national track and field star. In 1930 Owens enrolled in Cleveland’s East Technical High School, determined to earn the necessary vocational training that would give him the qualifications to escape the clutches of Depression-era poverty. To the benefit of the sporting world, Owens shunned his academic training in favor of developing his prodigious athletic talents. A host of big-time colleges coveted Owens’s sprinting and jumping abilities. After initial interest from the University of Michigan, Owens enrolled at Ohio State University. Arriving onto the Columbus campus, Owens experienced the harsh realities of a segregated America as he was barred from the dormitories by the color line and kept out of public view in his job as a freight elevator operator in the state government office complex. Owens ignored the racial slights and continued to focus his energies on developing his blossoming athletic skills. The Alabama native’s hard work soon paid off as he claimed an unprecedented eight NCAA titles from 1935 to 1936. The “Buckeye Bullet’s” greatest intercollegiate athletic achievement came in May 1935, at the Big Ten Championships held in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the span of forty-five minutes, Owens set three world records and tied another. After the 1936 Olympics, he returned to the United States a hero but quickly realized the limitations of race in translating his fame into material and social success. Lucrative financial offers failed to materialize, forcing Owens to humiliate himself by racing horses at county fairs and fronting a swing band. Although racism certainly limited his opportunities, Owens still made good money, by Depression-era standards, in his entertainment pursuits. Through various failed investments, Owens lost most of his earnings. Nevertheless, over the remainder of his life Owens achieved success as an envoy for the Republican Party and as a corporate “pitchman” for a variety of products. Later, Owens became the leader of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC). On March 31, 1980, following an incredible career, sixty-six-year-old Jessie Owens succumbed to lung cancer.

Seeking to build upon a Berlin Games that many interpreted as a huge success, the IOC awarded the 1940 Olympics to another controversial host, the Japanese capital city of Tokyo. The rise of militant totalitarianism in Japan, the Japanese seizure of the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931, and Japan’s subsequent invasion of China in 1937 aroused widespread international concern. Many nations reconsidered their commitments to participate in the 1940 Olympics. Boycott movements once again began to organize, especially in the Western liberal

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democracies, including the United States. In July 1938 Japan defused this potentially explosive controversy by renouncing their right to host the 1940 Olympics. The IOC transferred the games to Helsinki, Finland. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 scuttled the IOC’s plans and forced the cancellation of the 1940 Olympics, though the United States, which would not enter the war until 1941, briefly flirted with the idea of staging a smaller-scale version of the 1940 Olympics, mainly for the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in Detroit, Michigan. Though the 1940 Olympics did not relocate to the United States, two “Olympic”-style sports carnivals were staged on American soil during the Depression. In 1936 at a year-long fair celebrating the centennial of Texas’ war for independence from Mexico, Dallas held a “Centennial Olympics” composed of a multitude of sporting events, highlighted by a June 19 track meet at the Cotton Bowl that included performances by 1932 American Olympic heroes Eddie Tolan and Ralph Metcalfe in a field comprised mainly of black and white collegians from segregated southern universities. The event represented a remarkable exception to the thorough racial segregation during the 1930s of sporting events in the states that had seceded from the union during the Civil War. P. D. Whitted, the sports editor at the Dallas Express, the city’s African American newspaper, heralded the “Centennial Olympics” as a precedent-setting event. “Mark my word, athletics will break down more racial prejudice than any other single factor,” Whitted predicted. “It was a great day and sometime in the future we who witnessed the event will sit back in our rocking chairs and say we saw the 1st one,” Whitted concluded (1936). Though the “Centennial Olympics” did not lead to the immediate dismantling of racial segregation in Dallas, in Texas, or anywhere else in the South, it was not a one-time anomaly. In 1937 Dallas staged the “Pan American Olympics” as part of an international exhibition that extended the centennial celebration of independence for an additional year. A U.S. national team competed in track and field, boxing, and soccer against athletes from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Peru, and Uruguay. Texas law barred interracial boxing, requiring the U.S. team to leave two national champions who were African Americans off the “Pan American Olympics” roster but Latin American and U.S. athletes of African descent once again competed in the track and field competitions. Though Jesse Owens had forfeited his amateur status and could not compete in Dallas, several of his fellow “black auxiliaries” from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, including Cornelius Johnson (the gold medalist in the high jump), David Albritton (the silver medalist in the high jump), and John Woodruff (the gold medalist in the 800-meters), competed in the “Pan American Olympics” in the heartland of the segregated South.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS A Color Line Falls in Boxing The Olympic Games of the 1930s, and the two imitations in Texas, revealed battles over racial segregation in American sport. So, too, did the prizefights of the Depression decade. During the 1920s prizefighting had transformed from a scandalous pastime controlled by nefarious promoters with links to gambling rings and organized crime that catered to the vulgar tastes of the rabble into a respectable, multimillion-dollar entertainment that attracted both the masses and glamorous

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1930–1939

celebrities. Though colorful characters and rumors of fixes still swirled around the edges of the sport in the 1930s, it increasingly became a drama that showcased the nobility of the common man. The decade began without the superstars who in the 1920s dominated the fight game. Heavyweight champions Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney decided they were too old for the ring while promoter Tex Rickard, who presided over the grand million-dollar fights of the 1920s, passed away in 1929. As the Great Depression seized the nation, prizefighting searched for new stars, particularly in the heavyweight division. In spite of the lack of great heavyweights in the early 1930s, boxing flourished. The amateur ranks witnessed the expansion of the Golden Gloves tournaments. In 1932 the national title fights, which had initially pitted the champions of New York City and Chicago against one another, expanded to include teams from thirty-eight different cities. Boxing also flourished on college campuses, ranking as the second most popular spectator sport behind football at many schools. In professional prizefighting, African American pugilist Henry “Homicide Hank” Armstrong compiled a stellar record. Armstrong, the son of Mississippi sharecroppers who migrated in during his childhood to St. Louis, became in 1938 the only fighter ever to hold titles in three classifications simultaneously ranking as the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight champion of the world. During the first half of the 1930s, however, the most glamorous title in boxing, the heavyweight crown, was unavailable to African American challengers due to a firmly drawn color line. The crown remained in the hands of journeymen fighters such as Jack Sharkey, Primo Carnera, Max Schmeling, Max Baer, and James Braddock, who did not particularly thrill the public with their pugilistic skills. In this climate the nation discovered a boxing hero in the unlikely figure of Joe Louis. The racial dynamics of prizefighting made Louis an unlikely hero in an era in which the specter of Jack Johnson still hung over the prizefighting industry (see chapter 5). The proud, provocative Johnson, who reigned as heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915, had played to the worst stereotypes of white racism. Arrogant, vain, boastful, and stubborn, Johnson intentionally transgressed every racial boundary he could find, bragging about his pummeling of white challengers, partying with abandon, and reveling in breaking the era’s taboos regarding relationships between white women and black men. Johnson became a lightning rod for white racial hatred. When he triumphed over white challengers in the ring, whites erupted in violent spasms, rioting in African American neighborhoods. The upwelling of white violence destroyed lives and property, and clearly communicated to the African American community that they needed to stay in their subservient roles in American society regardless of Johnson’s challenges to the commonly accepted racial hierarchy of the era. When Johnson in 1915 finally lost, under what some thought were suspicious circumstances, the heavyweight title, the white public, the white press, and white fight promoters promised to never again allow an African American a shot at boxing’s most significant championship. That twenty-year-old tradition seemed guaranteed to prohibit Joe Louis, the son of an African American sharecropping family from Alabama that migrated to Detroit in the 1920s in search of better economic opportunities, of a shot at the heavyweight title. The Great Depression hit the Louis family and other African Americans, both in the industrial North and the agricultural South, especially hard. In the racial climate of that time, African American factory workers were generally the first laid off and the last rehired. African American farm laborers,

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already the nation’s poorest group, suffered even greater hardships in the Depression era. Many state and federal programs designed to relieve the miseries of the Depression discriminated against African Americans. During the early 1930s young Joe Louis exhibited tremendous skills but seemed destined to exclusion based on skin color to the highest levels of the fight game. The white press routinely depicted him through the standard racial stereotypes of the time as an animalistic brawler who triumphed through brute strength and entirely lacked mental agility. The African American press depicted a much different Louis, a well-spoken, well-mannered, intelligent young man who appeared destined to be denied an equal opportunity in his chosen profession by the pernicious patterns of American racism. Following an amateur career in which he won fifty fights, lost only four, and earned an AAU national heavyweight championship, Louis turned professional in 1934. He initially battled in the obscure bottom rungs of the heavyweight division. He quickly learned that he had to beat his mainly white opponents by knockouts to earn victories. Leaving decisions to white judges was a recipe for defeat. His manager, John Roxborough, a Chicago machine politician with ties to the underworld, taught him to avoid the boastful displays that had made Jack Johnson the most reviled man in white America. Louis learned to retreat quickly to his corner when he knocked down an opponent rather than gloating over a prostrate white fighter and providing a potential signal of arrogance. His handlers made sure that Louis did not imbibe or womanize in public, and that he studiously avoided liaisons with white women. His humble demeanor and the careful crafting of his image worked. The white press, while generally portraying him in unflattering racial stereotypes, nevertheless labeled him a “credit to his race,” the polar opposite of Jack Johnson. Throughout the mid-1930s, Louis kept beating his opponents while hoping for a title shot. The American media, white and black alike, recognized he was a superbly talented fighter in an era of mediocre heavyweights. Pressure began to build to erase the color line drawn and grant Louis a shot at the heavyweight title. The only blemish on his ring record was a shocking, twelfth-round knockout in 1936 at the hands of German boxer Max Schmeling (the heavyweight title-holder from 1930 to 1932), a huge upset that disheartened millions of African Americans while allowing Hitler’s Nazi regime to trumpet the superiority of Aryans over other races. Louis, overconfident and poorly trained for the Schmeling bout, quickly recovered. He would never again lose a fight. In 1937 he finally received a title shot and quickly dispatched James Braddock to earn the heavyweight crown. The next year, in a much anticipated rematch with Schmeling that the press and public viewed as a referendum on the rivalry between American democracy and Nazi totalitarianism, Louis easily avenged his sole setback in the prize ring with a first-round knockout. Celebrated after the fight as a national hero to white as well as black Americans, Louis became the most visible African American in the world. Even in Mississippi, the heart of the Jim Crow South, whites heralded Louis’s triumph as a public drubbing of Nazism. For Depression-era African Americans who had little to cheer from their places at the bottom of the American socioeconomic ladder, Louis became the most important hero of his generation. African Americans throughout the nation huddled around radios to listen to his fights. Victory celebrations in African American neighborhoods in northern cities drew tens of thousands into the streets. Death

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1930–1939

row inmates in southern prisons invoked his name as they went to their deaths, pleading for Louis to help them. African American musicians composed dozens of songs about him, African American writers lionized his achievements, and African American leaders enlisted him in their campaigns for racial justice. Louis became, particularly to the most impoverished African Americans, the “Black Messiah,” a symbol of hope for redemption against racism’s enormous travails. Louis defended his crown successfully twenty-five more times before he retired in 1949. He used his fame in the late 1930s and after to fight for civil rights causes such as greater access to employment and better educations for the nation’s disenfranchised minority. For African Americans, from the black elites to those at the impoverished bottom of American society, the white celebrations of Joe Louis’s prowess served as a portent that segregation might be sooner rather than later overcome. In the troubled Depression decade Louis rose to hero status in American culture, in the white as well as the black community.

Setting New Standards in Track and Field and Swimming and Diving While Joe Louis won the hearts of white as well as black Americans for his triumph over Max Schmeling and the Nazis, the dramatic stage of international competition also made Jesse Owens and other African American track and field stars into national heroes. Indeed, as the Olympics and the major meets in Texas indicated, track and field provided an important arena during the Great Depression for challenging color lines. Track and field was a popular spectator sport during the 1930s, drawing tens of thousands of fans to major meets. The sport thrived on college campuses and at a national circuit of AAU events. For American audiences, it also stood as the most important sport at the Olympics. Track and field functioned during the era as an amateur sport, though promoters of major AAU events and intercollegiate programs offered financial inducements to star athletes. Indeed, the money involved was an open secret and the media often condemned the “shamateurism” system of pretend-amateurism that dominated the highest levels of track and field. At the Olympic Games of the 1930s U.S. athletes dominated the sprints, jumps, throws, and middle-distance races. In the decathlon, the ten-event contest generally considered the greatest all-around test of track and field skills, a former University of Kansas football star named James Bausch began at the 1932 Olympics a streak of U.S. gold medal performances that would last for the next three decades. American Glenn Morris won the 1936 Olympic gold medal. In the sprints and jumps, African Americans replaced Irish Americans as world-dominating athletes. Indeed, on college campuses and at the Olympic Games track and field represented one of the leading areas of integration in American society. While the vast majority of American intercollegiate track and field athletes were white, African Americans starred at the highest levels of competition. Eddie Tolan and Ralph Metcalfe set the standard by carrying off the lion’s share of sprint medals at the 1932 Olympics. Jesse Owens turned in the first four-gold-medal performance in Olympic history in 1936, winning the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes, anchoring an American victory in the 4100-meter relay, and taking the top prize in the long

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jump. In addition to Owens, John Woodruff won a gold medal in the 800-meters, Archie Williams won a gold medal in the 400-meters, and Cornelius Johnson won a gold medal in the high jump. In 1935 Owens turned in what many track and field experts still consider the greatest individual performance in history. Representing Ohio State University at the Big Ten Championships, Owens set three world records and tied another in the span of a single hour. In women’s track and field, African American star Alice Coachman, who in 1948 would become the first black woman to win a gold medal for the U.S., won in 1939 the first of her ten national championships in the high jump.

Babe Didrikson Transforms Women’s Sport During the Great Depression, track and field, and other sports, showcased challenges not only to racial boundaries but to gender stereotypes. The nation witnessed the rise of Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias. Arguably the best female athlete in American history, she received the Associated Press award of “Best Woman Athlete of the Twentieth Century.” Babe, as she was known to everyone, stood out in several sports. She made her first mark on the national stage in basketball. In 1930, during her senior year of high school, the Golden Cyclones, a Dallas-based AAU semiprofessional team sponsored by women’s sports promoter and Employers Casualty Insurance Company owner Melvin McCombs, recruited Didrikson to play on their squad with the promise of a lucrative job. On the court, Didrikson stood out for her exceptional talent and for her fierce competitiveness. From 1930 to1932 she led her team to two AAU tournament finals and one national championship. She made the AAU AllAmerican basketball teams in 1931 and 1932. Didrikson’s ego nearly outshone her immense talent. In an era during which the public expected athletes, especially female athletes, to be humble and self-effacing, she made bold and brash pronouncements about her skills and never hesitated to make her accomplishments known. Both her opponents and her own teammates found her personality challenging. Didrikson played with great intensity and thoroughly enjoyed the spotlight, traits that led her to sometimes seek personal accolades at the expense of her own teammates. The press flocked to cover her exploits. Her colorful manner and controversial image made her more visible than any other female athlete had ever been. Basketball stardom was only a starting point. McCombs nurtured Didrikson’s talents, giving her plenty of time to train for the company’s basketball and softball teams and encouraging her in other pursuits. In 1932 she turned from basketball to track and field. She set off a firestorm of publicity when she entered the 1932 AAU track and field championships as a one-woman team. Didrikson competed in eight of the ten events that comprised the meet—an unheard-of challenge. Putting on one of the greatest individual sports performances at a national championship, in the course of three hours Didrikson single-handedly overwhelmed the best women track stars from around the country. Jogging from one competition to the next, Didrikson had little time to recover. Amazingly, Didrikson won six of the eight events she entered. She set new world records in the baseball throw, the javelin throw, and the 80-meter hurdles. She bettered the national marks in the shot put, and high jump—an event in which she tied with her rival Jean Shiley, who also shared the new American record. Didrikson also won the long jump. She finished in fourth place in the discus. Her only finish

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out of point-scoring position in the meet was a disappointing performance in the 100yard dash in which she failed to make the finals. As a one-woman team Didrikson amassed thirty points, eight more than the entire second-place Illinois Athletic Club team could muster. The AAU championship also served as the Olympic trials, guaranteeing Didrikson a spot at the 1932 American Olympic team. Olympic rules for women’s track and field limited Didrikson to only three events. She chose the javelin throw, the 80-meter hurdles, and the high jump. At the Los Angeles Games, her very first toss of the javelin earned the gold medal and established a new world record. She also won gold and broke the world record in the 80-meter hurdles in a controversial photo-finish. Her third performance also produced controversy. Didrikson and her U.S. teammate Shiley both produced world-record high jumps of 5 feet 51=4 inches. The judges ruled that since Didrikson had jumped with an unorthodox style the victory would go to her teammate, who had used the more conventional style. Didrikson received the silver medal. Didrikson’s track and field feats in 1932 won her the Associated Press female athlete of the year award. Following the Olympics Didrikson sought to cash in on her fame, traveling around the United States putting on shows and exhibitions of her remarkable athletic talents. She pitched for the House of David, a long-bearded, barnstorming baseball team that made national tours for an obscure religious sect. In one exhibition she pitched against the Philadelphia Athletics, a National League power at that time. She also organized a touring basketball squad, Babe Didrikson’s AllAmericans, which played games all over the United States. While her basketball and baseball tours earned her money to support her family, they also earned her a reputation as a “mannish” self-promoter in search of a quick buck. Seeking a more “feminine” sport, she migrated to golf where “amateurs” could earn lucrative sums through product endorsements and a variety of other gimmicks. Didrikson pursued golf seriously after the Los Angeles Olympics. In 1935 she won the Texas State amateur championship. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Golf Association revoked her amateur standing, claiming that the money she earned in baseball, basketball, and billiards tainted her golfing status. The amateur golf powers objected as much to her controversial image and the fact that she was a truck driver’s daughter from rural East Texas as they did to her professional earnings in other sports. In response to the snub, Didrikson became an openly professional golfer, signing a lucrative contract to promote golfing equipment. She continued to try to feminize her image on and off the golf course, switching from slacks to skirts, applying makeup, and in 1938 marrying the famous wrestler and promoter George Zaharias. Still, she pushed at gender lines, becoming the first woman to play in a men’s golfing event when she entered the 1938 Los Angeles Open. Though she failed to make the cut, she was paired with Zaharias at the tourney, a match that quickly became a marriage.

Feminine Stereotypes and Sport While Babe Didrikson reigned as the most famous, and the most controversial, female athlete of the Depression era, other athletes, especially in sports then considered as properly “feminine” such as tennis, swimming, and diving, as well as golf, also enjoyed popular acclaim. Indeed, of the first ten winners of the Associated

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The Power of “Sex Appeal” in Women’s Sport Babe Didrikson, born in the United States to Norwegian immigrants, and Sonja Heine, a Norwegian who immigrated to the United States to find her fortune, both rose during the 1930s to the pinnacle of athletic achievement. American society, however, viewed their achievements quite differently. Americans embraced Sonja Heine during the 1930s, even though she was a Norwegian. Heine won figure skating gold medals for Norway at the 1928, 1932, and 1936 Winter Olympics. Her grace and beauty on the ice led the media to make her the biggest star of the Winter Games. Following her Olympic career, Heine toured the United States and Europe, earning a fortune in ice-skating exhibitions. Heine starred in figure skating during an era in which that sport was perceived as the epitome of female physicality. Figure skating was graceful and elegant, demonstrating the “admirable” qualities in females. While most Americans thought it fine that women competed in sports in growing numbers, many Americans disapproved of competitions in which women showed obvious strain or exertion. Heine’s dancing on ice served to highlight her femininity and fit the accepted gender norms quite nicely. When she relocated to the United States in the late 1930s, Heine’s sex appeal on the ice made her a headliner in the Ice Capades tours and catapulted her to movie-star status in Hollywood. Babe Didrikson, by contrast, made her mark in sports that produced copious and visible amounts of sweat and strain. Didrikson dominated basketball and track and field during the early 1930s. Like Heine, she won Olympic medals, earning two golds and a silver in track and field at the Los Angeles Games in 1932. She won her medals for the native land, the United States, rather than for the Norwegian homeland of her parents. The American public, however, did not embrace Didrikson with the ardor it lavished on the Norwegian Olympic star Heine. Didrikson’s well-publicized lack of sex appeal, and her participation in sports that did not fit 1930s American gender expectations, made her a much more controversial figure than Heine. Didrikson was frequently forced to defend her femininity. Both Didrikson and Heine appeared in the movies, but Heine received roles as the heroine of many scripts, while Didrickson was frequently as a sideshow or gimmick. The movie careers of Didrikson and Heine highlight sportswriter Paul Gallico’s contention during the 1930s that sex appeal mattered more than any other quality in public acceptance of women’s sport.

Press female athlete of the year award, inaugurated in 1931, eight of the winners earned the accolade based on their swimming, diving, golf, or tennis prowess. The only women from other sports to win the honor during the 1930s were selected for their track and field prowess, Didrikson in 1932 and Helen Stephens, the gold medalist in the 100-meter and 200-meter dashes at the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Tellingly, the press frequently depicted both Didrikson and Stephens as strikingly unfeminine women. Gender stereotypes were reinforced by the assault of the Women’s Division of the NAAF and professional female educators on competitive athletics. They succeeded in scuttling most competitive sports programs in colleges and high schools during the 1930s. Upper-class and middle-class co-eds found fewer opportunities to compete during the era. Women from working-class backgrounds, such as Babe

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Didrikson, enjoyed a different set of options. Basketball, volleyball, and softball leagues flourished, attracting working-class women to play at highly competitive levels. Major employers sponsored teams for their workers that played in AAUsanctioned tournaments around the nation. In an effort to stress the femininity of players, the competitions included not only the games themselves but also beauty contests to stress the attractiveness of players. Some of the competitive teams transformed themselves into national barnstorming clubs. The most famous example of the Depression era was the All-American Red Heads, a basketball team that got its start in Missouri in 1936. Sporting natural or dyed red hair and sponsored by team founder Connie Mack Olson’s chain of Missouri and Kansas beauty parlors, the Red Heads toured small towns throughout the United States, competing mainly against men’s teams and displaying the sort of basketball wizardry associated with the great African American men’s barnstormers, the Harlem Globetrotters. Playing by the five-on-five version of the men’s rules, the Red Heads were reputed to have won 90 percent of their games against male rivals. Softball joined basketball during the 1930s as an important pastime for women. Though baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis had barred women from professional baseball after Didrikson and other women had played exhibition games against men on the grounds that female constitutions were too delicate to withstand the alleged rigors of the national pastime, softball, which had originated in the 1880s, took off during the Great Depression. Requiring lesser expense and lesser expanse than baseball, softball fit the needs of Depression-era American culture. Federal public works projects pushed the game in urban parks and in rural fields. The American Softball Association, organized in 1934, sponsored national championships for both men and women. The women’s game became an especially passionate pastime in the small towns and rural areas. Women’s softball also proved popular in two major cities, Chicago and Los Angeles, where, as the U.S. economy geared up for a war by the end of the 1930s by employing increasing numbers of women, defense contractors sponsored large numbers of teams in industrial leagues. These leagues would provide a foundation during World War II for the establishment of a professional softball, and then baseball, circuit for women.

Sex Appeal and the Swimming Boom The Great Depression witnessed a surprising boom in swimming. New Deal agencies dug 770 new swimming pools during the era, expanding opportunities for one of the nation’s most popular recreations. A 1933 survey by the National Recreation Association estimated that swimming ranked alongside going to the movies as the most popular American leisure-time activities. Municipal pools became important centers of American life during the 1930s. In a trend that began after World War I, American pools became increasingly inclusive meeting grounds that cut across social class and gender lines. Reversing earlier trends, swimming pools increasingly mixed men and women, and people from differing economic backgrounds. Indeed, as some historians have observed, women’s bathing costumes shrank consistently during this period, making the swimming pool a key space for the development of an eroticized consumer culture that objectified the female body. As the success on the motion-picture screen of the scantily-clad Johnny Weissmuller during the 1930s revealed, swimming also eroticized male bodies.

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Weissmuller, who had reigned as the world’s greatest swimmer during the 1920s, became a huge star in the Tarzan film series of the 1930s (see chapter 6). At the same time that class and gender divisions shrank at public swimming pools, racial divisions grew. In the North and West as well as the South, pools became increasingly exclusive in terms of racial interactions. In the South, African American swimmers were kept out of white pools by law, whereas in the North and West residential segregation and social custom made black patronage of pools in white neighborhoods a rare occurrence (Wiltse 2007). Reinforcing the image of segregation in swimming, at a time when American Olympic track and field witnessed some important signs of integration, American swim teams remained almost exclusively white. In competitive swimming on the world stage the U.S. grip on international dominance slipped markedly during the 1930s. At the 1932 Olympics the U.S. men won fewer medals than the Japanese, the first time the Americans had not dominated the medal standings in the pool in more than a decade. At the 1936 Olympics the Japanese men once again bested the U.S. men. American women fared a bit better in Olympic pools. American “mermaids,” as the press referred to swimmers and divers in the era, thrived at international competitions. At the 1932 Los Angeles Games the United States won six of the seven events contested. The U.S. women did not perform as well at the 1936 Berlin Games, earning just three bronze medals in five events, but they again conquered the diving world, earning five of the six medals in the two diving contests. Olympic swimming medalists Helene Madison and Eleanor Holm, and divers Georgia Coleman, Dorothy Poynton, Marjorie Gestring, and Katherine Rawls became icons of “S.A.” (sex appeal), as the sportswriter Paul Gallico dubbed the most prized quality the media identified in female athletes during the Depression. Female swimmers rivaled Babe Didrikson for celebrity status during the era, and were certainly portrayed in the press as more acceptably feminine than the “Texas Tornado.” A scantily clad Eleanor Holm, a 1932 Olympic medalist who was kicked off the 1936 Olympic team for carousing on the voyage to Berlin, attracted enormous attention for her swimming performances at the “Aquacade” show for 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Holm’s intricate movements in the pool, choreographed to popular music, introduced Americans to the new sport of synchronized swimming. One of Holm’s fellow performers at the Aquacade, Esther Williams, made this particular form of swimming a staple of American movies during the 1940s.

Tennis and Golf in the Great Depression During the 1930s the number of public tennis facilities and public golf courses, like the number of public swimming pools, expanded as federal public works programs built new recreational facilities for the American public. Those new tennis courts and golf links would eventually help popularize the two games among the middle and working classes as well as the country club set. As with swimming and diving, tennis and golf also provided women with competitive careers that did not challenge the traditional boundaries of femininity. In women’s tennis Helen Wills continued the dominating career that she began in the 1920s. Wills won Wimbledon titles in 1930, 1932, 1933, 1935, and 1938, a U.S. championship in 1931, and a French championship in 1932. A severe back injury in the mid-1930s prevented her from winning even more major tournaments.

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During her comeback from the injury the Associated Press in 1935 selected her as their female athlete of the year. Renowned by the media for her girl-next-door attractiveness and for her icy determination on the court, her stoic public demeanor made her a sometimes distant figure for American fans. Like Didrikson, Wills sometimes challenged men in competitive arenas. In 1933 she defeated Phil Neer, then the eighth-ranked U.S. male player, in a San Francisco exhibition match. In matches against other women, Helen Jacobs served as Wills’s major challenger in the early 1930s. Jacobs won Wimbledon in 1936 and captured four straight U.S. championships from 1932 to 1935. After Helen Wills retired in 1938, Jacobs briefly reigned as the queen of the women’s game until Alice Marble seized the mantle as the nation’s greatest player. Marble won Wimbledon in 1939 and earned four U.S. championships, in 1936 and from 1938 to 1940. In men’s tennis, like in the women’s game, an aging superstar continued to dominate play well into the 1930s. William “Big Bill” Tilden, who had ruled the tennis world in the 1920s, continued to be a force in the 1930s even though he had turned professional and no longer qualified for the most prestigious tournaments. The major events in tennis such as Wimbledon and the U.S. Championships remained in the hands of organizers who did not want to compensate their laborers for filling the stands and enforced a strict brand of amateurism. Only the greatest stars, such as Tilden, could make money playing public exhibitions. Tilden, who turned forty in 1933, remained the biggest draw in tennis but his declining skills and lack of charismatic challengers meant that professional tennis stagnated during the 1930s. In the amateur ranks Ellsworth Vines Jr. dominated his fellow Americans and ranked as the top player in the world in 1932 and from 1935 to 1937. Vines turned professional in 1934 and took over from Tilden as the major force in the men’s professional game. A splendid all-around craftsman, Vines could not match Tilden’s charisma. As Vines moved into the professional ranks Californian Don Budge became the top American amateur. Budge led the United States to a 1932 victory over Germany in the semifinals of the Davis Cup international series, earning the Associated Press tennis player of the year honors and the James Edward Sullivan Award from the AAU as the nation’s top amateur athlete for his accomplishments. In 1938 Budge capped his domination of amateur tennis by winning the first “Grand Slam,” earning victories in a single calendar year at Wimbledon, the U.S. Championships, the Australian Championships, and the French Championships. After his sweep of the four major amateur tournaments Budge turned professional and toured with Ellsworth Vines and the aging Bill Tilden. In the Davis Cup, the major international tennis series of the era, Budge and Vines both starred for the United States before they turned professional. The Americans were a major amateur power of the Depression era, generally battling the British, the French, or the Australians for the top spot. The United States won Davis Cup titles in 1937 and 1938 and finished second in 1932, 1934, 1935, and 1939. The Great Depression had a major impact on golf. During the 1920s the game surged in popularity as middle-class players made golf an essential part of the nation’s business culture. Owning golf clubs and a membership at a private links became an important sign of success in American society. During the 1930s, however, nearly one-third of U.S. country clubs went bankrupt, cutting the number of places to play the game substantially. As the economy crumbled, golf’s hold on the recreational and business lives of middle-class men declined. In an effort to shore

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up this particular sector of the economy, the federal government subsidized the building of approximately 200 new courses through New Deal public works programs, boosting the number of public links substantially. Golf changed in other substantial ways during the Depression. For those who could still afford equipment, new technologies introduced in the 1930s, such as the replacement of wooden club shafts with steel compounds, the introduction of new specialty clubs, and the widespread adoption of high-pressured golf balls, made golf an easier game to learn. The new clubs and balls also markedly improved the scores of the top players. Indeed, the winning scores at U.S. Opens dropped by more than five strokes during the decade. Gene Sarazen, Byron Nelson, and Sam Snead dominated the major tournaments during the era. Fewer fans turned out to witness the higher scores, however. The retirement of Bobby “the Emperor” Jones in 1930 left the golf world without a superstar, in spite of the emergence of the young trio of Sarazen, Snead, and Nelson, to entice crowds to attend major men’s tournaments. The men’s professional tour faltered during the Depression years as the economic collapse took its toll. Babe Didrikson’s adoption of golf as her main sport beginning in 1935 brought more attention to the women’s game, and, eventually set the foundation for a professional women’s tour.

America at the Races—Horses, Automobiles, and Airplanes While many sports struggled during the Great Depression, racetracks thrived. More spectators attended horse races than any other sporting events. The introduction of pari-mutuel gambling after World War I led to a resurgence of interest at American horse tracks, a trend that continued in spite of, or perhaps because of, the economic downturn on the 1930s. Gambling represented the central attraction of horse racing, and the chance to earn a lucrative windfall in an era of plummeting fortunes proved irresistible to many. The national passion for horse racing set the stage for the rise of one of the most unlikely sports heroes of the 1930s, a story that has been chronicled in a recent best-selling book (2001) and popular motion picture (2003). Seabiscuit, a puny, gnarly-legged thoroughbred who ran with an odd gait, captured popular imaginations in the 1930s. The horse became a beloved folk hero who encapsulated American hopes in the midst of the Depression. Seabiscuit served as a symbol of optimism. The public read his story as a testament to the power of perseverance in the face of repeated failures. Seabiscuit rebounded from hard times, eventually triumphing over his many doubters. Though the horse had excellent bloodlines, having descended from some of the greatest horses in the history of American racing, Seabiscuit failed miserably on the race track during his early years. His original owners gave up on him, selling Seabiscuit in 1936 to a California buyer who had no experience in the horse-racing game. Nurtured by a sympathetic trainer, Seabiscuit turned into one of the greatest horses in the history of the American turf. After dominating the West Coast racing circuit, Seabiscuit traveled in 1938 to the traditional home of American thoroughbred racing in the East. Newspaper stories, radio updates, and newsreel footage chronicled every moment of Seabiscuit’s journey to challenge the dominant horse of the era, the regal War Admiral. The match race took place on the hallowed turf of Pimlico race track in Baltimore, War Admiral’s home course. Experts predicted War Admiral would easily beat the ungainly upstart from California. Thousands of spectators thronged Pimlico on race day, while millions

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of fans tuned into the radio broadcast of the race. In one of the great upsets in sports history, Seabiscuit sprinted to an easy victory. When chronic leg injuries forced Seabiscuit into retirement in 1940, racing fans lamented the absence the most unexpected and the most engaging racing champion in American history. While millions of Americans followed horse racing during the 1930s, the American South witnessed the beginnings of organized stock-car racing. Descended from the exploits of “whiskey trippers,” drivers who transported bootleg shipments of alcohol during Prohibition and adapted their automobiles to outrun the cars of the federal agents who sought to stop them, stock-car racing found a home at small tracks in the rural Appalachian South during the Depression. Stock-car racers modified the standard mass-production models of automobiles rather than building specialized race cars, an innovation that helped connect the racers to their fan base. During the 1930s the owner of a Daytona Beach, Florida, auto repair shop, William “Big Bill” France, became infatuated with stock-car racing. France organized a local racing circuit that took advantage of the smooth sand spaces of the Florida beach that ran along the Atlantic in his hometown. Understanding the appeal of racing common cars to the nation’s common folk, France promoted the new sport as the future of automobile racing. While France’s dream of a thriving national circuit of tracks did not fully materialize in the 1930s, in 1948 he would launch the National Association of Stock Car Automobile Racing (NASCAR). As stock-car racing slowly developed in the American South, the nation remained enchanted by the specialized race cars that sped 500 miles around an Indianapolis oval every Memorial Day. The Indianapolis 500 stood as the most popular automobile race in the American sports calendar. During the 1930s the race witnessed several tragedies, including the death of five drivers and mechanics in the 1933 race. In 1936 Louis Meyer became the first driver to win three Indianapolis 500 titles. Meyer also won the 1928 and 1933 races. During his victory celebration Meyer began an “Indy 500” tradition by taking a swig from a milk bottle. Meyer, unlike current drivers who drink reguar milk, drank buttermilk. Racing airplanes as well as racing cars captured the public’s attention during the 1930s. In an era in which aviation was still a novelty, huge crowds turned out to watch aircraft whip around pylon-marked courses. Beginning in 1926 the National Air Race series, sponsored by the federal government’s National Aeronautics Administration, staged races for various classifications of airplanes. During the 1930s Cleveland and Los Angeles became the major sites for these races. In both Ohio and California, tens of thousands of spectators turned out to watch the aircraft duel in time trials and to welcome the winners of a transcontinental air race. Military aircraft dominated air races in the 1920s but shrinking Depression-era defense budgets opened the door for civilian designers to compete in the 1930s. Aircraft designed by private entrepreneurs including the Seversky SEV and the Gee-Bee won major events. The National Air races awarded two major prizes. The Thompson Trophy was open to aircraft of any engine size or airframe design and was awarded to the fastest plane in a closed-course race. The Bendix Transcontinental Speed Classic Award went to the airplane that traversed a race course that spanned the continental United States the quickest. During the 1930s the Bendix races usually followed a course from Los Angeles to Cleveland, but in several years competitors flew from New York to Los Angeles. James Doolittle, who became a major figure in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War I, earned the first Bendix title in 1931. Famed aviatrix

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Amelia Earhart competed in the race but never won. Two female pilots did earn Bendix championships during the 1930s. Louise Thaden won the 1936 New York to Los Angeles race. Jacqueline Cochran took first place in the 1938 Los Angeles to Cleveland race.

New Markets and New Technologies in Bowling and Cycling During the 1930s bowling represented one of nation’s most popular sports in terms of participation. Americans of all ages, genders, and backgrounds bowled. The game had a particularly strong following among people of British, Dutch, and German descent, European nations where the sport had long and hallowed traditions. Bowling alleys survived the harsh economic climate by offering inexpensive entertainment for the masses. Bowling leagues thrived, particularly among blue-collar workers. Indeed, during the Depression bowling made a return to its working-class roots. During the 1920s the number of bowling alleys sanctioned by the American Bowling Congress had grown from 450 to 2000. Prohibition made these alleys “dry,” increasing the number of female patrons and granting bowling a status as a “family” recreation. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the newly resurgent beer brewing corporations returned to the bowling alleys in search of customers and advertising opportunities. Budweiser, Blatz, Pabst, Schlitz, and Stroh’s beers sponsored local bowling leagues as bowling once again thrived among its traditional core audience, working-class men. The influence of women in bowling, however, remained strong. One of the few sports that mixed men and women, the gender-blurring dimensions of the sport were expanded in 1939 when the all-male American Bowling Congress (founded in 1895) and the Women’s International Bowling Congress (founded in 1916) were joined together in the new International Bowling Association. Underscoring the popularity of the game among women, 1185 five-woman teams entered the 1940 Women’s National Bowling Association tournament. While the women’s and men’s organizations integrated during the 1930s, bowling in the United States remained racially segregated. In 1939 the African American community organized the National Negro Bowling Association after black bowlers were excluded from the new International Bowling Association. A new technological innovation that would dramatically change the recreational business spawned by the game also appeared during the Great Depression. In 1936, working in his garage, Gottfried Schmidt invented a machine that would in the next few decades revolutionize bowling. After World War II Schmidt’s automatic pin-setting device replaced human pinsetters, lowering the costs for bowling alley operators and dramatically expanding the market. The company that purchased Schmidt’s patent, American Machine and Foundry (AMF), would make a fortune through his innovation. During the 1920s, as the automobile became the dominant mode of transportation, bicycle usage declined. Americans increasingly considered bicycles as a children’s toy rather than as a tool for the transportation or recreation of adults. Manufacturers concentrated on developing children’s models, and one company, Schwinn, became the dominant force in the market. In spite of the Great Depression, Schwinn’s Excelsior model, sporting fat tires, a spring fork, and a tough frame—a style that later provided inspiration for the development of the mountain

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bike—sold extremely well during the 1930s. The Schwinn Excelsior became the standard bicycle for the nation’s adolescents.

THE MOST IMPORTANT NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN AMERICAN SPORT—RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTS New inventions sparked long-term transformations in cycling and bowling during the 1930s. Even more significant were the developments in electronic broadcasting during the decade, changes that would spark an enormous transformation in how Americans consumed sport for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst century. Regular radio broadcasts became a part of the fabric of American culture during the 1920s and expanded, in spite of the calamity of the Great Depression, in the 1930s. Sports provided a key commodity for radio networks, attracting millions of listeners to broadcasts of major-league baseball, college football, prizefights, auto races, and a host of other events, as noted in previous sections. Among the key developments in the era was the decision by major-league baseball in 1932 to allow franchises to develop their own individual broadcast policies, a development know as “home rule,” as well as the adoption of a similar idea of permitting individual institutions to set their own parameters on college football broadcasts by the NCAA. These decisions by the overseers of baseball and college football to refrain from collective bans on broadcasts, in spite of fears that radio coverage would diminish attendance, helped to develop lucrative new markets that eventually generated enormous revenues for the two most popular American spectator sports. Radio flourished in other sports as well. The 1938 rematch between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis drew the largest audience in the history of the medium. Two of every three American radios were tuned to Louis’s smashing victory over his German opponent. By the end of the Great Depression, a new electronic medium that broadcast pictures as well as sound made its debut. Televised sport began at the 1936 Olympics when Germany beamed closed-circuit images of the contests to several German cities. In April of 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, RCA introduced commercial television with President Franklin Roosevelt opening the festivities on the air. Telecasts of sport quickly followed. In May of 1939 the Princeton-Columbia baseball game became the first televised intercollegiate sporting contest in American history. Quickly thereafter New York–based television stations broadcast a six-day bicycle race, a major track and field meet, and a boxing match. In August of 1939 the Cincinnati Reds–Brooklyn Dodgers game from Ebbets Field marked the debut of major-league baseball on television. In September of 1939 a New York City station aired the first televised college football contest when Fordham College and Waynesburg College squared off live from Triborough Stadium. In October of 1939 television cameras returned to Ebbets Field to beam the Philadelphia Eagles– Brooklyn Dodgers NFL tilt. By 1940 the University of Pennsylvania had a television contract for its entire home football schedule. The Rose Bowl aired to a national television audience. RCA demonstrated color television. The Pitt-Fordham college basketball contest was televised in New York City. As World War II loomed, television, arguably the most powerful force in shaping American sport in the second half of the twentieth-century, had established a beachhead in every major athletic spectacle in the nation.

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AMERICAN SPORT AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION As the 1930s drew to a close, the American economy began to revive. A variety of measures of fiscal health, from rising industrial outputs to falling unemployment rates, signaled a recovery from a decade of hard times. The improvements in the American economy were a result of the nation gearing up for the Second World War, rather from any of the New Deal policies that President Franklin Roosevelt and Congress had implemented during the Depression. Indeed, by the end of the 1930s Roosevelt had shifted most of his attention from the sputtering economy to the looming war, a conflagration that the United States would enter at the end of 1941 but that consumed the rest of the world much earlier. The war in the Pacific began in 1937 when Japan invaded the mainland of China. Europe descended into war in 1939 when Germany launched its first major attacks. The war would eventually have dramatic impacts on American society and on American sport, increasing the interconnections between sport and the modern media, fueling the mass fascination with sporting spectacles, and providing a climate that fostered the racial integration of American sport, even major-league baseball. The war had an immediate effect on American sport, leading to the 1938 cancellation of the 1940 Olympics slated for Tokyo and a brief, unrealized hope in the United States that the games might be moved to Detroit. The American—and the Japanese—national pastime of baseball had been planned as a centerpiece of the 1940 Olympics. The two nations, which many on both sides of the Pacific hoped would be transformed into stalwart allies by baseball, were soon engaged in the bloodiest war in human history. Sport, Americans learned, could not prevent war. Nor, they came to recognize during the 1930s, could it eradicate the Great Depression. Sport, however, did provide Americans with a temporary escape from their economic misery, and solace during hard times. With smaller discretionary incomes, Americans still chose to use their shrinking number of dollars to buy tickets to the baseball park, or the football stadium, or the basketball arena, or the prize fight, or a myriad of other spectacles. The Great Depression damaged but did not destroy the vast American sports industry. Some games were canceled due to economic circumstances. Some leagues and franchises folded. Many sports programs at all levels cut back on expenditures. Still, Americans continued to bowl, golf, and ride bicycles. Aging stars such as Babe Ruth and new sluggers such as Hank Greenberg remained national icons. An unlikely Depression-era hero emerged in the form of a horse by the name of Seabiscuit, whom no one expected would ever prosper, lifting the spirits of millions in grim times. An African American unexpectedly earned the title of world heavyweight champion and represented his nation in bouts fraught with international import. Another African American won four gold medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin, defending his nation’s honor in a city that was soon to become the capital of what Americans would recognize as the twentieth century’s most evil empire. Joe Louis and Jesse Owens were portents of the future, heralding a sea change in race relations on American playing fields and in the larger society that would begin during the coming war and that echoes into the twenty-first century. Throughout the 1930s the Great Depression wracked the nation. It did not, however, extinguish American passions for sport. Indeed, in many ways, the foundations for a

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huge boom in American sport were laid during one of the nation’s most difficult decades.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Alexander, Charles. 2002. Breaking the slump: Baseball in the Depression era. New York: Columbia University Press. Baker, William J. 1986. Jesse Owens: An American life. New York: Free Press. Cahn, Susan K. 1994. Coming on strong: Gender and sexuality in twentieth-century women’s sport. New York: Free Press. Carroll, John M. 1992. Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in racial advancement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Carroll, John M. 1999. Red Grange and the rise of modern football. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cayleff, Susan. 1995. Babe: The life and legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Creamer, Robert. 1974. Babe: The legend comes to life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Crepeau, Richard C. 1980. Baseball: America’s diamond mind, 1919–1941. Orlando: University Presses of Florida. Deford, Frank. 1975. Big Bill Tilden: The triumphs and the tragedy. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dyreson, Mark. 2008. Mapping an empire of baseball: American visions of national pastimes and global influence, 1919–1941. In Baseball in America, ed. Donald Kyle, Robert R. Fairbanks, and Benjamin G. Rader, 143–88. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Englemann, Larry. 1988. The goddess and the American girl. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, Stephen R. 1994. Big leagues: Professional baseball, football, and basketball in national memory. New York: William Morrow. Gallico, Paul. 1938. Farewell to sport. New York: Knopf. Guttmann, Allen. 1992. The Olympics: A history of the modern games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hillebrand, Laura. 2001. Seabiscuit: An American legend. New York: Random House. Keys, Barbara J. 2006. Globalizing sport: National rivalry and international community in the 1930s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lattimer, George M., comp. 1932. Official Report, III Olympic Winter Games Lake Placid. New York: Lake Placid Organizing Committee. Lester, Robin. 1995. Stagg’s university: The rise, decline, and fall of big-time football at Chicago. Urbana, University of Illinois Press. Levine, Peter. 1992. Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Lynd, Robert S., and Helen Merrell Lynd. 1935. Middletown in transition. New York: Harcourt Brace. Margolick, David. 2005. Beyond glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a world on the brink. New York: Knopf. Mead, Chris. 1985. Champion—Joe Louis: Black hero in white America. New York: Scribner’s. Oriard, Michael. 2001. King football: Sport and spectacle in the golden age of radio and newsreels, movies and magazines, the weekly and the daily press. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Peterson, Robert W. 1970. Only the ball was white. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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Peterson, Robert W. 1990. Cages to jump shots: Pro basketball’s early years. New York: Oxford University Press. Rader, Benjamin G. 1992. Baseball: A history of America’s game. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ribowsky, Mark. 1995. A complete history of the Negro Leagues, 1884–1955. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group. Riess, Steven A., ed. 1998. Sports and the American Jew. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ruck, Rob. 1987. Sandlot seasons: Sport in black Pittsburgh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Ronald A. 2001. Play-by-play: Radio, television, and big-time college sport. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sperber, Murray. 1993. Shake down the thunder: The creation of Notre Dame football. New York: Henry Holt and Co. Tunis, John R. 1934. Changing trends in sports. Harper’s Magazine (December): 75–86. Voigt, David Quentin. 1983. From gentleman’s sport to the commissioner system. Vol. 1 of American baseball. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Watterson, John Sayle. 2000. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitted, P. D. 1936. Scrappy’s Sport Scraps. Dallas Express, June 27, p. 3. Will Rogers Remarks. 1932. Los Angeles Times, August 4, sec. 1, p. 1. Wiltse, Jeff. 2007. Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wong, John. 1998. FDR and the New Deal on sport and recreation. Sport History Review 29 (November): 173–91.

Films Baseball: Fifth inning, shadow ball. 1994. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS Video. The Great Depression: “To be somebody.” 1993. Dir. Stephen Stept, Joe Morton, Steve Thayer. PBS Video. Knute Rockne and his Fighting Irish. 1993. Dir. Lawrence R Hott. WGBH. People’s Century: 1930, Sporting fever. 1998. Dir. David Espar. PBS Video. Rites of autumn: Seasons of change. 2001. Dir. Don Sperling. Lions Gate Home Entertainment. Seabiscuit. 2003. Dir. Stephen Ives. Warner Home Video. Time capsule the Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1932. 1984. Dir. Bud Greeenspan. Family Home Entertainment.

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SPORTS IN AMERICA A History from Foot Races to Extreme Sports

VOLUME TWO 1940 to Present

EDITED BY

MURRY R. NELSON

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut
London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encyclopedia of sports in America, two volumes : a history from foot races to extreme sports / edited by Murry R. Nelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-34790-0 ((set) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34792-4 ((vol.1) : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-34794-8 ((vol.2) : alk. paper) 1. Sports—United States—History. 2. Sports—Social aspects— United States—History. I. Nelson, Murry R. GV583.E64 2009 796.0973—dc22 2008034749 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. C 2009 by Murry R. Nelson Copyright 

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008034749 ISBN: 978-0-313-34790-0 (set) 978-0-313-34792-4 (Vol. 1) 978-0-313-34794-8 (Vol. 2) First published in 2009 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9

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CONTENTS

Volume One, Colonial Years to 1939 Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

Timeline

xv

Chapter 1 American Sports, 1607–1860 Nancy L. Struna

1

Chapter 2 American Sports, 1861–1889 Gerald R. Gems

41

Chapter 3 American Sports, 1890–1899 Matthew Llewellyn

75

Chapter 4 American Sports, 1900–1909 Jim Nendel

113

Chapter 5 American Sports, 1910–1919 Sarah Bair

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Chapter 6 American Sports, 1920–1929 Murry R. Nelson

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Chapter 7 American Sports, 1930–1939 Mark Dyreson, Chad Carlson, John Gleaves, and Matthew Llewellyn

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CONTENTS

Volume Two, 1940 to Present Chapter 8 American Sports, 1940–1949 Ronald Briley

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Chapter 9 American Sports, 1950–1959 Murry R. Nelson

311

Chapter 10 American Sports, 1960–1969 Maureen Smith

351

Chapter 11 American Sports, 1970–1979 John Wong

393

Chapter 12 American Sports, 1980–1989 Sarah K. Fields

437

Chapter 13 American Sports, 1990 to the Present Jaime Schultz, Callie Batts, Perry Cohen, Sarah Olson, Amie Chaudry, Jaime Ryan, and Caitlin Shannon

477

Resource Guide

543

Index

549

About the Editor and Contributors

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CHAPTER 8

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949 Ronald Briley

OVERVIEW By the late 1930s, spectator sports and participation in sporting activities expanded as the nation recovered from the nadir of the Depression reached during the early years of the decade. Expanding employment in defense industries provided an economic foundation for greater amusement and recreation for the American people. For example, consumer expenditures on spectator sports in 1941 exceeded those of 1929 by more than 60 percent. This growing prosperity and American sport were threatened by the specter of war as Japan expanded into China, while in Europe the rise of fascist dictatorships in Italy and Germany, coupled with a Soviet regime under the control of Joseph Stalin, contributed to instability. The invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, brought World War II to the European continent, and the Olympic Games scheduled for 1940 and 1944 were canceled. Hopes that the United States might in some way escape the international conflict were dashed on December 7, 1941, when the American fleet in Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Navy. Responding to what President Franklin Roosevelt called “a date that will live in infamy,” the U.S. Congress declared war on Japan. In support of their Axis ally, Germany and Italy joined the war against the United States. An era of total war from 1941 to 1945 altered the face of American sport. Concerns about the rationing of gasoline and rubber tires led to the cancellation of automobile races such as the Indianapolis 500. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis feared that it would be necessary to suspend America’s number one spectator sport for the war’s duration, but President Roosevelt asserted that the national pastime was essential for American morale during the international conflict. Nevertheless, the quality of play declined as major league players were drafted or volunteered for military service. Dependent upon players ineligible for conscription, the talent pool for major league baseball included the St. Louis Browns’ one-armed outfielder, Pete Gray, and fifteen-year-old pitcher Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds.

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Major league franchises also emphasized their patriotism through promotions that raised over a billion dollars in war bond purchases. Continuing concerns that the major-league game might be terminated also led Phil Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, to organize the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) with franchises in small midwestern cities. The women’s league paralleled the expanding role of women in the workplace during the war years. Although lacking the popularity of baseball; professional hockey, football, and basketball persevered by curtailing traveling expenses during the wartime shortages. For example, during the 1943 season, the National Football League (NFL) franchises of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles merged to form what fans called the “Steagles.” Manpower shortages severely limited college football programs. In addition to nearly 200 smaller schools that discontinued football during the war, major university programs such as Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Michigan State, Mississippi, and Syracuse limited their scheduled games for the 1943 season. With smaller squads, freshman eligibility was allowed along with unlimited substitution. College basketball, on the other hand, was less impacted by the wartime manpower shortage as individuals over six feet, six inches were not eligible for military service. Less reliant upon manpower, horse racing remained popular during the war years, with Whirlaway capturing racing’s Triple Crown in 1941, surpassing Seabiscuit as the top money-winning racehorse. Major international golf and tennis championships, however, were discontinued during the war. In fact, the Augusta, Georgia, course, on which the Masters Golf Tournament was played, remained closed due to cattle grazing to support the war effort. Boxing events continued to be popular, but fewer championship bouts were scheduled, with prominent fighters such as heavyweight champion Joe Louis in the military. American sports quickly rebounded following the war, taking advantage of pentup demand fostered by wartime restrictions. College football programs expanded to ten-game schedules, with Army, Navy, and Notre Dame enjoying national followings. College basketball trailed football in popularity, but Madison Square Garden promoter Ned Irish drew huge crowds to the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) with games featuring such premiere New York City area teams as Manhattan, Long Island University, St. John’s, LaSalle, and City College of New York. Major-league baseball attendance mushroomed with over 20 million fans attending games in 1948, more than doubling the prewar attendance of 1941. Attendance increased as well for horse racing, prize fighting, the NFL, and even such “minor” sports as professional basketball. Automobile racing returned after the war along with golf and tennis. With wartime restrictions on the production of golf clubs and balls lifted, there was a tremendous expansion of public golf courses and tennis facilities. Private golf and tennis clubs also grew, and many fees became affordable for the growing middle class. Meanwhile, working-class American families were flocking to bowling alleys. Consumption of sporting goods grew rapidly as Americans enjoyed more leisure time. The postwar boom was fueled by the GI Bill, which made low-interest housing loans available for veterans, providing the foundation for the rise of suburbia. By the mid-1950s, approximately 60 percent of Americans had joined the middle class. But the affluent society and consumer culture also ushered in insecurities for Americans that were reflected in the world of sport.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

The suburbs were bastions of white privilege, contrasting sharply with the American crusade against racist Nazi ideology during World War II. Proud of their contributions to the war effort and with an improved economic foundation bolstered by defense jobs (although a considerable racial gap continued to exist between white and black wages), black Americans were no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship, and the civil rights movement was launched. In the realm of sport, racial integration was already a major factor in boxing, while professional football integrated in the mid-1940s with Marion Motley and Bill Willis of the Cleveland Browns. Racial discrimination was apparent, nevertheless, in the reluctance of southern schools to play football games against northern universities with black athletes. The focal point for racial integration, however, was the national pastime of baseball, which instituted a color barrier in the 1880s Jim Crow era. With the 1944 death of Commissioner Landis, who adamantly upheld the color line, and growing pressure from African American sportswriters, the postwar period appeared to be the moment to challenge baseball’s policy of racial segregation. In 1945 Brooklyn Dodgers general manager (GM) Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs to play for Brooklyn’s Montreal farm club. After a successful 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, Robinson was promoted to the Dodgers the following year. Robinson’s debut in a major-league uniform was protested by abusive fans and opponents, while some members of the Dodgers were less than thrilled with a black teammate. Robinson paved the way for other black players by accepting these slings and arrows, while earning Rookie of the Year honors in 1947. Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe soon joined Robinson as key members of the Brooklyn club, while in the late summer of 1947 Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians made Larry Doby the first African American player in the American League (AL). But the pace of baseball integration was slow. When Robinson retired in 1956, the Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox had yet to add a black athlete to their rosters. Nevertheless, racial progress achieved by majorleague baseball paradoxically led to the termination of a black business institution with the collapse of the Negro Leagues as black players and fans focused on the integrated game. The paradoxical nature of the postwar society was also evident in changing gender roles and attitudes. Following the war’s conclusion, there was considerable fear of another depression if working women did not leave the workforce. Unions, business, and the government were concerned that there would not be enough jobs for returning veterans. Accordingly, women were forced out of the factory jobs they had assumed during the war emergency. But this retreat by working women to the domestic sphere was not as monolithic as it is sometimes portrayed. In reality, by 1947, more women were working outside the home than during the war years, but much of this labor force was engaged with less than full-time jobs in secretarial or retail positions designed to supplement expanding patterns of consumption. Thus, women received conflicting messages regarding domesticity during the postwar period. In sport, these ambiguities were demonstrated by the growing sporting establishment acceptance of Mildred “Babe” Didrikson. The accomplishments of Didrikson during the 1932 Summer Olympic Games, as well as barnstorming baseball and basketball promotions, provided the female athlete with a “tomboy” image. This persona was softened or domesticated by her marriage in 1938 and

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Jackie Robinson, the first African American in major-league baseball, debuting in 1947, in the modern era. (Courtesy of Photofest)

emergence in the late 1940s as one of the founders of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League also persevered during the post war period, although the league disbanded in 1954. The busy work schedules of both women and men in the postwar years supporting the consumer economy, along with an increasing divorce rate, led to concerns that children of working parents were the source of a growing juvenile delinquency problem. Coaches began to assume the role of parent as youth sports were championed as the antidote for delinquency by officials such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. By 1949 over 867 teams in twelve states were competing for a national championship in the Little League World Series. The expansion of youth sport and high school athletics also placed considerable pressure upon young players. For example, in the steel community of Massillon, Ohio, high school football coach Paul Brown (who would later move on to coaching success with the Ohio State Buckeyes and Cleveland Browns) established a community football pipeline that allowed him to appoint the football coaches for the town’s three junior high schools. The Massillon High Tigers drew over 187,000 fans to their home games in 1945, a figure only exceeded within the state by Ohio State University. The nation’s post–World War II obsession with sport was evident in the increasing revenues from radio and the emerging television media. Although baseball owners in the 1930s were initially concerned that radio would negatively impact

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

attendance, by 1947 all clubs, with the exception of the Pittsburgh Pirates, negotiated local television contracts to accompany their radio broadcasts. And in 1949, major-league baseball established a seven-year World Series radio deal with the Gillette Razor Company for approximately $200,000 annually, some of which was earmarked for the sport’s pension fund. A year later, baseball reached a six-year World Series television deal with Gillette for $1 million annually. The razor company also enhanced the appeal of professional boxing through its radio and television sponsorship, but television was one of many factors contributing to an attendance decline for baseball beginning in 1949. After reaching a peak of 20.9 million fans attending major-league games in 1948, attendance fell 3 percent the following year, bottoming out at 14 million in 1953. Between 1948 and 1953, minor-league attendance dropped over 70 percent, while the number of clubs contracted from 488 to 155. As the film industry in Hollywood was finding, it was imperative that baseball adjust to the challenges of television and suburbia. With white population departing northern inner cities for the suburbs, many ballparks suffered from a lack of parking as well as the racial perspective that facilities were located in less desirable areas. In the immediate postwar years, the All-American Football Conference (AAFC) challenged the NFL by establishing franchises in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in 1946 the Cleveland Rams of the NFL relocated to Los Angeles. The growing economic pie for sport, evident with an expanding population and increasing radio and television broadcast revenues, also drew the attention of gambling interests. While efforts to fix horse races and boxing matches provided examples of corruption within postwar sport, the most publicized scandal involved point shaving in college basketball. With the emergence of the point-spread system of betting, in which the favorite team had to win by more than the number of points established by the bookmaker, it was possible for young athletes to convince themselves that they could accept payments from gamblers for simply reducing their team’s margins of victory. The scandal that erupted in 1951 revealed that in 1948 and 1949 the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national champion University of Kentucky Wildcats included three players who admitted to accepting bribes. In addition to concerns with corruption as well as changing gender and racial roles, American insecurity in the postwar era was reflected by the emerging Cold War, manifest in sports with the 1948 London Summer Olympic Games. The 1936 Berlin Games were used by the Nazi regime for political purposes, and it proved impossible for the first post–World War II Olympics to escape the shadow of the looming Cold War. Seeking to contain what the administration of President Harry Truman termed Soviet expansionism, the United States implemented the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, to which the Soviet Union responded with the Berlin Blockade. In the arena of sport, questions regarding the independence of the Soviet Olympic Committee and amateur status of Soviet athletes culminated in the decision by the International Olympic Committee to not invite the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies to the 1948 Games. With the exclusion of the Soviet bloc, the United States dominated the London Olympics, amassing 662 points to Sweden’s distant second of 353 in an unofficial point system established by the press. The American values of hard work and individual achievement were heralded by the victory of seventeen-year-old Bob Mathias in the grueling decathlon.

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Tested by world war and conversion to a postwar era in which traditional racial and gender attitudes were in flux, the American people and their sporting culture demonstrated perseverance and resilience during the turbulent 1940s.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Major League Baseball During World War II As war raged on the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia in 1940, majorleague baseball remained largely unaffected, but the passage of the nation’s first peacetime military draft on September 16, 1940, indicated that this would not likely remain the case. The Cincinnati Reds, behind the pitching of Bucky Walters and Paul Derringer, ran away with the National League (NL) pennant, while the Detroit Tigers narrowly defeated the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians in the American League, ending the Yankee streak of four world championships. In the World Series, Cincinnati prevailed in seven games, achieving its first championship since the 1919 Black Sox scandal. For baseball and for the nation, 1941 proved to be a most unusual year. Detroit was in no position to repeat in the American League, as slugger Hank Greenberg became the first major-league player to be drafted by the Army in May 1941. The Yankees were able to regain their dominance, and the nation was captivated by Yankee centerfielder Joe DiMaggio’s fiftysix-game hitting streak. DiMaggio’s amazing feat tended to overshadow the exploits of Boston Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who won the 1941 All-Star Game with a three-run home run and batted .406 for the season; the first .400 hitter since Bill Terry in 1930 (In fact, no batter has achieved the .400 mark since Williams.). The Brooklyn Dodgers, meanwhile, garnered their first NL flag since 1920, narrowly edging out the St. Louis Cardinals in an exciting pennant race. The Yankees won two of the first three games in the 1941 World Series, but with two outs in the top of the ninth in game 4, the Dodgers were on the verge of evening the Series. When Dodger catcher Mickey Owen was unable to handle a third strike and Tommy Henrich reached first base, the Yankees rallied to win the game. The demoralized Dodgers were no match for the Yankees in game 5, and the New York Yankees had another world championship. But baseball and America would confront Joe DiMaggio, Yankee great, salutes his bat during his far greater challenges following the Japanese record fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) attack on Pearl Harbor and entrance into

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

World War II. Many baseball officials thought that the sport might be curtailed as it was during World War I when Secretary of War Newton Baker issued a “work or fight” order in May 1918. To complete the season, baseball officials convinced Baker to extend the deadline until September. During World War II, the baseball establishment was quick to assert its patriotism and deflect suggestions that the sport was nonessential to the war effort. The Sporting News, the so-called Bible of baseball, through articles in late 1941 and early 1942, maintained that the continuation of baseball would encourage morale. Baseball, editorialized the paper, “has a responsibility to fans and the nation heightened by war. It must go on fighting, buoyed by the fact that it is the fun, the entertainment, the joy, the sports interest of the common people.” These sentiments were echoed by Detroit’s Hank Greenberg who was discharged from military service two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. “We are in trouble,” explained Greenberg, “and there is only one thing for me to do—return to the service.” The colorful Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York City and director of National Civil Defense, maintained in February 1942 that baseball was the “fun” of the common people and would be his only source of entertainment for the coming summer. Referring to the rumors of Nazi air attacks on New York City, LaGuardia proclaimed, “If we are to be hit, I’d just as soon get hit in Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, or Ebbets Field, as I would in my apartment. It seems to me; under the stands in the Stadium is as safe a place as any in the city. I am for baseball now, more than ever.” President Franklin Roosevelt agreed. In a letter to Baseball Commissioner Landis, Roosevelt wrote, “There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before, and that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and taking their minds off their work even more than ever.” Although Roosevelt did not believe that major-league baseball constituted an essential occupation for draft-deferment purposes, he argued that the professional game should continue even if rosters had to be filled with nondraft-age players. Officials of major-league baseball attempted to justify the faith expressed in the sport. At their annual meeting in 1942, major-league club owners made plans to aid the war effort and curtail expenses. They agreed to reduce team traveling, to increase night games so that baseball could be viewed by more working people, to set aside receipts from the All-Star Game for an armed services bat and ball fund, and to allocate 10 percent of all employees’ salary toward the war effort. Organized baseball proved to be successful in its fundraising endeavors, contributing approximately $2 million to the United Service Organization (USO), American Red Cross, and other service organizations. In addition, major-league baseball promotions accounted for $1 billion of war bond purchases. Thus, baseball fulfilled the morale function perceived by Roosevelt. Meanwhile, major-league baseball soldiered along on the field of play during the war years. Although rosters were depleted by draft quotas, the talent pool of the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm system, established by GM Branch Rickey, allowed the Cardinals to prevail over Brooklyn in a tight 1942 pennant race, with both ball clubs winning over 100 games. The Yankees again triumphed in the American League, but the perennial champions were dethroned by the Cardinals in the 1942 World Series, the first loss for the Yankees in the fall classic since they were defeated by the St. Louis club in 1926. Key changes in baseball’s executive suites

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Pete Gray One-armed outfielder Pete Gray, who played for the St. Louis Browns in 1945, is often perceived as a prime example of how desperate major-league baseball was for players to fill rosters during wartime manpower shortages. But Gray was more than a novelty. He was an athlete who worked hard to compensate for his disability, and the example he set by playing major-league baseball was an inspiration for many service personnel who lost limbs during the war. Gray was born March 6, 1915, in the mining town of Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. When he was only six years of age, Gray slipped while riding in a wagon, and his right arm was caught in a spoke; leading to an amputation above the elbow. The accident, however, failed to damper the young boy’s enthusiasm for baseball. Although he was naturally right-handed, Gray learned to bat and throw from the left side. He batted with one hand, choking up on the bat handle and hitting for average rather than power. Playing in the outfield, Gray wore his glove on his left hand. When he caught the ball, he would flip the ball in the air, drop his glove, and then catch the ball again before making his throw into the infield. The young outfielder also possessed outstanding speed and displayed daring on the base paths. A semiprofessional baseball star in the coal towns of Pennsylvania, Gray signed a professional contract in 1942 with Three Rivers of the Canadian-American League, hitting .381 in forty-two games. The following year he batted .289 in a full season for Memphis of the Southern Association. Gray enjoyed a fine season in 1944 with Memphis, hitting .333 with five home runs and sixty-eight stolen bases. He was named the league’s Most Valuable Player and earned a shot in 1945 with the Browns. The St. Louis Browns were the perennial doormat of the American League, but with the war-depleted rosters of 1944 they attained their only AL pennant. Gray opened the 1945 season in the outfield for the Browns. On May 19 Gray collected five hits and two runs batted in during a doubleheader sweep of the Yankees in New York City. Despite a good start to the season, Gray, who played left and center field, struggled with hitting the curve ball. Without his right hand to check his swing, it was difficult for Gray to change his timing. With the return of major-league players after the defeat of Germany and Japan, Gray was sent back to the minor leagues. In seventy-seven games for the Browns, he was only able to hit for a .218 average. From 1946 to 1949, Gray struggled as a journeyman outfielder with such minor-league franchises as the Toledo Mud Hens, Elmira Pioneers, and Dallas Stars. In the early 1950s, Gray returned to his hometown of Nanticoke, where he lived as a recluse until his death on June 30, 2002. While some dismissed Gray’s career as a World War II novelty, the outfielder was an inspiration for many disabled veterans and amputees. During his brief major-league career, Gray visited hospitals and rehabilitation centers, reassuring injured veterans that they could find a niche in the postwar economy. Gray, nevertheless, remained somewhat bitter that his career was often dismissed as a wartime aberration.

occurred after the Series. Lee MacPhail resigned as president of the Dodgers to enlist for military service and was replaced by Rickey who had quarreled with Cardinals’ owner Sam Breadon. These changes were destined to have considerable impact on postwar baseball when MacPhail returned from war to run the Yankees. As the quality of play deteriorated in 1943 with lower batting averages and fewer runs scored, the Yankees and Cardinals again met in the World Series with the New York club triumphant. With over 90 percent of prewar rosters now in the

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military (although most former major-league players were seeing more action performing for military teams than in actual combat), baseball’s offensive numbers continued to decline. Nick Etten of the Yankees led the American League in home runs with twenty-two, the lowest total for a home-run leader since 1918 and the dead ball era. The wartime shortage of talent also afforded an opportunity for perennial AL doormat, the St. Louis Browns, to win their first pennant in franchise history by edging the Yankees on the last day of the season. The 1944 baseball campaign concluded in a trolley series won by the Cardinals in six games. The 1944 off-season was a significant one for the future of the game. On November 25, 1944, Baseball Commissioner Landis died at age seventy-eight. The former judge played a pivotal role in restoring the integrity of the game following the Black Sox scandal and “fixed” 1919 World Series, but Landis was also a fervent supporter of baseball’s color barrier. His death offered an opportunity to alter the sport’s racial profile, although this goal was not uppermost for baseball executives in selecting Landis’s successor. Lee MacPhail of the Yankees submitted the name of Kentucky Democratic senator Albert B. “Happy” Chandler to his fellow owners, assuming that a politician might help the sport fend off challenges to the reserve system and baseball’s antitrust exemption. Chandler accepted the position, resigned from the Senate, and took office as Baseball Commissioner on July 12, 1945. Although MacPhail advocated maintaining baseball’s color line, Chandler did not share the racial views of Landis and MacPhail, allowing the sport to assume a leading role in the post–World War II civil rights movement. With the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945, some major-league players began returning to their clubs. Nevertheless, continuing wartime travel restrictions did lead to the cancellation of the 1945 All-Star Game. Behind the pitching of Hal Newhouser and the hitting of Hank Greenberg, back in a Tiger uniform after military service, Detroit squeezed past the Washington Senators for the AL pennant. In the senior circuit, the Chicago Cubs toppled the Cardinals from their wartime pedestal. With the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945, Americans were able to give their full attention to the first postwar World Series, won by the Tigers in seven games.

World War II and the Negro Leagues Segregation in major-league baseball encouraged Andrew “Rube” Foster to form the Negro National League (NNL) in 1920. Although the NNL struggled financially, especially during the Depression years, with eighteen different franchises between 1933 and 1948, there was never any doubt as to the quality of play. In barnstorming games between Negro League players and white major leaguers, the black teams more than held their own. Two of the most prominent franchises in the NNL were located in Pittsburgh. The Homestead Grays were owned and managed by business and civic leader Cumberland “Cum” Posey, while the Pittsburgh Crawfords were operated by Gus Greenlee, a notorious figure in the city’s numbers racket. The Grays featured players such as base stealer and centerfielder James “Cool Papa” Bell, first baseman Buck Leonard, and the “black Babe Ruth,” catcher Josh Gibson. The star attraction in the NNL was Leroy “Satchel” Paige, who pitched for at least eight clubs. In 1938 the NNL was challenged by the formation of the Negro American League (NAL) with franchises in the South and Midwest.

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All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) Fearing that major-league attendance might collapse with so many players in military service during World War II, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs Phillip Wrigley assumed the lead in forming a girls’ softball league to move into the big-league parks in case of an emergency. While the women’s league never replaced major-league baseball, over 600 women were given an opportunity to display their athletic skills in a baseball organization that extended beyond the war years. Initially called the All-American Girls Softball League, the new women’s league began play in the spring of 1943. The game included elements of both baseball and softball, allowing for stolen bases and establishing base and pitching distances beyond traditional softball dimensions, but the pitching remained underhanded with a conventional softball. Wrigley’s scouts believed they could find quality players in the softball leagues of cities such as Chicago, as well as in Canada where the sport of softball was popular. Nearly 300 women were invited to Chicago for final tryouts, and sixty were selected for the league’s initial season. Salaries ranged from $45 to $85 a week, a decent salary for the era. In addition to athletic abilities, feminine qualities and appearance were high priorities for the women who were required to attend Helena Rubenstein’s charm school. For uniforms, the women donned a one-piece shortskirted flared tunic fashioned after figure-skating uniforms of the time period. Wrigley approached major-league owners to have the women play in vacant parks while the men were on the road. The proposal was not well received by his fellow owners, and instead Wrigley contacted business leaders in smaller midwestern cities, and the league opened with teams in Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin; Rockford, Illinois; and South Bend, Indiana. To attain a degree of competitive balance, the rosters were assigned by the league office. The initial 1943 season was a success. Racine was the first champion of the All-American Girls Ball League (the name change was made near the end of the 1943 season, but the league became better known as the AAGPBL in the late 1940s when a smaller baseball and overhand pitching were incorporated into the game). With a 108-game schedule, the four-team league drew 176,612 fans. The games were well promoted by the local small-market media, and the women athletes were well accepted during the war years when women successfully performed traditional male roles in many professions. For the second season of the AAGPBL, franchises were added in the larger minorleague cities of Minneapolis and Milwaukee, but these franchises failed to attract the local business and media support garnered by the smaller market clubs; although the Milwaukee Chicks did capture the 1944 championship. Acknowledging that major-league baseball would persevere during the war, Wrigley sold the league to his Chicago advertising executive, Arthur Meyerhoff. Under Meyerhoff’s leadership, the Milwaukee Chicks were moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, while the Minneapolis Millerettes were transferred to Fort Wayne, Indiana. The charm schools were discontinued, but the quality of play remained strong and continued to attract crowds. League attendance in 1945 exceeded over 450,000 spectators. Accordingly, Meyerhoff saw no reason to disband the women’s league when World War II ended, and the AAGPBL experienced the same postwar boom as the major leagues and other spectator sports. The AAGPBL expanded to ten teams, formed a minor-league circuit, and toured Latin America. Attendance peaked in 1948 with ten clubs attracting 910,000 fans. But like its male counterpart, the AAGPBL experienced a downturn in attendance beginning in 1949. One reason for the league’s economic problems was that team directors voted to purchase the AAGPBL from Meyerhoff and operate each team

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independently. The league also suffered from the growing leisure opportunities in the suburbs and the emergence of television. Similar to minor-league baseball, the AAGPBL responded to the crisis by contracting. Down to only five teams by the conclusion of the 1954 season, the league disbanded. During the AAGPBL’s existence from 1943 to 1954, the Rockford Peaches earned four championships, and the Milwaukee/Grand Rapids Chicks claimed three titles. Over 600 outstanding female athletes performed in the AAGPBL; including Mary “Bonne” Baker, Jaynne Bittner, and Helen Callaghan. The AAGPBL was forgotten by many Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. However, the 1992 film A League of Their Own and the 1988 efforts of former players to gain recognition by the Baseball Hall of Fame recaptured the glory of women’s baseball in the 1940s.

The two Negro leagues enjoyed their greatest success during the war years as defense jobs provided black Americans with greater income and the stability for a real Negro League World Series. In 1942 the Kansas City Monarchs, behind the pitching of the irrepressible Paige, defeated the Homestead Grays, while during the following two seasons the Grays prevailed over the Birmingham Black Barons. The 1944 East-West All-Star Game for the Negro Leagues drew 46,000 fans, many of them white, to Comiskey Park in Chicago. Following the postwar integration of the major leagues, the Negro Leagues rapidly declined in support as black fans opted for the racially mixed game. The NNL failed in 1948, while NAL clubs such as the Kansas City Monarchs continued to barnstorm during the early 1950s. Despite their collapse, Negro League clubs provided a sense of community and racial pride for black Americans during the Jim Crow era.

Post–World War II Baseball (1946–1949) As World War II ended, increasing pressure was brought to bear upon majorleague executives to integrate the game. Black baseball writers such as Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Frank Young of the Chicago Defender, and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, joined by white press allies such as Lester Rodney with the communist Daily Worker, editorialized that segregation was inconsistent with the democratic values pursued by the United States in World War II and the emerging Cold War. The publication of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) also made a strong case that segregation conflicted with American values. Accordingly, political pressure was employed in such northern cities as Boston and New York. Because of political intervention by city councilman H. Y. Muchnick, the Boston Red Sox invited Jackie Robinson, Marvin Williams, and Sam Jethroe of the Negro Leagues to a Fenway Park tryout in April 1945. Although Robinson rattled line drives off Fenway’s “Green Monster” in left field, the Red Sox were not interested in signing a black player. Commissioner Chandler also created a Committee on Baseball Integration in the spring of 1945, but Yankee owner and general manger Lee MacPhail blocked the commissioner’s initiative. Meanwhile, Branch Rickey was quietly paving the way for the signing of a black player in Brooklyn. After assuming the posts of president and general manager with the Dodgers in 1942, Rickey secretly informed club stockholders that he was

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Branch Rickey Wesley Branch Rickey served as an executive for the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals, Brooklyn Dodgers, and Pittsburgh Pirates. He pioneered the farm system for developing talent and played an instrumental role in shattering baseball’s color line when he signed Jackie Robinson in 1945. Rickey was born December 20, 1881, near Lucasville, Ohio. He was raised with a strong work ethic and religious faith. He played and coached baseball as well as football at Ohio Wesleyan from which he graduated in 1906. While coaching at Ohio Wesleyan, Rickey became incensed when African American first baseman Charles Thomas was refused accommodations with the rest of the team. According to biographers, this experience convinced Rickey to address racial injustice if he were in position to do so later in life. Rickey played major-league baseball as a catcher with the Cincinnati Reds, St. Louis Browns, and New York Highlanders between 1904 and 1907. He retired after injuring his throwing shoulder and batting only .182 with the New York club. After a bout with tuberculosis, Rickey enrolled in law school at the University of Michigan, where he also coached baseball. After graduation, Rickey briefly practiced law in Boise, Idaho. But Rickey’s future was in baseball, not the legal profession. In 1913 St. Louis Browns owner Robert Hedges hired Rickey as field manager and general manager. Hedges selected Rickey because he was impressed that as a young player, Rickey followed his religious principles and refused to play on the Sabbath. Nevertheless, Rickey’s lectures on baseball and temperance failed to turn things around for the Browns, and in 1917 Rickey moved across town to the Cardinals, serving as manager and president of the club. The patriotic Rickey, however, missed the 1918 season when he volunteered for military duty during World War I. Rickey was relieved from his managing duties in 1925, but continued as vice-president and general manager of the Cardinals, who won the World Series in 1926, 1934, and 1942. Talent for the Cardinals was developed through Rickey’s network of minorleague or farm clubs. Rickey also earned a percentage on sales of surplus players in the farm system, and the executive was perceived by St. Louis players as excessively frugal in his contract negotiations. Although St. Louis won the world championship in 1942, Rickey quarreled with Cardinals owner Sam Breadon, and his contract was not renewed. The temperamental executive quickly landed a position with the Brooklyn Dodgers, serving as president, general manager, and co-owner of the club. To compete with the Cardinals, Rickey began to pursue mining a new market for talent with African Americans and the Negro Leagues, a business decision that coincided with his belief in equal opportunity. In October 1945 Rickey signed Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues to a contract with the Montreal Royals, the top farm club of the Dodgers. Rickey, however, failed to compensate the Kansas City club for Robinson’s services, asserting that Robinson did not have a valid contract with the Negro League team. After a successful season at Montreal, Robinson, with Rickey’s support, broke major-league baseball’s color line in 1947. With the addition of Robinson, as well as other black athletes such as Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, the Dodgers won the NL pennant in 1947 and 1949. Rickey, nevertheless, was maneuvered out of Brooklyn by his rival Walter O’Malley in 1950. The following year, the seventy-yearold Rickey signed a contract to serve as general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Rickey magic failed to work with the lowly Pirates, and after five seasons he was

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eased out of his position. Some of the players developed by Rickey, however, contributed to the 1960 world championship in Pittsburgh. Rickey refused to slow down, and in 1959 he accepted the presidency of the Continental League, a proposed third major league, which convinced the American and National Leagues to expand. He returned to the Cardinals in 1963 as special assistant to owner Gussie Busch, but Rickey’s presence led to tension in the Cardinal front office. Rickey was asked to resign after the Cardinals won the 1964 World Series. Rickey suffered a heart attack while delivering a speech upon his induction into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame and died on December 9, 1965. Two years later he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The politically conservative Republican was perhaps a strange choice to lead baseball’s civil rights movement, but Rickey was a sincere believer in the concept of equal opportunity, maintaining a life-long friendship with Jackie Robinson.

seriously scouting black players. Rickey’s search was certainly motivated in part by his shrewd desire to be the first baseball executive to tap a rich talent pool in the Negro Leagues. But the conservative Republican also had a strong aversion to racism that could be traced to his pious Methodist roots and experience with racial prejudice against one of his black players when he coached at Ohio Wesleyan University in the early 1900s. In 1945 Rickey announced that he was scouting black players in order to form a new Negro League team, the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. This explanation was a subterfuge, and on August 15, 1945, Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs was invited to Rickey’s Brooklyn offices. It was immediately apparent to Robinson that Rickey was interested in a great deal more than the Brown Dodgers. The Brooklyn executive was intent upon breaking baseball’s color line, but he wanted a black athlete who would succeed on and off the playing field. Thus, Rickey was impressed with Robinson’s military service and athletic record at UCLA where Robinson played football, basketball, and baseball, in addition to running track. Robinson was not the best player in the Negro Leagues, but Rickey believed that Robinson at age twenty-six possessed the maturity to withstand the animosity he would be subjected to by racist fans, opponents, and even teammates. Rickey was also pleased to learn that Robinson was contemplating marriage, as the executive believed any athlete breaking the color barrier would need a supportive spouse. Finally, Rickey told Robinson that he was looking for a man who had the courage not to fight back against insults. As a racial pioneer, if Robinson failed, it might set baseball integration back for decades. Robinson assured the Brooklyn president that he indeed had the right player, and on August 25, 1945, Rickey signed Robinson to a minor-league contract. Rickey, however, failed to compensate the Kansas City Monarchs, asserting that Robinson did not have a valid contract with the Negro League franchise. In October 1945 Rickey announced that Robinson would be assigned to the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club in the International League, for the 1946 season. Robinson led the league in hitting with a .349 average and was embraced by Montreal fans. Even though the Dodgers were involved in a tight pennant race with the Cardinals, Rickey refused to call up Robinson to the parent

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club. The Cardinals and Dodgers finished the season in a tie, but St. Louis prevailed by winning the first two contests in the best-two-out-of-three-game playoff format. The 1946 AL season was dominated by the return of superstars such as Bob Feller and Ted Williams from the military. Feller recorded twenty-six victories for the Cleveland Indians while striking out 348 batters. Williams led the Red Sox to the pennant with 38 home runs, 123 runs batted in, and a batting average of .342. The 1946 World Series was won by the Cardinals in game 7 when Enos Slaughter scored from first base on a double by Harry Walker. While baseball attendance boomed after the war and NL fans were treated to a thrilling pennant race, the major-league baseball establishment was confronted with significant challenges on the labor front. Jorge Pascual and his brothers, heirs to a Mexico City brewing fortune, attempted to lure major-league players to Mexico with lucrative bonuses and contracts up to $50,000 for three years. Cardinal stars such as Stan Musial were targeted by the Pascual brothers who did succeed in signing pitchers Hal Lanier and Fred Martin from the St. Louis franchise. In all, twenty-seven players from the major leagues journeyed to Mexico in 1946. Among the more significant players inking contracts with the Mexican League were Mickey Owen of the Dodgers, Vern Stephens of the Browns, and Danny Gardella of the New York Giants. Dissatisfied with living conditions in Mexico and the Pascual brothers’ failure to meet their financial obligations, most of the American players returned to the United States by 1948. Commissioner Chandler labeled those who jumped to the Mexican League as “disloyal” to organized baseball and banned them from the game for violating the sport’s reserve clause, which bound the player to the exclusive service of one club. In response to Chandler’s decision, former Giants outfielder Gardella challenged the reserve clause in the courts as a violation of anti-trust law. Most jumpers disassociated themselves from the Gardella case and petitioned the commissioner for reinstatement. Mickey Owen asserted, “I think Danny is wrong. I would never sue baseball. Baseball didn’t make us go to Mexico. I want to play baseball, not destroy it. Baseball must have the reserve clause” (Sporting News, February 23, 1949). Perhaps because of Owens’s appeal or, more likely, due to the threat of Gardella’s lawsuit, Chandler reinstated the delinquent players in June 1950. Gardella dropped his legal case against the reserve clause after a cash settlement with organized baseball. In addition to the 1946 labor threat posed by the Pascual brothers and Mexican League, discontent with the working conditions in major-league baseball was evident in the efforts of labor leader Robert Murphy to form the American Baseball Guild. While the Guild’s organizing endeavors ultimately proved unsuccessful, the threat posed by players’ unionization convinced baseball ownership to increase the minimum salary to $5,000 annually, provide medical coverage for game-related injuries, and pursue the creation of a pension plan. Ownership, however, refused to consider changes to the sport’s reserve clause. Hoping that baseball labor unrest was tamed by these minor reforms, the baseball establishment confronted the issue of racial integration in 1947—a time in which Dodger announcer Red Barber later proclaimed “all hell broke loose” in baseball. The Dodgers announced that Jackie Robinson would open the season at first base for the Brooklyn franchise. Initial efforts by some southern players on the Dodgers, led by Dixie Walker, to form a team revolt against Robinson were squashed by manager Leo Durocher, upon whom Rickey depended to guide

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

Robinson through his difficult first season. Rickey’s plans, however, were disrupted when, shortly before the season opened, Commissioner Chandler suspended Durocher for the season. Responding to complaints lodged by Yankee owner Lee MacPhail, Chandler launched an investigation into Durocher’s association with gamblers, such as film star George Raft, and the circumstances surrounding the manager’s marriage to recently divorced actress Laraine Day. A disappointed Rickey tapped his old friend Burt Shotton to manage the Dodgers and preside over Robinson’s shattering of baseball’s color line. On April 15, 1947, Robinson made his major-league debut with the Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, becoming the first African American player since the inception of segregation in the sport during the 1880s. Warmly received by Brooklyn fans, Robinson faced his first major test on April 22 in Philadelphia, where Phillies manager Ben Chapman fostered a racial tirade aimed at the lone black player on the field. Chapman’s language was so offensive that it led many Dodger players, especially second baseman Eddie Stanky and southern-born shortstop Harold “Pee Wee” Reese, to rally around their teammate. Opposition to Robinson also surfaced with reports that members of the St. Louis Cardinals, many of whom were from the South, were prepared to strike rather than play against Robinson. National League President Ford Frick made it clear that any striking players would be violating their contracts and face suspensions. The proposed boycott quickly fizzled. Robinson, nevertheless, continued to suffer verbal and physical abuse throughout the 1947 season, replying to his critics with timely hitting and dazzling displays of daring and speed on the base paths. Robinson batted .297 and stole twenty-nine bases, while scoring 125 runs and leading the Dodgers to the NL pennant. He was named NL Rookie of the Year by the Sporting News; a paper that originally questioned the wisdom of Rickey’s “great experiment.” In the American League, the New York Yankees were establishing a new dynasty that not even a triple-crown season by Ted Williams could overcome. The Yankees were led by the hitting of DiMaggio and the pitching of Allie Reynolds and reliever Joe Page. The 1947 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers marked a rivalry that dominated baseball through the 1950s. The Yankees won in a seven-game series highlighted by game 3 in which Bill Bevens carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning, only to lose the game 3–2 on a double by Dodger pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto. The Yankee victory party after game 7 was marred by the heavy drinking of Lee MacPhail who resigned his position with the club. The pace of baseball integration was slow; during the 1948 season, only the Dodgers, Indians, and Browns fielded black players. Robinson’s numbers declined somewhat during his second season with the Dodgers, but he was joined in the Brooklyn starting lineup by African American catcher Roy Campanella. Durocher returned as Brooklyn manager, but he failed to motivate the team, moved to the Giants, and was again replaced at the helm of the Dodgers by Shotton. The Dodgers finished behind the Boston Braves who won the National League on the pitching of Johnny Sain and Warren Spahn. In the American League, the Cleveland Indians defeated the Red Sox in a one-game playoff. Indian owner Bill Veeck had integrated the American League in 1947 with Larry Doby, who hit .301 with fourteen home runs and sixty-six runs batted in during the 1948 campaign. While the

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Cleveland pitching staff was led by nineteen-game-winner Feller, Veeck signed Satchel Paige, who as a rookie in his late forties contributed six wins and a save to the pennant drive. The Indians defeated the Braves in six games, earning their first world championship since 1920. The decade concluded in 1949 with a World Series again featuring the Yankees and Dodgers, two franchises that would dominate the sport during the 1950s. Brooklyn clinched the NL flag over St. Louis on the last day of the season. The Dodgers were paced by a Most Valuable Player performance from Robinson who hit .342 with 124 runs batted in and thirty-seven stolen bases. Black players were crucial in the Dodger pennant drive as rookie Don Newcombe won seventeen games and catcher Roy Campanella slammed twenty-two home runs and drove in eighty-two runs. The Yankees, on the other hand, under the direction of George Weiss failed to sign black ballplayers. But Weiss did select Casey Stengel to manage the club and under his leadership the Yankees achieved a dynasty in the 1950s. Major-league baseball weathered a world war and played an important role in sparking the civil rights movement. But the pace of racial integration in the sport was slow, and players were growing restive under the restrictions of the reserve clause. Attendance at major-league games began to decline in 1949, and the sport was confronted with new challenges to its status as the national pastime. Suburbia and increased leisure time presented new alternatives for the middle class, and baseball attempted to respond to these changing population patterns in the 1950s with the first franchise shifts since 1903.

Basketball College Basketball Similar to the situation in football, college basketball overshadowed the professional game during the 1940s. The popularity of college basketball was fostered through the efforts of Madison Square Garden officials in New York City and Ned Irish of the New York World Telegram to generate revenues during the Depression era by sponsoring doubleheaders between city teams and top schools from around the country. In 1935 Irish left the newspaper business and became director of basketball operations for Madison Square Garden, inviting sixteen teams to participate in a new tournament which he called the National Invitation Tournament (NIT). The success of the NIT encouraged the NCAA to establish its own championship tournament the following season, but the NIT remained the more prestigious event into the 1950s. Overall, World War II impacted college basketball less than most sports. With only ten players on a squad, it was easier for basketball teams to gain permission for travel. The sport also benefited from the military’s draft regulations. Because of standard sizes for beds and uniforms, the military exempted anyone over six feet, six inches from service. Accordingly, some of college basketball’s best athletes, such as DePaul’s 60 1000 star George Mikan, were ineligible for conscription. One of the strongest teams in the country during the early 1940s was Long Island University (LIU) coached by Clair Bee, author of the Chip Hilton book series crediting amateur sport for shaping character. In the 1941 NIT, Bee’s club defeated the

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

powerful Seton Hall Pirates, coached by “Honey” Russell, who entered the tournament with a forty-two-game winning streak. The primacy of New York City basketball was also upheld by St. John’s University, which gained NIT titles in 1943 and 1944. In the mid-1940s, big men from the Midwest challenged the New York City game based on ball control and precision passing by shorter players. In 1945 DePaul, behind center George Mikan, claimed the NIT title, while the NCAA championship was awarded to Oklahoma A&M, who defeated New York University by a 49–45 margin. The Oklahoma A&M (later Oklahoma State University) squad was led by seven-foot center Bob Kurland and coached by Hank Iba. Iba’s club, which also won the 1946 NCAA tournament, was known for its deliberate style of play and tenacious man-to-man defense. During the late 1940s another coaching legend emerged at the University of Kentucky. Adolph Rupp arrived at the university in 1930, making basketball respectable and popular among southern football fans. Rupp endeared himself to residents of the Blue Grass state by recruiting at home and winning, employing a lively fast-break style of play. The University of Kentucky Wildcats between 1946 and 1949 won 130 games, earning NCAA championships in 1948 and 1949. But the luster of these championships was tarnished when investigations into point shaving in college basketball revealed that star players Ralph Beard and Alex Groza accepted bribes from gamblers during their college careers. This investigation into cheating at Kentucky was an outgrowth of a broader scandal in which New York City district attorney Frank Hogan discovered that gamblers had infiltrated the basketball programs of LIU and City College of New York (which won both the NCAA and NIT tournaments in 1950), as well as other clubs participating in the NIT. The point-shaving scandal cast a shadow over college basketball for the next decade. But college basketball in the 1940s also reflected racial discrimination in the United States. Most of the major college teams in the decade were composed exclusively of white athletes. A notable exception to this picture of racial segregation in college basketball was Jackie Robinson at UCLA. During his tenure as a UCLA Bruin (1939–41), Robinson led the Pacific Coast Conference in scoring for two seasons before leaving the university for financial reasons. After military service during World War II, Robinson made his mark in baseball rather than basketball. William Garrett became the first black to play basketball in the prestigious Big Ten Conference during the 1947 season. Garrett earned All-American honors at the University of Indiana and was drafted by the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1951. The state of Indiana, which was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, was not an easy place for Garrett to play. Much like Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Garrett endured taunts from fans and opponents, while dealing with segregated facilities on the road. But Garrett paved the way for other black players, and by the time he left Indiana in 1951 Big Ten basketball rosters included a half-dozen black athletes. The civil rights movement confronted racial segregation in college basketball during the 1950s and 1960s, but during the 1940s most black college basketball players performed at black institutions such as Xavier University of Louisiana, Alabama State, Morgan State, Lincoln University, and Wiley College in Marshall, Texas.

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Hank Iba and Bob Kurland Hank Iba was basketball coach at Oklahoma A&M College (which became Oklahoma State in 1957) from 1934 to 1970, gaining a reputation for instilling discipline in his players. Iba’s teams were characterized by tenacious defense and a patterned motion offense. With seven-foot center Bob Kurland, the Oklahoma A&M Cowboys were NCAA basketball champions in 1945 and 1946, providing fuel for the post– World War II interest in college basketball but avoiding the scandals that plagued the sport during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Iba was born August 6, 1904, in Easton, Missouri. After graduating from Easton High School in 1923, he played basketball at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Iba completed his education in 1928 at Marysville State Teachers College in Missouri, where he obtained a degree in physical education. Coaching at Classen High School in Oklahoma City, Iba’s team won the state basketball championship in 1928. He then coached at Marysville State from 1929 to 1933 and the University of Colorado for the 1933–34 season before accepting the position at Oklahoma A&M. Iba’s teams were respected for their patient passing game, which spread out the opposing defense. When the Cowboys were on defense, Iba employed a physical halfcourt, man-to-man defense dependent upon teamwork and discipline, which Iba insisted upon in his players. In 1943 he offered a scholarship to a gangly and somewhat uncoordinated Bob Kurland, whom Iba helped develop into one of college basketball’s outstanding players in the late 1940s. Kurland was born December 23, 1924, in St. Louis. Kurland, 60 600 at age thirteen, led Jennings High School in suburban St. Louis to two berths in the Missouri state basketball tournament. Although Kurland was 60 900 during his senior year in high school, his awkwardness kept him from gaining much attention from college coaches. Iba, however, invited Kurland to a tryout in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Sensing the young player’s potential, Iba offered Kurland a college scholarship in 1942, promising to teach him the game of basketball. Because his height exceeded 60 600 , Kurland was ineligible for military conscription. After learning a hook shot and getting his weight up to 225 pounds, Kurland was a starter for the 1943–44 season, averaging thirteen points per game while earning AllAmerican honors. The defensive strategy Iba employed with Kurland caused a major controversy in college basketball. The coach stationed his center under the basket where Kurland was able to deflect shots on their downward arc. In response to this tactic, also allegedly employed by George Mikan at DePaul University, the NCAA adopted the goal-tending rule before the 1944–45 season. This rule change, however, failed to slow down Kurland and the Cowboys, who finished the season with a 26–4 record. Kurland topped the 1944–45 season off by scoring twenty-two of his team’s forty-nine points in the NCAA championship game victory over New York University at Madison Square Garden. Following the championship, the Cowboys played a Red Cross charity game against NIT champion DePaul and their big man, 60 1000 George Mikan. With Mikan in early foul trouble, Kurland and the Cowboys prevailed 52–44. The following year was another banner season for Iba and Kurland as the Cowboys successfully defended their national championship, becoming the first team to win repeat titles. In the championship 43–40 victory over North Carolina, Kurland was again dominant; scoring twenty-three points and earning Most Valuable Player honors. Kurland turned down professional basketball offers following his senior year at Oklahoma A&M, accepting a job with Phillips Petroleum and playing for the

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

company’s AAU team. In addition to three AAU titles with the Phillip 66ers, Kurland played on the 1948 and 1952 gold medal–winning U.S. Olympic teams. After the 1946 championship, Iba continued his winning ways in Oklahoma. His 1949 club lost the NCAA championship game to Kentucky, and Iba coached the U.S. Olympic basketball team to gold medals in 1964 and 1968. Iba believed that the United States should have been awarded another gold medal in 1972, but a controversial last-second basket gave the victory to the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s, many critics asserted that the game was evolving beyond the legendary coach. Iba cared little for recruiting and fast-break basketball. He retired in 1970 with a record of 767 collegiate victories against only 338 losses. Iba died from heart failure on January 15, 1993, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he continued to live near his beloved Oklahoma State University.

Professional Basketball During the 1940s, professional basketball was often considered a minor sport, but during the last years of the decade a foundation was established which allowed the sport to assume its major status during the 1950s and 1960s. For the 1949–50 basketball season, the National Basketball League (NBL) and Basketball Association of America (BAA) merged to form the NBA. This realignment provided stability for professional basketball as the sport penetrated national markets during the post–World War II period. The NBL was formed in the Midwest in 1937. Playing a pivotal role in its formation were corporations such as Goodyear and Firestone in Akron, Ohio, and General Electric in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The corporate teams were powers in the Midwest Industrial League and joined with ten predominantly Midwestern independent clubs to establish the NBL. In 1940–41 and 1941–42, the Oshkosh (Wisconsin) All-Stars won the NBL title behind the shooting and rebounding of center Leroy Edwards. World War II and the military, however, deprived Oshkosh of some key players, and the 1942–43 league title was claimed by the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Redskins. The 1943–44 and 1944–45 titles belonged to the Fort Wayne Pistons led by the backcourt duo of Buddy Jeannette and Bobby McDermott. The racial integration of the NBL during the war years, however, is often a neglected story. The motivation for the signing of black players was primarily the shortage of white athletes due to military service. During the 1942–43 season, the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets and Chicago Studebakers were struggling franchises and signed ten black players to complete their rosters. But the infusion of black talent was unable to save the franchises, which folded. By the 1943–44 season, Willie Smith, who played for the all-black barnstorming New York Renaissance during the 1930s, was the only black athlete in the NBL, playing for the Cleveland Chase Brass. Nevertheless, during the postwar period several franchises signed black players, and in the 1948–49 season the New York Renaissance team was recruited to replace the league’s Detroit franchise. The Renaissance became the Dayton Rens and compiled a 14–26 record during the last year of the NBL. The black athletes of the NBL, however, failed to attract the attention garnered by George Mikan, the league’s top recruit who, after leaving DePaul University,

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secured a $60,000 five-year contract with the Chicago Gears. Mikan led the Gears to the 1946–47 NBL championship, but the following year the Gears joined the new Professional Basketball League of America (PBLA). The PBLA, however, folded after only a few weeks, resulting in Mikan and his former teammates being parceled out to other NBL franchises. Mikan ended up with the Minneapolis Lakers. With Mikan as the unanimous choice for the NBL’s Most Valuable Player, the Lakers defeated the Rochester Royals for the 1947–48 NBL crown. The following season the Minneapolis club, along with NBL franchises in Rochester, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis, joined the rival BAA. These defections paved the way for the NBL merger with the BAA before the 1949–50 season. To take advantage of the continuing popularity of college basketball as well as the boom in spectator sports after the war, the BAA was formed in 1946 with businessmen Walter Brown of Boston and Al Sutphin of Cleveland, along with Ned Irish and Madison Square Garden, assuming leading roles. The league opened with eleven clubs located primarily in eastern cities. Although crowds were initially small and few teams enjoyed radio contracts, the BAA survived its first season, with the Chicago Stags defeating the Philadelphia Warriors for the championship. The 1947–48 campaign indicated that the new league was struggling to survive. Four of the organized franchises collapsed, and, to provide a balanced schedule, the Baltimore Bullets of the American Basketball League were brought into the BAA. The general low caliber of play in the BAA was evident when the new Baltimore franchise won the 1947–48 championship. The BAA, however, scored a coup before the 1948–49 season by getting four of the best NBL teams—Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, Rochester, and Indianapolis—to defect to the new league. With the addition of this new talent, attendance soared with much attention focused upon the league’s new star, Mikan, who led the Lakers to the 1948–49 championship while averaging 30.3 points per game in the playoffs. The NBL played out the 1948–49 campaign with eight teams before a merger with the BAA, which resulted in the establishment of the NBA. The new, somewhat unwieldy, league included seventeen teams in three divisions, but the final results were the same, as Mikan and the Lakers garnered the 1949–50 NBA championship. A solid foundation was in place for the sport’s growth during the 1950s. But African Americans were excluded from the professional basketball league in the late 1940s. Thus, outstanding black players were recruited by the Harlem Globetrotters, who replaced the New York Renaissance as the nation’s dominant black basketball team. The Globetrotters were formed by Chicago promoter Abe Saperstein. When he struggled to gain bookings for the barnstorming club, Saperstein turned to caricature, featuring the dribbling antics of Marques Haynes and the comedy routines of Goose Tatum. While the Globetrotters were drawing huge crowds, critics of the team asserted that their clowning reinforced racial stereotypes. With the integration of the NBA in the early 1950s, the Globetrotters were no longer able to secure the services of basketball’s best black athletes. The team, nevertheless, remains a staple of American entertainment into the twenty-first century.

Women’s Basketball Although women were denied a professional league, their enthusiasm for basketball was apparent in the Amateur Athletic Union’s (AAU) national basketball

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

tournament beginning in 1928. During the early 1940s, AAU women’s basketball was dominated by the American Institute of Commerce (AIC) of Davenport, Iowa. The AIC Stenos were AAU champions in 1942 and 1943, demonstrating the legacy of women’s basketball in Iowa as all of the young players, with an average age of seventeen and one-half years old, were graduates of state schools. In the mid-1940s, the focus of AAU women’s basketball shifted to the southeastern United States. Consolidated Vultee Aircraft was the largest manufacturing employer of women during World War II; 30 percent of the firm’s workers at its Nashville plant were female. The women’s factory team representing Vultee Aircraft, usually known as the Bomberettes, which was led by Alline Banks and Margaret Sexton, achieved its first AAU title in the 1944–45 season. With the reduction of employment for women in manufacturing following the war, the Bomberettes found new sponsorship with a beer distributor, Cook’s Goldblum. As the Bloomers, the former aviation workers won AAU titles in the 1945–46 and 1946–47 seasons. Leaving a disappointing marriage, Alline Banks Pate was lured to Atlanta where she played for the Atlanta Sports Arena’s Blues, leading the squad to the 1947–48 AAU championship. Alline Banks retired from basketball after her second marriage, but she returned for the 1949–50 season, securing a national AAU title for Nashville Business College and assuring her status as the predominant female player of the 1940s. Women’s basketball during the 1940s also featured its own barnstorming team with the All-American Red Heads, a team formed in 1936 in Cassville, Missouri, by Connie Mack Olson to promote his beauty parlors. Featuring their trademark red hair, the women, many of whom were former AAU stars, exhibited outstanding talent and flamboyance throughout the 1940s, barnstorming the country while winning approximately 70 percent of their games against mostly male teams. The All-American Red Heads’ novelty wore off in the 1970s as opportunities for young women in college basketball expanded with congressional passage of Title IX mandating equality in educational funding for both women’s and men’s athletic programs. The 1940s demonstrated the widening popularity of basketball in American society for both men and women.

Football College Football Challenging baseball’s national popularity was college football, which enjoyed a greater following than the professional game. The college game gained a wide audience during the 1920s with the emergence of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish under the direction of Knute Rockne and the exploits of the “Galloping Ghost,” Red Grange, at the University of Illinois, but by the end of the decade there were clear indications of overzealous recruiting on the part of big football schools. At its December 1939 Chicago national convention, the NCAA voted to promote amateurism through a policy in which athletic scholarships would be based on need and administered through the university administrations rather than athletic departments. To enforce this new regulation, the NCAA could expel offenders through a two-thirds vote of the membership. The NCAA, nevertheless, lacked funding for investigating violations of its amateur code, and on the eve of American entrance into a global conflict, the organization’s 1940 convention focused upon how athletic programs might encourage military preparedness.

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Although there was considerable concern about the international situation and the emergence of a peacetime draft in 1940, college football programs faced few restrictions in the last year before America’s entrance into the war. The University of Minnesota, based upon press association polling of sportswriters and coaches, was named the NCAA national football champions, while Michigan running back Tom Harmon was selected as winner of the Heisman Trophy. In 1941 the Minnesota Golden Gophers repeated as national champs, while their stellar running back, Bruce Smith, won the Heisman before volunteering for military service in the Navy. World War II brought considerable change to college football. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, fears of a possible Japanese attack on the West Coast led to the Rose Bowl being played on January 1, 1942, in Durham, North Carolina, where Oregon State defeated Duke 20–16. Due to wartime shortages and travel restrictions, as well as manpower shortages, many smaller colleges shelved their football programs during the war, while larger schools curtailed schedules and travel. Manpower shortages were also responsible for the introduction of female cheerleaders to colleges and universities beyond the South. In addition to relaxing freshman eligibility during the war, the NCAA also allowed unrestricted substitution. While some NCAA officials expressed optimism that the wartime idealism would reduce incidents of recruiting violations, manpower shortages and concerns about draft deferments produced the opposite effect. Disturbing to many fans was the fact that athletes switched schools to enter military training programs at rival schools. These players often joined the football teams of their new universities. For example, eight members from the 1942 University of Minnesota squad were playing with Northwestern University against the Golden Gophers the following season. Also, military training schools and bases formed teams that rivaled intercollegiate athletics. Paul Brown, who coached the Ohio State Buckeyes to a national championship in 1942, was placed in charge of the football program for the Great Lakes Naval Station outside of Chicago. Brown actively recruited both college and professional football players. The squads assembled by Brown were challenged by former University of Missouri coach Don Faruot’s Iowa Pre-Flight teams located on the campus of the University of Iowa. The base teams defeated major university programs during the war years, but Notre Dame under the guidance of Frank Leahy continued to vie for national honors. Behind quarterback Angelo Bertelli, Notre Dame was undefeated in 1943 before playing Army. A week before the game, Bertelli, who won the 1943 Heisman Trophy, was ordered to report for military training. Leahy believed that Army coach Earl Blaik instigated the timing of Bertelli’s call to duty, but reserve quarterback Johnny Lujack led the Fighting Irish to a 26–0 victory. In 1941 West Point grad and Dartmouth football coach Earl Blaik was tapped to end the losing ways of Army’s football program. Military officials allowed the new coach to begin open recruiting of high school players and outstanding athletes at other universities, believing that a strong West Point squad would be a morale booster for the nation during a period of crisis. The Naval Academy at Annapolis followed a similar pattern of recruiting but lacked the success, or perhaps the ruthlessness, of Blaik’s Black Knights. College football historian Murray Sperber asserted, “The Army football teams assembled and coached by Blaik during the war exemplified the total-victory mentality of World War II and also foreshadowed future attitudes in intercollegiate athletics, not only in the Black Knights’

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Frank Leahy During the 1940s Frank Leahy returned the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish to the level of success achieved by Knute Rockne during the 1920s. The rivalry between Notre Dame and Army in the 1940s helped revitalize interest in college football following World War II. Leahy was born August 27, 1908, in O’Neill, Nebraska. After playing high school football in Winner, South Dakota, and Omaha (NE) High School, Leahy entered Notre Dame in 1927. He started at tackle on the 1929 undefeated national championship team. Leahy, however, missed the 1930 season with a severe knee injury. Rockne praised Leahy for his knowledge of the game, urging him to pursue a career in football coaching. After he earned his degree in physical education in 1931, Leahy served as an assistant coach at Georgetown University, Michigan State College, and Fordham University. In 1939 he was named as head coach of the Boston College Eagles. After winning nine games in 1939, Leahy’s Eagles were undefeated in 1940 with an upset victory over Tennessee in the Sugar Bowl. The following season Leahy accepted the head-coaching position at Notre Dame. Although college rosters were depleted with players in military service, Leahy’s Fighting Irish lost only three games between 1941 and 1943, and the 1943 squad was selected as national champions. The coach entered the Navy from 1944 to 1945, serving as a lieutenant commander in charge of recreation programs for submarine crews in the Pacific. Returning to Notre Dame after the war, Leahy made the Fighting Irish college football’s dominant power in the late 1940s. Led by All-Americans Johnny Lujack and Leon Hart, Notre Dame enjoyed four undefeated seasons (1946–49) and three national championships. Leahy was admired for his keen football mind and relentless work ethic, but critics complained that he was obsessed with winning. In a 1953 game against Iowa, for example, Leahy was widely censured for encouraging one of his players to fake an injury in order to stop the clock late in the game. After a severe pancreatic attack brought on by overwork, Leahy resigned from Notre Dame in 1954. During his tenure at the university, Leahy’s teams captured five national championships, and his overall winning percentage of .864 ranks just behind his mentor Rockne. Following his retirement from coaching, Leahy was a prominent businessman and football analyst. He died on June 21, 1973, in Portland, Oregon, where he was in business with his son. Leahy helped restore the popularity of Notre Dame and college football following the difficult days of World War II.

annihilation of opponents but also in their coach’s and their school’s ability to wrap an obsession with sports victory in idealistic and patriotic language” (Sperber 1998, 138). Blaik’s most important recruits were running backs “Mr. Inside,” Felix Anthony “Doc” Blanchard and “Mr. Outside,” Glenn Davis, who were selected for the Heisman Trophy in 1945 and 1946, respectively. After Blanchard’s freshman year at the University of North Carolina, the athlete was drafted and assigned to a regular Army unit. Blaik then intervened to secure Blanchard an appointment to West Point, a tactic that Blaik’s critics referred to as “draft board recruiting.” But Blaik’s approach paid off on the gridiron, as between 1944 and 1947 the Black Knights enjoyed a thirty-two-game unbeaten streak. The Black Knights were national

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college football champions in both 1944 and 1945, but a 0–0 tie with Notre Dame in 1946, after Leahy returned from military service, denied Army its third straight national title. The 1946 game between Notre Dame and Army drew almost 80,000 fans, but the two institutions decided to discontinue the lucrative series, ostensibly because Army wanted a more national schedule and both programs were concerned that gambling interests might seek to become involved with the game. And, indeed, college football was attracting a great deal of attention during the postwar sports boom. Average attendance for major college football games in 1939 and 1940 was hovering around 23,000, but in 1946 that number rose to approximately 27,000 spectators per contest. The total attendance for all college football games in 1947 rose to 11,715,370, a 5 percent increase over the previous year. The growing economic impact of football for universities was apparent in an increasing number of recruiting scandals. For example, Buddy Young, who starred at the University of Illinois before the war, allegedly received twenty-five lucrative financial college offers while he was still in the Navy, before finally deciding on his return to Illinois. Also, it was reported eight players from Tulsa’s 1945 Orange Bowl team were lured to the University of Oklahoma the following season. In response to such allegations, the NCAA sought to clarify its position on amateurism and scholarships. In 1948, the so-called Purity or Sanity Code adopted by the organization allowed for schools to pay for an athlete’s tuition, incidental fees, and a meal per day in season, but direct aid would be awarded on the basis of need. Any jobs performed by athletes would “have to be commensurate with the services rendered.” Schools in the South perceived these regulations as favoring established football programs in the East and Midwest, where jobs were more plentiful and affluent alumni could provide players with money and employment. In July 1949 the University of Virginia announced that it would not comply with the Sanity Code as between thirty and forty players on the football team were receiving scholarships. Virginia’s defiance was supported by seven other southern institutions, which became known as “The Sinful Seven.” In January 1950 a majority of schools within the NCAA voted to expel Virginia, but the total was short of the necessary two-thirds. This action, in effect, did away with the reform efforts of the Sanity Code. The postwar efforts of the NCAA to limit the growth of big-time college football failed, and the commercialization of the college game continued unabated. On the gridiron, Leahy’s Fighting Irish dominated play in the late 1940s, winning national championships in 1947 and 1949 and returning Notre Dame to the glory days of Knute Rockne. From 1946 to 1949, the Irish were 38–0–1 with two Heisman Trophy winners in quarterback Johnny Lujack (1947) and end Leon Hart (1949). Notre Dame’s domination was interrupted in 1948 by the undefeated University of Michigan Wolverines who outscored the opposition 252–44, while the Heisman that year was awarded to Southern Methodist running back Doak Walker. College football’s growing popularity in the postwar era was marred, however, by continuing racial discrimination, especially in the American South. Many northern universities integrated their football programs in the early twentieth century with such outstanding players as Paul Robeson of Rutgers and Fritz Pollard of Brown. By the 1930s black college football players could be found in every section of the county except the South. To maintain Jim Crow, southern institutions insisted that visiting integrated college squads not play their black athletes. But

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

World War II fostered the integration of college football due to the shortage of athletes during the war years. Also, many northern institutions after the war found it increasingly difficult to discriminate against returning black veterans who wanted to play football. The lead in recruiting in black athletes was taken by the Pacific Coast Conference and Big Ten, and by the mid-1950s there were over sixty African American players in the Big Ten. Racial progress was celebrated on October 11, 1947, when Harvard played the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. The Harvard Crimson squad included lineman Chester Pierce, who became the first black athlete to play on the home turf of a white college in the former Confederacy. Harvard won the game 47–0, which was played without major incident. But such was not always the case. For example, black running back Johnny Bright of Drake University was one of college football’s leading offensive stars in 1949 and 1950, but his 1951 season was cut short in Stillwater, Oklahoma, when a member of the Oklahoma A&M squad broke Bright’s jaw with an unprovoked blow that many observers perceived as racially motivated. And the three major southern football conferences, the Southeastern (SEC), Southwest (SWC), and Atlantic Coast (ACC), remained segregated until 1963, reflecting white southern resistance to the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, black players in the South matriculated to the North or played for all-black colleges. Demonstrating the fundamental inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine of Jim Crow, most black college football programs operated on meager budgets with poor equipment and facilities; performing before smaller crowds and away from the media spotlight. But as professional football began to expand during the post–World War II period, the talent in black college football was evident in the number of players coming from Grambling and other southern black colleges.

Professional Football Formed in the early 1920s in predominantly medium-sized midwestern cities such as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Canton, Ohio, the National Football League (NFL) lacked the national exposure of college football. The professional league struggled through the difficult Depression years and almost ceased operations because of World War II, but during the postwar economic expansion professional football would begin to find its place as a popular spectator sport. The NFL expanded to the West Coast and was challenged by a new league—the All-American Football Conference (AAFC). A merger of the two leagues solidified the appeal of professional football in the 1950s and 1960s, presenting a challenge to baseball’s claim as the nation’s premiere sport. In 1940 the ten teams in the NFL consisted of the Washington Redskins, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers, and Philadelphia Eagles in the Eastern Division; and Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, Cleveland Rams, and Chicago Cardinals in the West. The Chicago Bears of George Halas were the dominant team during the 1940 season, but they were defeated 7–3 by the Washington Redskins in a late-season game. Washington owner George Preston Marshall antagonized the Bears by remarking that they were “quitters” and “cry babies.” The Bears enjoyed their revenge during the league title game when they humiliated the Redskins 73–0; the greatest margin of victory ever in a NFL title game. The 1941 season was tested by American entrance into World

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War II. The league’s title game, played only two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, attracted only 13,341 fans to watch the Bears defend their title with a 37– 9 victory over the New York Giants. With players leaving for military service and wartime restrictions on travel, the NFL struggled to survive between 1942 and 1945. Chicago Bears owner and coach George Halas left the club midway through the 1942 season to join the Navy, but the Bears remained the league’s dominant team, recording an undefeated regular season. In the 1942 title game, however, the Redskins, behind the passing and punting of Sammy Baugh, gained a degree of revenge for their humiliating 1940 loss in the championship contest. To survive the 1943 season, the NFL contracted. With owners Daniel F. Reeves and Fred Levy Jr. in military service, the Cleveland Rams were given permission by Commissioner Elmer Layden to suspend operations for a year, while Philadelphia and Pittsburgh combined franchises with the cities rotating home games. Bemused fans referred to the merged team as the “Steagles.” The manpower shortage also led the NFL to allow free substitution, but rule changes failed to alter the teams playing for the league championship in which the Bears defeated the Redskins by a score of 41–21. Baugh was the league’s best player, leading the NFL during 1943 in passing, punting, and interceptions. The NFL continued its policy of consolidation during the 1944 and 1945 campaigns. The struggling Pittsburgh franchise was granted permission to merge with the Chicago Cardinals for the 1944 season. Cleveland rejoined the NFL, and a new franchise was awarded to Boston, but the club was forced to merge with the Brooklyn Tigers for the 1945 football campaign. The final years of the war also broke the stranglehold of the Bears and Redskins on the NFL championship. In 1944 the Green Bay Packers defeated the New York Giants 14–7, while the following season Bob Waterfield of the Cleveland Rams led his team to a 15–14 victory over the Redskins. While the NFL’s very existence was brought into doubt by the war, the football league demonstrated its patriotism in numerous ways. Over 600 current and former NFL players saw military action in World War II, while the league also took a leading role in raising money for the war effort. In 1942 the NFL contributed $4,000,000 to the war bond drive, and fifteen exhibition contests provided nearly $700,000 for service charities. After passing through the crucible of war, professional football was poised to assert its role in the postwar economic boom. The NFL faced competition from the AAFC, which was formed in 1944 under the auspices of Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward. The AAFC launched play in 1946 with franchises in eight cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. Salaries for professional football players skyrocketed as returning veterans with professional and college experience were recruited by both leagues. The threat posed by the AAFC to the NFL was evident when 1946 AAFC rosters included over 100 players with NFL experience and over half of the 1945 College All-Stars. The NFL responded to this threat by replacing Commissioner Layden, who initially dismissed the activity of the millionaires backing the AAFC, with Bert Bell, co-owner of the Philadelphia Eagles. Under Bell’s leadership, the AAFC’s tapping of the lucrative California market was countered by the transfer of the Cleveland Rams to Los Angeles for the 1946 season. In addition, the Rams integrated the NFL by signing former UCLA stars Woody Strode and Kenny Washington to contracts. Black athletes played in the NFL during the 1920s, but from 1934 to 1946 league rosters contained no black athletes. This state

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

Kenny Washington of UCLA, one of the first African American players in the Pacific Coast Conference and, later, one of the first in the National Football League. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

of affairs is usually attributed to the influence of Boston Braves/Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall who opposed integration of his club and pressured other owners to follow suit. The vacancy in Cleveland was filled by the AAFC, which named the franchise after its coach, the legendary Paul Brown, whose coaching r
esum
e included Massillon High School, Ohio State University, and Great Lakes Naval Station. Brown integrated the AAFC by signing African American defensive tackle Bill Willis, who played for the coach at Ohio State, and former University of Nevada running back Marion Motley. Willis and Motley, along with quarterback Otto Graham and place-kicker Lou “the Toe” Groza, provided the talent that allowed the Browns to dominate the new league. The Browns won the AAFC’s championship every season during the four-year existence of the league. But the dominance of one club may have hurt the league as even the rabid Cleveland fans became complacent. After averaging crowds of over 50,000 for their initial campaign, attendance at home games for the Browns fell to approximately 20,000 per contest by 1949. In fact, the crowd for the last AAFC championship game, in which the Browns defeated the San Francisco 49ers 21–7, attracted only 22,500 spectators to Cleveland’s massive Municipal Stadium.

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Marion Motley The second African American elected to the National Football Hall of Fame, Marion Motley was an outstanding running back for the Cleveland Browns who played an important role in the integration of professional football. Motley was born June 5, 1920, in Leesburg, Georgia, and played high school football at Canton McKinley High School in the football-obsessed state of Ohio. Although not a great student during his high school days, Motley was recruited for the University of Nevada Wolf Pack by coach Jim Aiken, an Ohio native, in 1940. Motley was an immediate star for the Wolf Pack at fullback and linebacker, but his college career was almost cut short in 1940 when he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in an automobile accident. With the support of the school community and administration, Motley was able to pay a fine and avoid prison time, returning to Nevada as a star player from 1940 to 1942. He left college for military service in 1943, but he made little progress toward his degree, suggesting that the university was perhaps more interested in Motley as a football player than student. He spent most of his Navy tour of duty at the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago, where Motley played football for Paul Brown. Following the war, Brown was signed to coach the new Cleveland franchise in the AAFC. To compete with the NFL for talent, Brown was prepared to break the color line in professional football by signing Motley and tackle Bill Willis. Cleveland dominated the AAFC, winning the championship each season during the league’s four-year existence (1946–49). In 1950 the Cleveland Browns were incorporated into the NFL, shocking many football analysts by winning the NFL championship during their first season in the league. Suffering from a knee injury, Motley retired from the Browns in 1954, although he did attempt a brief comeback with the Pittsburgh Steelers the following season. During his eight-year tenure in Cleveland, Motley gained 4,721 rushing yards and scored thirty-one touchdowns. Despite his accomplishments as a player, Motley’s pay never exceeded more than $15,000 in a season. With little education, Motley worked as a postman and parking lot attendant after leaving professional football. But his desire to serve as a coach was thwarted by the racist hiring practices of the NFL. Although honored by his 1968 selection to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Motley remained somewhat disillusioned with his treatment by the NFL following a spectacular playing career. Motley died June 27, 1999, at seventy-nine years of age.

Under the leadership of Commissioner Bell, the NFL weathered the challenge of the AAFC. While NFL turnstile counts also increased after the war, the higher salaries produced by the competition for talent reduced league profits. A gambling scandal also struck the league on the eve of the 1946 title game between the Chicago Bears and New York Giants. Gamblers approached Giants running back Merle Hapes to throw the game. Hapes turned the gamblers down and told teammate Frankie Filchock about the incident. Neither player reported the bribe offer, but when the press leaked the story, Commissioner Bell suspended Hapes. Filchock, however, was allowed to participate in the title game. Although Filchock turned in an outstanding performance in the Giants’ 24–14 loss to the Bears, he was also suspended after the game for failing to share with league officials his knowledge of the bribe offer.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1940–1949

The NFL survived the crisis, but attendance figures indicated that the AAFC posed a real challenge. In 1946 the NFL outdrew the new league by 1.7 to 1.4 million spectators, while the AAFC attendance for the 1947 and 1948 seasons exceeded that of the more established league. But there were serious problems for some AAFC franchises. The Chicago Hornets found it difficult to compete with their NFL rivals, the Bears and Cardinals. A perennial loser, the Chicago Cardinals, behind the running of Charlie Trippi, defeated the Philadelphia Eagles 28–21 for the 1947 NFL title. The same two clubs played in the championship game the following season, but the Eagles prevailed 7–0 in a blinding snowstorm. The strong performance boosted the attendance of the Cardinals over their AAFC rival Hornets, while in Los Angeles the Rams won the 1949 Western title before losing to the Eagles in the championship game. The division victory, however, allowed the Rams to outdraw the AAFC Los Angeles Dons by a margin of 309,327 to 132,574. By the end of the 1949 season, both leagues were prepared to stop their bidding war. Despite its overall strong attendance figures, the AAFC reportedly lost $5 million in its four-year existence; while the NFL lost $3 million during the 1946–49 period. The merger favored the established league. Under the agreement, the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and Baltimore Colts were absorbed into the NFL, while the remaining five AAFC franchises were disbanded. With the merger complete, the NFL established a new attendance mark of 1,977,556 spectators in 1950, and professional football was on the road to challenging the popularity of baseball during the 1950s and 1960s.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing Prizefighting in the 1940s remained a male preserve dominated by the African American heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Louis. Born into an Alabama sharecropping family, Louis gained the heavyweight title in 1937 and reigned as champion for thirteen years. Louis and his mother left Alabama in the mid-1920s and moved to Detroit, where he compiled an impressive amateur boxing record. Louis turned professional in 1934 with Detroit political operative and numbers racketeer John Roxborough as his manager. Roxborough and Louis’s trainer, Julian Black, emphasized establishing a positive reputation that would appeal to white fight fans. Seeking to avoid the white backlash that plagued Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, Louis was urged by his handlers to cooperate with the white press and avoid being seen in public with white women. White Americans generally responded in a positive fashion, describing Louis as “a credit to his race.” The press, however, never allowed Louis to forget his racial identity, referring to the boxer as the “Brown Bomber.” Racial identity was also important to African Americans in the 1940s, and they perceived Louis as their champion. Louis defended his title against twenty-four white challengers, and every Louis victory was celebrated in the African American community. Louis gained the championship on June 22, 1937, after knocking out James Braddock in round seven. At age twenty-three, Louis was the youngest man to win the heavyweight title. Between his defeat of Braddock and enlisting in the Army in early 1942, Louis defended his championship twenty times, but perhaps his most famous fight was a nontitle bout.

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Portrait of Joe Louis (Joe Louis Barrow), seated on bleacher in Greenwood Lake, NJ, in 1941. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

On June 12, 1936, Louis fought former champion Max Schmeling in New York City. As a German citizen, Schmeling was touted by the Nazi regime as an example of Aryan racial superiority, and Adolf Hitler gloated when Louis was knocked out by Schmeling in round twelve of their fight. On June 22, 1938, at Yankee Stadium, Louis defended his crown in a rematch against the German fighter. Seeking to avoid the humiliation of their first bout, Louis scored a first-round knockout victory over the pride of the German Reich. The fight made Louis a national hero. With the nation poised on the edge of war in 1941, Louis struggled in two title defenses. On May 23, 1941, Louis won with a seventh-round disqualification over challenger Buddy Baer. Baer’s camp believed that Louis dropped their fighter with a punch delivered several seconds after the bell to end round six. When the referee refused to disqualify Louis for the blow, Baer failed to answer the bell for round seven and was disqualified, giving the victory to Louis. The following month, Louis was losing on points to former light heavyweight champion Billy Conn after twelve rounds, but Louis rallied to knock out the popular Irish-American fighter from Connecticut. His status as a national hero was assured when Louis enlisted in the Army a month after Pearl Harbor. Louis became an important symbol of national unity during the conflict, and the War Department used photographs of the fighter in uniform to promote war bond drives and defuse wartime racial tensions. His primary military duties consisted of public relations appearances and exhibition bouts to entertain the troops. Louis fought sparingly during the war, easily defeating Buddy Baer in a 1942 rematch. Nevertheless, there was considerable national interest in his 1946 postwar rematch with Billy Conn, who had last fought on February 13, 1942, when he defeated middleweight champion Tony Zale in a nontitle bout. Similar to Louis, Conn spent the war years in the military. The skills of both fighters deteriorated

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during their war inactivity, and Louis retained his title with an eighth-round knockout. Louis’s declining abilities were evident as he struggled to defeat his former sparring partner Jersey Joe Walcott in two title defenses. Louis retired as undefeated heavyweight champion of the world in 1949, but financial considerations led him to make an ill-conceived comeback in the early 1950s, losing bouts to Ezzard Charles and Rocky Marciano. The popularity of boxing in the 1940s, however, was hardly limited to the heavyweight division. Many Italian Americans, African Americans, and Latinos continued to perceive the ring as an avenue for social mobility as the nation emerged from depression and war into the more affluent postwar society. Notable fighters from these ethnic groups excelled in a classic boxing era during the 1940s. Among these pugilistic champions was Willie Pep. Born Guglielmo Papaleo in Middletown, Connecticut, featherweight Pep won sixty-two fights in a row before he was beaten by lightweight Sammy Angott, then won seventy-one more contests before his title was taken by Sandy Sandler on October 28, 1948. But in the rematch, Pep regained his title and ended the decade as champion. The bantamweight division was dominated by Manuel Ortiz, who was born in Mexico and raised in California, reflecting the growing Latino presence in prizefighting. Ortiz won the bantamweight title in 1942. He defended the title fifteen times before losing to Harold Dale in 1947, but he regained the championship later that year in a rematch. Boxing legend and African American champion Sugar Ray Robinson also launched his professional fighting career in 1940. Robinson suffered his first defeat in his fortieth bout, losing to middleweight Jake LaMotta, whom Robinson had bested four months earlier. Robinson did not lose another fight in the decade, including two additional rematches with LaMotta, and in December 1946 he defeated Tommy Bell for the welterweight championship. The most contested arena in boxing during the 1940s was the middleweight division. In 1946, Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano began a fierce rivalry when Zale defended his middleweight title by knocking out the challenger in the sixth round. The following year, Graziano returned the favor, knocking out Zale in the sixth round to claim the championship. The final chapter in the Zale-Graziano saga was played out on June 10, 1948, when Zale regained his crown, finishing off Graziano in three rounds. Zale, however, did not retain the championship for long as later that year he was defeated by French fighter Marcel Cerdan. On June 16, 1949, Jake LaMotta claimed the middleweight crown, knocking out the French champion in round ten of their bout. The anticipated rematch between Cerdan and LaMotta was canceled when the Frenchman perished in a plane crash. Boxing retained its popularity even when the sport was shrouded with controversy during the late 1940s. On February 21, 1948, Sam Baroudi died after a bout with Ezzard Charles, who claimed the vacant heavyweight title in 1949 after Louis retired. Even more disturbing to many fight fans were allegations of fixed fights and the influence of underworld figures such as the notorious Frankie Carbo. Both LaMotta and Graziano were accused of being involved with gamblers and “fixing” bouts, but with the Gillette Corporation sponsorship of both radio and television bouts, along with large arena crowds, prizefighting maintained its hold upon the American public in the postwar world. The individualism of the sport was also a respite from a society in which the corporate values of amity and cooperation were stressed within the national conformity of suburban culture.

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Tennis World War II and its aftermath furthered the democratization of tennis and golf, sports originally associated with country clubs and white privilege. During the war both sports were curtailed as tennis and golf balls were rationed along with golf clubs. In addition, the major tournaments for these two sports were suspended during the war. In the postwar period, as most Americans gained greater income and leisure time, both tennis and golf expanded beyond the confines of the country club and white America. Major tennis events such as the U.S. Open and Wimbledon were canceled during World War II. Another casualty of the war was the strict distinction between amateurs and professionals which the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) attempted to impose upon the sport. The elitist attitudes of the USLTA were challenged in the late 1940s by Jack Kramer. The son of working-class parents, Kramer won the U.S. Outdoor Championship along with Wimbledon singles and doubles titles in 1947; all of which were amateur championships. Following this success, tennis promoters offered Kramer $50,000 a year as well as a percentage of gate receipts to turn professional. On tour with Bobby Riggs, a Wimbledon champion in 1939, Kramer demonstrated that a market existed for professional tennis as the 1948 tour grossed nearly $400,000. The democratic possibilities of tennis in the late 1940s were also apparent in the budding careers of “Pancho” Gonzales and Althea Gibson, who would make their marks in the tennis world during the 1950s and 1960s. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1940s, Richard Alonzo “Pancho” Gonzales was banned from local tennis tournaments by Perry Jones, president of the Southern California Tennis Association; because the young Latino was too often truant from school. Gonzales spent 1945–46 in the Navy, and after he turned eighteen, the talented tennis player returned to California, entering local tournaments. By the end of 1947 Gonzales was ranked as the seventh-best player in the United States. Gonzales stunned the tennis world the following year by winning the U.S. Championship at Forest Hills, New York. He successfully defended his title in 1949 before turning professional. In her rise to prominence in the world of tennis, Althea Gibson confronted both gender and racial bias. Gibson was born in South Carolina to a family of sharecroppers, but she grew up in Harlem. She learned to play tennis at the Harlem River Tennis Courts. Her training was promoted by Dr. Walter Johnson, a Lynchburg, Virginia, physician active in the black tennis community. In 1947 she participated in the segregated American Tennis Association (ATA). After dominating the ATA, Gibson was allowed to participate in the 1950 U.S. Championships. In 1957 Gibson was the first African American to win a title at Wimbledon, and after winning the U.S. Championship she was named the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year.

Golf After weathering the crisis of World War II, the country club sport of golf also widened its appeal. From 1942 to 1945, all major U.S. Golf Association (USGA) events were suspended. The U.S. Open in 1942 was temporarily replaced by the

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Hale American Open, played as a war benefit and raising $20,000 for the cause. Although the majors were canceled and many members of the Professional Golfers Association were in military service, there was still plenty of golf in the United States during the war years. The accomplishments of Byron Nelson during World War II encouraged comparisons with golfing legend Bobby Jones. In 1944 and 1945 Nelson won twenty-six of fifty-one tournaments. After winning eighteen consecutive events in 1945, Nelson retired at age thirty-four in 1946. The women’s tour in the late 1940s was dominated by Babe Didrikson. In 1946–47, Didrikson won seventeen tournaments. Earning as much as $100,000 annually in endorsements, Didrikson decided to abandon her amateur status as a golfer and played a pivotal role in the formation of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). Although the purses for the LPGA failed to match the prize money for Babe Didrikson Zaharias, 1911–56. the men’s tour, Didrikson established the LPGA as a force (Courtesy of the Library of Congress) in the golf world, and she dominated women’s golf until experiencing failing health in 1953. Didrikson was criticized for being too masculine earlier in her athletic career as a basketball player and track star, but in the postwar period she presented a more feminine look with stylish clothes and hair, fitting into the consensus image of the suburban housewife. But like many of the women in suburbia, Didrikson was certainly working outside of the home and participating in the postwar economy. Greater leisure time and affluence contributed to the expansion of golf and tennis beyond the country club set. City governments constructed public golf courses and tennis complexes to meet growing demand. And even the fees of new private golf and tennis clubs were within the reach of an expanding middle class. Sporting goods companies also contributed to the growing commercialization of sport by promoting sales of Jack Kramer tennis rackets and Byron Nelson golf clubs for the increasingly active middle class with leisure time on their hands.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT SPORTS In addition to the expansion of golf and tennis facilities, bowling was a popular leisure activity in the postwar period. Often associated with the lower class and competing with pool halls for their clientele, bowling corporations such as AMF and Brunswick expanded their facilities with automatic pin-setters and air conditioning in order to enhance their appeal with a more affluent working class in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Bowling leagues were established for companies, churches, and housewives. The number of regular bowlers exceeded 20 million by the mid-1950s. Horse racing, which continued during the war years, also attracted its share of the postwar sporting market. The 1940s were a golden age for thoroughbred horse racing with four horses winning the sport’s Triple Crown (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes); Whirlaway in 1941, Count Fleet in 1943, Assault in 1946, and Citation in 1948. Of these fine horses, perhaps Citation was the greatest

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champion. Including his Triple Crown victories, Citation won nineteen of twenty races in 1948, earning over $700,000 in prize money. Citation was ridden by legendary jockey Eddie Arcaro who won over 4,000 races in his career, including Whirlaway’s 1941 Triple Crown. Due to a problem with his left fore ankle, Citation did not run in 1949. It was difficult for Citation to regain his top form, and the horse’s last race was in July 1951. Citation was the first colt to garner more than a million dollars in total earnings, offering further evidence of the lucrative postwar sporting market. While horse racing remained a staple of American sporting amusement during World War II, auto racing was heavily impacted by wartime rationing of gasoline and tires. In 1939 and 1940, Wilbur Shaw won the Indianapolis 500, and he was leading in 1941 with only sixty-two laps remaining. An accident, however, removed Shaw from the race, which was won by Mauri Rose. The drama of the 1941 race, however, was not repeated during the war years as the Indianapolis race was suspended from 1942 to 1945. The speedway was in need of considerable repairs after the war, and Indiana businessman Tony Husman tapped Shaw to manage the track. Under Shaw’s leadership, the Indianapolis 500 assumed its position as the most significant automobile race in American with the Blue Crown Special team of Mauri Rose and Bill Holland dominating the competition during the late 1940s. Indianapolis race cars were expensive, costing approximately $30,000 each. Seeking a less costly alternative, many southerners began to purchase cars from junkyards and modify them into race cars for several thousand dollars per automobile. Termed “stock-car races,” these popular events were initially staged on farm pastures before the construction of compacted clay tracks. Many of the early drivers, such as Bob Flock, were former runners of illegal “moonshine” liquor. To provide greater respectability for stock car racing, entrepreneur Bill France organized the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR). By modifying traditional passenger cars, NASCAR provided its fans with the illusion that their automobiles were capable of being race cars. Picking up on the growing popularity of the sport, sponsors such as the Ford Motor Company began to promote NASCAR. On June 19, 1949, the first of the Grand Nationals stock-car races was staged at the Charlotte (NC) Speedway, with Jim Roper declared the winner when Glen Dunway was disqualified. During the second half of the twentieth century, NASCAR would move beyond its southern roots to become a national obsession.

SUMMARY After wartime sacrifices, Americans turned out in record numbers for sporting events in the late 1940s. But the postwar economic boom was full of paradox. The consensus vision of America from suburbia assumed that an expanding capitalist economy would place all Americans within reach of the middle class. The rise of mass spectator sports seemingly supported this ideal of a unified, classless society. For example, historian Benjamin G. Rader suggests that in post–World War II America, “To some degree spectator sports replaced or supplemented the church, the family, the local community, subcommunities based upon status or ethnicity,

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and the older system of mutual class obligations as one of the sinews which held modern society together” (Rader 1983, 360). The image of consensus offered by suburbia, however, often proved to be a fac¸ade. The suburbs, as well as most of the nation’s professional and collegiate teams were white, and it would take a mass movement composed of such courageous individuals as Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. to shatter the walls of segregation in sport and society. The image of the contented suburban housewife also often masked a more competitive drive such as that displayed by Alline Banks during her AAU basketball career or a discontent later outlined by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Developing alongside the move to the suburbs was the growth of television. Although early television sets were expensive and reception poor, the demand for the new source of home entertainment proved almost insatiable. In 1950 only 20 percent of American households owned television sets, but by the mid-1950s this number jumped to over 70 percent. Along with increased leisure options in the suburbs, television played an important role in the decline of attendance for such sports as baseball by 1949. The new entertainment vehicle also fostered such programming as roller derby and professional wrestling which blurred the distinction between sport and entertainment. On the other hand, the challenge of television also spurred expansion and franchise transfers in professional sports in order to tap new markets. In the long run, the revenues garnered from television provided an economic bonanza for the growth of American sport during the second half of the twentieth century. The large profits generated by the expansion of professional franchises and television revenues produced labor unrest by athletes who were no longer willing to accept the restrictions imposed by ownership and such practices as baseball’s reserve clause. In addition to the paradoxes of suburbia, the Cold War loomed over post– World War II America. As diplomatic relations deteriorated between the Soviet Union and United States, Americans perceived the 1948 Summer Olympics as an opportunity to celebrate capitalistic achievement. The victories of American athletes during the London Games were somewhat tarnished by the exclusion of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies from the competition. American and capitalistic superiority, however, seemed assured following the athletic successes of the U.S. Olympic team at the 1952 Helsinki Games in which Bob Mathias defended his decathlon title. National insecurity regarding the Cold War, however, only increased following the 1949 explosion of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union. Fears of the Soviet Union encouraged political conformity and a monolithic anticommunism apparent when Jackie Robinson testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on July 18, 1949, to refute allegations by Paul Robeson that African Americans would not support the United States in a conflict with the Soviet Union. While acknowledging that racism was a major problem for American democracy, Robinson emphasized the patriotism of black Americans. Robinson later expressed regret over his testimony, but his appearance before HUAC demonstrated the shadow cast by the Cold War over American sport and society as the nation moved into the 1950s. The resiliency demonstrated by Americans and their sporting culture in dealing with World War II and its aftermath indicated that the nation would be ready to meet these new challenges.

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RECOMMENDED SOURCES Print Sources Berlage, Gia Ingham. 1994. Women in baseball: The forgotten history. Westport, CT: Praeger. Betts, John Richard. 1974. America’s sporting heritage: 1850–1950. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Bullock, Steven R. 2004. Playing for their nation: Baseball and the American military during World War II. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cahn, Susan K. 1994. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport. New York: Free Press, 1994. Cayleff, Susan. 1995. Babe: The life and legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Davies, Richard O. 1994. America’s obsession: Sports and society since 1945. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College. ———. 2007. Sports in American life: A History. New York: Blackwell. Dickey, Glenn. 1982. The history of professional basketball since 1896. New York: Stein and Day. Gorn, Elliott J., and Warren Goldstein. 1993. A brief history of American sports. New York: Hill and Wang. Ikard, Robert W. 2005. Just for fun: The story of AAU Women’s Basketball. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Isaacs, Neil D. 1984. A history of college basketball. New York: Harper and Row. Koppett, Leonard. 2003. Koppett’s concise history of Major League Baseball. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lanctot, Neil. 2004. Negro League baseball: The rise and ruin of a black institution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lowenfish, Lee. 2007. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s ferocious gentleman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Mead, Chris. 1985. Champion—Joe Louis: Black hero in white America. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Peterson, Robert W. 1997. Pigskin: The early years of pro football. New York Oxford University Press. Quirk, James P., and Rodney D. Fort. 1992. Pay dirt: The business of professional team sports. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rader, Benjamin G. 1983. American sports: From the age of folk games to the age of spectators. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. 1989. Winning is the only thing: Sports in America since 1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sammons, Jeffrey T. 1988. Beyond the ring: The role of boxing in American society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sperber, Murray. 1998. Onward to victory: The crises that shaped college sports. New York: Henry Holt. Tygiel, Jules. 1983. Baseball’s great experiment: Jackie Robinson and his legacy. New York: Oxford University Press Watterson, John Sayle. 2000. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiggins, David K., and Patrick B. Miller, eds. 2001. The unlevel playing field: A documentary history of the African-American experience in sport. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Films Baseball: Inning Six, The National Pastime, 1940–1950. 1994. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS. The Jackie Robinson Story. 1950. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Legend Films. Joe Louis: America’s Hero … Betrayed. 2008. HBO Films. A League of Their Own. 1992. Dir. Penny Marshall. Columbia Pictures. 75 Seasons: The Story of the National Football League. 1994. NFL Films.

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CHAPTER 9

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959 Murry R. Nelson

OVERVIEW The 1950s were a period of great political adjustment in the United States and the world, characterized by cautious, moderate legislation and policies. The ravages of World War II had deeply affected the entire European continent as well as Japan, and the United States was now the clear giant of economic power in the world. Though the United States had suffered nearly 500,000 casualties, this paled in comparison to the Soviet Union’s 23 million or Germany’s 7.5 million and Poland’s 5 million. Of the latter, 3 million were part of the nearly 6 million Holocaust victims. Even countries that lost “only” a few hundred thousand lost mostly young men, upon which a country builds its economy. Most of Europe was also devastated by bombings and fighting on the continent. The United States was able to absorb most of the approximately 15 million members of the American armed forces who fought in World War II back into a rapidly expanding economy. The Serviceman’s Adjustment Act of 1944 (and its successor in 1952), known as the GI Bill, provided full college benefits for all returning veterans, and this kept the economy from falling into depression, as more than 50 percent of the veterans took advantage of the bill and attended or returned to college. This also led colleges and universities to expand their enrollments greatly, creating larger institutions of higher education and a greatly improved educational populace. Many of the GIs were professional athletes. Major-league baseball had continued during the war, but with a number of players who would have been unable to be in the big leagues if not for the absence of so many top players fighting in the war. In pro football a few teams were forced to merge because of a lack of able-bodied players. The return of the servicemen allowed for both the NFL and a newly formed league, the All-American Football Conference (AAFC), to have enough top players to make for entertaining football. Professional basketball had been in desperate straits during the war, but now seemed poised to grow nicely after the merger of the NBL and the BAA to form the NBA.

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Another great effect of the returning GIs was the enormous increase in the birth rate, which had been stagnant for the war years, as so many young men and women were fighting on the European and Pacific fronts. The great Depression of the 1930s also gave many families pause as to whether they could afford more (or any) children in the perilous economic times. The 1930s saw 24 million births in the United States. With the boom that began in 1946, 32 million American births were recorded in the 1940s and in 1954 the United States had more than 4 million births, the first year that had occurred. That number was met or exceeded every year until 1965, increasing the population of the United States from 132 million in 1940 to 152 million in 1950 and 181 million in 1960. This boom in population was replicated in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and much of Western Europe. The effect was more than simply increased population; the influence that these “baby boomers” would have on social, cultural, and economic trends in the United States and worldwide has been profound. Trends in housing, fashion, music, education, transportation, and career choices have been largely led by the baby boom generation from the 1950s through the early years of the twenty-first century. In housing, the trend of the 1950s was the continued expansion of the cities through large suburban movement. In many cases this was limited to the white middle class as many suburban areas were either segregated by law (de jure) or practice (de facto) and this movement to the suburbs was termed, in some cases, as “white flight.” Large population movement to the suburbs led to a need for greater transportation access and superhighways and expressways were built throughout the nation to more easily connect the suburbs to the cities. This also led many families to purchase second automobiles, further increasing the need for more improved roads. President Eisenhower also made the interstate highway system a priority as part of national defense. Most sports stadiums were in the city and attendance at some venues declined as more fans moved to the suburbs and the neighborhoods around old stadiums declined. Some professional teams used these changing demographics as one reason to move their franchises. In baseball, teams left some cities of the Northeast like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to move westward. One of the most significant cultural trends of the 1950s was the development of rock and roll music, which consisted of a fusion of two types of music: rhythm and blues (r&b), played mainly by African American entertainers, and country and western swing, played by white musicians. At first record companies had white artists cover r&b songs to make them more acceptable to a larger market, but as the popularity of black artists grew, radio stations began to adapt their playlists and play more rock and roll. Great black artists like Fats Domino, Ivory Joe Hunter, Chuck Berry, and Ray Charles, and great white artists like Bill Haley and the Comets, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly became stars, seemingly overnight. Radio airplay was enhanced by the invention of 331=3- and 45-rpm vinyl records, replacing the heavy and easily breakable 78-rpm records made of vulcanite. Rock and roll music was seen, by some, as dangerous, and laws were passed to restrict concerts in various locales because of fears of race mixing and rioting. It was referred to in some bigoted quarters as “jungle music.” There was a similar change in professional sports as more African Americans became prominent stars in baseball, football, and basketball. Following Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cleveland Indians,

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and New York Giants led the way in signing more and more top African American ball players. In 1956 the most influential white rock and roll musician, Elvis Presley, made his mark nationally with the song “Heartbreak Hotel,” and by the end of 1956, he had recorded five number 1 hits. Rock music was now the most popular musical form in the nation and it grew more so through the rest of the decade, aided greatly by the first nationwide teen music show, Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. The music industry was tainted by the “payola” scandals of the late 1950s, but the music continued to play to larger and larger audiences. The scandals involved record companies paying disc jockeys for airtime for the companies’ records, hoping to have hits created by constant play. Surely, the greatest influence on all levels of culture and information in the 1950s was the widespread growth and accessibility of television. Invented in the 1920s in a mechanical form, television was not perfected in any electronic form until about 1935. Further development was hampered by the onset of World War II, but following the war, research and development began in earnest. Broadcasters became more prevalent, the cost of production was reduced, and by 1947 about 40,000 television sets were in use in the United States, as opposed to 40 million radios. When 1950 began, there were 5 million television sets in use; that figure doubled by the end of the year. By the end of the decade, 42 million American homes had televisions. The phenomenal growth was related to the fact that television productions were viewed as “essential” to one’s basic awareness as an American at that time. Many television productions were live and some of the most popular things to telecast were local sporting events, most specifically professional baseball. Television series that were most popular during the 1950s were westerns, variety shows, situation comedies, and quiz shows. In 1955 the Mickey Mouse Club was first aired on afternoon network television, following the success of the Disneyland television show that premiered in 1954. Walt Disney himself served as the host of his show, later called Walt Disney Presents, for thirteen years. Television network news became more and more popular with fifteen-minute broadcasts each evening. The political conventions of the two major parties were covered from gavel to gavel each evening on all three major networks in 1952, 1956, and 1960. Television became the major source of news and entertainment in the 1950s and retained that title through the next forty years. Television also became the preferred medium for sports in the 1950s as more and more fans purchased sets. Most baseball broadcasting was local, other than the World Series. Football broadcasting was limited, but by the end of the decade it was clear that television and football would be a match “made in heaven.” The Kentucky Derby was regularly telecast beginning in the 1950s. The United States and the world were deeply affected by the rise of Communism and the Soviet Union immediately following World War II. The destruction of much of Eastern Europe and the political instability of the region allowed the Soviets to swiftly establish Communist regimes under the influence of the Kremlin. In an effort to take over all of Eastern Germany, the Soviets blockaded entry into the western part of Berlin, which was controlled by the French, British, and Americans. The blockade, begun in June of 1948, prevented West Berlin from receiving food and supplies to keep the city’s population alive and well. The Allied response was to organize a massive airlift of goods and supplies, with planes taking off and

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landing at Templehof Airport. Flights continued for almost twelve months until the blockade was lifted. This action by the Soviets made the West even more fearful of expansionist desires on the part of Russia and its allies, the Chinese Communists, who now controlled the Chinese mainland. In 1950 civil war broke out in Korea, which had also been divided into a Communist-controlled North and a democratically supported South. The United States entered the Korean conflict (termed a “police action”) in 1950, as part of the United Nations forces that repelled the North Korean and, later, Chinese troops. Hostilities ended in July of 1953 with a ceasefire, but no peace treaty was signed. More than 33,000 American troops were killed with more than 92,000 wounded in this undeclared war. The political result was a stalemate as the lines of separation between the two parts of Korea were essentially the same at the end of fighting as they had been at the beginning. Many American athletes, amateur and professional, served in Korea. The war reinforced the Communist threat to many Americans, known as the “Red Scare,” and made the United States ripe for fears and accusations of Communist sympathizers within the U.S. government and military. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin used this issue as a platform for his election. A series of hearings followed in 1954, where McCarthy openly lied about lists of Communists in the government and accused others of being Communists. He was finally exposed, and, six months later, he was censured by the U.S. Senate. McCarthy died in 1957 of what was termed acute hepatitis, most likely caused by alcoholism. One of the most bizarre effects of McCarthyism was the decision by the Cincinnati Reds to change their name to “Redlegs” for much of the 1950s, finally reverting to the Reds name in 1959. In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first unmanned satellite, which put the Soviets in space. This increased fear of the growing Communist threat for many Americans, worrying that the Soviet entrance into space would be the first step in an attack on the United States. The Sputnik program spurred a “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, both striving to put the first man in orbit. Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first in April 1961, followed a month later by Alan B. Shepard of the United States. The fear of Communism, combined with fears of atomic-bomb attacks during the 1950s, made air-raid drills a common occurrence in most American schools. Despite the 1950s’ reputation as a seemingly carefree time, there was always the ever-present threat of war or Communism. The most important social impact of the 1950s came from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in May 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Brown case established that the notion of “separate but equal” public facilities for blacks and whites was inherently unequal, overturning a Supreme Court decision from 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson. The Brown ruling affected not just schools, but lunchrooms, train stations, water fountains, movie theatres, public bathroom facilities, and a host of other areas. Since most southern states had passed state laws that mimicked the Plessy decision, the federal decision in 1954 was at odds with many state laws. Some southern states fought the implementation of the Brown decision on the basis of “states’ rights.” The decisions in Brown in 1954 and Brown II in 1955 were the impetus for the civil rights movement, which grew in the 1950s and extended into the 1960s. What might have seemed like a small incident actually sparked the first a major battle in the civil rights movement. City buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955

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required that African Americans sit in the back of the bus while whites sat in the front. The definition of where the “middle” was depended on how many whites were on the bus. Rosa Parks was in the “colored” section of a city bus and as more whites boarded, she was told to give up her seat to a white person. She refused to move and was subsequently arrested. African American civil rights activists called for a boycott of the city buses until the rules on seating were altered. The local civil rights leaders asked for assistance from the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and Martin Luther King Jr., a twenty-six-year-old minister came to Montgomery to lead the boycott. The boycott lasted 382 days until the Supreme Court affirmed that segregation on public buses was, indeed, illegal. These events propelled King to national prominence as a civil rights leader. In August 1957 nine African American students attempted to enroll at segregated Central High School, the best high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, but were stopped by order of Governor Orville Faubus. President Eisenhower called in the 82nd Airborne Unit to escort the teens to the high school and to ensure their safety. Amid a screaming crowd of whites, the nine students began school at Central, each of them accompanied by a paratrooper for the first days of school. At the same time, the Myers family in Levittown, Pennsylvania, faced hundreds of white protesters outside their new home as they became the first African American family to move into a previously all-white neighborhood. For many white Americans in the 1950s, these events brought the first real awareness of segregation and racial inequality, and the civil rights movement gained more and more sympathizers. There were also backlashes, such as lynchings and Ku Klux Klan activity. The civil rights movement would continue throughout the 1950s with lunch-counter sit-ins and protest marches, but advance rapidly in the next decade. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April of 1945, Vice President Harry S Truman became president. He was elected for a full term in 1948, but chose not to run again in 1952. The election, held in the midst of the Korean War, was won by Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate Republican who had been the Supreme Allied Commander of the Armed Forces in World War II. Eisenhower, known as “Ike,” promised that he would go to Korea and seek a solution to ending the war, an action he took shortly after taking office in 1953. Eisenhower was greatly respected by most Americans and was re-elected in 1956. Eisenhower initiated an interest in golf among Americans because of his love of the game and the many rounds of golf that he played while president. He also was an avid football fan, having been an All America player at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) during the early part of the twentieth century. Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard Nixon, were devoted college football fans. Their abiding interest made football watching (and interest in sports in general) almost a “patriotic duty.”

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Baseball in the 1950s—Race and Ethnicity The 1950s is seen as a golden age of baseball with almost limitless numbers of stars. It equates with the previous “golden age,” the 1920s, with one significant difference—the inclusion of great young African American baseball stars, a group

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kept out of baseball until 1947, when Jack Roosevelt Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The appearance of Robinson was the most significant action in organized baseball in the postwar period. Later that year, Larry Doby took the field for the Cleveland Indians. The Dodgers and the Indians were the most aggressive teams in the National and American leagues, respectively, in signing top African American talent. The Dodgers were the top team in the National League in the 1950s and their great African American players like Robinson, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Jim Gilliam, and Joe Black were instrumental in that success. The Indians signed Doby, Luke Easter, and the ageless Satchel Paige and won the pennant in 1948, as well as 1954. Overcoming the Yankees, however, was simply too great a task as New York won pennants in 1949–53, 1955–58, and 1960–64. Some teams were slower at signing African American players. The Boston Red Sox was the last team to do so in 1959 when Elijah “Pumpsie” Green took the field for Boston. The opening of opportunities in the major leagues for African Americans ultimately meant the decline and death of the Negro Leagues. The Negro National League disbanded in 1949, while the Negro American League continued through the 1950s, a shadow of its former greatness. That league ended in 1962. The great African American players in the 1950s included Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, Henry “Hank” Aaron, Monte Irvin, Ernie Banks, and Elston Howard. Mays, Duke Snider of the Dodgers, and Mickey Mantle of the Yankees were often the topic of conversation among baseball fans who couldn’t decide who was the best centerfielder in New York and baseball. Mays had played in the Negro Leagues since the age of sixteen and first appeared for the Giants in 1951 when he was twenty. By the time he retired in 1973, he and the Giants had won three pennants and one world championship; Mays had been voted Most Valuable Player (MVP) in the National League twice and appeared in twenty-four All-Star games. Robinson debuted with the Cincinnati Reds in 1956, was the Rookie of the Year, won Most Valuable Player Awards in both leagues, and led his teams (the Reds and the Baltimore Orioles) to five pennants and two world championships. Robinson played in twelve All-Star games and hit 586 home runs. Aaron played for the Braves in two cities (Milwaukee and Atlanta) and was the all-time leader in home runs with 755 until 2007. He also holds career records for extra base hits, runs batted in, and total bases. He was Most Valuable Player in 1957, led his team to two pennants and a world championship, and played in twenty-four All-Star games. Because of segregation and serving in World War II, Irvin did not play in the major leagues until he was thirty and his career ended seven years later. He played on one world-championship and two pennant-winning Giants teams. Ernie Banks, known as “Mr. Cub,” hit 512 homers for the Cubs and was league MVP twice, but his team never won a pennant. Elston Howard was the first African American to play for the Yankees and he was on ten pennant-winning and four World Championship teams. Howard, a catcher, was a nine-time All-Star and league MVP in 1963. All of these players were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The 1950s were also a time when Latin Americans began to make noted contributions in the major leagues. Throughout the twentieth century Latinos were allowed to play in the major leagues unless they were “too black,” in which case they were barred like African Americans. This was perplexing to most Latinos since most Caribbean countries had little overt discrimination on the basis of color. The postwar period saw some top Latinos take the field in the major leagues.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

Milwaukee Braves’ Hank Aaron. (Courtesy of Photofest)

Roberto (Bobby) Avila (from Mexico) was a three-time All-Star, playing for the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians. Both Alfonso (Chico) Carrasquel and Luis Aparicio were slick fielding shortstops from Venezuela, playing in the American League for the Chicago White Sox. Aparicio later starred for Baltimore and Carrasquel for Cleveland. Saturnino “Minnie” Minoso was a dark-skinned Cuban who played for the White Sox, Indians, Cardinals, and Senators. He debuted in the majors at the late age of twenty-eight, because of segregation, and was voted Rookie of the Year in 1951. He was one of only two players to play in five different decades and had a lifetime average of just under .300 (.298). Vic Power (born Victor Pellot Pove in Puerto Rico) had his name “Americanized” early in his career and made his major-league debut in 1954 at the age of twenty-six. He was renowned for his flashy, but expert fielding at first base. He also was known for his quick wit. Once, while in a restaurant in the South, the waitress told him that they did not serve Negroes. He replied, “That’s okay. I don’t eat Negroes.” Camilo Pasqual was born in Havana, Cuba, where the Washington Senators had their top minor-league team from 1954 to 1960. Pasqual was a top pitcher for the Senators and the Minnesota Twins, winning 174 games in his career. In 1955 Roberto Clemente made his debut with the Pittsburgh Pirates at the age of twenty. He was Most Valuable Player in the National League in 1966 and led the Pirates to World Championships in 1960 and 1971. He had 3,000 hits before dying in a plane crash in 1972 while trying to bring provisions to the victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. He and Aparicio were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The New Transience of Baseball For the first half of the twentieth century, each league had eight baseball teams, each located in the same city for all those years. In 1953 the Boston Braves relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where they had their top minor-league team. The

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Braves played in an old ballpark and were limited in their parking and other facility growth by their closeness to Boston University. In addition, the Red Sox seemed to be far more popular, so the Braves moved to Wisconsin, where they were welcomed with open arms. In 1954 the St. Louis Browns of the American League moved their franchise to Baltimore and became the Orioles. The Browns were consistent losers in the 1950s and drew few fans. They were “second-class citizens” compared to their NL rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals. The Browns’ move was the impetus for the Philadelphia Athletics, who relocated in 1955 to Kansas City (later moving to Oakland in 1968). These moves all reflected economics, in that the teams that moved were not doing well financially in their present locations. Two of the three were in cities with two teams and the changing demographics of the United States indicated that northeastern cities would continue to grow far more slowly than cities in the South and the West, the so-called Sun Belt. In 1957 the migration of baseball teams took a very unexpected turn. Both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers announced that they were leaving New York and moving to the West Coast, to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively. Both teams were highly popular and in the largest metropolitan region in the United States so this was not like the prior moves of the 1950s. Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley wanted to build a larger, new stadium in Brooklyn, but was thwarted by the city. After much negotiation, he decided that moving to Los Angeles was more attractive and he convinced his fellow owner, Horace Stoneham of the Giants, to also move. That way there could be two teams on the West Coast and road trips by other teams would not be so economically inefficient. The movement of the two teams paralleled the enormous growth and movement of the American population since World War II. Los Angeles had grown from just under 2 million in 1950 to what would become 2.5 million by 1960, nearly a 25 percent increase. Though San Francisco had not grown much, since it is a relatively small city in area, the Bay area would jump from 2 million to over 2.5 million by 1960. Both areas continued to grow as more Americans migrated west and large numbers of immigrants chose to come to these areas, often from Mexico or other Latin American nations. The abandonment of New York was not accepted well in the New York area, as one might expect, and Major League Baseball promised that a new NL franchise would be established there as soon as baseball chose to expand. That happened in 1962 when the Houston Colt .45s and the New York Mets were added to the National League. In their first year in Los Angeles the Dodgers nearly doubled their attendance from 1957 and the Giants did the same in San Francisco.

Media and Baseball Baseball was widely covered in U.S. newspapers, although in the 1950s the number of daily newspapers began a slow but steady decline that continues to this day. Readership dropped precipitously. Many newspapers combined with other dailies. New York City, which had as many as ten daily papers in 1950, had only three (or four if one counts the New York edition of the Wall Street Journal) by the end of the decade. One of the biggest reasons for this decline was the rise of television and television news, brief though were the news broadcasts. Many busy Americans

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

seemed to allot less time for reading about the news and were satisfied to get the summaries that television provided. Pictures took precedence over in-depth reading. Radio listening had not seemed to affect newspaper readership nearly as much. Radio, however, was an important component to the continued popularity of baseball. Every team had at least one radio station that covered all or many of the team’s games and many teams had “networks” of radio stations to allow listeners outside of the metropolitan area to hear game coverage. Some stations even provided simulcasts of games, a holdover from the earlier days of radio. In a simulcast, a radio engineer at a station would use the ticker-tape wire service like the Associated Press. Specific game information would be given to an announcer who would pretend to be at the game, giving “play by play” coverage. The announcer would be aided by people in the studio, who would provide sound effects to replicate the sound of a bat hitting a ball, or play an audiotape of crowd noises. It was quaint and harmless and seemed to bring the game into people’s homes. By the end of the decade such make-believe coverage was unnecessary as technology provided easier switching and hook-ups to get even distant games broadcast live. One of the great inventions of the time that brought baseball to people wherever they were was the transistor radio. People on the move could now follow the action of their favorite teams, no matter where they might be. By far the most popular games to listen to were the annual World Series contests, played in October, which pitted the NL champions against the AL champions. With only eight teams in each league and no playoffs, there was just the World Series, which took less than two weeks to complete in early October.

The Transistor Radio Nothing made the World Series as accessible to baseball-crazed youngsters in the 1950s as the invention and development of the transistor radio. In 1953 the first transistorized portable radio was displayed in Dusseldorf, Germany, at an electronics fair. The radio operated with a flashlight battery and a transistor-based radio receiver, as opposed to the standard vacuum-tube radio that required large, heavy batteries. Transistor radios were first made commercially available in 1954, but were expensive ($50, over $350 in today’s dollar equivalent). At that same time the largest Japanese electronics firms, like Sony and Mitsubishi, were developing their own transistor radios, which were cheaper to make and sell, because of cheaper labor costs and materials. In 1957 these models became available in the United States for about $30; prices fell to under $20 by the early 1960s. The radios came with earphones and were pocket-sized. In other words, they were ideal for listening to the World Series secretly while in school. Because of the radios’ newness, most teachers were unfamiliar with them and their capacities and the most electronically savvy youngsters could hear the big games while seeming to be concentrating on their schoolwork. The transistor radio remained popular throughout the rest of the twentieth century, although teachers became more aware of them. Some teachers even allowed them if students stayed on task in the classroom. Their in-school use for listening to the World Series became moot when the games were moved from day to night games beginning in 1971. One estimate suggests that at least 7 billion transistor radios are in existence today. The radios began to decline in popularity with the rise of portable digital audio players, though they remain popular for listening to news, weather, and emergency alerts.

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Beginning in 1947, the World Series was televised, although there were only a few hundred thousand television sets in American homes. Since then, the series has continued to be televised on various networks over the years. In the 1950s, the Gillette Razor Company was the primary sponsor of this, and many other top sporting events. World Series games were played during the day so viewership was not as high as it might have been in evenings, but that was not a primary consideration. It was not until 1971 that some World Series games would be played at night at television sponsors’ request.

The Seasons of the 1950s The 1950s were dominated by one team, the American League’s New York Yankees. From 1949 to 1964, they won fourteen pennants and nine world championships. The Yankees were led by the legends, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, and Hall of Fame players Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Johnny Mize, Phil Rizzuto, Elston Howard, and Enos Slaughter. Casey Stengel, their manager from 1949 to 1960, also was elected to the Hall of Fame. The Yankees had the best players, but they also had a great psychological advantage, that is, they were sure that they would win the pennant and other teams were not. And the Yankees were usually right, as evidenced by their record. Some players acquired in the twilight of their careers somehow were rejuvenated by becoming Yankees and they became stars once again. Stengel platooned his players and went with hunches on who should be in his lineup on any given day. More often than not, he was correct. In 1954, when the Yankees did not win the league title, they still won 103 games, which would almost always be enough to ensure a pennant. The Cleveland Indians had a remarkable year, winning 111 games, the AL record for a 154-game season and the best winning percentage ever in the league. In 1950 the Korean War had not yet begun to siphon players from the leagues as would gradually happen over the next three years. One of the most prominent was Ted Williams, a veteran of World War II who was recalled to active duty as a fighter pilot at the age of thirty-three in 1952 and flew thirty-eight combat missions in Korea over the next two years. When Williams returned, he never hit below .328 and won two batting titles over the next five years. Many other players volunteered or were drafted into the service and fought in Korea. The Yankees won the AL pennant in 1950 in a close battle with the Detroit Tigers. It was Joe DiMaggio’s last full year as a player. DiMaggio, known as the “Yankee Clipper,” had starred for the team since joining the Yankees as a twentyone-year-old in 1936. He was the Most Valuable Player in the league three times and hit in fifty-six straight games in 1941. DiMaggio had 32 home runs and 122 runs batted in for 1950 and led the Yankees to the pennant. He was slowed at times by heel injuries, but played in 137 games. The Yankees met the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series. It was the first Phillies’ pennant since 1915 and only their second ever, a huge surprise keyed by the “Whiz Kids,” namely, Robin Roberts, Richie Ashburn, Curt Simmons, Granny Hamner, and Del Ennis. The Phillies’ elation was short-lived, as the Yankees swept them in four games. The next year saw one of the most dramatic pennant races in history as the New York Giants came from 131=2 games back in August to defeat the Brooklyn

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

Dodgers in a playoff for the pennant. The Most Valuable Players were two New York catchers, Yogi Berra of the Yankees and Roy Campanella of the Dodgers. After the dramatic playoff victory, the Giants seemed ready to topple the champion Yankees. Both teams had exciting rookies who would fashion Hall of Fame careers, Willie Mays for the Giants and Mickey Mantle for the Yankees. The series would also be the last games of Joe DiMaggio’s career; he retired at age thirty-six. The Giants took a two-games-to-one lead, but the Yankees won three straight to repeat as World Series champion for the third year in a row. The 1952 season saw the Yankees victorious once again, in a tight contest with Cleveland. The Dodgers (who lost Don Newcombe to the military) surprised the Giants (without Willie Mays, also drafted into the service) and topped the Giants and Cardinals for the pennant. Stan Musial of the Cardinals won his sixth batting

“The Shot Heard Round the World” No baseball game in the 1950s is more renowned than game 3 of the National League playoffs, October 3, 1951. The Brooklyn Dodgers held a 131=2-game lead over the New York Giants in mid-August. Besides the rivalry of teams from two New York boroughs, there was the additional intensity created by Giants’ manager Leo Durocher. He had been the Dodgers’ manager from 1939 until the middle of 1948, when he clashed with the Dodgers’ general manager, Branch Rickey. Rickey and the Giants worked out a deal that let Durocher out of his contract and allowed him to sign with the Giants. Beating the Dodgers became of great importance to Durocher. The Giants won thirty-seven of the final forty-four games to catch the Dodgers, who went 26–22. At that time playoffs only occurred when two teams tied for the pennant, and the playoffs were considered an extension of the regular season. The playoffs were a best-of-three series and the Giants took game 1, 3–1 as Bobby Thomson hit a two-run home run. Thomson was one of the few European-born players of the time, coming from Glasgow, Scotland. His family immigrated to Staten Island, New York, when he was a child. Thomson began his career in 1946 at the age of twenty-two and hit twentyfour or more homers for the Giants in six of his seven full seasons with them. The losing pitcher in game 1 was Ralph Branca, the Dodgers’ starting pitcher. The Dodgers triumphed easily in game 2, 10–0 behind rookie pitcher Clem Labine. In game 3, played in the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ home field, Brooklyn took an early lead of 1–0. The Giants tied it in the seventh, but the Dodgers got three runs in the eighth to lead 4–1. Don Newcombe, the Dodgers’ ace pitcher, tired in the ninth, since he was pitching on only two days rest. The Giants scored one run and had one out with two men on when the Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen finally pulled Newcombe. Surprisingly, he inserted Branca, the game 1 loser, who had had trouble with Bobby Thomson, the next batter, all year. Thomson had hit several home runs off Branca, but Dressen’s pitching staff was tired and there were few other choices. Thomson took the first pitch for a strike. The second pitch was intended to push Thomson off the plate, but the ball drifted a bit and Thomson yanked it down the short left-field line. As the ball carried into the stands, the Giants’ local radio announcer immortalized the blow with his excited shouts of “There’s a long drive, it’s gonna be, I believe … The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

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title, but the MVP award went to Hank Sauer of the Chicago Cubs. Bobby Shantz, who won twenty-four games for the fourth-place Philadelphia Athletics, was the MVP in the American League. The Yankees topped the Dodgers in seven games in the World Series to win their fourth straight championship, only the second team in history to do so. One of the unusual events of 1953 was the decision by the Cincinnati Reds to alter their name, in response to the McCarthy-era fears of Communists. The Reds officially became the Redlegs, retaining that name until 1959, when they reverted to their former name. No matter what they were called, the Reds were still a bad team; they finished in sixth place, thirty-seven games behind the Dodgers, who won the pennant by thirteen games. Once again they would meet the Yankees, who had also won easily, by 81=2 games over the Indians. The Indians, however, had the league’s Most Valuable Player. He was Al Rosen, one of the few Jewish American major leaguers. Rosen received all twenty-four of the first-place votes after leading the league in home runs, runs batted in, total bases, runs, and slugging average. Rosen’s counterpart in the National League was Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ catcher, who won his second MVP award after leading the league in runs batted in with 142 and finishing third in home runs and slugging. He also played the most difficult position, catcher. Campanella and his teammates wanted to end their run of losses to the Yankees in the World Series. The Yankees took the first two games in Yankee Stadium, but the Dodgers came back to win the next two before the Yankees closed out the series with two more victories. The Yankees became the first and only team to win five consecutive world championships and the Dodger fans uttered their famous cry, “Wait ‘til next year!” The Cleveland Indians broke the Yankees’ streak in 1954, setting a new record for victories, and were favored to top the New York Giants in the World Series. The Giants were led by Willie Mays, best in the league with a .345 batting average and MVP winner. He also made the greatest catch in World Series history in game 1. With the score tied at 2–2 and two Indian runners on base with nobody out, Vic Wertz hit a smash to the deepest part of the Polo Grounds, which was 483 feet to dead center. Mays caught the ball at full speed, his back to the infield, about 450 feet from home. He turned, fired the ball in, and neither runner could even advance. The Indians failed to score in the inning; the Giants won the game in the tenth. The game 1 loss deflated the Indians and they were swept by the Giants in four games. The next two years saw a return to Dodger-Yankee battles in the World Series. For the Dodgers, 1955 was “next year” as they finally defeated the Yankees in seven games for the championship. Campanella and Berra, the opposing catchers, were again the league MVPs, the third time for both. The Yankees reversed the outcome in 1956, which was the year Mickey Mantle won the triple crown (leading the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in) and the MVP award, his first. The highlight of the series was game 5, when Don Larsen of the Yankees pitched a perfect game. The win gave the Yankees a three-games-to-two lead, but the Dodgers tied the series with a ten-inning 1–0 victory. New York came back to crush the Dodgers, 9–0, to win the championship. For the next two years, the Milwaukee Braves were NL champions, playing against the Yankees both times in the World Series. Milwaukee had a pennant winner just five years after the Braves arrived in town, and the city was ecstatic. The

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

The Perfect Game There have been only seventeen perfect games in major-league baseball history and only one in the postseason, game 5 of the 1956 World Series, played on October 8, 1956. A perfect game is one where no player on a team reaches first base. The hero of that game was Don Larsen, a player with a lifetime record of thirty wins and forty losses in four regular seasons. On that October day, however, everything he threw went where he intended. There were only two close plays and a questionable third strike on the twenty-seventh and last batter, Dale Mitchell. Larsen was opposed by Dodger pitcher Sal Maglie, who gave up only five hits in the game. Larsen’s control was so good that he had a three-balls count on only one batter, Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese. In the second inning, Jackie Robinson, playing in his final game, hit a smash off the third baseman’s glove that ricocheted directly to the shortstop, who threw out Robinson. In the fifth inning, Gil Hodges hit a long drive to left center that Mickey Mantle managed to snare with a one-handed running catch. Baseball superstition says that teammates don’t mention a no-hitter in the dugout, but Larsen talked about it. His teammates, however, either responded with silence or told him to “shut up.” Larsen said that he even ducked into the tunnel connecting the dugout to the clubhouse for a cigarette between the seventh and eight innings. In the ninth Larsen got the first two batters easily, then had a one-ball, two-strike count on Dale Mitchell before throwing a ball that the umpire called a strike (though most observers thought that it was high) and ending the game. Catcher Yogi Berra ran to the mound and leaped into Larsen’s arms, a shot often reproduced in baseball anthologies. Larsen received the MVP award for the series, which the Yankees took, four games to three. He retired twelve years later with a lifetime mark of eighty-one wins and ninety-one losses. As one sportswriter called it, “The imperfect man pitched the perfect game.”

1957 Braves were led by veteran pitcher Warren Spahn, who would retire as the alltime leading left-handed pitcher in baseball with 363 wins; Ed Mathews, who was the game’s top third baseman and would hit 512 home runs in his career; and Henry “Hank” Aaron, who led the league in home runs and won the MVP award. Aaron would go on to be baseball’s all-time home-run king, until his record was broken in 2007 by Barry Bonds. The Yankees were led by Mickey Mantle, who won his second consecutive MVP award, edging Ted Williams who had hit .388, the closest anyone had come to hitting .400 since Williams himself had done so in 1941. Both teams had won their league races by eight games, but the Yankees’ experience made them the Series favorites. Nevertheless the Braves edged the Yankees four games to three, as pitcher Lou Burdette tied a World Series record with three victories in one World Series. Near the end of the season the Giants and Dodgers announced their moves to the West Coast and it was a sad end of the season for New York City baseball fans. The next year the Dodgers debuted in the Los Angeles Coliseum, a building made for the Olympics of 1932 and used for football. It seated over 90,000, but the baseball dimensions were unusual, and the Dodgers commenced building a new stadium that was ready in the Chavez Ravine area for the opening day of 1962. The Dodgers finished in seventh in 1958. The Giants moved to Seals Stadium in San

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Francisco where the Pacific Coast League Seals had played. The stadium only seated 22,500, but a new ballpark, Candlestick Park, was ready for occupancy in 1960. For the first time in many years, neither MVP was from the pennant-winning team. Jackie Jensen of the Red Sox won in the American League, and Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs, who finished tied for fifth, won the NL award. The World Series again went to seven games, with the Yankees regaining the championship from the Braves. The last year of the 1950s produced some unusual events. For the first time in five years, the Yankees did not win the pennant. Instead, the Chicago White Sox with speed and pitching edged the Cleveland Indians for the AL title. The doubleplay combination of Luis Aparicio and Nelson Fox was the heart of the White Sox and Fox won the MVP award. Ernie Banks won the MVP award for the second straight year after hitting forty-seven home runs. The Dodgers rebounded from seventh to win the pennant. The Dodgers tied the Milwaukee Braves and the Dodgers won the pennant in a two-game playoff. The Dodgers had no big stars, but their team play was excellent.

San Francisco Giants’ centerfielder Willie Mays shows his batting form in the eighth inning of the game with American League during the All-Star game in Pittsburgh, July 7, 1959. Mays walloped a triple to the right center that won the game. Baltimore Orioles’ catcher Gus Triandos is seen at left. (AP / Wide World Photos)

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

In the World Series, the White Sox pounded the Dodgers 11–0 in game 1, but the Dodgers won the championship in six games. The Dodgers were still playing in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the contests there set records each day for major-league attendance with more than 92,000 fans attending, records that will never be broken. The next year (1960), the Pittsburgh Pirates won their first pennant since 1927 and went on to defeat the Yankees in seven games on a dramatic ninth-inning home run by Bill Mazeroski. Dick Groat of the Pirates and Roger Maris of the Yankees were voted league MVPs. By the end of the 1950s baseball was ready to consider expansion, confident that the path followed by the Dodgers and Giants, that is, moving west, was the direction for major-league baseball. There was also the matter of fulfilling the promise to New York City to have a new NL team in the nation’s largest city. These actions would all be taken in the early 1960s.

Basketball College Basketball College basketball had grown tremendously in popularity in the 1940s, but the revelation of point shaving at top universities in 1951 disgusted many people. It took until the end of the decade to recapture lost fans and to return college basketball to a position of trust among the fans and the media. Of the two postseason tournaments, the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament, the former was both larger and more prestigious. It was possible for a squad to play in both tournaments, which both Bradley and City College of New York (CCNY) did. By 1959 the NCAA tournament was up to twenty-three teams and viewed as the better tournament than the NIT with its twelve teams, most of which were conference runners-up rather than champions. College basketball drew millions of fans, but most coverage was regional. Unlike football, there were intersectional rivalries, many of which played out in tournaments held between semesters, as well as before league seasons began in January. Thus, there were greater opportunities for fans and media people to see teams from around the country, even though television coverage was not national in scope. The biggest story of 1950 was CCNY’s victories in both the NCAA and the NIT tournaments, but this was quickly overwhelmed by the revelations of point shaving. Point shaving is not throwing a game as such. Rather, it involves players from a team trying to keep a game closer than the point spread. So, if a team is favored by ten points and they only win by six, people who bet on the underdog team win money because the winning team did not beat the point spread. The point-shaving scandals were a direct result of big gamblers paying off certain players to keep games closer. With that done, the gamblers could bet either for or against the spread (depending on who was paid off) and win thousands of dollars. The scandals involved some of the top programs and players in the country in 1950, including Long Island University (LIU), coached by Hall of Famer Clair Bee; CCNY, coached by Hall of Famer Nat Holman; Bradley University, coached by Forrest “Fordy” Anderson; the University of Kentucky, coached by Hall of Famer Adolph Rupp; University of Toledo, coached by Gerard Bush; New York

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CCNY Does a Double In March of 1950 both Bradley University and CCNY entered the NIT and the NCAA tournaments. This was possible because the NIT ended on March 18 and the NCAA ran from March 23 to March 28. The previous year the University of Kentucky had entered both tournaments, won the NCAA, but lost in the quarterfinals of the NIT. CCNY was not even ranked in the Top 20 in the basketball polls, but they were able to get into the NIT when some teams chose not to enter. The Beavers were 17–5 and a local favorite. CCNY was coached by Nat Holman, one of the Original Celtics of the 1920s. That team was voted into the Hall of Fame as a unit in 1959. Holman’s players were all from the New York area, most directly from the city itself. CCNY had two African American starters, Ed Warner and Floyd Lane, with Ed Warner and Irwin Dambrot the top scorers and rebounders. There were twelve teams in the tournament, staged at the most famous venue in basketball, Madison Square Garden. CCNY was not seeded so they needed to play in the first round, where they beat the defending NIT champion University of San Francisco easily. Then they played 1949 NCAA champion Kentucky and won by thirtynine, one of the worst defeats ever for an Adolph Rupp–coached team. In the semifinals, CCNY topped number 6–ranked Duquesne by ten, then defeated number 1–ranked Bradley in the finals, 69–61. Ed Warner of CCNY was MVP. The NCAA tournament consisted of only eight teams and they were divided into two regions. In the Eastern Region, which was played in Madison Square Garden that year, CCNY edged Ohio State, 56–55, and then topped North Carolina State, 78 to 73. In the Western Regional, Bradley had beaten BYU and Baylor in Kansas City to win the right to play CCNY. For the only time in the decade the NCAA finals were played in New York City, a decided advantage for the CCNY Beavers. In a tense contest, CCNY topped Bradley for the second time in ten days, 71–68, to claim the NCAA championship, the only time that this was ever accomplished. Irwin Dambrot was voted Most Outstanding Player and coach Nat Holman was carried off the court in triumph. A year later a number of CCNY players were found guilty of point shaving and the school reassigned Holman, and moved to de-emphasize basketball. The Beavers would never be a top basketball program ever again, but in March, 1950 they did the seemingly impossible.

University, coached by Hall of Famer Howard Cann; and Manhattan College, coached by Ken Norton. Top players involved in the point shaving were fined and/ or prohibited from playing professional basketball, and a few served prison time. The effects were felt throughout the sports world. Some of the schools moved to de-emphasize their big-time basketball programs, such as LIU, CCNY, and Manhattan. Some coaches, though not implicated, were removed from their positions since they were seen as somewhat complicit by not having control of their teams. College basketball struggled to clear its institutional reputation, which took most of the next ten years. Gambling, however, on these and other sporting events did not go away; it merely became more hidden.

Media and College Basketball Most college basketball interest was regional. Beginning in the mid-1950s regional television packages provided coverage of the top leagues like the Big Ten,

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

the Pacific Coast Conference, the Big Eight, and the Atlantic Coast Conference. There was also selected coverage of various teams in the Northeast, but there were no major leagues at that time. Most eastern teams were independents and it was not until the 1970s that the Atlantic 10 and Big East conferences came into existence. Radio coverage was extensive but, again, there was no national radio network coverage. Most colleges had their own announcers and some, like the University of Kentucky, had a large regional network throughout Kentucky, southern Indiana, and southern Illinois. The two major tournaments, the NIT, held at Madison Square Garden in New York, and the NCAA, held at various sites (five of the years the finals were in Kansas City) were not televised until the mid-1950s and then only the championship contests. The NIT was only televised in selected regions through the 1950s. Newspaper coverage was intense throughout the period in both large and small daily papers.

Ethnicity and College Basketball Many of the top college basketball conferences were either barred by law, or custom, from admitting African Americans, into the middle of the 1950s. The Southeastern Conference (SEC) remained segregated until the late1960s and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) nearly as long. The Big Ten and the various Pacific Coast leagues had African American players in the 1940s and many of the Big Eight (later the Big 12) schools played African Americans starting in the 1950s. Until 1955 no NCAA champion had more than one African American starter and most had none. The concerted efforts at recruiting African Americans changed that. In 1955 the University of San Francisco Dons, led by Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, won all but one game and swept to the NCAA title. Russell and Jones were joined by Hal Perry in the starting lineup, the first time a major college power had started three African Americans. Their disciplined play belied the inaccurate stereotypes that some prejudiced observers had about how African Americans played basketball. The next year, USF went undefeated and won the NCAA tournament again. This was a big boost for exploding those aforementioned stereotypes, and for the recruitment of top African American players at major college powers. In 1957 Wilt Chamberlain, the most highly recruited schoolboy in history, took his University of Kansas team to the NCAA finals, but they were defeated in triple overtime by the University of North Carolina. Chamberlain, a 70 200 African American center, was constantly triple-teamed by the smaller UNC players. This was Chamberlain’s sophomore year and, at that time, players were required to play on a freshmen team their first year in college. Chamberlain left the University of Kansas after his junior year, but he and Bill Russell would impact professional basketball from the late 1950s through the 1960s. Chamberlain was named Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA tournament in 1957, just as Russell had been in 1955. Hal Lear, a guard from Temple, won the honor in 1956 and Elgin Baylor of Seattle University received the award in 1958. All are African Americans. The NIT champions in the 1950s were mostly lacking in African American starters with a few exceptions like Ed Warner of CCNY in 1950, Walter Dukes of Seton Hall in 1953, Sihugo Green of Duquesne in 1955, Tony Jackson of St. Johns in 1959, all of whom were selected as the Most Valuable Player in the NIT.

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In the 1960s there would be a great rush to recruit African Americans as a result of the foundation that these black pioneers had laid in the 1950s. In 1963 a team with four African American starters (Loyola of Chicago) won the NCAA title, and in 1966 Texas Western won the NCAA tournament with five African American starters. Women were not represented on NCAA basketball teams until the 1970s, their inclusion coming largely as a result of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. Some National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) teams like Nashville Business College and Wayland Baptist University had top women’s basketball teams in the decade.

Professional Basketball In 1949 the National Basketball League (NBL), begun in 1937, and the Basketball Association of America (BAA), founded in 1946, merged into one new league, the National Basketball Association (NBA). The newly created league had seventeen teams, which was more teams than could be supported economically at that time. Within a year, the league had lost six teams and was a manageable eleven teams located within the Northeast and Upper Midwest of the United States. This was where the largest number of people resided and where basketball was the most popular. The league had one franchise move and another fold the next year so it was at ten teams in 1951–52. In 1953 another franchise folded and another followed in 1954. Beginning in 1955 the NBA remained at eight teams for the rest of the decade, but there were franchise shifts during this period. At the beginning of the 1959–60 season, the Eastern Division had teams in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Syracuse, all of which had been in those cities since the NBL-BAA merger. The Western Division consisted of four teams, three of which had relocated since 1950. These were the St. Louis Hawks, the Minneapolis Lakers, the Detroit Pistons, and the Cincinnati Royals. By 1972 three of these had relocated, with Detroit the only stable franchise.

Geography and the NBA As just noted, the NBA was quite “fluid” during the 1950s. Team moves reflected economics, that is, movement was needed to improve team profit margins. That might mean moving to a city that had never embraced pro basketball, but was growing (a kind of westward expansion that paralleled the changing demographic of the United States), or it might mean moving to a city that was simply bigger and could attract a larger fan base. In 1950 although both Baltimore and Washington had teams, the local population was not growing as fast as other areas. There was growth in suburban areas, but there was reluctance to return to the city center to view basketball at night, and the cities’ populations were shrinking. The owners could not find buyers and there was no assurance of profit from moving to an unknown city, so both franchises folded, Washington after a year, Baltimore after four years. The West had greater geographical volatility. The team in Moline, Illinois, drew well, but felt that the escalating costs of maintaining the team required a bigger venue in a bigger city. Thus, in 1951 the franchise relocated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the Milwaukee Hawks. Four years later, owner Ben Kerner decided that more money

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

could be made at in an even larger city and moved his franchise to St. Louis, where they would remain for the next thirteen years. The NBA remained, basically, a northeastern and upper midwestern league through the 1950s.

Ethnicity and Pro Basketball The NBL had integrated as early as 1942, but the BAA was never integrated. The NBL had had an all African American squad in the league in 1948–49, but the Dayton Rens (actually the New York Renaissance squad playing out of Dayton) had disbanded after the 1948–49 season. So the new NBA, with nine former NBL clubs and eight former BAA clubs, had no African Americans in 1949–50. The next season, however, New York Knicks owner Ned Irish signed Nate “Sweetwater” Clifton; the Boston Celtics drafted and signed Chuck Cooper from Duquesne University; the Washington Capitols signed Earl Lloyd from West Virginia State to a contract and Hank DeZonie, the former Ren who had played for Dayton in 1948–49, was signed by the Tri-Cities Blackhawks and played in five games near the end of the season. Though there were difficulties in integrating the league, the problems were less than Jackie Robinson had faced in 1947 in major-league baseball, for a number of reasons. First, three years had passed since baseball had integrated. Second, many of the white players in the NBA had gone to college and had had some contact with African Americans. Third, black and white basketball teams had been playing against each other since at least the 1920s. There was a greater respect for their respective abilities as basketball players. This is not to pretend that there were not problems for these first four pioneers and the African Americans that followed them into the NBA. Many of the cities where they played still practiced aspects of Jim Crow laws, with Baltimore, Indianapolis, and Washington the most pronounced. This would affect hotels and restaurants. Fans made racial slurs in almost every NBA city. Finally, many NBA teams played exhibitions in various other cities, and those below the Mason-Dixon line sometimes prohibited blacks and whites from taking the court together. These practices continued even after the Brown decision of 1954 and made some African American players feel that they needed to speak out regarding these kinds of discriminatory practices, which were the basis for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1951 Don Barksdale from UCLA joined the Baltimore Bullets, but Earl Lloyd was out of the league in the military. New players were Davage Minor and Bob Wilson. Lloyd returned in 1952, but only Blaine Denning, who played one game that year, was a new African American in the NBA. The next year, 1953, Ray Felix from LIU became the starting center for Baltimore and was named Rookie of the Year and two other players, Rollen Hans and Isaac Walthour, appeared briefly in the NBA. There were no African Americans on any of the Western Division teams other than Walthour’s four games for Milwaukee. Ken McBride, Jim Tucker, Bob Knight, and Jackie Moore entered the NBA in 1954, but all were out within two years. African American players were added in 1955 to both the Knicks (who had three of the twelve African Americans in the league) the Pistons, the Lakers, and the Royals. The Knicks had selected Walter Dukes from Seton Hall and the Royals drafted Maurice Stokes from St. Francis of Pennsylvania. Stokes was terrific, averaging more than sixteen points and sixteen rebounds per game and being

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named Rookie of the Year for 1955–56. He became one of the top players in the league and set a league rebounding record, but was stricken by posttraumatic encephalopathy after hitting his head in a fall in a game in Minneapolis, late in his third year in the NBA. Stokes went into a coma three days later and recovered enough to live a life as an invalid, cared for by a former teammate, Jack Twyman. Stokes died in 1970 at age thirty-six. In 1956 the NBA had fifteen African Americans and the most important was Bill Russell, the former star of the USF NCAA championship team, who entered the league in December after competing in the Olympics in Australia. Russell changed the NBA dramatically and became the greatest winner in the NBA. An unbelievable defender, he specialized in blocking shots and tipping them to his teammates to start fast breaks. He also was a rebounding demon, who broke Stokes’s year-old record for rebounds in a year in 1957–58. That year Russell also led the Celtics to the NBA finals for the second straight year. The number of African Americans in the NBA remained at fifteen in 1957–58, but the players had changed. Philadelphia added Woody Sauldsberry, who became the Rookie of the Year and the first of five African Americans in a row to win the award. At this point, seven of the eight NBA clubs had at least one African American; the St. Louis Hawks were the only one without one. (They did have Worthy Patterson on their roster for four games.) Ben Kerner, the Hawks’ owner, was not sure that St. Louis, a border city, would be very receptive to this “social change.” The next year (1958–59) the Hawks obtained Si Green in a trade with the Royals and a number of other African Americans entered the league, most notably, future Hall of Famers Hal Greer with Syracuse, Elgin Baylor with Minneapolis (named Rookie of the Year), and K.C. Jones for Boston. Green’s trade and Stokes’ loss left the Royals with only rookie Wayne Embry. In the last year of the decade (1959–60), the NBA had twenty-four African Americans on the rosters of the eight teams with three or four on at least six of the teams. Over the next decade the ratio would continue to grow. In 1959, the most famous of these players was Wilt Chamberlain, who came into the NBA after playing a year for the Harlem Globetrotters. His impact was immediate as he shattered the league scoring record (37.6 points per game) as well as the league rebounding record (27 rebounds per game).

The NBA Seasons of the 1950s The NBA’s first league champion in the seventeen-team league was the Minneapolis Lakers, led by George Mikan. The next year the Rochester Royals beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals to win their only NBA title. For the next three years (1952, 1953, 1954) Mikan and his Lakers won the NBA title. Then Mikan retired at age twentynine. He did return two years later for thirty-one games, but then retired permanently. The Syracuse Nationals, led by Dolph Schayes, won the title in 1956. The championship situation was considerably altered by Bill Russell’s entrance to the league in December of 1956. He and the Celtics won the title eleven of the next thirteen years, beginning with 1956–57. The following year Russell was injured in the NBA finals and the St. Louis Hawks and Bob Pettit were able to claim the NBA championship. The Celtics closed the decade with a title in 1959 and won the next eight years in a row.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

The Best Basketball Player of the Early Twentieth Century In the 1950s, basketball writers and coaches voted on the top player of the first half of the twentieth century and George Mikan won easily. This would have been hard to fathom when Mikan graduated from high school in 1942. He had played sparingly in high school at Quigley Prep in Chicago and Joliet Central, from which he graduated. His only asset was height, but he was clumsy and had little shooting skill. What he did have was indomitable determination and intelligence. Mikan wanted to go to Notre Dame, but was rebuffed by their coach, who suggested that he enroll and play at DePaul University in Chicago. Mikan did and his coach there, a twenty-eight-year-old named Ray Meyer, saw that Mikan had great potential if he would agree to work hard. Hard work was never George Mikan’s problem. Long hours in the gym on specially designed drills turned Mikan into a star and he in turn turned DePaul into a champion. Behind Mikan, DePaul won the NIT in 1945, at that time the most prestigious tournament in college basketball. He was college player of the year in both 1945 and 1946 and he led the nation in scoring both of those years. Mikan’s superior height (60 1000 ) and agility allowed him to block balls before they went into the basket and led to the creation of the goal-tending rule. His dominance in the center lane also led to a rule that widened it from six to twelve feet. At the conclusion of his senior season, Mikan signed with the Chicago Gears of the National Basketball League and led them to the 1946–47 NBL playoffs, which they won, defeating Rochester in the Finals. The next year, however, the Chicago Gears’ owner decided to start his own league, which collapsed within a month. The Gears players were then put into a special draft and Mikan became a Minneapolis Laker. It was a great union. Starting in 1947–48, Mikan led the Lakers to titles in the NBL (1947–48), the BAA (1948–49), and four titles in the NBA (1949–50, 1951–52, 1952–53, 1953–54). Because the NBA did not institute a Most Valuable Player award until Mikan had retired, he only won such an award in the NBL. When he retired he was the all-time leading scorer in the NBA in both points and points per game. Mikan briefly coached the Lakers, but spent the majority of his career after the NBA as a lawyer and running a travel agency. He had attended law school while playing for the Chicago Gears and did very well in real estate investments. In 1967 he was instrumental in the formation of the American Basketball Association and became its first commissioner, remaining in that office until 1969. In 1959 Mikan was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame and was also named one of the NBA’s Greatest Fifty Players ever in 1996. Mikan battled diabetes and other ailments at the end of his life and died at his home in Arizona in 2005 at the age of eighty.

The teams in the league were gaining financial stability, but there were not the enormous profits that would characterize professional sports beginning in the late 1970s. Most of the players held second jobs in the off-season and the top salary was probably that of Bob Cousy of the Celtics, at less than $50,000 per year. Teams traveled for the most part by train, but by the end of the decade air travel would predominate for the western trips to Minneapolis and St. Louis. Fort Wayne remained a difficult city to get to, even by train, and in 1957 Fort Wayne and Rochester relocated to Detroit and Cincinnati, respectively. Les Harrison, the Royals’ owner, had been having troubles making ends meet, and he moved the

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Royals in the hope of improving that. Things did get better in Cincinnati, but not enough for him to keep the team, and he sold it in 1959. Through the 1950s the level of play continued to improve as the players entering the league were bigger, stronger, and faster than their predecessors. Besides the emerging stars like Cousy, Russell, Baylor, Greer, Chamberlain, Pettit, and Schayes, other new talents joined the league. These included Paul Arizin, Tom Heinsohn, Bill Sharman, Cliff Hagan, Jack Twyman, George Yardley, and Tom Gola.

College Football Bowl Games Though not nearly as popular as baseball, college football was probably the second most popular sport in the United States in the 1950s. Some of the teams that were most dominant in the decade were Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Texas, Michigan State, Ohio State, and UCLA. Most teams played regionally, and intersectional games were rare. Only in the bowl games was there often assurance that intersectional games would be able to indicate real superiority at the college ranks. Even these games were subject to a number of restrictions. During most of the 1950s many southern or border schools neither allowed African Americans to play on their squads nor would they play teams with African Americans. Until the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954, many of these same schools simply did not allow blacks to enroll, and, even after Brown, the “foot dragging” was enormous. Thus, it is difficult in retrospect to truly gauge how good some of these teams were, since they carefully limited with whom they would compete. Another restriction was self-imposed; some schools simply would not play postseason games. Faculty felt that the season was already long enough or that postseason games were time-consuming and meaningless. The expenses also outweighed any economic or reputational rewards. In addition, some leagues only allowed one team to play in a bowl game, most often the league champion. Thus, the number of bowls played was quite small and the eagerness of some teams to compete in those games was problematic. The Rose Bowl, the oldest bowl game (started in 1902), pitted the Big Ten champion against the Pacific 8 (or 10) champion beginning in 1947. The Big Ten had one wrinkle, however, not allowing its members to participate two years in a row. Thus, the top team was not always represented. During the 1950s, Ohio State won three Rose Bowls, Michigan State two, Iowa two, Michigan one, and Illinois one. The Big Ten had only one loss in the decade, 1953, when Southern Cal edged Wisconsin. The Orange Bowl, played in Miami (first year 1933), beginning in 1954, established a relationship with the Big Eight (later the Big 12) that tied the league champion to the Orange Bowl contest, against a highly ranked opponent. Before that, teams were selected at large and were usually highly ranked. (The Associated Press started a college football poll in 1936.) The 1954 Orange Bowl pitted number 1 Maryland against number 4 Oklahoma with the latter winning 7–0. This was in the first year of what would become an amazing forty-seven-game winning streak on the part of Oklahoma that stretched into the 1957 season. The next year Duke beat Nebraska, but for the rest of the decade the Big Eight teams were victorious as Oklahoma won in 1956, 1958, and 1959, and Colorado in 1957. From 1954 to 1958 an ACC team played against the Big Eight team.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

The Sugar Bowl, played in New Orleans (begun in 1935), during the 1950s featured the Southeastern Conference (SEC) champion against a top-ranked opponent. In the 1950s, the SEC team won six of the ten games played. In the 1951 Sugar Bowl, Kentucky upset number 1 Oklahoma 13–7. The next year, number 1 Tennessee was upset by Maryland, 28–13. The Cotton Bowl began in Dallas in 1937 and, beginning in 1942, matched a Southwest Conference (SWC) team against an at-large opponent. For the 1950s, the SWC teams went 5–5 over the decade. The most meaningful Cotton Bowl of the decade may have been the one in 1960, which followed the 1959 season. Number 1 Syracuse played fourth-ranked Texas, and Syracuse defended the poll voters by winning 23–14. The 1950s marked the last decade in which smaller universities would still be ranked in the Top 20 in the college football polls. Major universities and their programs would be overwhelmingly dominant by the end of the decade, a pattern that would continue over the next fifty years and beyond. Schools such as Princeton, Cornell, San Francisco, Yale, and the service academies would largely disappear from these rankings.

Media and College Football Until the late 1950s the bowl games were not televised; in fact, very few college football games were televised on anything but a regional basis. There was no network package and games on Saturday were shown on various stations recruited by a regional company. Thus, most people in the Southwest saw SWC games and those in the Midwest would generally get Big Ten games, but even those shown were not necessarily the top game, since most conferences had agreements to provide coverage of all of their teams on a somewhat equal basis. Television showed national games only two times a year in this era. One was during Thanksgiving Weekend when a few traditional games were shown such as Texas–Texas A&M or Army-Navy, which sometimes was televised the next weekend. The other televised date was New Year’s Day and the bowl games. College football had a huge following, but it was very fractionalized; most people in a region would not have seen teams from other regions play, either in person or on television. There were some notable exceptions like Southern Cal and Notre Dame, a rivalry that began when Knute Rockne was coaching at Notre Dame in the 1920s. Every region had its “big game” and these were well covered by the regional media, both newspapers and radio, but television was problematic until the end of the decade. Thus, Harvard-Yale, Alabama-Auburn, Michigan–Ohio State, Texas–Texas A&M, USC-UCLA, Stanford-California, and Oklahoma-Nebraska, just to name a few, were all well covered by the local print and radio media.

Ethnicity and College Football Up until World War II, most of the top football conferences had little, if any access, for African American players. The Big Ten had no rules about segregation, but few African Americans played football there until after World War II. Part of the reason for this was that the percentage of students who went on to college was less than 30 percent until that time and the percentage of blacks going on to college was half of that. Of those, many went to traditionally black colleges or universities. The Pacific Coast Conference (Pac 8) had a slightly better record on recruiting of African

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Americans. Also, there were far fewer schools in the West so the likelihood of an African American going to a PCC school was simply greater if the student was from that state. The Jim Crow laws in the South meant that African Americans were barred from most schools in the SWC, SEC, and ACC. It also meant that schools not bound by such law or practices became more successful as they recruited more and more African Americans, enlarging their pool of potential players. One indication of these changes was the fact that no Heisman Trophy winners were African Americans until 1961. Beginning a decade later, in 1972, the next eleven Heisman Trophy winners in a row were African Americans. The Outland Trophy, awarded to the nation’s best college lineman, was first awarded to an African American in the mid-1950s. These awards, however, were as much based on public relations as abilities, since few people (coaches, fans, players, media) ever got to see players out of their own region until television began carrying more games at the end of the decade. The coaches of college football had more longevity than the players who left school within four or five years. Thus, the big “stars” were Bud Wilkinson of Oklahoma; Paul “Bear” Bryant of Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Alabama; Woody Hayes of Ohio State; Chalmers “Bump” Elliott of Michigan; Frank Leahy of Notre Dame; Forest Evashevski of Iowa; Lynn “Pappy” Waldorf of California; and Darrell Royal of Texas.

Professional Football At the beginning of the 1950s, professional football had a limited audience. There was local radio coverage and fans attended games with occasional sellouts, but the overall appeal of the game was limited. By the end of the decade, pro football had surpassed college football in interest and popularity and was nearing the formerly unchallenged popularity of baseball. The biggest reason for this was television, specifically national television. During the early 1950s, the Dumont Television Network carried Saturday night NFL games, but in 1955 the network folded and the games were no longer carried. That same year NBC began broadcasting the NFL championship game, paying $100,000 to the league for the game’s television rights. At that time the league was limited in number of teams and real fans of the game. In 1950 the NFL had absorbed its only rival, the All-American Football Conference (AAFC), which had begun in 1946 with eight teams. By 1949 the league was down to seven teams and some franchises were in financial trouble. The NFL took three of the franchises, the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts, making the NFL a thirteen-team league. The league also adopted the “free substitution” rule, which meant that there were no limits on how many players could be substituted and how often. This made the game much faster since players could be fresher and increased interest and popularity of the sport. Only the Los Angeles Rams and the Washington Redskins had local television contracts to televise all of their games, home and away. The league made two divisions, no longer just based on geography, and each team played twelve games. At the end of the season, the Los Angeles Rams and the Chicago Bears tied for the National Conference title with records of nine wins and three losses. In the American Conference, the Cleveland Browns, late of the AAFC, tied the New York Giants with records of ten wins and two losses each.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

Bud Wilkinson and the Streaks of the 1950s Charles (Bud) Wilkinson (1916–94) was an all-around athlete in high school in Minnesota and went on to star on national championship teams in football at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1937. After receiving an English degree and working for a time in banking, Wilkinson joined the U.S. Navy in 1943. There he assisted with football coaching and served on an aircraft carrier, When he was discharged he was recruited to be an assistant coach at Oklahoma in 1946 and when the head coach left for Maryland, Wilkinson was appointed head coach and athletic director at the university. He was thirty-one. In Wilkinson’s first year as head coach, the squad went 7–2–1, winning their last five in a row and tying Kansas for their second league title in a row. The Sooners of Oklahoma won the next thirteen titles in a row under Wilkinson. After a loss to Notre Dame in September 1953, the Sooners went on to win every game that they played until November of 1957, when they were upset by Notre Dame once again, 7–0. Their streak of forty-seven straight victories is still the record in college football. Amazingly, the Sooners under Wilkinson had a thirty-one-game winning streak from 1948 to 1950. From 1948 to 1958, Wilkinson’s record at Oklahoma was 107–8 with two ties, 91 percent wins. His teams went twelve seasons without losing a conference game and Oklahoma was voted the national champion in football in 1950, 1955, and 1956. In 1954 they defeated number 1 Maryland in the Orange Bowl, but the polls were conducted before bowl games so Oklahoma was only ranked number 4. In 1956 Wilkinson recruited Prentice Gault, the first African American to be recruited and play football at a major university in the Southwest. The University had waged a long legal battle into the 1950s to remain segregated, so Gault was not universally well received by Wilkinson’s players. Wilkinson held firm and Gault became an All-American running back. President John F. Kennedy appointed Wilkinson as the first director of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Wilkinson retired as football coach after the 1963 season at the age of forty-seven and a record of 145–29–4, a winning percentage of .815. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1964, but was defeated and became a football analyst for ABC in 1965. In 1969 he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. Wilkinson was persuaded to return to coaching in 1978 with the St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL, but went only 9–20 in two seasons and was fired. He returned to broadcasting and died in 1994 at the age of seventy-seven.

The Browns had lost to the Giants twice during the regular season, but upset them 8–3 in the playoffs. The Rams topped the Bears, 24–14, to win their division. This set up a championship game pitting the Browns of Cleveland (and the supposed weaker former AAFC) against the Rams, who had moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland after the 1945 season because of financial losses. This made pro football the first major sport to expand to the West Coast. The AAFC had teams in both Los Angeles and San Francisco that year. The championship game matched great quarterbacks Bob Waterfield from the Rams against Otto Graham of the Browns. Both played well, but the Browns managed to intercept five of Waterfield’s passes and this proved to be the difference. A field goal by Lou Groza with twenty-eight seconds remaining gave the Browns the title.

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Ethnicity and the NFL The NFL and professional football had a number of African Americans playing in the 1920s, but in 1933 the NFL owners made an unwritten agreement to not continue signing black players, a policy that continued until after World War II. The creation of the AAFC in 1946 set off a bidding war for NFL players and, amidst this frenzy, both leagues found it necessary and useful to sign some African Americans. The Los Angeles Rams signed Woody Strode and Kenny Washington, both of whom had starred at UCLA. The local connection and their talents made these acquisitions a smart business choice for the Rams. In the AAFC, the Cleveland Browns signed fullback Marion Motley and guard Bill Willis, who were the best at their positions in the league. Both played with the Browns until 1953. Their presence paved the way for a number of other African Americans at Cleveland. Len Ford, a veteran of World War II, who then played at Michigan, signed with the Los Angels Dons of the AAFC in 1948, right out of college. He was a great player, but the Dons folded after the 1949 season and Paul Brown was able to draft Ford for the Browns, where he played until 1957. He then played one year with Green Bay before retiring. Motley, Willis, and Ford were all inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, In 1948 the San Francisco 49ers signed Joe Perry as a running back. He had only played in junior college and in the military, so some thought signing him was a mistake, plus some opposed any black players. Perry scored a touchdown on his first rushing play, led the AAFC in rushing in 1949, and played for fourteen seasons. He, too, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Buddy Young was only 50 500 , but a dazzling runner from the University of Illinois who was signed by the New York Yankees of the AAFC in 1947 as a back. He remained with them for three years, then went to the new Yankee franchise, which had been the New York Bulldogs, of the NFL in 1950. In 1952 the franchise moved to Dallas, then to Baltimore as the Colts the next year. Young was a fixture on this team until he retired after the 1954 season and later became the NFL’s Director of Player Relations. Paul “Tank” Younger was the first African American from a historically black university (Grambling) to play in the NFL when he was signed by the Rams in 1949. He played in the Rams’ backfield with Dan Towler, whose nickname was “Deacon” because he was a graduate student in religion. Towler retired in 1955 to become a minister. Younger was later an NFL executive with the Rams and the San Diego Chargers. In 1948 Emlen Tunnell became the first African American to play for the New York Giants and he remained with them through the 1958 season, starring as a defensive back. He finished his career with three years in Green Bay. Tunnell returned to New York in 1963 as an assistant coach, one of the first African Americans to coach in the NFL. He was also the first African American elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967. The 1950s saw more and more African Americans signed to play pro football including stars like Dick “Night Train” Lane, Ollie Matson, Roosevelt Brown, Roosevelt Grier, and Lenny Moore. In 1957 Jim Brown was signed by the Browns and was the leading rusher in the NFL eight of the next nine seasons. Brown never missed a game, despite the pounding that he took. He was voted the league’s MVP

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three times and retired to pursue an acting career after the 1965 season. He returned to New York in 1967 as an assistant coach. By the end of the decade every NFL team had at least one African American, except for the Washington Redskins. Their owner, George Preston Marshall, had been one of the three owners to propose the “gentlemen’s agreement” in 1933 that kept Africans Americans out of the league. Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers and George Halas of the Chicago Bears had broken that agreement as early as 1953, but Marshall persisted, claiming that Washington was a southern city and his fans wouldn’t accept integrating the team. It took until 1962 for that to change.

Media and Pro Football Football got good local coverage in the daily newspapers and every team had local radio broadcasts. As noted earlier, television coverage was uneven, depending on the market. The lack of a league package for the NFL, other than for the championship game, kept salaries relatively low and some top college players even refused to go to professional careers, feeling that it was safer and more lucrative to end their football careers and pursue some line of business. Unlike baseball, which signed players out of high school, almost all football players in the 1950s attended college, with most graduating, so football was not their only avenue for professional advancement. The league needed to attract more fans, generate more income, and raise salaries in order to capture all of the best players. During most of the decade, college football outdrew pro football and had higher ratings on television. The big ‘break” for pro football came in 1958 when the Baltimore Colts played the New York Giants for the NFL championship. After stumbling along with local television coverage in the 1950s, the NFL and, later, the AFL got large national television contracts in the 1960s. Pro football turned out to be the sport made for television, as well as the sport made by television.

The 1950s Pro Football Seasons After the Browns topped the Rams in the first NFL season following the collapse of the AAFC, Los Angeles reversed the results in the 1951 championship game, winning 24–17. The Rams were led by quarterbacks Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin, who threw to Tom Fears and Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch for over 200 yards. The Browns had topped the American Conference with a record of 11–1, while the Rams had barely won their conference with an 8–4 record, only a halfgame better than Detroit and San Francisco’s 7–4–1 records. In 1952 the New York Yankees moved to Dallas as the Texans, where they failed to draw fans. (Having a record of 1–11 can do that.) The Browns won their conference with an 8–4 mark, while Detroit and Los Angeles tied for their title at 9–3. In a playoff, the Lions, behind quarterback Bobby Layne, defeated the Rams 31–21. The Lions then defeated the Browns for the championship, 17–7. The Detroit Lions made it two in a row the next year, topping the Browns once again, this time 17–16. The Browns got their revenge in 1954 as they humiliated the Lions in the title game, 56–10. Otto Graham threw three touchdown passes and scored three himself to lead the Browns in the romp. The last game of Graham’s career was the 1955 championship contest, and he ended his professional career

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The Greatest Game Ever Played December 28, 1958, was the date of what most sport historians call the best NFL championship game ever. The weather was cold and blustery and the field at Yankee Stadium still had dirt areas left from the baseball diamond. NBC broadcast the game and as the game got better, the audience increased. One of the combatants was the Baltimore Colts with six future Hall of Fame players (and a future Hall coach, Weeb Ewbank.) The Colts also had four African American starters. The opponents were the New York Giants with six future Hall of Fame players and two future Hall coaches. The Giants had had to beat the Browns on the last day of the season to tie for the Eastern title, then had to beat them again to get into the championship game. They had won the title in 1956. The Colts had been a “wandering” franchise for a number of years earlier in the league’s history, but had settled successfully in Baltimore in 1953. They had never been in a championship game. The Colts were led by Johnny Unitas, a young quarterback who had been cut by the Pittsburgh Steelers, then played semiprofessional football while working construction to support his family. In 1956 Unitas had a tryout with the Colts and made the team. He became the starting quarterback in the fourth game of 1956 when George Shaw, the starter, was injured. In 1957 Unitas made the Pro Bowl after throwing twenty-four touchdown passes in twelve games. He went on to throw touchdowns in forty-seven consecutive games, a record. The New York Giants were led by quarterback Charlie Connerly and a trio of top running backs—Frank Gifford, Mel Triplett, and Alex Webster. The Giants’ defense, anchored by linebacker Sam Huff, was deemed almost impregnable. The Giants scored a field goal in the first quarter, but two Gifford fumbles led to Alan Ameche scoring two touchdowns, and the Colts led at halftime, 14–3. The Giants scored a touchdown in the third quarter and another in the fourth to take a 17–14 lead. Unitas and the Colts got the ball at their own fourteen-yard line with two minutes to go. Unitas then marched the Colts down the field, throwing precision passes to his receivers, Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore. Unitas completed four of six passes, using all but thirteen seconds before Steve Myhra kicked the field goal that tied the game. The gun sounded and the players were surprised to find that the game would go on, into a sudden-death overtime period, the first time that this had occurred. The Giants won the toss and received, but failed to gain a first down. They punted and the Colts took over at their own twenty-yard line. Unitas then led the Colts eighty yards, mixing his passes (he completed four of five) with handoffs to Ameche and Moore. The Colts drove to the one-yard line where Ameche took a handoff and plunged through the right side of the line for the game-ending score. The game electrified not just the more than 64,000 fans in attendance, but millions who watched on television that Sunday evening. Before this game the NFL had never averaged more than 40,000 in attendance for its games. From this point on, the league never averaged less than 40,000 per game. Two years later the NFL and NBC signed a $4.65-million deal, enormous for the time. A new league began in 1960, confident that pro football was a growth enterprise, all as a result of this stimulating contest. Each of the winning Colts got $4719 as their share for winning the championship. Each player in the 2007 Super Bowl received $68,000.

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with a 38–14 victory over the Rams. Grahams threw two touchdown passes and ran for two others. With Graham’s retirement, the Browns dropped below .500, and the New York Giants won what was now called the Eastern Conference. The Western title went to the Chicago Bears, who edged Detroit by a half game. The Rams were rebuilding and they fell to 4–8. The Giants destroyed the Bears, 47–7, in the championship game. The Browns came back in 1957 with their great rookie running back, Jim Brown of Syracuse, who led the league in rushing. Cleveland went 9–2–1 and then met the Lions for the championship in Detroit. Detroit had edged San Francisco in a playoff for the Western Conference crown, but easily topped the Browns, 59–14, in the championship game. In 1959 the Colts repeated their victory over the New York Giants of the previous year. The game was not nearly as close, as Unitas threw a touchdown and scored another in a 24-point fourth quarter and Baltimore won, 31–16. In 1960, the Philadelphia Eagles, led by quarterback Norm Van Brocklin, defeated the Green Bay Packers, 17–13, Coach Vince Lombardi’s only playoff loss.

Professional Hockey In the 1950s there were six teams in the National Hockey League (NHL) and they represented two Canadian (Montreal and Toronto) and four American cities (Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit). The geographic appeal was limited to the Northeast, though hockey was very popular in the upper Midwest. Still, it would take until the 1967–68 season for the NHL to expand beyond the six franchises. Hockey was popular in Canada throughout the twentieth century, but its appeal was limited in the United States. “Hockey Night in Canada” began on radio on the Canadian Broadcast Commission (CBC) in 1931 and began airing on television in 1952 on Saturday nights. The television transmission could be picked up by Americans close to the northern border, but for the rest of the United States, television coverage of the NHL was limited to telecasts by local stations until 1956–57, when CBS began telecasting games on Saturday afternoons to the four American cities. The players were almost entirely Canadian; about 10 percent or fewer were Americans. The top stars, however, were embraced by the local fans, and the 1950s had plenty of top stars. These included Maurice “the Rocket” Richard and Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion of the Montreal Canadiens, Bobby Hull (“the Golden Jet”) of the Chicago Blackhawks, Gordie Howe and Alex Delvecchio of the Detroit Red Wings, Andy Bathgate of the New York Rangers, Tim Horton of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Johnny Bucyk of the Boston Bruins. The Bruins also signed Willie O’Ree as the first black player in the NHL. Two teams dominated the 1950s in the NHL. The Detroit Red Wings won the league championship in 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1957. The Montreal Canadiens won in 1956, 1958, 1959, as well as the next three years.

The Olympic Games of the 1950s The Olympics of the 1950s had increased numbers of teams and participants. The 1948 Games in London had been put together at relatively short notice and the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki, Finland, allowed for more time for

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planning. The additional years allowed a number of countries to recover from World War II and enter the Games of 1952, and the most prominent was the Soviet Union, which had not competed since it was Russia in the 1912 Games. The Soviets were excellent and pressed the United States to such a degree that it took the United States nearly the entire Games to win the unofficial medals race even though it far outdistanced the Soviets in gold medals won. Sixty-nine nations competed in 149 events, the largest total ever. Emil Zapotek of Czechoslovakia won three gold medals in the 5,000-meter, 10,000-meter, and marathon races. Bob Mathias of the United States won his second decathlon title in a row. In 1948 he had been a surprise victor in London as a seventeen-year-old. As a twenty-one-year-old he set a new world record for the event in winning his gold medal. Most of the favorites won their events with some upsets. Floyd Patterson, the future heavyweight boxing champion of the world, won a gold medal at the middleweight division. There was a new tension to the Games with the addition of the Soviets and the Soviet-bloc nations. The Soviets and their allies chose to not be housed in the Olympic Village; instead, they were housed in their own village, closer to the Soviet border, which allowed them to limit contact with the athletes of other nations. The desire to “beat the Russians” was quite strong among the athletes, and probably the same desire to top the Americans was prevalent among Soviet competitors. Olympics coverage was generally limited to newspaper reports and some movie newsreel highlights shown in theaters for a few weeks. The technology and time differences made the Olympics a source of interest to Americans, but a very distant interest. This remoteness was even more pronounced for the Winter Games held in Oslo, Norway, in February 1952 where thirty nations competed. Almost all the medals won went to countries from Europe or North America. The United States, surprisingly, finished second in the medals’ total to host Norway, but American interest was minimal, as was media coverage. The 1956 Winter Games were held in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, marking the Soviet Union’s first appearance in the Winter Games. They surprised the rest of the world by taking home the most medals. The United States fell to fourth in total medals won, behind Austria and Sweden. Five of the seven medals won by Americans were in figure skating, with Hayes Jenkins and Tenley Albright winning gold medals. These Games were televised for the first time, though they were unable to be shown live in the United States. Instead, American television showed taped highlights later in the week after the competition was held. This helped increase American interest in figure-skating competition, since these events were highlighted after the American victories. The 1956 Summer Games were the first held in the Southern Hemisphere (in Melbourne, Australia) and this necessitated having the Games in November and December, spring and early summer in that hemisphere. Political events also altered the inclusion of some nations. The Suez Canal crisis caused Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq to pull out of the Games. The Soviet invasion of Hungary led to withdrawal from the Games by Netherlands, Switzerland, and Spain. Then the People’s Republic of China withdrew, protesting the inclusion of the Republic of China (Taiwan). This would be the first of many protests on the Olympic stage over the next fifty years.

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Overall the Soviets dominated, winning the most medals by far, and the most gold medals, five more than the United States. The Soviet mastery of gymnastics was instrumental in their large victory margin, leading one noted American paper to call gymnastics a “minor sport.” American Bobby Morrow won three gold medals by winning the 100-meter and 200-meter and being part of the 400-meter relay team. Bob Richards of Illinois won his second straight Olympic pole vault. He was then pictured on the front of a Wheaties cereal box in 1958, a tradition begun with athletes in 1934. American men won fifteen of the twenty-four track events, but Australia was the leading nation in swim medals. Because of the great difference in time zones, taped highlights again were shown on American television on weekends. The American dominance in basketball continued unabated. From the inception of the sport at the 1936 Olympics, the Americans had not lost a game. The 1956 team, led by Bill Russell, continued that tradition, winning games by over fifty points regularly and winning the gold medal game by thirty-four points over the Soviet Union. Coverage of the basketball team in the Olympics was better than American coverage of any other sport in the Games. In 1960 the Winter Olympics were in Squaw Valley, California, near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This was the first Winter Olympic Games to be held in North America since the Lake Placid Games in 1932. Many of the events, particularly skiing and skating, were televised live in the United States, which brought more recognition to the athletes and more popular interest in their sports. The Soviets were dominant in the number of medals won, but Carol Heiss and David Jenkins of the United States won gold medals in figure skating, as did the U.S. ice hockey team, defeating the heavily favored Soviet Union in the semifinals and the Czech team in the finals. The 1960 Summer Games were held in Rome in July and a number of American performances were memorable, though the Soviets dominated in terms of total medals. Rafer Johnson set a new record in the decathlon, Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals in track, Chris von Saltza won three golds in swimming and Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) won the gold in the light-heavyweight boxing division. In addition, the greatest amateur basketball team ever assembled, led by Jerry West, Oscar Robertson, Walt Bellamy, and Terry Dischinger, annihilated opponents by an average of more than forty points with the closest victory being by twenty-four points. Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia won the marathon running barefooted, becoming the first black African to win an Olympic medal.

INDIVIDUAL SPORTS Boxing Boxing in the 1950s was at its zenith because of great fighters at many weight classes, and because television took to boxing early in the decade, where it was a popular sport through that medium. Conversely, boxing in the 1950s was mired in gambling and fight-fixing scandals and a number of boxers or promoters were connected to organized crime figures. The federal government became involved with investigating boxing, beginning in 1960 when Senator Estes Kefauver’s Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly investigated the hold that crime figures had on

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boxers, most often through being managers or promoters of the top boxers. The results were fixed fights, top fights only shown on closed-circuit theater broadcasts, and unhappy fight fans.

Law and Gambling in Boxing Various legal issues plagued boxing in the decade, most revolving around known gamblers or people with gambling connections being associated with or controlling fighters or scheduling of top bouts. An additional problem was the unevenness of enforcement in each of the states, which governed boxing through the individual state athletic or boxing commissions. Tough rulings in one state had no weight, necessarily, in other states, so if a boxer or manager lost his license or had it suspended in New York, for example, it had little effect on the fighter’s ability to box in Nevada. Many of the fighters and/or managers were associated in some manner with the International Boxing Club (IBC), which seemed to have intertwined relationships with some figures connected to organized crime. The U.S. Department of Justice brought suit against the IBC under the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibited monopolies. A district court ruled for the IBC, citing a 1922 Supreme Court decision that had allowed baseball to be exempt from the Sherman act. After the Supreme Court and Congress each tried to get the other entity to make a definitive decision on the issue, there was a ruling in 1955 that boxing fell under the Sherman Antitrust Act, and in 1959 the Supreme Court essentially demanded the disbanding of the IBC. There was resistance and subterfuge, but the IBC did finally have its control (and that of organized crime) on boxing loosened by the end of the decade.

Media and Boxing Since the 1920s, top boxing matches had been carried on the radio and been very popular. In the early 1950s, television was eager to produce and promote boxing matches on almost any evening of the week. With various weight classes, the opportunity to carry boxing seemed almost limitless. Then the promoters began showing lesser fights on some nights and charging for closed-circuit telecasts of some championship bouts. By the end of the decade, televised boxing was generally limited to one or two nights a week, and in the early 1960s the only regularly shown boxing matches were the Friday Night Fights, usually sponsored by Gillette. Just as television had embraced and furthered boxing popularity, the saturation of boxing coverage, coupled with the corruption in the industry, soured the public on boxing. In 1952 it was estimated that about one-third of the available audience watched boxing telecasts. By the end of the decade, that figure was about onetenth. Sponsors were lost and the fight telecasts were dramatically reduced. The top heavyweight fights were not being televised, rather shown in theaters, but were broadcast on the radio and this continued into the 1960s. A number of top bouts for other weight classes were shown on live television, however.

Ethnicity and Boxing in the 1950s Boxing had seen discrimination against African Americans since at least the early part of the century and Jack Johnson’s championship years had hardened

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racism in boxing. These racists wanted to make sure that another black champion would not emerge, particularly at the heavyweight division, but Joe Louis overcame that to become champion in 1937 and held the title until retiring in 1949. The title was then awarded to Ezzard Charles, who successfully defended it nine times before losing the title to Jersey Joe Walcott in 1952. Possibly the greatest fighter, pound for pound, of that era was Sugar Ray Robinson. At various times, he held the world’s middleweight and welterweight titles from 1946 to 1952, then, after a two-and-a-half-year retirement, 1955–57, after which he lost to Gene Fulmer. Robinson defeated Fulmer in a rematch for the middleweight crown. In 1958 Robinson lost to and then defeated Carmen Basilio for the title, Robinson’s fifth time of regaining a title. He continued to fight until 1965, when he was forty-four. Robinson was named the greatest fighter of the century, by the Associated Press and the greatest fighter in history by ESPN.com in 2007. Besides his boxing, Robinson was also an accomplished singer and dancer and very noticeable on the New York social scene. He owned a popular nightclub in New York. His smoothness as a fighter and an entertainer made him the idol of an entire generation of young African Americans in the 1950s. In homage to him, a number of other top fighters added “Sugar” in front of their first names, most notably boxing champion Sugar Ray Leonard in the 1970s. Floyd Patterson won the heavyweight title in 1956, which had been vacated when Rocky Marciano retired as champion. Patterson had won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics at the middleweight class at the age of seventeen. He became the youngest heavyweight champion ever at twenty-one. In 1959 Patterson lost his title to Ingemar Johannson, but won it back in 1960.

Noted Champions of the Era The most-admired heavyweight of the era was Rocky Marciano, who won the title in September of 1952 and retired, undefeated, in April of 1956. Marciano had served in World War II for two years and became a professional boxer in 1947. Marciano won all of his fights, almost 90 percent of those by knockouts. Archie Moore was another top African American fighter, who was light heavyweight champion from 1952 to 1960 and again from 1961 to 1962. He also fought for the heavyweight title twice, but lost to Marciano and Patterson. Moore’s career began in 1936, when he was twenty-three, and lasted until 1963 when he was fifty. He is the only fighter to have faced both Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali and had 145 knockouts in his career. Jake LaMotta, perhaps best known for a film biography of his life called Raging Bull, was middleweight champion from 1949 to 1951. LaMotta also testified before the U.S. Senate in 1960 that he had thrown a fight in 1947 in order to get an opportunity to fight for the title. This was necessary for him being allowed to fight because of the control that organized crime and the IBC had on boxing at the time.

Golf Golf grew tremendously in popularity during the 1950s due to a number of factors. First, economic times improved greatly in the postwar period and more people had the time and money to spend on golf. The demographic shifting of the

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Seated on bench, with golf clubs (left to right): Byron Nelson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ben Hogan, and Clifford Roberts. Photo by Morgan Fitz, Augusta, Georgia. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

population also led to more interest in the sport. The general movement toward warmer U.S. climates meant that more people lived in areas where golf could be played more months of the year. The movement from city to suburbs, which continued apace during the 1950s and 1960s, put more people in reach of golf courses and this, in turn, stimulated the growth in the number of new public and private courses available to play. More public course access meant that golf could expand from being an exclusively upper- and upper-middle-class sport to being one that could include the middle class, as well as some members of the working class. About 6,000 new golf courses were built in the 1950s. The president of the United States from 1953 to 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a dedicated golfer and he was often shown playing the game. (His scores were not revealed.) Thus, Americans might model themselves after their president and play golf, now seen as a real American pastime. Finally, there was television, which began to televise more and more (almost exclusively male) golf tournaments, or parts of them, and the very telegenic golfers who were prominent in the 1950s. These included Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, and Arnold Palmer among men and Mickey Wright, Betsy Rawls, Louise Suggs, Patty Berg, and Babe Didrikson Zaharias among women.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1950–1959

Women and Golf in the 1950s The struggle for women to play and be recognized for their golfing ability was pioneered by Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias. Born in Texas in 1911, she was a basketball and track star in her younger years, winning two Olympic gold medals in the 1932 Games in Los Angeles. She was also a softball star, but in about 1935, she began playing golf and was almost an immediate sensation at the game. Most tournaments at the time were for amateurs, which limited who might be successful at the game, since one needed to be independently wealthy to afford to play very much. Didrikson won all the national amateur titles before becoming a professional in 1947 and working to form and nurture the Women’s Professional Golf Association (WPGA) and later the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA). In the late 1940s she won seventeen straight amateur tournaments and by 1950 she had won the U.S. Women’s Open (begun in 1946) twice. She was a vibrant, dynamic woman who drew large crowds and she was instrumental in the success of professional golf for women. After winning the 1950 U.S. Open, Didrikson Zaharias was the leading LPGA money winner for 1951 and 1952. The next season she was diagnosed with cancer, but recovered enough to win the U.S. Open again in 1954. She also was president of the LPGA from 1952 to 1955. Her cancer returned in 1955 and she died in 1956 at the age of forty-five. She was voted Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year six times and was named the Female Athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. Patty Berg, born in 1918, won the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 1938 before turning pro in 1940. She served as a lieutenant in the Marines in World War II from 1942 to 1945, and turned professional in 1948. She joined with Didrikson in founding the LPGA and was its first president in 1948. She won the first U.S. Open in 1946 and was voted the Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year in 1938, 1942, and 1955. Berg won a total of fifty-seven pro tournaments in her career. The LPGA established the annual Patty Berg award for sportsmanship and contributions to golf. Louise Suggs, born in 1928, was one of Didrikson’s top rivals. A top amateur before turning pro in 1948, Suggs won the U.S. Open in 1949 and 1952 as well as the LPGA championship in 1957. She won a total of fifty-eight pro tournaments before retiring. Betsy Rawls, born in 1928, finished second in the U.S. Open to Babe Didrikson Zaharias in 1950, turned professional in 1951, and won the U.S. Open in 1951, 1953, 1957, and 1960. She won the LPGA championship in 1969. Rawls won a total of fifty-five pro tournaments. Mary Kathyrn (Mickey) Wright, born in 1935, was a top amateur golfer and became a professional in 1955. She won the U.S. Open in 1958, 1959, 1961, and 1964, and the LPGA championship in 1958, 1960, 1961, and 1963, among her total of eighty-two pro tournament victories. She was named the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year in 1963 and 1964. Many observers call her the best female golfer ever. Despite these great players who popularized golf, there was almost no television coverage in the 1950s of women’s tournaments, and the prize money was not very large. The top LPGA money winners in the 1950s never won more than $27,000

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in any year, whereas the top men’s winners regularly won $60,000–$75,000 in a year. In 1955, the average annual income for Americans was $5,000.

The Men of Golf in the 1950s The 1950s were a transitional period for men’s professional golf. The 1940s were dominated by three golfers, namely, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and Sam Snead. Many tournaments were canceled during World War II, but all had resumed by 1946. Nelson chose to retire in 1946 and devote his time to ranching, leaving Snead and Hogan as the undisputed kings of the game. Other top players like Cary Middlecoff, Doug Ford, and Billy Casper challenged the two, but the dominance of Snead and Hogan is clearly seen by victories in the major tournaments in the period from 1949 to 1957. Either Hogan or Snead won the U.S. Open three times, the Masters five times, the PGA twice, and the British Open once. The latter tournament was not as commonly played by the top Americans at that time as it is now. In some years (1953 was a good example) the British Open and the PGA Championship overlapped. Hogan was born in Texas (1912–97) and won nine major championships between 1946 and 1953. He won a total of sixty-four championships before retiring at age fifty-nine in 1971. His fame was enhanced by a 1951 film made of his life, Follow the Sun, starring Glenn Ford as Hogan. In 1953 Hogan won five of the six tournaments that he entered, including the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open. He was unable to play in the PGA championship. Hogan was not a big man (50 700 , 140 pounds) and many American golfers admired him because of how he could beat the “big boys” with his great swing and technique. His popularity was greatly enhanced after his amazing recovery from a near-fatal automobile accident in 1949. His golf instruction book was one of the best-selling golf books ever. Sam Snead, a native of Virginia, was also not a big man (50 1100 , 190 pounds), but he was much bigger than Hogan. The two were born within three months of each other in 1912 (d. 2002). Snead turned pro in 1934 and won eighty-two PGA tournaments before retiring in 1979 at the age of sixty-seven. He continued to play in senior tournaments and won thirteen. Snead won seven major championships between 1942 and 1954. In 1979 he was the first PGA Tour player to shoot his age (67) in a round. Snead’s folksiness made him popular with galleries and sportswriters. As Snead and Hogan faded from golf dominance, a young golfer named Arnold Palmer was beginning an illustrious career. The son of a professional golfer, Palmer attended Wake Forest University before joining the Coast Guard for three years. Upon his discharge, he returned to serious golf playing and won the U.S. Amateur in 1954. He turned pro the next year and won the Canadian Open and throngs of admirers. Palmer was a risk taker on the course, and was known for his long drives, after which he often hitched up his pants and strode down the fairway. He was intense, but had a sense of humor and the galleries loved him. He was the biggest factor in making golf so popular in the late 1950s and convincing television network executives to carry more golf tournaments in the 1960s. Palmer won the Masters four times, the British Open twice, and the U.S. Open once, among his sixty-two tour victories. The men’s professional golf tour was segregated until 1960. Charlie Sifford was the first to break this color barrier. He had attempted to play in a PGA event in

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1952, but was denied. He won the Long Beach Open in 1957, which was not a PGA Tour event, but was co-sponsored by the PGA. One of the problems for the PGA was that a number of the courses that were used for tournaments were private and segregated. The best example was the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, which remained segregated until 1974.

Tennis Unlike golf, tennis maintained amateur demands for its top players and tournaments. Thus Wimbledon only allowed amateurs to compete until 1968, and most other top tournaments were barred to professionals. The result was that interest in tennis tournaments appealed more to those with more money than the average American. There was interest in playing tennis and the number of public courts grew during the 1950s, but there was not the connected interest in “big-time” tennis. In the 1960s, the development of the Hard Tru (composite) court surface also made tennis courts easier to build and maintain. Australian men were the dominant players in the world in the 1950s, although there were some excellent American men playing, such as Tony Trabert, Alex Olmedo, and Vic Seixas Jr. Two American women were most prominent in the 1950s, Maureen Connolly and Althea Gibson. Connolly was born in 1934 and was a star in tennis as a teenager, winning the Girls National 18-and-under championship when she was fifteen. In 1951, at the age of sixteen, she won the U.S. Open, the youngest woman to ever do so. She repeated that in 1952 and also won Wimbledon. In 1953 she won all four major tournaments, the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open, the first woman to ever do so. The next year she bypassed Australia, but won both Wimbledon and the French Open once again. In July she was in a horseback riding accident with a truck, which resulted in her right leg being crushed, ending her career at age nineteen. In 1966 she was diagnosed with cancer, to which she succumbed in 1969 at the age of thirty-four. Althea Gibson was a rarity in competitive tennis in the 1950s, an African American. Gibson was born in South Carolina in 1927, but her family moved to Harlem in New York City in 1930. She began playing tennis as a young teen, but she was often unable to play in various locations or tournaments because of being African American. Denied membership in the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), she played under the American Tennis Althea Gibson. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

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Association (ATA), an all-black organization. Starting in 1947 she won ten straight ATA tournaments. In 1950, thanks to the assistance of tennis great Alice Marble, she was allowed to enter her first USTA events and the next year played in the All England championships at Wimbledon. Gibson graduated from Florida A&M University in 1953 and moved to Missouri to work as an athletic instructor. She also continued to hone her game, and in 1955 she won the Italian Championship. The next year she won both women’s singles and doubles at the French Championships. Her doubles partner was an Englishwoman, Angela Buxton. Buxton was Jewish and had suffered discrimination similar to Gibson’s. The next year Gibson and Buxton captured the doubles title at Wimbledon, becoming the first Jew and the first black to win at that venue. In 1957 and 1958 Gibson won both the women’s singles and doubles titles. She also won the U.S. Outdoor Championships those same two years. In both 1957 and 1958, Gibson was named the Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. She retired in 1959 from amateur tennis because it was too costly to continue playing without a steady income. In 1964 she tried to become a professional golfer, but her late start (she was 37) prevented her from ever becoming a golf star. Gibson served as New Jersey State Commissioner of Athletics for ten years until 1985 and died in 2003 at age seventy-six. She was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1971.

Horse Racing During the decade, there were a number of great horses, but no horse won the Triple Crown of racing (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, Belmont Stakes). Three horses won two legs of the Triple Crown. Tim Tam in 1958 won the Derby and the Preakness, but fractured a bone in the Belmont Stakes and still finished second. Both Nashua (1955) and Native Dancer (1953) won the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes. Nashua was edged by Swaps in the Kentucky Derby and Native Dancer barely lost to Dark Star in the Derby. Both Nashua (1955) and Native Dancer (1953) were each named Horse of the Year. Three jockeys were most prominent in the decade, Willie Shoemaker, Bill Hartack, and Eddie Arcaro. Arcaro was the most successful in the 1950s, winning two Kentucky Derbys, two Belmont Stakes races, and four Preaknesses. When he retired in 1962 he had ridden over 4,700 winners and amassed purse winnings of more than $30 million. Shoemaker won the Derby twice and the Belmont twice during the decade. In 1986 he was the oldest jockey to win a Kentucky Derby at the age of fifty-four.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT SPORTS Bowling During the 1950s, bowling became quite popular in the United States. It was carried regularly on television and at least two male bowlers became well known and highly emulated, Don Carter and Dick Weber. Bowling was something anyone could do, though not necessarily well, but size was not a factor in how well one bowled since

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balls were of various weights. The advent of automatic pinsetters at bowling lanes in the 1950s put pin boys out of business, but made the game faster and more “reliable.” Chicago and St. Louis were the centers of bowling popularity in the 1950s, though there were increasing numbers of lanes throughout the United States. Don Carter of St. Louis and Dick Weber of Indianapolis (who moved to St. Louis) were teammates on a top bowling team, the Budweisers, sponsored by the beer company. Carter was the bowler of the year in 1953, 1954, 1957, 1958, 1960, and 1962. In 1962 he was also named professional athlete of the year, the only bowler ever to win the Hickok Belt. Dick Weber was a founding member of the Professional Bowlers Association and won his first title in 1959. He would become the top male bowler of the 1960s.

Auto Racing

Don Carter poses with his bowling ball at the American Bowling Congress Master’s Tournament in St. Louis, April 20, 1959. (AP / Wide World Photo)

The Indianapolis 500 race was highly popular during this decade, often drawing more than 100,000 people to the Indianapolis Speedway for the Memorial Day Race. The top racer during decade was Bill Vukovich, who took two Indy 500 races in 1953 and 1954. No one else won more than once, although Howard Keck, John Zink, and George Saith all finished second twice during the decade. In 1954 the average speed for a winning car exceeded 130 miles per hour for the first time.

SUMMARY Team sports in the 1950s were characterized by dynasties. The Yankees won eight American League pennants and five championships during the period 1951–60 and were the dominant force in baseball. The Dodgers were the best of the National League, winning five pennants and two World Series titles. The Giants won pennants in 1951 and 1954. Most of the titles won by the Dodgers and the Giants were when the teams were located in Brooklyn and New York, respectively, and the relocation of both franchises to California after the 1957 season was as compelling a story as the pennants. In basketball the Boston Celtics began their domination with the signing of Bill

Marshall Teague is shown after qualifying, May 26, 1957, for the Indianapolis 500. One of NASCAR’s first stars and pioneers, Teague sits behind the wheel of a Sumar Special Indy Car. (AP / Wide World Photo)

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Russell, who led them to eleven world titles in thirteen seasons. In college basketball, Kentucky and San Francisco were the only schools to win more than one NCAA title in the decade. Oklahoma and Notre Dame were seen as the top college football programs and both enjoyed long winning streaks during the decade. The Cleveland Browns and the Detroit Lions each won three NFL titles during the decade, with Baltimore’s Colts winning in 1958 and 1959. Hockey, too, was a league of little parity with Montreal and Detroit dominating the league. The first postwar decade was one of great success for sports throughout the nation as teams and individual players became wealthier and more recognizable to sports fans throughout the country thanks to the growing influence of television. The growth would grow exponentially in the following decade.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Bromberg, Lester. 1962. Boxing’s unforgettable fights. New York: Ronald Press. Grimsley, Will. 1971. Tennis, its history, people and events. Englewood Cliff, NJ: PrenticeHall. Halberstam, David. 1994. The Fifties. New York: Ballantine Books. Koppett, Leonard. 1968. 24 seconds to shoot: An informal history of the National Basketball Association. New York: Macmillan. Mantle, Mickey, with Herb Gluck. 1985. The Mick, an American hero. New York: Doubleday. McFarlane, Brian. 1967. Fifty years of hockey, 1917–1967: An intimate history of the National Hockey League. Toronto: Pagurian Press. Nelson, Murry. 2005. Bill Russell: A biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Rader, Benjamin G. 1983. American sports: From the age of folk games to the age of spectators. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Sullivan, Neil. 1987. The Dodgers move west. New York: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Ron. 2002. They cleared the lane: The NBA’s black pioneers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. William, Juan, and Julian Bond. 1988. Eyes on the prize: America’s civil rights years, 1954– 1965. New York: Penguin.

Films Follow the Sun: The Ben Hogan Story. 1951. Dir. Sidney Lanfield.

CHAPTER 10

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969 Maureen Smith

OVERVIEW America in the 1960s was a decade marked by tremendous societal change. Changes in demographics, gender relations, technology, pop culture, the free speech movement, and civil rights had profound effects on the decades to follow. Moreover, the Vietnam War divided the nation. At the start of the decade, Americans faced the Cuban Missile crisis. American troops were deployed to Vietnam and those left at home eventually protested the war. Women made slight gains, but most of these were to wait until the next decade. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the same year the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women presented its report. During the decade, the number of Hispanics living in the United States tripled and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized the United Farm Workers of America. The British band, The Beatles, invaded the United States and changed the rock and roll scene for millions of teenagers. Illegal drug use was popular and rock and roll ruled, with the Woodstock music festival attracting hundreds of thousands of young Americans in 1968. The hippie movement thrived, and neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury became destinations for these free-loving folks. Technology led to an American being launched into space in 1961, with astronaut John Glenn orbiting the earth two years later, and in 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. The civil rights movement was the decade’s most important and significant shift in American society. These changes had a direct impact on sporting fields. The civil rights movement began with sit-ins and marches and led to legislation that allowed African Americans to vote, as well as other rights owed to them as American citizens, such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 1960s were a politically charged and turbulent time; newspaper headlines and television screens covered daily doses of student movements, free speech movements, urban riots, assassinations and killings, the Vietnam War, women’s rights demonstrations, and the various factions within the civil rights struggle for

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black rights and citizenship. It was during the 1960s that larger numbers in the black community and the civil rights movement sought to enact changes in social, political, economic, and legal aspects for black American citizens. Moreover, the focused attention on integration efforts by the media informed white Americans to a greater extent. Led into the decade by Martin Luther King Jr. and his fight for integration, the struggle for freedom evolved into a more politically active and liberating movement with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, the black student movement, and in the second half of the decade, the Black Power movement. There was an undeniably strong link between the sports world of the 1960s and politics, both nationally and globally. Still, few leaders of the decade made any mention of sports as being part of the larger political scene, except to state that it was not an appropriate arena for political discourse. Just as the civil rights movement gained momentum and progressed from gradualism to direct action, so, too, did the behaviors and efforts of black athletes. Previously silent and seemingly accepting of the status quo, most black athletes who had been integrated into the white sporting arena had maintained a low profile, staying away from controversy. Sport, too, experienced great change during the 1960s. The increased popularity of television played a major role in the growth of sport. Professional leagues expanded across the country, claiming new territories in newly constructed stadiums paid for by cities desperate to have a professional team. By the end of the decade, some players began to recognize the financial boons reaped by the owners at their expense and began to address the labor issue. Colleges and universities faced great changes on the playing fields, with the process of integration causing coaches and players alike to shift their attitudes about race. These same issues played themselves out on professional playing fields and locker rooms. The Olympic Games provided an international stage for Cold War politics between the United States and the Soviet Union. Women struggled to gain respect, recognition, and opportunity in sports. College football and basketball were the most popular college sports of the decade. Moreover, with the integration of colleges and athletic teams, both sports faced issues related to the integration process. With the integration of college campuses and college athletics, black college athletes emerged as central figures in increasing campus activism. College sport became a viable and visible platform for black college athletes to express their discontent at their treatment as black Americans and black athletes. Black college athletes employed similar tactics used in other protest activities of the civil rights movement, which eventually culminated in various boycott movements. The first half of decade was the actual integration of athletic teams, while the second half of the decade dealt with the impact and effects of the integration efforts, culminating when several black college athletes actively worked to change the athletic landscape for black athletes through protests and boycotts Several factors contributed to the growth and success of the civil rights movement, as well as advances made by blacks in sport during the 1960s, including World War II and the Cold War, legal rulings such as Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Voting Act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965), along with an economic boom that helped to propel blacks into the economic mainstream. The political climate allowed for the intersection of civil rights and the involvement of athletes within such movements. At a time when the civil rights movement was dominated by images of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Freedom Riders, and news coverage of racial demonstrations, the protests by

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black male athletes during this decade merits attention as part of the larger discourse of race relations in the United States as they played out on athletic fields. The image of black athletes in the 1950s and the gains they had seemingly made, along with the injustices they continued to face, laid the groundwork for the athletes that followed them in the next decade (Hutchinson 1977).1 Baseball finally had at least one African American player on each roster when the Boston Red Sox signed Elijah “Pumpsie” Green in 1959. There were a greater number of black participants in professional sport, with several becoming national figures. With the integration of educational institutions came a significant rise in the number of black college athletes. While females, both black and white, were gaining some recognition, it was primarily every four years in Olympic competition, with few professional and college opportunities organized on the same scale as their male counterparts. Sport enjoyed a reputation for being an equal playing field, where talent was more important than someone’s socioeconomic status or race, though this belief was certainly challenged throughout the decade. Some felt that sport was ahead of society in terms of race relations, noting that baseball had integrated before the military and schools. And yet within this sporting world emerged a number of black athletes whose race consciousness had been raised, and, unlike their predecessors, they acted upon this new consciousness. Black athletes began to notice inequities still apparent in sport, the discriminations still faced within athletics. Coupled with increasing pressure from the black community on U.S. race relations and cries to end discriminatory practices in country, black athletes began to see their positions in sport as a possible platform to propose change and to confront current thinking. These challenges to the democracy of sport were an expression of the black militancy and the general re-examination of American culture that peaked in the late 1960s. In this transition, several black athletes risked their careers, their personal safety, their financial security, and their image and status as athletes for a meaning that many Americans could not comprehend, much less respect. In looking back at these athletes, one magazine wrote of the black athlete of the 1960s; “He understands that his ability to hit a 30-foot jump shot does not give him a better chance for equal housing. He now knows that running one hundred yards in record time won’t help him get a better job. He realizes that while he may be a hero with a uniform on, after the game, he is just another Black face in the crowd” (Gumbel 1972). Moreover, these players were viewed by their coaches as being unable to perform in certain “thinking” positions, such as quarterbacks in football. Black 1

All-star teams were dominated by black players, who set records for the amount of money they were making and the increasing total number participating in professional sports. In 1954, 5 percent of the NBA was black, by 1970 56 percent was. In 1957 the NFL was 14 percent black, by 1971 34 percent (Hutchinson 1977, 16). Between 1947 and 1964, eleven of the eighteen National League MVPs were black. Between 1954 and 1964, the NL batting leader was black seven of the eleven years and the home-run leader eight of the eleven years (152). In 1967 the first college All-American teams was named for the 1966–67 year and the starting five were black (163). During the 1967–68 season, the NBA had 71 blacks out of 139 players, and in 1972 in the rival league ABA 63 of 110 athletes were black (164). In track and field, of the fifteen gold medals won by Americans at the 1968 Olympic Games, ten were won by black athletes, with eight world records being set (246). The years 1957–58 were the first time that more than two “Negroes” were named to first-team All-American teams, and five black players were predicted to be All-Americans the next season. For 1966–67, Look magazine named six African Americans in a list of ten All-Americans, and the next year named eight African Americans out of ten spots.

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athletes were considered to be intellectually inferior to their white teammates. In the coverage of sport, few newspapers employed black journalists, with the exception of the black press, which was losing much of their coverage to mainstream newspapers, with the same exclusion occurring in television coverage. Blacks were generally excluded from front-office and managements positions. Still, as a result of the protests by a number of black athletes at the college and professional level, by the end of the 1960s some results were noticeable, such as the hiring of black coaches, creation of new organizations, and the support of white teammates. By the early 1970s, the race issue in the sporting world, like the civil rights movement, had lost much of its momentum, and an attitude of grudging acceptance seemed to prevail, leaving the sporting nation with the “acceptable” belief that while African Americans were superior athletes and could help their team climb to the top of the standings, they were still inferior in every other way, politically, socially, economically, and legally.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Major-league baseball in the 1960s experienced great changes with new teams added to the league, several teams relocating across the country, and a number of record performances, both good and bad. Two themes were prominent in baseball, expansion and integration. The expansion of major-league baseball was prompted in 1960 by the creation of a proposed third major league, the Continental League, which hoped to operate an eight-league team in cities where major-league baseball did not have teams; the eight teams were proposed in New York, to replace the departed Dodgers and Giants, Houston, Toronto, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dallas–Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Buffalo. Expansion in baseball came as a result of several factors, including population growth in the United States, postwar affluence, and the expansion of air travel, which made transportation much easier and more efficient. Another major factor was pressure from Congress to expand the business of baseball. Equally, if not more significant, was the relocation of the two New York teams to California, as well as the Milwaukee Braves’ move to Atlanta, which established those previously uncharted territories of the United States, namely cities who did not have their own teams. Many cities sought a team to solidify their civic standing. Of course, when one team left for another city, the bereaved city was in need of a new team. Expansion and relocation worked together to create a bigger league with more teams spread across the country. While the Continental League was unsuccessful in its challenge to major-league baseball, four teams were invited to join the league, beginning the expansion era in baseball. In 1961 the Washington Senators relocated to Minneapolis–St. Paul and became the Minnesota Twins. To replace the departed Senators, a new team with the same name, the Washington Senators, arrived in the nation’s capital. Los Angeles was awarded a second team, the Angels, who changed their name to the California Angels by 1965 (and in later years, to the Anaheim Angels and, eventually, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). In 1962 two more teams were added who had been part of the Continental League proposal, the New York Mets and the Houston Colt 45s, who became the Houston Astros in 1965. The Milwaukee

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Braves moved to become the Atlanta Braves in 1966, leaving a vacancy in Milwaukee, which was filled by the Milwaukee Brewers, who arrived in 1970 after spending the previous season as an expansion team called the Seattle Pilots. The Pilots were joined that first season by the San Diego Padres, the Montreal Expos, and the Kansas City Royals. By the end of the decade, the American League (AL) and National League (NL) had two divisions, East and West, and held a playoff between the top team in each division before playing for the league championship, which determined the World Series representative. New teams prompted the construction of new sport facilities, with a number of notable stadiums being built during this time. The San Francisco Giants, who had moved from New York to San Francisco prior to the 1958 season, moved into their new stadium, Candlestick Park, at the start of the 1960 season, with Vice President Richard Nixon attending the opening ceremonies. Their main rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, opened their new stadium at Chavez Ravine in 1962, the only privately financed stadium of the decade. The New York Mets, after playing at the Polo Grounds for two years, moved into Shea Stadium in 1964. In a remarkable advent of stadium construction, the Houston Astros moved into the Astrodome, a one-of-a-kind domed stadium, in 1965. Integration was also a major theme in professional baseball during the 1960s. After Jackie Robinson had integrated major-league baseball in the 1947 season, it took another twelve years before every team had at least one African American player on their roster. After the introduction of African Americans into major-league baseball, Latin American players gradually increased their presence in the American game. During the 1960s, a greater number of players from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Cuba earned spots on major-league rosters and their performances earned praise and awards. Still, they faced discrimination due to their skin color as well as the language barrier since the majority of them spoke Spanish. Even after all professional teams had been fully integrated, black and Latin American athletes continued to face discrimination. Though the color line had been crossed over a decade earlier, owners failed to challenge the segregation that continued to exist in spring training sites in Florida. Though black players played a role in the attempts to end these practices, much of the protests came from the black communities within the cities where spring training occurred. St. Petersburg, for example, known as the center of spring training, had been the site of several lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960. Bill Veeck, owner of the Chicago White Sox, became the first owner to take action to end segregation when in 1961 he canceled reservations for his players to stay at a segregated hotel. After Veeck’s initiative, other owners followed. Yet, even after the integration of facilities, southern practices of segregation seemed to prevail. The San Francisco Giants in the early 1960s had the greatest number of African American and Latin American players on their roster, including the three Alou brothers in the outfield. A notable incident came when manager Alvin Dark instituted an English-only rule that created tensions with the Latin American players. Dark was quoted in a newspaper interview saying that he believed that African American and Latin American players were not as mentally alert as their white teammates. Dark named Willie Mays as the team captain, hoping to alleviate any concerns players had related to his comments. Dark finished the season, but did not return the next year.

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The Houston Astrodome The Houston Astrodome was the first domed sports stadium when it became the home of baseball’s Houston Astros in 1965. Constructed at a cost of $35 million, the Astrodome was designed by a team of architects: Hermon Lloyd & W. B. Morgan and Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson. The Astrodome hosted a number of special events in the 1960s, such as the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo beginning in 1966, as well as the Bluebonnet Bowl, a college football postseason game. Elvis Presley appeared in concert at the Astrodome. The Astrodome also hosted college basketball’s “Game of the Century,” when the number 1–ranked UCLA Bruins traveled to the Astrodome to face the number 2–ranked Houston Cougars. In an upset, the Cougars led by Elvin Hayes beat the Bruins 71–69, ending UCLA’s forty-seven-game winning streak. Because of field configurations, seating capacity varied by sport. For baseball, the Astrodome held over 54,000 spectators. Football games had an increased capacity of over 62,000. When the Astrodome was built, it was nicknamed the Eighth Wonder of the World, in part because no other sport facility resembled it and it represented a new era of stadium construction. A domed, air-conditioned stadium was especially suitable for Houston because of the unpredictable weather, which in most stadiums might cause delays or cancellations. A domed stadium avoided the inconvenience of rainouts and made for a new exciting sport facility. Houston’s former mayor, Judge Roy Hofheinz, conceived the idea for the stadium and used it as a means of attracting a major-league team to Houston. The Astrodome, completed in 1964, was designed to be eighty-one stories tall and covered over nine acres. Though the first season was played on a Bermuda grass surface, the grass died after the ceiling panes were painted to help reduce the glare, which players had complained about. The second season, the Astros played on a dirt field with green paint. By 1966, artificial grass was installed on part of the field with the rest of the field painted green. After the All-Star break, the remainder of the artificial grass was installed. The grass, called ChemGrass, came to become known as Astroturf. Another unique feature of the Astrodome was its four-story-tall scoreboard. The Astrodome inspired other cities to construct stadiums that allowed for play during inclement weather, as well as the multipurpose approach to stadium design.

Despite the racism faced by both groups on and off the field, a number of notable performances by blacks and Latin Americans were among the best of the decade, including Mays, Roberto Clemente, Juan Marichal, and Bob Gibson. Roberto Clemente was an all-star outfielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1961 Clemente led the National League in batting average, hitting .351. Clemente batted over .300 every season in the 1960s with the exception of 1968, when he hit .291, leading the National League four years (1961, 1964, 1965, 1967). Clemente enjoyed a MVP season in 1966 when he hit .317 with a career-high 29 home runs and 119 runs batted in. The next year, he hit a career-high .357. He was voted to every All-Star game of the 1960s and was awarded the Gold Glove Award beginning in 1961 until 1972. On June 28, 1970, the last season the Pirates played at Forbes Field, the team hosted Roberto Clemente Night, to honor the player and his accomplishments. Willie Mays came to the San Francisco Giants when the team moved west from New York in 1958. In their 1962 pennant-winning season, Mays hit .304. Mays

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Curt Flood During the 1969 season, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood was a little more outspoken than usual and had a few rifts with management (Flood with Carter 1970, 1971; Herzog 1995, 182; Miller 1991, 190). After the team had a poor showing in 1969, Flood, who had batted .285 in the losing season, was traded in the off-season to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood refused to be traded to the Phillies and challenged baseball’s antitrust exemption and the reserve clause. The reserve clause was an agreement binding a player to his current team. Essentially, the team owned the rights to the player for the following season and unless the player was traded or released, he was bound to his team for life. Flood decided to sue Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the presidents of both leagues, and the twenty-four team owners for $3 million, triple damages, and free agency. Flood’s goal was to create a ruling that allowed a player to “establish his value in an open market” (Koppett 1969, 42; Miller 1991, 190–92). Curt Flood was represented by former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was selected by Marvin Miller. In a motion heard by Judge Irving Ben Cooper, Flood was denied an injunction to make him a free agent for the 1970 season. His trial began in May 1970, and three months later, the federal district court ruled against Flood. Despite the backing of the players’ association, no active player testified on Flood’s behalf, though former players Jackie Robinson, Hank Greenberg, and Jim Brosnan and former owner Bill Veeck spoke out in support against the reserve clause. Judge Cooper ruled that the reserve clause did not violate civil rights statutes. After Flood and Miller appealed the decision, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s ruling in January 1971. Flood was anxious to have his case resolved. He said, “Let’s put it in the open. Let the Supreme Court decide what’s right” (“Flood tide” 1970). Surprisingly, the Supreme Court agreed to hear another appeal. In Flood’s final appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–3 against the baseball player in the case of Flood v. Kuhn. Flood’s baseball career suffered as a direct result of his challenge to baseball. Sitting out the 1970 season and living overseas, Flood signed with the Washington Senators for the 1971 season at an increased salary. Flood’s stint with the Senators lasted thirteen games, in which he hit seven singles and barely batted over .200. Flood was depressed at his poor performance. He retired from the game at the age of thirtythree. Moreover, Flood was plagued by legal, fiscal, and marital problems, eventually escaping to Europe.

was an offensive and defensive asset to the Giants. In 1963 and 1964 he combined for 85 home runs and had over 100 runs batted in (RBI) each season, along with scoring 100 runs both years. Mays won the MVP award in 1965 with a career-high fifty-two home runs. That same season, he hit home-run number 500 on September 13, 1965. He enjoyed his last 100-RBI season in 1966, becoming only the second NL player to hit over 100 RBIs eight seasons in a row. Mays hit his 600th career home run in September 1969. In 1970 Sporting News named Mays the “Player of the Decade” for the 1960s. Notable performances in baseball begin with Roger Maris’s single-season homerun record of sixty-one dingers in 1961, leading the New York Yankees to a World Series victory against the Cincinnati Reds. The Yankees made it three titles in a

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Roger Maris Roger Maris joined the New York Yankees in 1960. Previously, Maris had played on the Cleveland Indians and Kansas City Athletics. In his first season with the Yankees, Maris won the American League’s MVP award. In 1961 Maris became a household name when he and his teammate, Mickey Mantle, began to hit home runs at a record pace challenging Babe Ruth’s single-season record of sixty home runs. Maris was portrayed in the press as a grouchy outsider, while Mantle was much more popular with New Yorkers and playful with the media. As they battled head to head in the lineup trading home runs, the two teammates helped lead their team to a 109–53 record. During the home-run chase, Mantle injured his knee and it became clear that it would be a chase for Maris alone, with many baseball fans rooting against the Yankee, including Commissioner Ford Frick. Frick insisted that Ruth’s record should stand because his achievement was accomplished in 154 games, while Maris would have the advantage of playing in an extended 162-game season. Frick insisted that if Maris hit more than sixty home runs and it occurred after the 154th game, an asterisk would accompany his achievement. After 154 games, Maris’s home run tally was fiftynine. Maris tied Ruth’s record on September 26, 1961. On October 1, 1961, Maris hit his sixty-first home run, establishing a new single-season record. The home-run chase has been dramatized in the HBO film *61.

row when they defeated the San Francisco Giants in game 7 in 1962, ending a dramatic series between the two teams who had once been crosstown rivals. The Giants had ended the regular season tied with the Los Angeles Dodgers and had to play a three-game playoff to determine who would go to the World Series. The expansion team, the New York Mets, set a record for the most losses in a season with 120, while tallying a meager 40 wins. The next year, in the 1963 World Series, the Yankees faced another former crosstown rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, losing in four games. Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax capped off a stellar year on the mound, winning the Cy Young Award and the World Series MVP award. For the fifth year in a row, the New York Yankees appeared in the Fall Classic, when they faced the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964. This marked the end of a dominating Yankees franchise and the end of their postseason appearances for several years. The team dissolved into one of the worst in the following years after losing to the Cardinals in seven games. In game 7 of the 1964 Series against the Yankees, Bob Gibson gave up two ninth-inning home runs but was able to pull out the victory and the World Series MVP award. Koufax, enjoying another Cy Young Award season, led the Dodgers to the World Series in 1965. The Dodgers and Giants were battling for the pennant and in an incident that some feel aided the Dodgers met each other on August 22, 1965. During the game, Giants pitcher Juan Marichal was batting against Koufax and felt that Dodger catcher John Roseboro’s throw back to the pitcher was too close to his ear. Marichal took his bat and hit Roseboro over the head with it, creating an on-the-field scuffle between the two rival teams. Marichal was suspended for over a week and missed two starts that ultimately helped contribute to his team’s fading at the end of the season with the Dodgers winning the pennant by only two games. The incident marred Marichal’s reputation and fueled the rivalry.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Pitcher Sandy Koufax (left) and catcher John Roseboro celebrate on the field in Los Angeles, October 6, 1963, after the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees 2–1 to take the 1963 World Series in four straight games. (AP / Wide World Photo)

Marichal had begun his major-league career with the San Francisco Giants in 1960. In his first game, he pitched a one-hit shutout to beat the Philadelphia Phillies. Marichal enjoyed his first twenty-game-win season in 1963, an accomplishment he repeated several times, leading the league with twenty-six games in 1963 and 1968. He maintained an earned run average (ERA) that never rose above 2.76. Marichal won the most games for any pitcher during the 1960s with 161 victories, but was never awarded the Cy Young Award. Koufax was scheduled to pitch game 1 of the 1965 World Series for the Dodgers, but because the game fell on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Jewish pitcher opted to sit out his start, creating a stir among baseball fans who debated the role of religion and sports. The Dodgers went on to defeat the Minnesota Twins in seven games with Koufax winning the Series MVP Award. Koufax won his third unanimous Cy Young Award in 1966, his final season, though his Dodgers lost in the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles in four games. The Boston Red Sox made it to postseason play in 1967 led by their triplecrown, MVP-winning outfielder Carl Yastrzemski, who hit .326 with 44 home runs and 121 runs batted in. Facing the St. Louis Cardinals, the Red Sox lost in seven games. Bob Gibson of the Cardinals was the 1967 Series MVP, pitching three complete games in games 1, 4, and 7 and giving up only three earned runs. In 1968 Gibson’s ERA was 1.12, a record low. He pitched forty-seven consecutive scoreless innings. In addition to winning the Cy Young Award that season, he also won the NL MVP award in what has since become known as “the Year of the Pitcher.”

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Some believe that the pitcher’s mound was lowered five inches by the start of the next season to control for Gibson’s dominance. It had little effect on him, with Gibson pitching to a 20–13 record and 2.18 ERA. He won the Cy Young Award in 1968 and 1970. Between 1963 and 1970, he won 156 games and lost 81, along with nine Gold Glove awards. The Cardinals met the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. Gibson struck out seventeen Tigers in game 1. Pitching against Gibson’s Cardinals in the 1968 Series was Denny McLain, the AL MVP and Cy Young Award winner who compiled a 31–6 record. In the Series, McLain met his match with Gibson, losing both games 1 and 4. He was able to win game 6 on two days rest and the Tigers won the Series in game 7. McLain won his second Cy Young Award the next season. In one of the most improbable matchups of the decade, and perhaps baseball history, the young New York Mets, a team created to replace the Dodgers and Giants, found themselves in the World Series against the Baltimore Orioles. Because of the growth of the leagues, the 1969 postseason marked a change in the playoff structure. With the American and National Leagues each now having East and West Divisions, the division winners played each other to determine who would play in the World Series. Leading the Mets into the playoffs was pitcher Tom Seaver, who had won Rookie of the Year honors with the Mets in 1967, tallying sixteen victories for the last-place team. In his second season, Seaver again won sixteen games with over 200 strikeouts, but his team continued to find themselves in the bottom of the NL standings. In 1969 the Mets and Seaver enjoyed tremendous years. Seaver won twenty-five games and the Cy Young Award. In the playoffs, the Mets defeated the Atlanta Braves with the Orioles beating the Twins. In the Series, Seaver lost game 1, but won game 4 with a complete game, ten-inning victory. The “Miracle Mets” won the series in five games over the Orioles. At the end of the season, Seaver was awarded the Hickok Belt as the top professional athlete of the year and named “Sportsman of the Year” by Sports Illustrated. Following his World Series season, Seaver set a record on April 22, 1970, when he struck out the last ten batters, finishing with nineteen strikeouts, tying a record set by the Phillies’ Steve Carlton. The Orioles bounced back from their World Series loss to the Mets to reach the postseason in 1970 and defeated the Cincinnati Reds in five games.

Basketball Professional Basketball The NBA underwent a number of changes during the 1960s, including the format of playoffs, expansion, and the challenge of the American Basketball Association. At the start of the decade, NBA seasons were seventy-nine games long with a seven-game championship playoff series. In 1961, the East Division had four teams (Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Warriors, Syracuse Nationals, and New York Knicks) and the West Division had five teams (Los Angeles Lakers, Cincinnati Royals, Detroit Pistons, St. Louis Hawks, and Chicago Packers). By the end of the decade, the professional basketball landscape had expanded across the country with five additional teams, an expanded playoff structure, and a young rival league. Expansion and relocation in professional basketball, much like other professional sports, were prominent themes during the 1960s and one that forced fans to pay close attention to who was playing where and with what team name. Prior to

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

the 1960–61 season, the Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles. The next year, a team was added to Chicago. Before the 1962–63 season, the Philadelphia Warriors moved to San Francisco and into the Western Division, with Cincinnati switching to the Eastern Division. That same season, the Chicago Packers changed their name to the Chicago Zephyrs, though not for long. A year later, the Zephyrs relocated to Baltimore and changed their name to the Bullets. The Syracuse Nationals moved to fill the void in Philadelphia, becoming the 76ers. To fill the void left by the Zephyrs, Chicago was awarded a new franchise, the Bulls in 1966– 67. The Bulls made the NBA a league of ten teams, split into two divisions of five teams. Using a new playoff format that year, the division winners played the fourth-place teams in a first round, with a division championship round to follow, and then the league championship. In 1967–68, two more teams were added, the Seattle Supersonics and the San Diego Rockets, for a twelve-team league playing eighty-two games per season. It was in this same year, with the growing popularity of basketball and other cities wanting a team of their own, that the American Basketball Association began play in cities where NBA teams were not located, including Dallas, Denver, Houston, and Oakland. The ABA started the 1967–68 season with eleven teams playing seventy-eight games per season. The ABA was able to attract some NBA talent, with the new Oakland franchise signing one of the NBA’s leading scorers, Rick Barry, and hiring former NBA star George Mikan as the league’s commissioner. The next season, the NBA responded by adding two more teams, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Phoenix Suns. Just as the NBA relocated franchises, the ABA suffered similar growth pangs. The Anaheim Amigos became the Los Angeles Stars in 1968 before becoming the Utah Stars in 1970. The Houston Mavericks became the Carolina Cougars in 1969. The Minnesota Muskies were the forerunners of the Miami Floridians (1968) and later, simply, Floridians (1970). Before the league even started, the New Jersey Firefighters changed their moniker to the Americans and the next year became the New York Nets in 1968. The Oakland Americans, who began as the Oaks, moved to become the Washington Capitals in the first season and two years later were the Pittsburgh Condors. The New Orleans Buccaneers relocated to become the Memphis Pros in 1970, leaving the Dallas Chaparrals, Denver Rockets, Indiana Pacers, San Diego Conquistadors, and Kentucky Colonels as the only teams to stay in one place for the first four years of the league. The National Basketball Association was dominated by the Boston Celtics’ dynasty during the 1960s. The Boston Celtics won titles in 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, and 1969, leaving two titles for other teams during the ten-year period. With a cast of terrific players, including Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and K.C. Jones, along with their coach, Red Auerbach, the first championship of the decade came at the hands of the Minneapolis Lakers. Over the 1960s, the Celtics and Lakers would square off regularly in the postseason creating a rivalry that was unparalleled. With new players and a returning cast, such as John Havlicek, Sam Jones, Frank Ramsey, and Satch Sanders, the Celtics won eight consecutive titles, with six of those titles coming against the Lakers. Over the 1961–62 season, the Celtics won a record sixty games. They defeated the Lakers for their fourth consecutive title in game 7 overtime. The next season, Bill Russell won the season MVP award and led the Celtics to their fifth straight championship title, this time needing only six games to beat the Lakers.

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Auerbach was a great coach who had the respect of his players. In 1964 he started five African Americans, the first time that had occurred in an NBA game. Auerbach retired in 1966 and became the general manager, handing the reins over to player Bill Russell, who served as player-coach. Russell was the first African American to coach a modern American professional sport team. Russell’s first season as a player-coach resulted in the Celtics losing their first championship title in eight years, to the Philadelphia 76ers. The Celtics went on to win titles again in 1968 and 1969, beating the Lakers both times. When Russell retired after the 1969 season, his Celtics team had won eleven of the previous thirteen titles. The other two teams to win an NBA title during the 1960s were the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967 over the Warriors, and the New York Knicks, who in 1970 won their first title. In the ABA, the Pittsburgh Pipers defeated the New Orleans Buccaneers for the inaugural title in 1968, with the Oakland Oaks defeating the Indiana Pacers the next year, and the Pacers returning in 1970 to defeat the Los Angeles Stars. Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Elvin Hayes, Wes Unseld, Willis Reed, Rick Barry, John Havlicek, Dave Bing, Billy Cunningham, Sam Jones, and Lenny Wilkens were some of the top stars of the 1960s. Elgin Baylor was a scoring machine for the Lakers in the first years of the 1960s. He averaged 34.8 points per game (ppg) in 1960–61, 38.3 in 1961–62, and 34.0 in 1962–63. Jerry West was drafted second by the Lakers in 1960 and was part of the Laker team that established the rivalry with the Celtics. West’s Lakers lost to the Celtics in the 1969 finals, but he became the first player from the losing team to win the series MVP. Oscar Robertson, the Big “O,” joined the Cincinnati Royals in 1960. As a rookie, Robertson averaged 30.5 ppg, 10.1 rebounds per game (rpg), and a league-leading 9.7 assists per game (apg). He earned Rookie of the Year honors and was selected to the All-NBA First Team, as well as playing in the All-Star Game. Robertson was selected to the All-NBA First Team nine seasons in a row. In his sophomore campaign, Robertson rewrote the history books when he averaged a triple-double, with 30.8 ppg, 12.5 rpg, and 11.4 apg. The Royals even made the playoffs after finishing at the bottom in the prior season. By the 1962–63 season, the Royals, led by Robertson, played their way into the NBA finals, losing to the Celtics dynasty. He won another MVP award in 1963–64 for his 31.4 ppg, 9.9 rpg, and 11.0 apg. The Royals traded Robertson to the Milwaukee Bucks before the 1970–71 season, a move that surprised many basketball experts. One of Robertson’s important contributions to the NBA is referred to as the Oscar Robertson suit, which he filed in 1970 as the president of the Players Association. The lawsuit contended that the NBA was in violation of antitrust laws when they restricted player movement. Eventually the suit was settled in 1976, after Robertson’s retirement, and allowed free agency for the players, leading to higher salaries. Jerry Lucas joined Robertson and the Cincinnati Royals in 1963–64 after enjoying a tremendous college and Olympic career. Winning Rookie of the Year honors, Lucas averaged 17.7 ppg and 17.4 rpg in his first NBA campaign. Rick Barry won the Rookie of the Year award in 1965–66 after averaging 25.7 ppg and 10.6 rpg. His Warriors team played in the 1967 NBA championships and lost to the 76ers in six games. Barry jumped from the NBA to the ABA prior to the 1967–68 season after a contract dispute with the Warriors and eventually played for the Oakland Oaks of the ABA, earning a championship in 1968–69. Barry relocated with the

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Oaks when they moved to Washington, DC, and later Virginia, before returning to the NBA and the Warriors in 1972. In the 1968–69 draft, Elvin Hayes was picked first by the San Diego Rockets and Wes Unseld was selected second. In his rookie year, Hayes led the league in scoring with 28.4 ppg. He averaged 17.1 rpg and was named to the All-Rookie Team. Unseld was voted Rookie of the Year and MVP in 1968–69 playing for the Baltimore Bullets. The year before he was drafted, the Bullets finished in sixth place, but with Unseld they won first place in their division. They lost in the division semifinals. Lew Alcindor was drafted first by the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969, after turning down a $1-million offer from the Harlem Globetrotters. Alcindor made an immediate impact on the league and his team, who jumped to second place in his rookie season. He won Rookie of the Year honors after finishing second in scoring with 28.8 ppg and third in rebounding with 14.5 rpg. In only his second season in the NBA, Alcindor won the MVP award, along with the scoring title with 31.7 ppg. He led the Bucks into the postseason, which included a championship over the Baltimore Bullets in a four-game sweep. After the finals, Alcindor announced that he had changed his name to Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Arabic for “noble, servant of the powerful one.” “Pistol” Pete Maravich graduated from Louisiana State University in 1970 and was the third pick of the NBA draft. He signed a record $1.6-million contract with the Atlanta Hawks, making him one of the league’s highest-paid players. As a rookie he averaged 23.2 ppg and was named to the All-Rookie Team. The two players who dominated the NBA during the 1960s were Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, two centers who matched up time after time, big game after big game. Chamberlain was the more flamboyant performer, with statistics and record performances that amazed basketball fans and players alike. Russell, though he was a terrific athlete and accumulated plenty of impressive statistics of his own, was also a member of the Celtics’ dynasty and the NBA titles he won far outmatched Chamberlain’s various teams. Chamberlain’s historic accomplishments during the 1960s include becoming the first player to score 3,000 points in a season, as well as the first player to collect more than 2,000 rebounds in a single season. In one game, Chamberlain grabbed a record fifty-five rebounds. In 1961–62, Chamberlain set another scoring record when he tallied 4,029 points with an astounding 50.4 ppg and 25.7 rpg. On March 2, 1962, Chamberlain established an all-time single-game scoring record when he scored 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks, leading the Warriors to a high-scoring 169–147 victory. Chamberlain led the Warriors to the NBA finals in 1964 against the powerful Celtics, losing in five games. During the 1964–65 season, the Warriors traded Chamberlain to the Philadelphia 76ers and renewed his Eastern Division rivalry with the Celtics and Bill Russell. Chamberlain and Bill Russell enjoyed an intense but friendly competition over the span of their careers with their team meeting in postseason play and often spoiling the hopes of the other. At the end of the 1964–65 campaign, the 76ers met the Celtics in the division championships. In game 7, the 76ers lost in the final seconds to the Celtics, marking the fifth time in seven years that the Celtics had beaten Chamberlain and whichever team he was playing for in postseason play. Chamberlain responded the next year by winning the NBA MVP award for his performance of 33.5 ppg and 24.6 rpg. After losing in the postseason to the Celtics again in 1966, Chamberlain and the 76ers retooled in their efforts to beat their

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Wilt Chamberlain (November 1965), Philadelphia vs. San Fransico at Madison Square Garden. (Courtesy of Photofest)

nemesis. With a new coach who implemented an offense that spread the ball around, and Chamberlain’s efforts to work with his teammates, the 76ers met the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals in 1967. In a five-game series, the 76ers were finally able to defeat the Celtics, led by player-coach Russell, who had replaced Auerbach. Once past the Celtics, the 76ers faced the Warriors in the finals, and won the series in six games, giving Chamberlain his first title. After enjoying their championship season, the 76ers continued to win, the next season (1967–68) owning the best record in the league. Chamberlain won his fourth MVP award for his performance of 24.3 ppg, and 23.8 rpg, as well leading the league in assists with 702, an amazing stat for a big man. He also became the first player to score 25,000 points over his career. The 76ers met the New York Knicks in the Eastern Division semifinals, winning in six games. Like clockwork, the 76ers then faced the familiar Russell and his Celtics. The 76ers led the series three games to one, but the Celtics rallied back to win game 5 and then game 6, causing a game 7 matchup for the NBA title. The Celtics beat the 76ers in Philadelphia, 100–96, winning back their title and marking the first time that a team had lost the series after leading by three games to one. Chamberlain’s teams were now 1–6 against the Celtics in playoff series. Prior to the 1968 season, Chamberlain was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, the first time a MVP winner was traded the next season. Ticket sales for the Lakers went up over 10 percent, but Chamberlain’s statistics were not as gaudy as past

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years, though still respectable at 20.5 ppg and 21.1 rpg. It seemed as if Chamberlain’s teams were now a perpetual playoff contender and the Lakers beat the Warriors and then the Hawks in the Western Division playoffs before meeting up with the team Chamberlain had played the prior year, the Celtics. The series went to down to the deciding game 7 for the second year in a row between Chamberlain and Russell. This game 7 resulted in another title victory for the Celtics, who were able to pull out a win by a score of 108–106, with Chamberlain sitting out the last six minutes. For the fourth year in a row, Chamberlain’s team made it into the NBA finals when the Lakers met the New York Knicks in 1970. For the third year in a row, Chamberlain’s team was denied the NBA title in game 7.

College Basketball College basketball generally provided the manpower for America’s Olympic teams. Several teams were very successful over the decade, making regular appearances in postseason play. The NCAA Tournament typically included twenty-five teams over several rounds of play with single elimination. Ohio State won the NCAA title in 1960 and lost the next two years to Cincinnati. The Buckeyes were led by Olympic gold medalist Jerry Lucas and coach Fred Taylor. Lucas was an All-American and won Big Ten Player of the Year three years in a row (1960–62), and his team never lost a game on their home court during his tenure. His Buckeyes lost only one game in 1961, a year after winning their NCAA title, and he was named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year, selected among college and professional athletes. Cincinnati lost the title in 1963 to Loyola (Illinois), a team that started four black athletes, the first time for an NCAA championship contest. In 1963 Mississippi State did not compete in the NCAA Basketball Tournament because of an unwritten law that forbade interracial competition. In 1964 UCLA emerged to win their first of a record number of national championships. Led by coach John Wooden, UCLA won the NCAA title in 1964, beating Duke, after winning every game that season, capping off a perfect 30–0 campaign. UCLA became only the fifth school to repeat as champions in 1965, beating Michigan 91–80 and finishing the season at 28–2. The signing of the first African American basketball player at Texas Christian University in 1965 was significant enough to merit attention in Sports Illustrated. Texas–El Paso (UTEP) was the lone Rick Barry, future NBA Hall of Fame player, picwinner during UCLA’s stretch defeating the Uni- tured as a collegian at the University of Miami, versity of Kentucky in 1966, in a game that has where he led the nation in scoring. (AP / Wide since been documented in a Hollywood film, World Photo)

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Glory Road. That UTEP squad had five black starters, the first time that had occurred in a championship game. UCLA did not qualify for the postseason tournament that year, but returned the next season, with a new player, Lew Alcindor, and their second perfect 30–0 season, ending with their NCAA title victory over Dayton, 79–64. The number 1–ranked Bruins were matched against the number 2–ranked University of Houston Cougars in the first ever nationally televised college basketball game, played in the spacious Houston Astrodome in front of over 52,000 spectators. The Bruins’ fortyseven-game winning streak was snapped by the Cougars by a score of 71–69 and the game was dubbed the “Game of the Century.” Later that season, UCLA faced Houston in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament and avenged their earlier loss with a 101–69 win and a trip to the finals against the University of North Carolina, whom they defeated 78–55 for their second straight title. The Wooden-led Bruins finished Alcindor’s senior season with a 29–1 record ending with their third consecutive NCAA title, beating Purdue 92–72. For their fourth straight title, the Bruins defeated Jacksonville 80–69 for the 1970 crown and finishing with a 28–2 record. UCLA basketball would roll into the 1970s with four straight titles and continue on for a total of seven straight titles and nine titles over eleven seasons. No other college basketball team would come close to John Wooden and the dynasty of the UCLA Bruins during the 1960s and 1970s.

Football Professional Football Professional football at the start of the 1960s offered football fans two options, the National Football League (NFL) and its new rival, the American Football League (AFL), a group of owners left out of the NFL who started the league in 1960. For several years these two leagues competed for fans, players, and television dollars before finally merging to become one league. The National Football League heading into the 1961 season was comprised of fourteen teams and divided into two divisions, East (New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, Cleveland Browns, St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Steelers, Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins) and West (Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, Baltimore Colts, Chicago Bears, San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, Minnesota Vikings). At the end of each season, a championship game was played between the winners of each division. The American Football League began play in 1960 and at the start of the 1961 season was comprised of eight teams in two divisions, East (Houston Oilers, Boston Patriots, New York Titans, Buffalo Bills) and West (San Diego Chargers, Dallas Texans, Oakland Raiders, Denver Broncos), with a similar playoff format as their NFL counterparts. Pete Rozelle was elected commissioner of the NFL in 1960, while Lamar Hunt served as the president of the AFL, with Joe Foss as commissioner. When the AFL arrived on the football scene in 1960, the two leagues made a “no tampering” verbal pact that helped define the boundaries between the two leagues as they scouted talent. The upstart AFL signed a five-year television deal with ABC.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Television and radio contracts were an additional source of revenue for both leagues, and over the decade each league made a number of deals that helped solidify its standing. Despite the NFL’s tradition and efforts to proclaim its league as the “better” league, the AFL media deals were continued evidence of the league’s legitimate standing as a challenger to the NFL. In 1961 the NFL signed a two-year deal with NBC for the rights to the championship games, at a cost of $615,000 each season. Almost half that money was earmarked for the player benefit package. That same season Congress passed a bill that legalized single network television contracts by each professional football league. In 1962 CBS poured its money into the NFL, agreeing to telecast regular-season games for $4.65 million a year. The AFL secured a television contract with NBC to air their championship game for $926,000 in 1963. Both leagues enjoyed paydays in 1964 when the NFL and CBS inked a $14.1 million a year deal for two years to air regular-season games with an additional $1.8 million for the championship games. The AFL and NBC agreed to a five-year, $36-million television contract, making it clear that the renegade league was going to be a permanent fixture in professional football. CBS and the NFL signed a new contract in 1965 for the 1966 and 1967 seasons for $18.8 million per year and the next year agreed to $2 million for each championship game. In an important agreement, CBS and NBC paid $9.5 million for the rights to air a proposed AFL-NFL championship game. In 1969 ABC signed a deal to televise Monday Night Football, thirteen games a season, with a contract that would run three years. Each league culminated its season with a championship game. The Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants met in the NFL championship game for the first two titles of the 1960s, with the Packers winning both, blanking the Giants, 37–0 in 1961, and winning 16–7 in 1962. The Giants lost their third championship game in a row, falling to the Chicago Bears 14–10 in 1963. The Cleveland Browns defeated the Baltimore Colts 27–0 for the 1964 title. The next year, the Packers and Colts met in a Western conference playoff game to determine which team would meet the winner of the Eastern Conference. Green Bay won in overtime, 13–10, and went on to defeat the Browns 23–12 for their third title in five years. In the final NFL championship game before the merger of the two leagues, the Packers beat the Dallas Cowboys 34–27 in the 1966 title game. The AFL’s first championship game in 1960 was won by the Houston Oilers, who defeated the Los Angeles Chargers, 24–16. Houston won its second title in 1961 over the relocated San Diego Chargers, by a score of 10–3. The Oilers were led by 1961 MVP QB George Blanda, who threw for over 3,000 yards and 36 touchdowns. Blanda also kicked for the Oilers, making sixteen of twenty-six field goals. The Dallas Texans ended Houston’s run in 1962, beating the Oilers in overtime, 20–17. The Texans were led by QB Len Dawson, who in 1962 threw for almost 2,800 yards and seventeen touchdowns. The Boston Patriots beat the Buffalo Bills 26–8 in an Eastern Division playoff, and were then trounced by the Chargers in the 1963 championship game, 51–10. The Chargers were led by two top players, flanker Lance Alworth and quarterback (QB) Tobin Rote. That season, Alworth caught sixty-one passes for 1,205 yards and eleven touchdowns from QB Rote, who threw for 2,510 yards and seventeen touchdowns. The Chargers made it to their fourth title game in five years in 1964, but lost to the Bills 20–7. Jack Kemp was the QB for the Bills and, after leading the Bills to the AFL title in 1964, he had an MVP season in 1965, throwing for 2,368 yards and ten touchdowns, while running in the end zone for four more,

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and leading the Bills to the 1965 title game where they beat the Chargers 23–0. Paul Lowe, playing for the Chargers, became the first AFL player to rush for more than 1,000 yards in two seasons. In his 1965 MVP season, Lowe rushed for 1,121 yards, following up a 1963 season with 1,010 yards. In 1966 the Kansas City Chiefs defeated the defending champion Bills, 31–7. While relocation was not frequent, it did occur, and as each league grew in popularity, expansion became a trend in both leagues. The AFL’s Los Angeles Chargers moved to San Diego after their first season of play. In 1963 the Dallas Texans relocated to become the Kansas City Chiefs. Atlanta was awarded an AFL franchise for the 1966 season, with a team awarded to Cincinnati the following season. Certainly there was a great deal of friction between the two leagues. One league would secretly convince a player to sign with them, one league would pay more money than the other, and fans debated which league was stronger and had the better players. The AFL owners took their complaints through legal routes and filed an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, which the AFL lost in 1962. The rivalry only intensified. The AFL stunned the football world by signing rookie quarterback Joe Namath out of the University of Alabama for $400,000, a record amount and an indication that the challenge league was legitimate. Namath’s signing surely contributed to NFL owners considering the merger of the two leagues. The recruiting and signing of college players was one of the main disputes between the two leagues. The integration of professional football was underway in both leagues, though each league had a different approach to the issue. The AFL was more proactive in recruiting and signing African American players and benefited from their level of play, making

Weeb Ewbank, head coach of the American Football League’s New York Jets, takes a look at Joe Namath, the team’s $400,000 quarterback from the University of Alabama during a light workout on Namath’s surgically repaired knee in New York, on June 29, 1965. (AP / Wide World Photo)

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

the AFL more exciting and high-scoring than the NFL, which was slow in integrating its rosters. Several racial incidents in professional football merit discussion. In September 1964 the San Diego Chargers were in Atlanta for an exhibition game with the New York Jets. Several African American players were playing pool in a hotel and were asked to leave the facilities. In January 1965 the African American players selected for the AFL All-Star game decided to boycott the game hosted in New Orleans because of several incidents of discrimination in their first day in the southern city. Instead of playing the game without the players or canceling the game, the AFL owners and commissioner moved the game to Houston. Several players believed that NFL teams had quotas for the number of African Americans on each roster. At least one player had trouble finding housing in Dallas. Finally, after years of competition between the two leagues off the field, the leagues decided to compete on the field. It was announced on June 8, 1966, that

1965 AFL All-Star Game Boycott The 1965 American Football League All-Star Game boycott occurred as a result of African American players who, after arriving in New Orleans and facing a number of racial incidents, voted to leave the southern city and skip the game. The players presented their concerns to the leadership of the AFL, who instead of dismissing the concerns of the players decided to relocate the game from New Orleans to Houston in less than a week. The boycott stands as an example of a group of players standing together to fight against discrimination. Several events during the week preceding the All-Star Game led to the protest. African American all-stars were refused service at nightclubs and confronted by nightclub doormen brandishing guns. Several players were stranded at the airport for up to three hours because no taxis would pick them up, while others were refused taxi service around the city. Other players recounted statements directed at them. The players were led to believe that they would not encounter such incidents and were quite surprised by the reception they received. On January 10, 1965, the African American players from both teams met at the Roosevelt Hotel, the headquarters for the East All-Star team, and discussed their treatment and possible responses to the treatment. The players included at least one from each AFL team. After a long discussion about the treatment they had received, the twenty-one African American All-Star players from the American Football League decided to boycott the All-Star Game in New Orleans scheduled for January 16, 1965. Arguing that the city and its citizens discriminated against them, the African American players voted 18–3 to boycott the game and informed Commissioner Joe Foss of their decision. Efforts to convince the players to stay by the New Orleans branch of the NAACP were unsuccessful. Commissioner Foss found the situation regrettable, but agreed the players had adequate reasons for the walkout. The players also had the support of the American Football League Players Association. The athletes’ collective protest succeeded when Commissioner Foss decided to relocate the game to Jeppeson Stadium in Houston, a much smaller venue, which virtually guaranteed a financial loss. African American newspapers nationwide recognized the collective effort and compared the players’ protest with other civil rights protests in their reports on the incidents and related editorials. The relocated game, won by the West, 38–14, drew only 15,446.

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the two leagues would merge to form a twenty-four-team league. The two leagues continued to play separate schedules until 1969 but agreed to meet in a world championship game matching each league’s top team against the other. Until then, the former NFL realigned themselves into the East (with Capital and Central divisions) and West (Central and Coastal divisions). The new merged league proposed to expand to twenty-six teams by 1968 and twenty-eight by 1970. Congress approved the merger. The structure of the new National Football League was divided into two conferences, the National Football Conference (NFC) and the American Football Conference (AFC), with two divisions in each. That year, the AFL and NFL spent a combined $7 million on their draft picks and AFL Commissioner Joe Foss resigned his position. The Oakland Raiders’ owner Al Davis took over Foss’s position until the merger was complete. The 1967 Oakland Raiders were led by MVP QB Daryle Lamonica, who threw for 3,228 yards and thirty touchdowns, leading the team to the AFL title game against the Oilers. Lamonica continued to post impressive numbers, and the next season he passed for over 3,200 yards and twenty-five touchdowns. Lamonica and Namath shared MVP honors in 1969, the last year an AFL MVP award was given. Lamonica had his third straight season of over 3,000 yards with 3,302 yards and thirty-four touchdowns, and helped lead the Raiders to a playoff victory over the Oilers, before losing to the Jets. Namath, following his Super Bowl victory, passed for 2,734 yards and nineteen touchdowns. On January 15, 1967, Los Angeles Coliseum hosted the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, pitting the Green Bay Packers representing the NFL against the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. The game was aired on both CBS and NBC, and was witnessed by 61,946 fans at the game. The Packers defeated the Chiefs 35–10, giving the NFL the first win in the merging of the two leagues in postseason play. The Packers were rewarded with $15,000 for each player and the losing Chiefs earned $7,500 each. In the second World Championship matchup between the NFL and AFL, played on January 14, 1968 in Miami, the Packers repeated their title with a 33–14 win over the Oakland Raiders. For the first time, a football game received over $3 million in gate receipts. Prior to the 1969 season, the postseason format was reconfigured. In the AFL, the winner of one division was scheduled to play the runner-up in the other division, providing a round of games before the big NFL-AFL game. Played in Miami on January 12, 1969, and now called the Super Bowl, the New York Jets faced the Baltimore Colts. Jets QB Joe Namath had thrown for a record-high 4,007 yards in 1967 and followed up his record-setting performance by winning the AFL MVP award, throwing for 3,147 yards and fifteen touchdowns, and leading the Jets to the Super Bowl game versus the heavily favored Colts and their MVP-winning QB Earl Morrall. Namath guaranteed a win for his underdog team and unexpectedly led his team to a 16–7 over the Colts, marking the first time the AFL emerged as the victors in the postseason clash. Namath’s prediction and subsequent win cemented his legendary status in the game, some of it established with his commercial endorsements and luxurious New York lifestyle. During the 1969 season, four NFL teams (Miami, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland) were shifted to the new AFC for a total of thirteen AFC teams. The playoff format added a “wild card” team. In Super Bowl IV, on January 11, 1970, the AFC’s Kansas City Chiefs defeated the NFC’s Minnesota Vikings, 23–7, at the

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

annual showdown hosted in New Orleans. Nine months later, Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi died on September 3, 1970, and the NFL renamed the trophy awarded to the Super Bowl winner the Lombardi Trophy in honor of the legendary coach. Gambling became a concern in 1963 when two NFL players were suspended for placing bets on football games, including ones in which their teams played. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle suspended Green Bay Packer QB Paul Hornung and Detroit Lion Alex Karras for one year for gambling on the football games. Hornung had been the NFL MVP in 1961. Five of Karras’s teammates were fined $2,000 for betting on games they did not play in. Both Karras and Hornung were reinstated for the 1964 season. On September 7, 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame opened its doors in Canton, Ohio, and four years later inducted their first African American member, Emlen Tunnell. The Buffalo Bills guard Bob Kalsu, drafted by the team in 1968, had to fulfill his ROTC obligation and serve in Vietnam. Kalsu was killed in action on July 21, 1970, becoming the only active NFL player killed in duty. A major labor advance was reached in 1970, when the league consented to a four-year agreement with the Players Association that guaranteed $4,535,000 a year to the player pension and insurance benefits. Notable players in professional football in the 1960s include a list of all-star performers. Quarterbacks and running backs dominated the MVP list in both the AFL and NFL. Notable QBs of the 1960s included New York Giants QB Y. A. Tittle, who won the NFL MVP award in 1962 and 1963, Colt QB Johnny Unitas, who won the NFL MVP in 1964 and 1967, and Bart Starr, Green Bay Packers QB, who won the award in 1966. In 1969 Los Angeles Rams QB Roman Gabriel won the NFL MVP with John Brodie, QB of the San Francisco 49ers, following in 1970. Abner Hayes, a halfback for the Dallas Texans, won the AFL MVP award, along with the Rookie of the Year award, after leading the league in rushing yards (875 yards) and touchdowns. Cookie Gilchrist enjoyed a great career with several AFL teams beginning with the Buffalo Bills after playing in the Canadian Football League (CFL). In his first AFL season, 1962, Gilchrist rushed for over 1,000 yards, the first time in AFL history. He scored fifteen touchdowns as a rusher and receiver, along with kicking fourteen extra points and seven field goals. Packers RB Jim Taylor enjoyed a MVP season in 1962. Clem Daniels, a halfback on the Oakland Raiders, had a great season in 1963, gaining over 1,000 yards on the ground and close to 700 yards in receptions, scoring seven touchdowns. In the NFL, the dominant running back was Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns, who won the NFL MVP in 1963 and 1965. Gino Cappelletti was another terrific receiver, catching seven touchdown passes in 1964, while gaining 865 yards in receptions. Cappelletti also served as the Patriots’ field-goal kicker and made twenty-two of thirty-eight attempts in 1964, making him the highest-scoring kicker in AFL history. Jim Nance, a fullback for the Boston Patriots, was the AFL MVP in 1966, rushing for a record-high 1,458 yards and eleven touchdowns.

College Football College football and basketball were the most popular college sports of the decade. Moreover, with the integration of colleges and athletic teams, both sports

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faced issues related to the integration process. With the integration of college campuses and college athletics, black college athletes emerged as central figures in increasing campus activism. College sport became a viable and visible platform for black college athletes to express their discontent at their treatment as black Americans and black athletes. Black college athletes employed similar tactics used in other protest activities of the civil rights movement, which eventually culminated in various boycott movements. In 1968 thirty-seven athletic protests, rebellions, and boycotts occurred in intercollegiate athletics. In 1963 the University of Pittsburgh was invited to compete in the Sugar Bowl but had to turn down the invitation when bowl officials could not guarantee the integrated squad would find integrated facilities in the host city. That same year, Baylor University opened its athletic rosters to black athletes, and two years later, the lilywhite Southeastern Conference (SEC) finally began to recruit black athletes. One football coach who held fast to segregated play was Gene Stallings of Texas A&M, who explained, “I’ve got nothing against the Negro athlete, but I don’t believe he fits into our plans right now. What we need is a team that will work and pull and fight together and really get a feeling of oneness. We need to be a complete unit. I don’t believe we could accomplish this with a Negro on the squad” (Scorecard 1965). At San Jose State in 1967, the United Black Students for Action threatened to prevent the opening game of the football game from being played. Their protests were related to the treatment of black student-athletes. Eventually, the university president canceled the game. The success of the movement at San Jose State encouraged similar actions at other universities. African American football players protested their treatment at a number of universities, including Michigan State, University of Washington, University of Wyoming, Indiana University, and Syracuse University. Some were removed from their team for their protests, while some schools responded by hiring an African American coach, usually as an assistant. College football crowned a number of champions throughout the decade, with no team dominating the top spot. While some years there was a consensus national champion, most years the top honor was shared by two teams, which was determined by reporter and coach voting. For example, in 1961, Ohio State and Alabama shared the national championship. The next year USC was named champion, a title they claimed again in 1967. Texas wore the title crown in 1963 and the next year three teams, Alabama, Arkansas, and Notre Dame, shared the top spot. Alabama repeated their winning ways, claiming the title in 1965, although this time sharing the top spot with Michigan State. Michigan State repeated in 1966, sharing the title with Notre Dame. Ohio State and Texas claimed sole ownership of the national championship in 1968 and 1969 respectively, with Texas and Nebraska sharing the honors in 1970. The most prestigious award given to college football during this era was the Heisman Trophy, with Ernie Davis of Syracuse winning in 1961. Other notable winners include Navy’s Roger Staubach in 1962, Mike Garrett of USC in 1965, Steve Spurrier of Florida in 1966, and USC’s O.J. Simpson in 1968. Stanford’s Jim Plunkett won the award in 1970.

Hockey Two teams dominated the National Hockey League during the 1960s, the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs. Montreal had been a power in the 1950s and they began to slide early in the 1960s. Despite the Canadiens’ having

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

the best record in the league in 1960–61, the Stanley Cup Playoffs were won by the Chicago Blackhawks and their young stars, Bobby Hull, Bill Hay, Murray Balfour, and Stan Mikita. Montreal’s Doug Harvey, Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion, and Jean Beliveau were beginning to age a bit. The Toronto team, led by Frank Mahovlich and Dave Keon, won the Stanley Cup three straight years from 1962 to 1964 and then in 1966. Montreal added young stars Yvan Cournoyer, Bobby Rousseau, John Ferguson, and Gilles Tremblay and won the Stanley Cup in 1965, 1967, 1968, and 1969. Bobby Orr entered the league in 1966 and became the top player in the game for the Boston Bruins, who would win the Cup in 1970 and 1972. In 1967, the National Hockey League doubled in size from six to twelve teams, adding franchises in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Oakland, Minnesota, and St. Louis. The rapid expansion put all the new squads in the Western Division, which was decidedly weaker than the older Eastern Division. It took until 1974 for an expansion team (the Philadelphia Flyers) to win a Stanley Cup.

Olympic Games After the first televised Olympic Games in 1960, the next Olympiad occurred in 1964, with the Winter Games hosted in Innsbruck, Austria, and the Summer Games in Tokyo, Japan. Grenoble, France, hosted the 1968 Winter Games while Mexico City hosted the 1968 Summer Games. The Olympic Games during the 1960s exemplify the nexus of international politics and sport. Boycotts, student protests, apartheid, amateurism, and nationalism were the order of the day, with the IOC’s President Avery Brundage standing at the helm of the growing sport

Gatorade The famous sports drink Gatorade was invented in 1965 by a team of professors at the University of Florida and named for the team’s mascot, the Gators. The coaching staff approached university physicians to identify why so many of the football players were affected by heat-related illnesses, common in the humid environs of Florida. The doctors, Robert Cade, Harry James Free, Dana Shires, and Alejandro de Quesada, determined that when the athletes sweat their bodies were not replacing the electrolytes excreted during exercise, and that the amount of carbohydrates the athletes utilized for energy expenditure were also not being replaced during exercise. The group of researchers worked to develop a beverage that would combat both problems. The result of the researchers’ work was a carbohydrate-electrolyte drink that replaced what the body was excreting through sweat and exercise. They dubbed the cocktail “Gatorade.” Dr. Cade patented the beverage and worked with Stokely-Van Camp, Inc., a fruit and vegetable canning company located in Indianapolis, to produce the beverage. The football coaching staff supplied Gatorade to their players during practice and games, and the team performed successfully on the field, racking up a 7–4 season. The next season the Gators went 9–2 and won the Orange Bowl for the first time in school history. Other college football teams began to use Gatorade, and professional teams followed suit. In 1969 the Kansas City Chiefs began using Gatorade and ended up winning the Super Bowl. Players and coaches attributed their success to the sweet drink. Soon, recreational athletes were drinking Gatorade sold in stores across the country.

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spectacle. Although the IOC required all participating athletes to be amateurs, there was a marked difference between the collegiate American athletes and their Eastern European competitors, who received support from their government. A number of record-setting performances and surprising victories also marked the era.

1964 Winter Olympic Games Innsbruck, Austria, hosted thirty-six nations, including a combined East and West Germany team, and 1,091 athletes competing in thirty-four events at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games. One problem leading up to the Games was a lack of snow, which was solved by the Austrian army who delivered snow and ice bricks to the various venues. It was the first year luge events were held. The Olympic team from the United States won a total of six medals, finishing eighth among the countries and well behind the Soviet Union’s 25 medals. The sole gold medal for the U.S. was won by speed skater Richard McDermott in the 500-meter. One woman won two medals for the U.S.; Jean Saubert won silver in the giant slalom and a bronze in the slalom. The other three medals came in men’s slalom and men’s figure skating.

1964 Summer Olympic Games The Tokyo Olympic Games marked the first time the Olympic Games were hosted by an Asian nation. From ninety-three nations 5,051 athletes, including 678 women, participated in 163 events. Two sports, judo and volleyball, were included in the Games for the first time. It also marked the last time a cinder track was home to the track and field events. At the Toyko Games, American athletes battled the Soviet Union on the track, in the swimming pool, and on the courts. The United States won the unofficial medal count, collecting 36 golds, 26 silvers, and 28 bronze medals, for a total of 90 medals, a few medals short of the Soviet Union’s 96 total medals, but outmatching their gold medals 36–30, thus putting them at the top. The host nation Japan finished third with 29 total medals, with the United Team of Germany coming in fourth with 50 total medals, but with only 10 gold medals compared to Japan’s 16 first-place finishes. Several Americans had stellar gold medal performances. In track and field, Billy Mills won a surprise victory in the 10,000-meter run, with Bob Hayes sprinting to victory in the 100-meter dash. The United States finished first and second in the men’s 110-meter high hurdles and 200-meter dash. American male track and field athletes won medals in the 400- and 5000-meter run, and both relays (4100- and 4400-meter). Al Oerter won a gold medal in the discus with teammate David Weill claiming the bronze. High jumpers John Thomas and John Ranbo tied for second place. Ralph Boston won gold in the long jump, Fred Hansen won gold in the pole vault, and Dallas Long won gold in the shot put. Female tracksters won a number of medals, with Wyomia Tyus winning the 100-meter dash and Edith McGuire finishing second, but winning gold in the 200-meter race. The U.S. women won the 4100-meter relay race. American swimmers won twenty-nine of the medal count, with Don Schollander collecting four gold medals in the pool. Kathleen Ferguson won gold in the 100-meter backstroke, with teammate Virgina Duenkel claiming the bronze. Sharon Stouder won gold in the 100-meter butterfly and silver in the 100-meter freestyle. Kathleen Ellis collected two bronze medals, one in the 100-meter

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Tennessee State Tigerbelles The Tennessee State Tigerbelles were the most successful women’s college athletic team prior to the passage of Title IX in 1972. Tennessee State dominated AAU competition, which was integrated, unlike several other sports. Tennessee State won indoor and outdoor national titles in the 1950s and 1960s. Led by Coach Ed Temple, the Tigerbelles represented the United States at Pan American Games, annual track meets between the Soviet Union and the United States, and U.S. Olympic teams. Temple ran a summer camp for his athletes, and included high school athletes as a means of introducing them to his training system and the Tennessee State campus. Many of the high school athletes attended Tennessee State for their college years. One of the most famous Tigerbelles was three-time Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph. Rudolph had been recruited to run for Temple when he saw her playing a high school basketball game. Rudolph ran as a sixteen-year-old in the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, winning a bronze medal as a member of the 4100 meter relay (all four were part of Coach Temple’s summer program). Four years later, Rudolph stunned the world watching the Rome Olympic Games in the first televised Games when she won three gold medals in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and anchored the 4100-meter relay with three teammates from Tennessee State. Upon returning from Rome, Rudolph finished her college education earning her degree in elementary education. She continued to compete in track meets, becoming the first woman to run at the Millrose Games in New York. Other famous Tigerbelle Olympians include Mae Faggs, Lucinda Williams, Martha Hudson, Margaret Mathews, Barbara Jones, Willye White, and Isabelle Daniels. Faggs was an Olympian in 1948, 1952, and 1956. Eight Tigerbelles competed on the U.S. team at the American-Soviet Union meet hosted in Philadelphia in 1959. Later that year, ten Tigerbelles competed on the American team at the PanAm Games. In 1960 eighteen American women were on the track and field team, eleven of the women were African American and eight of those eleven were Tennessee State Tigerbelles. Tigerbelles continued to succeed on the international stage throughout the 1960s. Wyomia Tyus was the next great sprinter filling Rudolph’s shoes. Tyus won the 100meter dash in the 1964 Olympics and became the first track and field athlete to win the event in successive Olympic Games when she repeated her gold-medal performance in 1968, beating her Tigerbelle teammate Edith McGuire. McGuire won gold in the 200-meter dash.

butterfly and the other in the 100-meter freestyle. American men swept the top three spots in the 200-meter backstroke. American women swept the medals in the 400-meter freestyle and the 400-meter individual medley, including the remarkable gold medal performance by seventeen-year-old Donna De Varona, who also won gold in the 4100-meter freestyle relay. De Varona had been the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic swim team at the 1960 Olympic Games. For her 1964 Olympic performances, De Varona won the Female Athlete of the Year Award from the Associated Press and United Press International. She became the first female sports broadcaster in 1965 with ABC and in 1968 worked as a commentator at the Mexico City Summer Olympic Games. American divers tallied eight medals, winning gold in the women’s and men’s 10-meter platform, and first in the men’s and women’s 3-meter springboard events.

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Other medal performances at the 1964 Tokyo Games came in sailing, rowing, modern pentathlon, equestrian/eventing, weightlifting, shooting, judo, and wrestling. Boxer Joe Frazier won the gold medal in the heavyweight division and the U.S. men’s basketball team won gold. Canoe/kayaker Marcia Jones-Smoke won a gold medal in the K-1 500-meter event Prior to the Games, African American comedian and human-rights activist Dick Gregory tried to organize a boycott of the Tokyo Olympic Games, but failed. He was able to get people to protest and picket at the track and field trials. There were reports of incidents at the Tokyo Games which included unequal treatment of African American Olympians, including social activities, housing accommodations, and athletic assignments.

1968 Winter Olympic Games The Winter Games of 1968 in Grenoble, France, had 1,158 athletes from thirtyseven nations compete in thirty-five events. The 1968 Games were the first Olympics that required female athletes (there were 211 at the event) to undergo sex testing. Norway claimed the unofficial medal count with a total of fourteen, with the Soviet Union in second with thirteen, and France in third with nine. The U.S. team tallied a total of seven medals, all coming on the ice. Two American figure skaters won medals. Tim Wood finished second in the men’s event and Peggy Fleming won the prestigious gold medal on the women’s side. The remaining five medals came in speed skating. Richard McDermott won silver in the 500-meter, while three American women, Jennifer Fish, Mary Meyers, and Dianne Holum, tied for the silver in the 500-meter women’s event. Holum also won a bronze in the 1000-meter race.

1968 Summer Olympic Games The Summer Games in Mexico City were the first ever hosted in Latin America and were rife with controversy even before the first competition occurred. University students protesting in a public plaza about the cost of the Games to the host country were shot and killed by government forces in the days leading up to the Games. The high altitude of the city was a major concern, with officials concerned that performances would be affected. These concerns proved to be real with world records being established in sports that required short bursts of power, such as sprinting and jumping events, and making endurance athletes, any event over two minutes, struggle in high-altitude environment. Consistent with what had occurred in Grenoble in the Winter Games, female athletes were sex tested. It was the first Games to include shooting as a women’s event. At these Summer Games, 112 nations participated, bringing with them 5,516 athletes competing in 172 events. Noticeably absent was South Africa, suspended from the IOC as a result of other African nations threatening to boycott the Games if the apartheid nation was invited. Leading up to the Games, there had also been threats of a boycott by a contingent of African American athletes. The Olympic trials for track and field were held during the summer of 1968. Many African American athletes, in all sports, had given thought to a boycott. Using the trials to promote the idea of a boycott, protesters held signs, one reading “WHY RUN IN MEXICO AND CRAWL AT HOME” (Underwood 1968). Talk of the boycott

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Olympic Project for Human Rights The Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) was an organization started by Harry Edwards as a response to the inequities faced by black athletes in college and professional sports. The main focus of the Olympic Project for Human Rights during 1967 and 1968 was to promote a boycott of the Mexico City Olympic Games by America’s black athletes. The OPHR also sponsored boycotts by college athletes of their own collegiate competitions prior to the October Games as a popular means of protest. Prior to the 1968 Olympic Games, the OPHR discussed the idea of African America athletes boycotting the games to help establish that the United States needed the athletic talent of African Americans to beat the best of other nations. Tired of being exploited for their athletic abilities, but being discriminated in sport and society, the athletes debated for months about what they should do. The OPHR helped shape the debate and dialogue and created a list of six demands at the Black Youth Conference hosted in Los Angeles on November 22–23, 1967, attracting over 200 attendees. At a meeting held in New York City on December 15, 1967, at the Americana Hotel, the demands were presented. The first demand was the “restoration of Muhammad Ali’s title” and Ali’s right to box in the United States. The second demand was the removal of “Avery Brundage from his post as Chairman of the International Olympic Committee.” Brundage was seen as both anti-Semitic and antiblack. The group’s third demand was the “curtailment of participation of allwhite and individuals from the Union of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia in all United States and Olympic Athletic events.” The groups also demanded that there be the “addition of at least two black coaches to the men’s track and field coaching staff appointed to coach the 1968 United States Olympic team; though Stan Wright was a Black coach, he was not considered acceptable because of his political leanings as a “devout Negro.” The group’s fifth demand was for the “appointment of at least two black people to policy making positions on the United States Olympic Committee; and their sixth and final demand was the “complete desegregation of the bigot dominated and racist New York Athletic Club” (Edwards 1969, 58–59). OPHR organized a boycott of a track meet at the New York Athletic Club (NYAC). The committee wanted to attract international press coverage. There were mass withdrawals by teams and individual athletes, cancellation of the high school competition, and only nine black athletes registered for competition. Villanova’s team withdrew as a result of a team vote. The boycott of the NYAC meet was successful in that attendance was down 50 percent, race times were mediocre, and the Russian National team withdrew from competition. Despite the failure to inspire an all-out boycott of the 1968 Olympic Games, OPHR’s presence was felt in a number of ways. Neither South Africa nor Rhodesia had teams competing at the Games as a result of pressure from other African nations, resulting in both countries being uninvited to participate. American athletes, white and black, wore OPHR buttons. The Harvard crew team members wore OPHR buttons. In photos of the famous victory stand gesture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, all three medalists, including Australia’s Peter Norman, are wearing OPHR buttons.

was mixed, with rumors spreading about threats on black athletes’ lives if they did or did not boycott. African American track and field coach Stan Wright was shadowed by bodyguards after having his life threatened. Wright was not in support of the proposed boycott.

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For some of the athletes, the proposed boycott had been a theme that resonated throughout the year, even if they were not planning on actually boycotting the Olympics. At the trials the black athletes who were certain to make the team had a meeting, with the group evenly divided about going ahead with the boycott. Many of the athletes felt their hard work and talent would go to waste if they were not able to compete at the Olympic Games. Others believed that their boycott would not send the desired message to the American people. It was decided that all the athletes would be released from their commitment to boycott the Games. For one, the boycotters could have been replaced by blacks who were not committed to a boycott; two, the sports establishment could point to black athletes who decided not to boycott and undermine the revolt that way; and perhaps most important, the unity among black athletes would have been strained. The plan accepted by fifty athletes at the trials meeting called for all the athletes to compete at Mexico City, but stated that no black athlete was to celebrate in any victory celebrations. There was talk of sitting during the national anthem and sewing emblems on their team uniforms. The athletes left the trials prepared to compete at the Olympics, but to make their displeasure with American racial practices known on the international stage. In the medal count, the United States topped the unofficial medal count with 107 medals to the Soviet Union’s 91, and well ahead of third-place finisher Japan’s 25 medals. East and West Germany each had their own teams, with the German Democratic Republic finishing in fifth among nations and the Federal Republic of Germany close behind in eighth place, winning more medals than their former countrymen, but fewer golds. American track and field athletes, including many of the African American men who threatened to boycott earlier in the year, collected 28 medals of all three colors in a variety of events, with some world record–setting performances. Jimmy Hines and Charlie Greene finished first and third in the 100meter race. On the women’s side, Wyomia Tyus became the first athlete to repeat a gold-medal performance in the 100-meter race after her 1964 win in the same event. Tyus was trailed by teammate Barbara Ferrell for second place. The women’s 4100-meter relay put on a gold-medal performance. Madeline Manning-Jackson won a gold medal in the 800-meter run. Decathlete Bill Toomey earned a gold medal for his efforts, and American men swept the 400-meter race, with Lee Evans finishing first, followed by Larry James and Ron Freeman. Distance runner Jim Ryun won a silver in the 1500-meter run and Willie Davenport won a gold medal in the 110-meter high hurdles followed by his teammate Ervin Hall for the silver. James Matson repeated his 1964 gold-medal performance in the shot put, as did discus thrower Al Oerter, who won his fourth consecutive gold medal in the event. In the high jump, American Dick Fosbury utilized a jumping style that had him use a curved approach and a takeoff over the bar which had his back clear the bar first in a move dubbed the “Fosbury Flop.” Other jumpers used the traditional western roll approach, but Fosbury’s innovative move changed the event and he won a gold medal at the Games. Long jumper Bob Beamon was one of the beneficiaries of the thin air in Mexico City. He long jumped to a world record distance of 29 feet, 21=2 inches, breaking the old record by more than 21 inches and establishing a new record that stood for twenty-three years. After the 200-meter race, won by San Jose State’s Tommie Smith with his teammate John Carlos finishing third, the reality of the pre-Olympic boycott and protest discussions became a reality. On the victory stand during the playing of the national

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Extending gloved hands skyward in racial protest, U.S. athletes Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos stare downward during the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” after Smith received the gold and Carlos the bronze for the 200-meter run at the Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City on October 16, 1968. Australian silver medalist Peter Norman is at left. (AP / Wide World Photo)

anthem, the two Americans stood in their bare stocking feet with each man holding a black gloved fist in the air, as a symbol of their stand against racial discrimination in America. The two athletes quickly left the Games returning to a mixed reception in the United States. The American press criticized the two African Americans for their inappropriate gesture and both men endured personal troubles following the event. The image of the two athletes, gloves in the air, became a renowned symbol of the Games and eventually gained respect from mainstream America, although after over thirty years and plenty of time to recognize the historic symbolism of the gesture and far removed from the tumultuous times of the late 1960s. In response to the victory stand gesture, American heavyweight boxer George Foreman, also African American, proudly waved an American flag after his gold medal win, one of seven medals won by American boxers. The U.S. men’s basketball team also won gold. Medals were won by American athletes in diving, equestrian/eventing, equestrian/jumping, sailing, weightlifting, wrestling, shooting, and swimming. American swimmers collected 52 medals, sweeping the men’s 100-meter

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butterfly, the women’s 100-meter freestyle and 200-meter freestyle, the men’s and women’s 200-meter individual medley, and sweeping all five relay events. Don Schollander returned from the 1964 Games to win silver in the 200-meter freestyle and a gold medal in a relay event. Mark Spitz won silver in the 100-meter butterfly, bronze in the 100-meter freestyle, and two gold medals in relay events. Debbie Meyer, a sixteen-year-old, became the first swimmer to win three gold medals in individual events in the same Olympic Games, setting Olympic records in the women’s 200-meter, 400-meter, and 800-meter freestyle. Meyer had set world records in each of the events at the Olympic Trials. The 1968 Olympic Games were best remembered for the image of Smith and Carlos on the victory stand, despite all efforts by the U.S. Olympic Committee and the IOC to shift the focus from the gesture. The events had been chronicled in books, articles, and documentaries, as well as popular culture, such as t-shirts, and the two athletes in the victory-stand gesture were embodied in statue form almost forty years later on the campus of San Jose State University.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing The sport of boxing enjoyed great popularity in the 1960s, with a number of exciting championship bouts and the emergence of the “Greatest of All Time,” Muhammad Ali. African American boxers dominated in the ring, holding the heavyweight title almost the entire decade. Ali’s reign as titleholder ended only when the sport’s organizing bodies suspended him for his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. Army, not as the result of another boxer’s skill and strength. Entering the 1960s, Sweden’s Ingemar Johannson was the heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing enjoyed popularity in part because of the televised fights.

Benny Paret Benny “The Kid” Paret (born March 14, 1937) won the welterweight title on March 27, 1960, beating Don Jordan. On April 1, 1961, Paret lost the title to Emile Griffith by a knockout, but was able to reclaim the title seven months later on September 30. A third match, the “rubber match,” to determine which man would hold the title, was scheduled for March 24, 1962. Prior to the fight, Paret had taunted Griffith by calling him a “maric
on” (homosexual). Griffith took out his anger on Paret in the ring. In the twelfth round, he hit Paret twenty-nine times in a row. Referee Ruby Goldstein was criticized for not stopping the fight sooner. After the fight, Paret went into a coma and died on April 3, 1962. Only 100 days before, Paret had lost to Gene Fullmer in a fight for the middleweight championship. In that fight, Fullmer punished Paret so badly that he suffered from headaches until his meeting with Griffith. The fight was nationally televised on Friday Night Fights. The punishment from Griffith was the first time millions of fight fans witnessed a boxing match resulting in a boxer’s death. After Paret’s death, politicians worked to ban boxing and were successful in reducing the sport’s popularity on mainstream television. The 2005 documentary, Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, focuses on Griffith’s boxing career and his fight with Paret.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

Muhammad Ali (a.k.a. Cassius Clay, right) (ca. 1960). (Courtesy of Photofest)

Boxing was a suitable sport for television with the small confines of a ring easy for a camera to follow. Concerns over gamblers’ involvement were frequent, as well as the occasional debate about the violence and morality of boxing. Johannson, who had won the title against Floyd Patterson in 1959, lost his title to Patterson in a rematch on June 20, 1960. With Patterson as the new titleholder, the boxing ring took on a new dimension during the 1960s, with African American boxers continuing the trend as the latest ethnic group to use the sport in their quest for success and upward mobility. Over the course of the next decade, several championship bouts gained the attention of people around the world. Patterson was always trying to prove that he was a great fighter and was criticized for fighting inferior boxers, for not being able to last a full fight, and for being too nice to his opponents. Patterson’s next challenge was Sonny Liston, who had been arrested over nineteen times, charges including assault, assault on a police officer and armed robbery, before he met Patterson in the ring. Once out of prison, Liston became connected to the underworld, specifically John Vitale, Frankie Carbo, and Frank “Blinkie” Palermo; Carbo and Palermo were both facing prison time for their illegal activities in boxing. When the boxing commission denied Liston a license to fight Patterson, his failed efforts at redemption were cited. In preparation for the fight against Patterson, Liston

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lived for three months in a Denver rectory and worked with Father Edward Murphy, learning to read, write, and “become a law-abiding citizen” (Scorecard 1961). To increase his chances at a shot at the title, Liston changed management twice before being granted a shot at Patterson. Patterson’s clean image was put up against Liston’s criminal record and they finally met in the ring on September 25, 1962, on the infield of Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Liston knocked Patterson out in the first round in two minutes and six seconds. Liston immediately predicted, “You’re next, Loudmouth,” to onlooker Cassius Clay. Liston’s victory did little to solve his problems in the press or his public image. Liston and Patterson met for the second time in the ring on July 22, 1963, in Las Vegas in Liston’s first defense of his title. Needing only four additional seconds, for a total fight time of two minutes and ten seconds, Liston held on to his title. Liston had outmatched Patterson in two fights and Patterson was out of contention for the heavyweight title. Now it was Liston who faced the challengers—up first was Cassius Clay. Clay had won the Olympic gold medal at the 1960 Games in Rome. By the time he met Liston in the ring as a challenger, he had already earned $1 million with his fists, with a 19–0 record. Sponsored by the Louisville Group, a collective of white businessmen from Clay’s hometown, the fighter’s backers were a breath of fresh air to the dirty world of boxing. In opposition to the mobsters that surrounded Liston, the issue of Clay’s “right” to fight for the title never came into question. The guidance of the Louisville Group provided the young fighter with “the benefit of all their experience and business acumen,” and they surrounded him with a substantial moral and ethical environment, a rare commodity in professional boxing. Clay was predicted to be too inexperienced to face a man of Liston’s size, strength, and experience. Despite the oddsmakers tagging him as a longshot, Cassius Clay signed a contract to fight Liston. Clay’s lawyer attempted to delay the bout, confident that his client was unprepared for such a challenge, but Clay insisted. Ultimately, Clay got his way and the fight was on. Days after the ink was dry on the contract, Clay got a notice from his draft board for a preinduction physical. However, the military could be deferred on account of the scheduled fight. Still, the young fighter, with only nineteen professional fights under his belt, was viewed by many as the savior of the tainted and corrupt boxing world, though most thought he could not beat the champion. But Clay, who was his own best salesman, essentially made himself the official, though some thought illogical, challenger to Liston. Former champ Rocky Marciano saw the Liston-Clay bout as a “mismatch of the first magnitude” (Horn 1963). While many thought the prefight banter was publicity to build up the fight, it became a legitimate grudge match when Clay ribbed Liston about his prison record. Even Clay knew that his chatter did not endear him as a fan favorite: “It’s easier to like an ugly old man than it is to like a loudmouth kid, and everybody wants him to teach me a lesson” (Clay 1964). For all the prognosticating about the fight, Liston continued to be the favorite. His size and strength, along with his brutal left jab, made him an overwhelming pick. It was believed that Clay’s best weapon against Liston could actually be “his very arrogance, his youthful, absurd confidence.” When considering defeat, Clay was sure it would be no easy victory for the champ. He thought there might be a slim chance that he could lose to Liston, but for the champ to keep his title Clay predicted that Liston would have to “knock me down and then I’ll get up and he’ll have to knock me down again and I’ll still get up.… I’m gonna have to be killed before I lose and I ain’t going to die easy” (Clay 1964; Maule 1964).

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When the two fighters finally met in the ring in Miami Beach, Clay had officially beaten Liston when the champ remained in his corner at the start of the seventh round. Liston, who had once seemed like Superman in the ring, had been beaten convincingly. First on America’s agenda, though, was Clay’s religious conversion, his membership in the Nation of Islam, and his subsequent name change to Cassius X and then to Muhammad Ali. Clay’s rumored Nation of Islam Muslim membership was confirmed at a press conference in the days following the fight. After the fight, the press focused more on Ali’s conversion than his surprise victory over Liston. Ali’s public image was shaped by the Muslim newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, and was in sharp contrast to the images that white writers were presenting of the fighter. Muhammad Speaks documented Ali’s donations, his work with children, with his community, his black pride, and his politics regarding race and religion. Simultaneously, white mainstream newspapers referred to him as Cassius Clay, discredited him based on his religion and his call for the separation of the races, as well as his loud mouth. Most fight fans had a difficult time with Ali’s conversion. The World Boxing Association echoed the fans’ sentiments when it debated taking Ali’s title from him. The WBA stated, “Clay has set a poor example for the youth of the world” and they felt the same about Liston and his troubles with the law. Ali’s assessment of the fight scene was this, “We both villains. So naturally, when we get in the ring, the people, they would prefer if it could happen for it to end in a double knockout, because they don’t want either one of us to win” (Scorecard 1964; Maule 1965). The two met in the ring over a year later, this time in Lewiston, Maine, on May 25, 1965. When Ali agreed to fight Liston for the second time, the WBA withdrew its title from Ali, but he maintained the World Boxing Council (WBC) title. After postponing the fight due to an Ali injury and relocating it from Boston to Maine in part due to the reactions about Ali’s religious beliefs, Ali beat the favored Liston with a “phantom” punch in the first round. Many cried that the fight was fixed, though there was no proof of such a scandal. Less than six months later, Ali and Floyd Patterson met in Las Vegas on November 22, 1965. The fight was not born out of Patterson’s need to get back into the ring, but was rather an attempt on his part for redemption; his own personal redemption, and to redeem the sport that had made him into the man he had become. Patterson thought if he won, it would be his contribution to civil rights. The ideologies and politics of the two fighters drew lots of media attention in the weeks prior to the fight. While some thought it was more of Ali’s antics to build up the gate, it was really Patterson who contributed to the heightened tensions between the two men, citing Ali’s religious choices as detrimental to boxing. Ali mocked Patterson’s decision to integrate his family into a white neighborhood and questioned Patterson’s blackness. Ali predicted that Patterson would not only lose, but would be so humiliated by the punishing blows that he would have to don a disguise to escape the shame, just as he did years earlier in his loss to Sonny Liston. The fight lasted twelve long rounds for Patterson and many criticized Ali for not putting his challenger out of his misery. It was a mismatch and a letdown to many. Perhaps it was a letdown to some because the sentimental favorite lost, but to others it was a great symbolic victory. Ali talked to Patterson through the fight,

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bantering at his opponent, who finally had to listen to Ali’s antics with little recourse. Ali yelled, “Come on American, come on white American.” The white press was sure that Ali’s in-the-ring antics were “part of his juvenile scheme to embarrass Patterson” (Rogin 1965). Patterson’s shot at redemption left him embarrassed and ashamed, exactly what Ali had wanted. Ali defended his title nine times, the first against Liston and the last against Zora Folley in March 1967. He was scheduled to fight Ernie Terrell, who held the WBA belt, in March 1966, but Terrell backed out and Ali instead faced George Chuvalo. Ali then fought two bouts in England against Henry Cooper and Brian London, and then traveled to Frankfurt, Germany, where he beat Karl Mildenberger. Ali’s next fight in the U.S. was against Cleveland “Big Cat” Williams, in November 1966 in Houston’s Astrodome. Finally, Terrell could not avoid Ali and they faced off in Houston on February 6, 1967. In the leadup to the match, Terrell had repeatedly called Ali “Clay,” and as Ali landed punches he taunted Terrell saying “what’s my name, Uncle Tom?” After fifteen rounds, Ali was declared the winner. In the final defense of his title, against Zora Folley on March 22, 1967, Ali knocked Folley out in the seventh round. Though Ali failed the exam to be drafted into the Army in 1964, the military revised the exam and Ali was reclassified as 1-A, making him eligible for the draft. At his induction ceremony held on April 28, 1967, in Houston, Ali refused to be inducted, claiming conscientious objector status, as it was against the principles of Islam. He had said in 1966, “I ain’t got no quarrel against them Viet Cong.” For refusing to be inducted, Ali faced five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. The New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license and stripped him of his title, as did other boxing commissions. In Ali’s absence, Joe Frazier was able to win the title. Two months later, a jury found Ali guilty and the judge sentenced Ali to the maximum penalty. Ali’s conviction was upheld by a court of appeals and his case moved its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. As the popularity of the war dwindled and the protesters grew in numbers, there was also growing support for the suspended fighter, who resorted to giving lectures across the country at colleges. Finally, in 1970, Ali was granted a license to fight in Georgia. He met Jerry Quarry in the ring in Atlanta on October 26, 1970, and beat Quarry after only three rounds. Soon after the New York State Supreme Court ruled that Ali had been wrongly denied a license in New York and he was able to schedule a bout in Madison Square Garden on December 12, 1970. He beat Oscar Bonavena in fifteen rounds and won the North American Boxing Federation (NABF) title.

Golf Golf during the 1960s was dominated by two American men, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Golf tournaments were very international, with men from all over the world competing for titles. Three of the four major tournaments, the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the PGA Championship, were hosted in the United States, with the other, the British Open, hosted in the United Kingdom. The Masters Tournament was held every year in Augusta, Georgia. Typically, CBS covered the final four holes of the tournament using six cameras. In between the four major tournaments, golfers played smaller tournaments all over the United States. A women’s professional golf league,

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1960–1969

the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), also played tournaments, but received much less attention and money for their play. Palmer and Nicklaus won a combined fourteen major titles. Palmer began the decade as the sport’s top athlete, winning the Masters and U.S. Open titles in 1960 along with the Hickok Belt, given to the top professional athlete of the year, as well as being named Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated. Palmer enjoyed a streak of victories between 1960 and 1963, winning twenty-nine titles and close to $400,000. He captained the U.S. Ryder Cup team in 1963. Other majors won include the Masters again in 1962 and 1964, and the British Open in 1961 and 1962. Prior to Palmer’s success at the British Open, most American players did not compete in the annual tournament. However, Palmer’s success at the tournament (televised in the United States) encouraged other golfers to make the trip across the ocean, a trip made much easier with the increased popularity of air travel. In 1968 Palmer became the first golfer to earn $1 million over his career. That same year, Billy Casper was the first golfer to break the $200,000 mark for annual earnings, pulling in $205,168. Palmer’s success during the 1960s was so great he was named “Athlete of the Decade” by the Associated Press. Jack Nicklaus attended Ohio State University and as a student won the U.S. Amateur title in 1959 and 1961, and the NCAA title in 1961. Nicknamed “the Golden Bear,” Nicklaus became a professional in 1962 and won Rookie of the Year honors. In his first professional event, the Los Angeles Open, Nicklaus finished fiftieth. Nicklaus emerged as the of the game’s hottest stars, winning the U.S. Open his rookie season and the Masters and PGA championships the next year. Other majors won during the decade include the Masters again in 1965 and 1966, the U.S. Open in 1967, and the British Open in 1966 and 1970. Other golfers who won major tournaments in the 1960s include Ken Venturi, Gary Player, Bobby Nichols, Billy Casper, Raymond Floyd, Lee Trevino, and Julius Boros. In 1961 Gary Player became the first non-American to win the Masters. Four years later, Player became the first non-American to win a U.S. Open in forty-five years, and only the third player to win the career Grand Slam (Gene Sarazen and Ben Hogan). The next year Jack Nicklaus joined the exclusive club, when he won the British Open in 1966 at age twenty-six, becoming the youngest golfer to have won all four of the majors. Other notable events in men’s golf during this time period include Pete Brown becoming the first African American to win a PGA Tour event in 1964 at the St. Petersburg Open, only three years after the PGA had removed wording in their constitution that barred non-Caucasians from participating in PGA tournaments. In 1965 qualifying school was introduced and the format of the U.S. Open changed from three days of competition with thirty-six holes on the final day to four days of eighteen holes each. The next year, the British Open followed suit in changing their format to four days, eighteen holes per day and for the first time, the tournament was televised live in the United States. Titlelist introduced the icosahedron dimple pattern, an aerodynamically superior design, on their golf balls in 1970. The LPGA hosted a seventy-two-hole Championship tournament every year. Most tournaments held throughout the year were limited to fifty-four holes (for example, St. Petersburg Women’s Open, Dallas Civitan Open, Babe Zaharias Open, Bluegrass Ladies Invitational, and Buckeye Savings Invitational). Between 1961 and 1966, the LPGA Championship was hosted at the Stardust Country Club in Las Vegas. It was

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then moved to Pleasant Valley Country Club in Sutton, Massachusetts. Other majors for women included the Western Open (which ceased play in 1967), the Titleholders, and the U.S. Women’s Open. In 1965, the U.S. Women’s Open Tournament final round was nationally televised for the first time. Mickey Wright (born February 14, 1935) won the LPGA Championship three times in the 1960s (1960, 1961, and 1963). Wright also won the U.S. Women’s Open in 1961 and 1964, along with the Western Open title in 1962, 1963, and 1966, making her one of the decade’s top female golfers. She topped the LPGA money list four years in a row beginning in 1961, as well as winning the Vare Trophy, awarded for the low scoring average, every year from 1960 to 1965. For four consecutive years, Wright won at least ten LPGA tournaments a year. She earned over $31,000 in 1963. That same year, Arnold Palmer became the first golfer to win more than $100,000 in a year, winning $128,230. Wright was named the Associate Press Athlete of the Year in 1963 and 1964. She retired from professional golf in 1970. Other top women on the professional circuit during that time period include Louise Suggs, Kathy Whitworth, Sandra Haynie, Carol Mann, Marlene Hagge, Marilynn Smith, and Betsy Rawls. Winnings during the time period varied. In 1961 winnings for tournaments ranged between $475 and $1,300. The winner of the 1964 LPGA title won $2,400. When Mickey Wright won the Ladies World Series of Golf in 1966, she pocketed $9,500, the highest payday of the year. The average that season ranged between $1,500 and $3,000. In 1969 the winnings ranged between $2,500 and $4,500. In 1968 Kathy Whitworth topped the money list with $48,379, only to be bested the nest year by Carol Mann’s $49,152 earnings. Both Whitworth and Mann won 10 LPGA events in 1968.

Tennis Amateurism ruled the sport of tennis at the start of the 1960s. Tennis players could compete in the four Grand Slam tournaments only if they were amateurs, with professionals only able to compete in other tournaments for prize money. The four Grand Slam tournaments were the Australian Championships, the French Championships, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Championships. Victors at Wimbledon would raise their trophy in victory, but leave with empty pockets. While professional male tennis players could compete in other tournaments to earn money, opportunities for female tennis players to earn money were few and far between. During the amateur reign of tennis, American men and women competed against the world’s best and often came up short on the court. Australians, both male and female, dominated the Australian Championships, which makes sense as many Americans did not compete in the tournament because of the travel expenses and no chance to earn money to pay for the tournament. Roy Emerson won on the men’s side in 1961 and 1963–67, with fellow Australian Margaret Court dominating on the women’s side winning the tournament from 1960 to 1966 and again for 1969–71. Court did well at the French Championships, winning in 1962, 1964, 1969, and 1970. In 1967 many male players participated in tournaments that were part of the National Tennis League (NTL) or World Championship Tennis (WCT), organizations that granted their players permission to compete in certain tournaments. Billie Jean King worked as a playground instructor and earned $100 a week prior to the open era. She was vocal in her criticism of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association’s

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(USLTA) amateurism rules which she called “shamateurism,” in part because many of the sport’s top players were given money under the table to encourage them to participate in certain tournaments. Prior to the open era, amateur tennis players, both male and female, relied on sponsors, or their own personal wealth, to help cover their travel expenses, which fostered the image of tennis as an elite sport. Technology was another factor that began to alter the equipment used in tennis. Wilson developed the revolutionary racquet, the T2000, which was made of steel and not the regular wood, making the racquet lighter. Later, in 1968, Spalding introduced the Smasher, which was made of aluminum. The open era in tennis started in 1968 and ushered in the age of professional tennis. The four Grand Slam tournaments changed their names from championships to Open (e.g., the French Open), and welcomed professional tennis players and those who remained amateurs. Commercial pressures and rumors of amateurs taking money under the table led to the “open era.” Once the open era began, the opportunity to earn prize money increased, with the U.S. Open prize money totaling $100,000 in 1968. Again, Billie Jean King’s efforts were significant as she fought for equal prize money for the women. As women’s tennis became more popular, the prize money gradually improved between the two genders, and in 1971 King became the first female athlete to earn over $100,000 in prize money. She was also fundamental in the creation of the Virginia Slims tour, the first professional women’s tennis tour. American men were generally not the top winners on the tennis circuit in the 1960s. Stan Smith and his doubles partner Bob Lutz found some success, as did Donald Dell. Smith had been a three-time All-American tennis player at the University of Southern California and won three NCAA titles, the 1968 singles titles and the 1967 and 1968 doubles titles. Perhaps the most well-known American tennis player of the decade was Arthur Ashe. Arthur Ashe attended UCLA on a tennis scholarship beginning in 1963, the same year he was selected as the first African American member of the U.S. Davis Cup team. Ashe won the NCAA singles title in 1965 and his team won the NCAA title the same year. In 1968 Ashe became the first African American male to win the U.S. Open and lent his support to the formation of the Association of Tennis Professionals, an organization of male tennis players, though he was still an amateur. Ashe was scheduled to compete in the South African Open in 1968, but was denied a visa to enter by the apartheid nation. As a result, Ashe believed that South Africa should be expelled from professional tennis. He turned professional in 1969 and in 1970 won the Australian Open, his second Grand Slam win. American women found greater success on the international stage, but did not reap the same financial benefits as their male counterparts once the open era had begun. Darlene Hard began the decade as the best American women’s player, winning the French Championships in 1960 and the U.S. Championships in 1960 and 1961. She was also an outstanding doubles player and won the last of her thirteen doubles titles in 1969 at the U.S. Open. Another American female tennis player of note was Karen Hantze Susman. In 1961 and 1962 Susman teamed with Billie Jean Moffitt to win the women’s double title at Wimbledon. She also won the singles title at Wimbledon in 1962. Susman and King won the U.S. Championships doubles title in 1964. Nancy Richey was another top American female tennis player and ranked second in the world in 1969. Richey won the singles title at the 1967 Australian Championships and the 1968 French Open, as well as four doubles titles, including three of the four

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majors in 1966 (she did not win the French Championships that year). Between 1963 and 1968 Richey won six consecutive U.S. clay court singles titles. The top American female tennis player during the 1960s was Billie Jean Moffitt, who married Larry King in 1965 and was thereafter Billie Jean King. At the age of fifteen she lost in her Grand Slam debut at the 1959 U.S. Championships. The next year, she won the Philadelphia and District Women’s Grass Court Championships before losing again at the U.S. Championships for the second straight year. By the end of the year, she was ranked fourth among American women tennis players by the USLTA. King paired with Karen Hantze Susman to win the 1961 women’s double crown at Wimbledon. She rose to number three in the rankings. In a major breakthrough on the international stage, the unseeded King played her way into the finals of Wimbledon where she lost to Margaret Court. That year, she finished second in the USLTA rankings behind Darlene Hard. In 1964, King decided to commit to tennis year round. She trained with a coach in Australia after a businessman offered to sponsor her tennis training. King finished ranked seventh in the world and second in the United States behind Nancy Richey. In 1965, for the third year in a row, King lost in the semifinals of Wimbledon. Winning six tournaments that year, she finished ranked fourth in the world, and tied for first in the U.S. with Gunter. King’s breakout year was 1966, when she ended her losing streak against Court and won her first Grand Slam singles title, beating Maria Bueno in the finals of Wimbledon. She finished ranked first in the world. In 1967, she played at the French Championships for the first time and lost in the quarterfinals, before winning her second straight singles title at Wimbledon, beating Virginia Wade. She swept Wimbledon, winning the singles title, but also the women’s double and mixed doubles titles, a feat she repeated at the U.S. Championships. She competed in her first Australian Championships in 1968, beating Court in the finals. The French Championships had become the French Open, where King lost to Richey in the semifinals, before winning her third consecutive Wimbledon singles title. In the final of the inaugural U.S. Open in 1968, King lost in the finals to Wade. For the first time, King did not appear on the USTLA rankings list because she was considered a professional. King continued to make regular appearances in the semifinals and finals of championships, losing in the semifinals of the 1969 French Open and being upset in the finals of Wimbledon a month later. At the U.S. Open, she lost in the quarterfinals and ended the year with no Grand Slam titles for the first time since 1965. Margaret Court won all four Grand Slam singles titles in 1970, leaving King second in the world rankings, though first in the United States. King would continue to leave her mark on women’s tennis and women’s sport in the 1970s.

Horse Racing Thoroughbred racing had no Triple Crown winners in the decade, but seven times horses won two of the three races in a single year. Carry Back in 1961 took both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, but finished far back in the Belmont Stakes, the longest of the three races. Two years later, Chateaugay won both the Derby and the Belmont, but finished second in the Preakness. The next year, Northern Dancer won the first two legs of the Crown, but finished third in the Belmont. In 1966 Kauai King also won the first two races, but slipped to fourth in the Belmont. The following year Damascus, later named Horse of the Year, won the last two races, after finishing in third in the Derby.

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Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW) The CIAW was created in 1967 as the organizing body for the governance of women’s intercollegiate athletics. In 1956 three organizations, the National Association for Physical Education for College Women, National Association for Girls and Women in Sports, and the American Federation of College Women, formed the Tripartite Committee. Out of this committee another group was formed, the National Joint Committee on Extramural Sports for College Women. The CIAW evolved out of the NJCESCW. Basketball was one of the more popular sports for women to participate in at the college level, though the sport was not always organized in a way where the best teams were identified and competition was often local. Moreover, the AAU was still largely responsible for the organization of play. With the CIAW and other organizations, such as the Division of Girls and Women in Sports (DGWS, part of AAHPERD), there was an increasing effort being made for universities to have organized sport teams. AAU teams generally did not have age limits or require school affiliation. During the 1960s numerous rule changes made the women’s game more resemble the men’s game. For instance, in 1961, a rule allowing two players to run the full court was made, as was a rule that allowed for three dribbles, creating more court movement. In 1964 it was ruled that a player could hold the ball indefinitely or five seconds if she was guarded. In 1966 a rule change allowed for continuous, unlimited dribbling. Overseeing the rule changes were the AAU and DGWS. Games were often played in small gyms where there was no room for bleachers and spectators, and where each team wore different colored singlets in the absence of uniforms. Between 1964 and 1968, Wheaton College was one of the better teams in the country with a 41–3 record. Between 1962 and 1969 Nashville Business College won eight consecutive AAU national championships. In 1969 CIAW organized an invitational women’s basketball tournament with sixteen teams hosted by West Chester State College in Pennsylvania. In the final game, West Chester State defeated Western Carolina. A National Women’s Invitational Tournament (NWIT) was also held that year with Wayland Baptist beating Ouachita Baptist in the final game. In 1970 Northeastern University of Boston hosted the CIAW Tournament. California State–Fullerton was the winner after beating West Chester State. AT the NWIT, Wayland Baptist beat Midwestern Oklahoma State for the title. CIAW expanded their organization of women’s college sport and championships in other sports began, including badminton, golf, gymnastics, diving, swimming and diving, track and field, and volleyball. The CIAW developed into the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW).

In 1968 a first occurred as the winning horse, Dancer’s Image, was disqualified after the race when an illegal substance was found in the after-race testing. Forward Pass, who had finished second, was declared the winner and then won the Preakness. Amidst fears of a “tainted” Triple Crown winner, Stage Door Johnny won the Belmont with Forward Pass second. The next year Majestic Prince won the first two races, but injured a tendon in the Belmont. Trainer Johnny Longden wanted to hold the colt out of the Belmont, but was pressured to enter him because of the possible history-equaling win. The horse finished second to Arts and Letters, but was injured severely enough to never race again.

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The leading jockeys of the decade were Bill Hartack with six Triple Crown victories (including four Kentucky Derby wins), Willie Shoemaker with five Triple Crown victories, and Braulio Baeza who won three Belmonts and a Derby.

SUMMARY American sport during the 1960s was marked by tremendous change, such as expansion of professional sport leagues, technological advances, developing opportunities for women, and a shift in the roles and identities of African American athletes in college and professional sport. The 1960s established excellence in a number of sports—records set, championships won, and heroes crowned. Well into the twenty-first century, American sport fans still recall Palmer and Nicklaus in golf, the Bill Russell–led Boston Celtics dynasty, the bold predictions of Broadway Joe Namath in Super Bowl III, and the unrivaled dominance of the UCLA basketball team and their coach John Wooden. Set against the backdrop of an America undergoing societal and cultural changes, such as the civil rights movement, the free speech movement, a growing women’s movement, as well as protests of the Vietnam War, sport was not immune. Despite all the changes in American sport and society during the 1960s, some things remained the same. Women, though they were afforded opportunities to compete professionally in golf, were still limited in the sports offered to them at the Olympic Games, and by their educational institutions. For female athletes, their opportunities in American sport, and enjoying a similar status as their male counterparts was still decades away. The increasing number of African Americans in college and professional sport, and their skillful use of sport as a platform for exposing racism in sport and American society, must be singled out as the most significant “event” of the era. Every sport was impacted by the issue of race and ethnicity; from golf, and the decision to integrate PGA tournament play; the influx of Latin American athletes into major league baseball; the integration of college teams; the decision of Muhammad Ali to refuse his induction into the military; to the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Olympic victory stand, and their black gloved fists in the air—sport became another American landscape shaped by the people who played the games.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Books and Dissertations Ashe, Arthur, Jr. 1988. A hard road to glory: A history of the African-American athlete since 1946. New York: Warner Books. Ashe, Arthur, and Arnold Rampersad. 1993. Days of grace: A memoir. New York: Knopf. Bass, Amy. 2002. Not the triumph but the struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the making of the black athlete. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burgos, Adrian, Jr. 2007. Playing America’s game: Baseball, Latinos, and the color line. Berkeley: University of California Press. Early, Gerald. 1989. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American culture. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. ———. 1994. The culture of bruising: Essays on prizefighting, literature, and modern American culture. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. Edwards, Harry. 1969. The revolt of the black athlete. New York: Free Press.

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Flood, Curt, with Richard Carter. 1970. The way it is. New York: Trident Press. Gorn, Elliott J., ed. 1995. Muhammad Ali: The people’s champ. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hartmann, Douglas. 2003. Race, culture, and the revolt of the black athlete: The 1968 Olympic protests and their aftermath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzog, Brad. 1995. The Sports 100. New York: Macmillan. Hult, Joan, and Marianna Trekell. 1991. A century of women’s basketball: From frailty to Final Four. Reston, VA: National Association for Girls and Women in Sport. Hutchinson, George. 1977. The black athletes’ contribution towards social change in the United States. Ph.D. diss., U.S. International University, San Diego. Jackson, George. 1985. Soul brother superfighter. Placerville, CA: Green Valley Graphics. Korr, Charles P. 2002. The end of baseball as we know it: The players union, 1960–81. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Marqusee, Mike. 1999. Redemption song: Muhammad Ali and the spirit of the sixties. London: Verso. Miller, Jeff. 2003. Going long: The wild ten-year saga of the renegade American Football League in the words of those who lived it. Chicago: Contemporary Books. Miller, Marvin. 1991. A whole different ballgame: The sport and business of baseball. New York: Birch Lane Press. Oriard, Michael. 2007. Brand NFL: Making and selling America’s favorite sport. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Regalado, Samuel O. 1998. Viva baseball! Latin major leaguers and their special hunger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Roberts, Randy, and James Olsen. 1989. Winning is the only thing: Sports in America since 1945 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sammons, Jeffrey T. 1988. Beyond the ring: The role of boxing in American society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Scott, Jack. 1971. The athletic revolution. New York: Free Press. Smith, Tommie, with David Steele. 2007. Silent gesture: The autobiography of Tommie Smith. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wiley, Ralph. 1989. Serenity: A boxing memoir. New York: Henry Holt. Wushanley, Ying. 2004. Playing nice and losing: The struggle for control of women’s intercollegiate athletics, 1960–2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Zang, David W. 2001. SportsWars: Athletes in the age of Aquarius. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.

Articles Bout proceeds to go to starving: World champion offers to fight for Mississippi children. 1967. Muhammad Speaks, July 21, 7. Champ Ali urges Blackstone Rangers to practice messenger’s “black unity.” 1966. Muhammad Speaks, September 2, 8. Champ fights to save children from blighted lives—takes time out to work with children of the poor. 1966. Muhammad Speaks, July 15, 7. Champ offers closed TV of fight to 6 colleges. 1966. Muhammad Speaks, October 28, 9. Clay, Cassius. 1964. “I’m a little special.” Sports Illustrated 20, no. 8 (February 24): 15. Flood, Curt, with Richard Carter. 1971. My rebellion. Sports Illustrated, February 1, 25. Flood tide. 1970. Newsweek, January 12, 45. Gumbel, Bryant C. 1972. The black amateur athlete: Not just an athletic animal—Part 3. Black Sports 2, no. 1 (May/June): 63–66. Horn, Huston. 1963. A rueful dream come true. Sports Illustrated 19, no. 21 (November 18): 26.

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How days of a boy on borrowed time were extended by heavyweight champ. 1966. Muhammad Speaks, April 22, 9. Koppett, Leonard. 1969. Flood backed by players, plans suit to challenge baseball reserve clause. New York Times, December 30, 42. Maule, Tex. 1964. Liston’s edge: A lethal left. Sports Illustrated 20, no. 9 (March 2): 21. ———. 1965. The baddest of all looks over the universe. Sports Illustrated 22, no. 7 (February 15): 21. Muhammad Ali becomes single biggest black contributor to UNCF charities. 1967. Muhammad Speaks, March 3, 20. Muhammad Ali chosen to head black Watts summer festival in California. 1967. Muhammad Speaks, August 8, 4. Muslim champ spends day at Chicago school, molds concept of “black heroes.” 1966. Muhammad Speaks, February 18, 9, 12. Rogin, Gilbert. 1965. Champion as long as he waits. Sports Illustrated 23, no. 22 (November 29): 24. Scorecard. 1961. A good decision. Sports Illustrated, 4, no. 15 (July 24): 10. ———. 1964. Boxing’s silliest hour. Sports Illustrated 20, no. 13 (March 30): 9. ———. 1965. Sports Illustrated 23, no. 1 (July 5): 13. Spiritual example displayed by champion overshadows strength, physical prowess. 1966. Muhammad Speaks, November 25. Underwood, John. 1968. The non-trial trials. Sports Illustrated, July 8, 13.

Films Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games. 1999. Home Box Office. Glory Road. 2006. Dir. James Gartner. Glory Road Productions LLC.

CHAPTER 11

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1970–1979 John Wong

OVERVIEW In the 1970s, the construction of a national sporting culture in the United States was more or less complete. Modern sports, characterized by standardized rules, bureaucratic governing bodies, recordkeeping, and extensive media promotion, became more geographically widespread and more inclusive by extending participatory opportunities to women and minority groups. By no means, however, did women and minorities have equal access to organized modern sports. The advent of television technology and its importance as a medium of popular culture only helped to popularize modern sports and the concomitant ideology. On the other hand, those who were on the fringes of society and excluded challenged modern sports’ underlying assumptions based on racial, gender, and class stereotypes. Begun in the mid 1960s, this “Athletic Revolution” continued through the early 1970s as more Americans began to question entrenched social and political relationships in sport. Activists from both inside and outside organized sports pushed to correct past injustices, discrimination, and denial of opportunities. Political, economic, social, and environmental crises in this decade reflected some of the old concerns as well as awareness of new problems. Yet, the 1970s also witnessed opportunities and achievements in American politics and social awakenings. Social movements that divided America and at times led to ugly confrontations continued into the early 1970s but increasingly, many more Americans who once deemed these protests and demands for change as radical now accepted them as necessary, if not unavoidable. President Richard Nixon continued the previous administration’s Vietnam policy although secretly the Southeast Asian conflict was extended from Vietnam into neighboring Laos and Cambodia. But in January of 1973, the United States agreed to withdraw U.S. forces by March of 1973, though the final withdrawal was not until 1975. While President Nixon called the peace treaty ending the Vietnam War for the United States “Peace with Honor,” many Americans understood that the might of the nation and its foreign policies had been questioned if not undermined. As the

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Vietnam conflict was winding down, however, an opportunity for diplomatic triumph presented itself. After some clandestine negotiations, in February 1973 Nixon became the first sitting U.S. president ever to visit Communist China. Nixon, who made his political career as a staunch anticommunist, met with Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou En Lai, an unprecedented meeting between capitalism and communism. It was sport, however, that paved the way for Nixon’s visit, the first official exchange (also known as Ping-Pong Diplomacy) between the two countries since the Communists came to power in 1949. In April 1971 the Chinese invited the American Table Tennis team to visit China after the completion of the sport’s World Championship in Japan. With American journalists accompanying the team, the public at home was captivated by reports of the American team in a country that had closed its doors to the outside world. The Americans played a series of exhibition matches against their hosts, toured historical landmarks, and were feted by their hosts. China’s emergence onto the world’s political stage signaled both the growing power and importance of third world nations once relegated to the fringes of world affairs and their impact on American foreign and domestic policies. No development, however, demonstrated the emergence of a third power bloc in world politics more than the oil-producing nations in the Middle East, who carried much clout in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Originally organized as a cartel to regulate production output and, therefore, prices, OPEC had a heavy Arabian presence. These Arab countries had a long-standing conflict with Israel since that the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine in 1948. Shortly after the Yom Kippur war in 1973, they convinced the cartel to impose an oil embargo to western nations, which lasted from October 1973 to March 1974. Drivers in the United States faced long lines at gas stations, and prices at the pumps jumped fourfold. Less observable, but just as damaging nevertheless, an economic recession ensued. The success of the embargo reversed the power relations between the formerly colonized, oil-producing countries and the industrial, affluent West, and forced western nations, including the United States, to pay attention to OPEC concerns. With Israel and its Arab neighbors constantly at odds and the new power of OPEC, the United States took steps to stabilize the region. In 1979, as a first step, Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accord under the initiative of President Jimmy Carter. Yet, the importance of oil also emboldened nationalists in these countries who disdained western domination and influences. These anti-West and anti-American feelings materialized when the Shah of Iran fled his country in 1979. Seen as too westernized and corrupt, the shah and his government were overthrown by revolutionary forces under Ayatollah Khomeini, who then proceeded to establish an Islamic state. Angered by the United States’ role in supporting the shah’s regime, American support for Israel, and the deposed Shah’s presence in the United States after the coup, Iranian students broke into the American embassy in Teheran and took American hostages in November of 1979. For the second time in the decade, the United States suffered humiliation at the hands of a so-called minor nation. With American hostages held captive in Iran and the nation still trying to recover from the wounds of Vietnam, President Carter took a strong stance when

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the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979. In January of 1980, Carter linked the Soviet invasion with threats to American security. To demonstrate his toughness against the Soviet Union further to an increasingly skeptical Congress and public, he chose a most visible event. In February, Carter urged a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games and proceeded to pressure the U.S. Olympic Committee to withdraw its team from the Games. Even though the American team did not attend the games (as the president wished), many other nations did. Yet the boycott and his other initiatives (including a daring but failed attempt to save the hostages) did not help Carter in the subsequent presidential election. Ronald Reagan defeated Carter to become the fortieth president of the United States in 1980. While international events impacted the American psyche, internal turmoil, leftover from the 1960s, and advancements in race and gender issues also made their marks in the 1970s. In the 1960s the civil rights and women’s liberation movements encountered entrenched resistance; but both had gained wider acceptance by the 1970s. Federal involvement in affirming the rights of African Americans in the sixties had translated into some successes in the 1970s. In 1971 fifteen African American members of Congress formed the Congressional Black Caucus to address the interests of the African American population. In the same year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of busing children to schools outside their neighborhoods in order to achieve the goal of racial desegregation. As the civil rights movement concerning African Americans and other minorities continued through the 1970s, gender equity gained similar federal protection during this decade. One of the more important pieces of legislation that addressed equal opportunity for women in this decade was the Education Amendments Act, specifically its Title IX provisions, in 1972. Signed by President Nixon, the act prohibits discrimination based on sex in all federally funded education programs or activities. In the same year, Congress also passed the Equal Rights Amendment affirming equal treatment for both sexes. Under Article V of the Constitution, three-quarters of the states had to ratify the amendment within seven years in order for it to become law. By the March deadline in 1979, however, only thirty of the required minimum of thirty-eight states had ratified the amendment. Although the Equal Rights Amendment failed to become law, twenty-one states enacted similar statutes in their constitutions, which often had stricter sanctions against sex discrimination. As significant as Title IX and state Equal Rights Amendments were to affirm equal opportunity to women, so was the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legally upheld a woman’s right to control her own body concerning reproduction. These events gave legal and political backing to the women’s rights movement in challenging the patriarchal power establishment. As both African Americans and women gained legal protections, other minorities also pushed for a greater voice and sought to redress past discrimination. Continuing his struggles for better working conditions and pay for migrant farm workers, often of Latino heritage, C
esar Ch
avez organized the National Farm Workers Association (later United Farm Workers) in the 1960s, but achieved success in forcing grape producers to recognize the union when the two parties signed a contract in 1970. Commemorating the Stonewall riots in which the New York City police battled with members of the gay community, the first Gay Pride Parade took place in the city in 1970. In 1975 Congress passed the Education for all

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Handicapped Children Act, which required all public schools to provide equal accommodation to children with physical and mental disabilities. While prejudices and inequities still existed, these events signaled a willingness on the public’s part to acknowledge and remedy past injustices. Despite some successes for minorities to challenge the status quo, a number of domestic events confirmed the younger generation’s general suspicion of those in power, especially the Nixon administration. A year after the Pentagon Papers were published, operatives from the Republican Party broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. Subsequent investigations revealed that the Watergate burglary was but one of many illegal activities that were linked to the inner circle of the presidency. During the course of the scandal, Vice President Spiro Agnew pleaded no contest to charges of corruption (unrelated to Watergate) and resigned from office in 1973. Seeing that his administration suffered an image problem, Nixon chose Gerald Ford, a former University of Michigan football player and House of Representatives leader, to succeed Agnew. Yet Nixon’s effort to boost the credibility of his office failed, as more and more details of wrongdoings came to light, and his attempts to derail the Watergate investigation drew condemnation. Amidst calls for impeachment, Nixon resigned his post on August 9, 1974. Ford’s presidency inherited the problems of recession and inflation, largely a result of the energy crisis, from his predecessor. The 1970s witnessed a concern for the environment that, together with the civil and women’s rights movements, dovetailed into a human rights movement–a more inclusive and global initiative. As early as April 1970, people across the country joined in the celebration of Earth Day. Modeled after the strategies of anti–Vietnam War protests, Earth Day was an educational and informational event that brought environmental issues to the American public consciousness. First prompted by a concern for the safety of automobiles, which led into activism against major corporations and government agencies, Ralph Nader in 1971 created Public Citizen, an organization that researched and published findings on a wide range of issues, one of which was the environment. In 1978 residents in a Niagara Falls (NY) neighborhood, Love Canal, were evacuated because of toxic waste in the area. This national spotlight on indiscriminate exploitation of the environment was followed by a March 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the station’s nuclear reactor core had a meltdown. When Mount St. Helens in Washington State erupted in 1980, the earth’s full fury was evident for all to witness. Although not manmade, the volcano’s destructive power demonstrated the fragility of human existence. The concern for the environment and, by implication, for fellow human beings would eventually evolve into a political force in the 1990s. At the same time that Americans paid attention to global issues, some also turned inward for both spiritual and physical fulfillment and satisfaction. Others pursued physical well-being in the fitness movement. Still others immersed themselves in hedonistic pleasures, such as frequenting discotheques (dance clubs that played a genre of music blending black and Latino sounds), imbibing recreational drugs, and pursuing casual sexual encounters (pre-AIDS crisis). Indeed, author and journalist Tom Wolfe labeled the Seventies the “Me Decade” when many Americans turned from the political and social idealism of the 1960s to personal enrichment.

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Although Americans looked for inner peace through different pursuits, the idea of “community” did not vanish. And sports benefited. Indeed, sport both reflected and created the social tensions in American society.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball—The National Pastime As the oldest professional team sport, Major League Baseball (MLB) experienced a shift in the power relationship between management and players that started in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s. Legal challenges, fostered by a militant union leadership, eventually eroded the owners’ almost totalitarian rule. Ever since 1968, when the owners reluctantly entered into the first collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the union, they realized that the union had been chipping away at their control over baseball through successive renegotiations of the CBA. In the 1970s the owners decided to test the union’s strength and tried to recapture their power over professional baseball, which led to the first strike by professional baseball players in 1972. Through the union director, Marvin Miller, the players asked for adjustments to their health care benefits and pension plans. When the owners refused, the players walked out. The strike lasted thirteen days, including the first nine days of the season. Since neither side had established an emergency fund for such an occasion, both owners and players suffered financially from lost income because of the strike. The owners’ losses, however, were much larger and led them to capitulate to the union’s original demands. On April 15 the baseball season opened without making up for the games missed during the strike. This labor action, however, would not be the last and foretold many more disputes between the two sides in the coming decades. Although the strike was a dramatic illustration of the players’ growing power and assertiveness, many more gains came through negotiations and judicial and legislative means. In the 1970s, the players gained the right to settle disputes, including salaries, through a third-party arbitrator. Indeed, it was binding arbitration that brought down the century-old reserve clause. Negotiated into the agreement reached after the 1972 strike, binding arbitration on salary disputes allowed players with two or more years of service to argue their case before a three-person panel (with one member from management, one from union, and a third person agreed upon by both sides) who had to make a decision either in favor of management or the player. No splitting of the difference was allowed. Immediately many qualified players used this avenue. Although the outcomes did not always favor the players, enough decisions were and forced the owners to re-evaluate their salary offers from then on. Binding arbitration also brought down the reserve clause that had bound a player to a club for his entire career until retirement or the team released him. Curt Flood had challenged the reserve clause under antitrust law in 1969. Through successive appeals that eventually reached the Supreme Court, MLB’s antitrust exemption remained intact when the Supreme Court ruled against Flood in 1972 (see sidebar in previous chapter, p. 357). The reserve clause would disappear by the end of the decade as the union attacked it via binding arbitration. The first crack

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at the reserve clause came when James “Catfish” Hunter of the Oakland Athletics filed a grievance against owner Charlie Finley for breach of contract in 1974 and asked that he be declared a free agent. On December 13 arbitrator Peter Seitz stunned the sporting world by siding with Hunter. Finley then filed suit against the Seitz judgment, but failed to have it overturned. The New York Yankees finally signed Hunter away from the Athletics for an unheard-of sum, $3.75 million over five years. Hunter’s case demonstrated to the players, owners, and public alike, the possibility of free agency, despite the existence of the reserve clause. Without free agency, a player’s worth was always under market value. For the union and the players, the main assault to the reserve clause came when Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos played without signing contracts in 1975. (McNally actually had retired from baseball early in the 1975 season.) On behalf of both players, the union filed a grievance at the end of the 1975 season claiming that both players were now free agents because, as stated in the contract, the reserve clause only reserved an unsigned player’s service for one year. In December arbitrator Seitz ruled that both players were free agents, in effect dismissing the league and owners’ argument that the one-year extension carried over from year to year. (On demand from management, Seitz was fired from the arbitration panel after this verdict.) Immediately, the owners filed suit against the judgment but again failed to win. The consequence of this verdict was significant because players could now shop around their services if they refused to renew their contract for the next season. Realizing, and grudgingly accepting, this new development, owners began signing players for longer terms and more generous offers in order to keep them from going on the market. Salaries in professional baseball rose. In 1970 the average player salary was about $29,000. In 1975 it was around $46,000. By 1980 the figure had jumped to $146,000. Moreover, since other professional leagues had similar if not exact language of the reserve clause in their contracts, the implication of the Seitz decision went beyond professional baseball. In spite of the owners’ cries of demise of the sport because free agency would bankrupt the teams, MLB did well in this decade. In 1971 MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn negotiated a $70-million, four-year television package with the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). In part on the strength of the exciting 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox, MLB’s 1976 newly negotiated television package paid each club $23.2 million per year. Especially for large-market teams, revenues from this new television deal and local television broadcast (which the team did not have to share with others in the league) added to their profits. Despite spiraling salaries, television revenues more than covered increased salary expenses. By 1980 player salaries, on average, only constituted about 39 percent of team expenses. Moreover, franchise value also jumped in this decade because of this prosperity. In 1970 a MLB franchise was valued approximately at just over $10 million. This figure had increased threefold by 1980. Not all the action occurred at the negotiating table or in the courtrooms for baseball in the 1970s. To give offense a boost, the American League (but not the National League) adopted the designated hitter rule in 1973. Despite the addition of this rule, twelve starting pitchers recorded twenty or more victories even as batting averages increased that year. But arguably the most significant event on the

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Hank Aaron Born on February 5, 1934, in Mobile, Alabama, Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron was one of seven children of Herbert and Estella. His professional baseball career began with the Mobile Black Bears, a team in the Negro League, for $10 per game. Aaron then moved up the Negro League hierarchy when he signed with the Indianapolis Clowns in 1951 and, then, with the Boston Braves of MLB in 1952. Initially, Aaron played for the Braves’ minor-league team, the Eau Claire Bears of Wisconsin, where he would be the only African American on the team. He was then promoted to Jacksonville (FL), at a time when segregation was still the rule in the South. He was one of the first African Americans in that league (the South Atlantic League) and had to endure racial taunts while playing. Aaron made his Braves’ debut in 1954. The next year, Aaron was selected as an All-Star, the first of twenty-four such designations. As he neared Ruth’s record near the end of the 1973 season, the national media began to follow his games closely and, at the same time, Aaron began receiving threats and hate mail. There was also immense public support for Aaron once these threats were revealed. When Aaron’s playing career was over in 1976, his total home-run record stood at 755 and was only surpassed by Barry Bonds in 2007. Aaron retired with a career average of .305, 2,297 RBIs, 1,477 extra base hits, and 6,856 total bases; the latter three statistics are still MLB records as of 2008. Besides his athletic abilities, Aaron was an outspoken critic of the lack of managerial opportunities in professional baseball. After he finished his playing career, Aaron worked as an executive vice-president for the Atlanta Braves.

field occurred on April 8, 1974, in Atlanta when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime home-run record. Ruth’s record, set at a time of a segregated MLB, also stood as a last vestige of white superiority to some. To have the record broken by a black man seemed to indict the segregationist policy of the old MLB that excluded so many talented black athletes. Aaron, of course, was not the only player who had distinguished himself on the diamond. Pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan had two no-hitters in 1973 and added another two by 1975. Then there was Steve Carlton. After a salary dispute with the St. Louis Cardinals, he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, a team that had languished at the bottom of the Eastern Division of the National League in the previous season. In his first season, Carlton led the league in victories (27), complete games (30), strikeouts (310), and earned run average (ERA) (1.97), even as the Phillies remained last in the division. It was an especially impressive feat since the Phillies only won fifty-nine games for the season. His twenty-seven victories represented 46 percent of the team’s success and earned him the 1972 Cy Young Award by unanimous vote. Carlton continued to help the Phillies as the team improved in the latter half of the decade, capturing the division title three times (1976, 1977, and 1978). In 1980 the Phillies won the World Series with Carlton pitching in the final game. While the Phillies became a very successful team in the latter half of the 1970s, the Cincinnati Reds and the Oakland Athletics were two of the most dominant teams of the decade. The Reds appeared in three World Series, winning two (1975 and 1976) of them, the same record as the once dominant New York Yankees in

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California Angels pitcher Nolan Ryan hurls the ball in the first inning, August 21, 1974, against the Detroit Tigers. Despite a stellar pitching performance, fanning nineteen Tigers, Ryan lost in the eleventh inning to Detroit’s Mickey Lolich, 1–0. Ryan struck out nineteen batters for the second time in three starts and set a major-league record for most strikeouts in three consecutive games, a total of fortyseven. (AP / Wide World Photo)

the 1970s. On the other hand, the A’s won three (1972–74) consecutive World Series. Other than the outstanding achievements by teams and players, professional baseball also received some sad news in this decade. Approximately two years prior to Aaron’s record-breaking game, Jackie Robinson, the first black player to break the color line in MLB, passed away at the relatively young age of fifty-three. Robinson, however, was not the only famous player whose time had come too soon. In 1972 Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates died at the age of thirty-eight in a plane crash. A Puerto Rican by birth and a humanitarian by temperament, Clemente was on his way to deliver relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. Robinson and Clemente were evidence of the gradual desegregation of professional baseball, and public admiration of the two perhaps indicated acceptance of minorities in sport. One year after Aaron set the home-run record, another Robinson, Frank (no relation to Jackie), made MLB history when the Cleveland Indians named him manager of the club, making him the first African American in a management position in professional baseball. Robinson had been an outstanding (and later Hall of Fame–elected) outfielder and he continued his career as manager with several more clubs in the coming decades. Yet, minorities in upper-management positions remained few and far between, even though over one-third of the players were African Americans and Latinos by the 1970s. The paucity of management opportunities continued after the decade was over.

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Basketball Professional Basketball Similar to the other professional sports in the 1970s, professional basketball experienced a boom, with a rival league taking advantage of the demand for sport entertainment in the marketplace. For the established league, the National Basketball Association (NBA), franchises’ values went from $200,000 in 1961 to $3.75 million in 1970. In the 1970s the NBA expanded from seventeen teams in 1970 to twenty-three teams in 1980, in part a reaction to the rival league, the American Basketball Association (ABA), created by Gary Davidson and Dennis Murphy (who would later create the World Hockey Association). Unlike the NHL teams, which often owned minor-league teams to maintain and develop talent, the NBA conscripted their young talent relatively cheaply as the NCAA became the major proving ground for aspiring basketball players. Hence, Davidson and Murphy created the ABA in 1967 with eleven teams spreading from coast to coast. While major metropolitan areas such as Anaheim, Oakland, Dallas, and New York hosted ABA franchises, ABA could also be found in smaller markets, such as Indianapolis and Louisville, but had a tradition of successful college basketball teams. The idea was, of course, to tap into existing basketball audiences in hope of transferring their enthusiasm for the college game to the professional teams. By 1970 the bidding war between the two leagues led to discussions of a merger, which would not materialize until 1976 as the NBA faced two court challenges accusing it of being a monopoly and thus violating the federal antitrust law. Both

Spencer Haywood Spencer Haywood was one of ten children born (1949) in a poor family in rural Mississippi. A member of the 1968 gold-medal Olympic basketball team, Haywood signed with the new American Basketball Association (ABA) in 1969 because the NBA prohibited signing any player until four years after he graduated from high school. The rule, in large part, was to placate the NCAA who feared competition on top recruits from the professional league. While the ABA had a similar rule, the league decided to exempt Haywood because he was such a high-profile prospect that signing him would bring credibility to the new league. After one year with the ABA’s Denver Rockets, Haywood left the team and signed with the NBA’s Seattle Supersonics. Unlike the ABA, NBA owners voted not to exempt Haywood, who then filed suit against the NBA. Haywood and his lawyer argued that the NBA’s refusal to sign him amounted to a group boycott and violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. As to the four-year rule, Haywood countered that the rule created a hardship for him and his family since he was the sole wage earner. After the Supreme Court verdict, the NBA changed the four-year rule and included a “hardship” clause that allowed any underclassman to petition to be included in the draft if he could show evidence of hardship. In 1976 the NBA eliminated the four-year provision entirely and any college player could enter the draft if he notified the league at least forty-five days before the draft. That was subsequently modified in 2006. Haywood played for thirteen seasons, averaging just over 20 points per game in his pro career.

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lawsuits came from NBA players. Oscar Robertson led one of the lawsuits and Spencer Haywood the other. Robertson, generally known as “the Big O,” had been in the NBA for ten seasons. A legitimate all-star, Robertson had had successes in college, the Olympic Games, and the NBA. Playing guard, not only was he a superb scorer and passer, Robertson was also a good rebounder. By 1970, Robertson had been the president of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) for four years. Knowing that the merger between NBA and ABA would eliminate opportunities for professional basketball players, Robertson, joined by a bevy of NBA stars, filed suit in New York against the NBA, the ABA, and their member franchises. Among the complaints were the reserve clause, college draft, and a list of league polices and practices that, they argued, constituted collusion among the owners to restrain trade. In the 1970–71 season, Spencer Haywood also filed a lawsuit against the NBA in the Los Angeles federal court, alleging that the NBA policy of disallowing its member franchises from drafting any player until four years after his class had graduated from high school violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. Although Haywood’s lawsuit was filed after the Robertson case, the court expedited the process because Haywood claimed a delay would seriously harm him from earning a livelihood as the NBA threatened to expel Haywood’s club, the Seattle Supersonics. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and on March 22, 1971, Justice William O. Douglas wrote the opinion in favor of Haywood. Douglas’s ruling would play an important part in the final ruling of the Robertson suit four year later. Citing the Haywood case as precedent, the Court found for the players in 1976 that a merger between the NBA and ABA would constitute a restraint of trade as it would eliminate competition for players’ services. Yet, the merger did take place. In 1976 the NBA took four ABA teams, San Antonio, New York, Denver, and Indiana after negotiating a settlement with the NBPA. Known as the Robertson Agreement, the NBA, among other concessions, agreed to abolish the reserve clause and limit the rights of a team to retain its drafted players to one year after which time the players would go back to the draft if the team was unable to sign them. To a certain extent, the 1976 merger in professional basketball came as a result of the ABA’s ability to compete with the NBA. The ABA had positioned itself as a young, dynamic league that produced a flashy product and, it was hoped, would attract paying customers and a national television contract. In 1971 ABA’s Virginia Squires acquired a player who would epitomize the exciting nature of all the changes the league had promoted in its brand positioning. Foregoing his senior year at the University of Massachusetts, Julius “Dr. J” Erving signed a four-year, $500,000 contract with the team. While the ABA had other star players such as Spencer Haywood, Connie Hawkins, and George Gervin, none of them came close in generating fan excitement as Julius Erving. Despite the drawing power of Erving and other ABA star players, the inability to acquire a national television contract magnified the financial problems of some of the franchises. Erving’s team, the Virginia Squires, was a good example. First entered into the league as the Oakland Oaks in 1967, the team moved to the nation’s capital after only two years in the Bay Area. One year later, the franchise moved again to Virginia. Gambling on Erving’s potential as a draw, it gave Erving a big contract. With his electrifying skills, Erving led the team to the ABA finals in his first two seasons with the team. Yet, financial problems forced the team to

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trade Erving to the New York Nets in 1973. With Erving in the lineup, the Nets went on to win two ABA titles (1974 and 1976), and Erving was chosen as the league’s Most Valuable Player in three consecutive seasons. The Squires never reached the finals again. While the ABA faced problems with weak franchises and its inability to acquire a network television contract, the NBA had its games broadcast on ABC (1972– 72) and CBS (1973–82) during the 1970s. Moreover, the established league was also able to produce a new group of star players. In 1969 the Milwaukee Bucks signed UCLA’s 70 200 sensational center, Lew Alcindor, to a $1.4-million contract. As a superb player with size, Alcindor followed the footsteps of dominant NBA centers Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. Since Russell had retired in 1969 and Chamberlain was nearing the end of his career (he retired in 1974), Alcindor became the premier center of the decade and the result was immediate. The Bucks improved by winning twenty-nine more games than the previous season and reached the second round of the playoffs in Alcindor’s rookie year. When the Bucks traded for Oscar Robertson in Alcindor’s second season, the team won the NBA championship, often beating their playoff opponents by eleven points or more. A convert to Islam, Alcindor officially changed his name to Kareem Abdul Jabbar the day after the Bucks won the championship. Unlike Muhammad Ali (see boxing section below), his name change did not elicit a public outcry and was a testament to the American public’s changing attitude. As a devout Muslim and a private man, Abdul-Jabbar asked the team in October 1974 to trade him to a metropolitan center, either New York or Los Angeles, because he did not feel the Midwest could provide his cultural needs. In a six-player swap, the Los Angeles Lakers acquired Abdul-Jabbar and another Milwaukee player in 1975. Although no one team dominated the NBA in the 1970s—eight different teams won the championship—the acquisition of Abdul-Jabbar would develop a dynasty battle between Los Angeles and Boston in the late 1970s and lasted well into the 1980s. Abdul-Jabbar did not immediately help the Lakers to a championship. But in the 1979 NBA draft, Los Angeles used its number one pick to select Michigan State University’s Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. Johnson was a fantastic ball handler and passer. At 60 900 , he was also a versatile player. Although he played guard, he could fill in as a forward on occasions and in the 1980 NBA championship series against Dr. J and the Philadelphia 76ers, Johnson even played center in game 6 after Abdul-Jabbar sustained an injury in game 5. Together with Abdul-Jabbar, Johnson constituted the core of the Lakers dynasty. As strong as Los Angeles was with the duo, it was not without competition. In 1978, Boston picked Larry Joe Bird, a junior from Indiana State University, sixth overall but was unable to sign him until 1979 because Bird chose to remain in college for his senior year. Although still a good team, the Boston Celtics no longer dominated the NBA like they had in the previous decade. In his first year, Bird improved the Celtics to a 61–21 season, the best regular-season record up until that time. (The team posted a 29–53 record in the previous season). Despite Johnson’s brilliance, Bird won the league’s Rookie of Year award. The Celtics, however, did not reach the NBA championship, losing in the conference finals to the 76ers. In 1980 the Celtics added center Robert Parish and drafted Kevin McHale. Together with Bird, the trio would make the Celtics one of the dominant teams in the 1980s, rivaled only by the Lakers.

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The infusion of Johnson, Bird, and McHale, among others, also helped to revive the NBA. Rumors of drug abuse by players, complaints against franchise movements, and legal troubles plagued the league throughout the decade. Thus, even before the arrival of this new crop of young talent, the league began tinkering with the product in hope of stimulating fan interests. In the 1978–79 season, it added a third court official and the next year saw the NBA adopting the ABA invention, the three-point line, which opened up the game by drawing the defense out to the perimeter. In 1979 Commissioner Larry O’Brien negotiated a three-year cable television deal with the USA Network in addition to the existing CBS contract. This experiment with cable television would eventually lead the NBA to a partnership with the newly formed ESPN in 1982. By the end of the 1970s, then, the NBA was well positioned to grow in the marketplace.

College Basketball Men’s college basketball also blossomed in the 1970s. Its popularity in part had to do with the relatively small financial requirements for any school to operate a team. Basketball needed only fifteen players (and scholarships), a miniscule number compared to college football. While its revenues were also smaller than football, the advantageous cost-benefit ratio made basketball a viable and important program with NCAA-member institutions. Although basketball was a team game—more so in the college than the professional ranks—it was entirely possible to be successful if a team had one or two dominant players. Thus, many more schools in the NCAA had a basketball program than had a football program. Despite the easier path to institutional glory through a good basketball program, NCAA oversight of intercollegiate athletics favored schools that had established programs up until the early 1970s. From the mid1960s to the mid-1970s, the most dominant school in college basketball was University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Coached by the legendary John Wooden, UCLA basketball teams won ten NCAA titles during that period, including an unprecedented run of seven consecutive championships from 1967 to 1973. The NCAA rule of banning freshmen student-athletes from the varsity squad for their first year in college helped programs such as UCLA’s. Originally designed to help freshman student-athletes acclimatize to college life, the rule effectively channeled top talent to prestigious programs as high school seniors realized that their chances of developing into top-notch college players would be better there. When the rule was repealed in 1972, however, schools that had not been able to compete for the same high school talents as the top schools were now able to entice Earvin “Magic” Johnson, NBA Hall of Famer, high school seniors with promises of immediate while a collegian in 1979. (AP / Wide World Photo) playing time; thus making many more schools

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1970–1979

competitive. After Wooden retired following the 1974–75 season, no schools would have the dominance of UCLA of the 1960s and 1970s. The success of Wooden’s teams did not rest entirely on the program’s ability to recruit talented players. It also speaks volume about the importance of coaching. Coaches such as Adolph Rupp of Kentucky, who would finish his career in 1972, Dean Smith of North Carolina, and a young Bobby Knight, who started his tenure as head coach at University of Indiana in 1971, became celebrities in their respective campuses. Yet, opportunities for African Americans to lead a major university’s program remained scarce despite the abundance of African American players and programs in traditionally black colleges. Like Jackie Robinson, Will Robinson (no relation) broke the color line in 1970 and guided Illinois State University to a winning record before departing to take up a scouting position with the Detroit Pistons. Despite his success, college basketball did not immediately welcome black head coaches. Although coaches increasingly developed their reputation based on the success (and failure) of a particular program, college basketball also trumpeted individual players. Aided by television’s thirst for stars, athletic departments actively promoted their top talent through game broadcasts. With the passing of the UCLA dynasty era and the diffusion of talent, television increasingly focused on the use of marquee players as promotional draws for the college game. Nowhere was this tactic more important in 1979 when two lesser-known programs in college basketball, Michigan State University and Indiana State University, met in the NCAA finals. Led by Magic Johnson, Michigan State defeated Indiana State and its superstar, Larry Bird, 75–64, in what was at the time the most-watched game in both college and professional basketball. The 1979 NCAA final drew 38 percent of the television viewing audience. As Johnson and Bird extended their rivalry into the NBA, the connection of college basketball as a path to a professional career became even closer. A professional career in basketball was not available to the women’s game in the 1970s although the sport was also very popular in woman intercollegiate athletics. Not until 1969 did the first women’s intercollegiate basketball tournament take place; however, it was an invitational organized and hosted by West Chester State, a small former teachers’ college in Pennsylvania. Title IX would change the direction of women’s intercollegiate athletics, including women’s college basketball. (See below). In 1972 the newly formed Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) hosted its first basketball championship. Since college athletic departments generally did not adequately fund women’s sports, many basketball teams had to resort to other measures in order to participate. The eventual winner of the first AIAW championship, Immaculata College, for example, had to seek donations to defray travel expenses. Like UCLA in men’s basketball, Immaculata College (the Mighty Macs) in Pennsylvania dominated AIAW championships in the first half of the 1970s, winning the first three. Its coach, Cathy Rush, ran two-hour practices and recruited players, a change from former practices. Unlike men’s college basketball, small colleges actually won most of the AIAW basketball championships for much of the decade. After the last Immaculata victory in 1974, Delta State (Mississippi) took the trophy in the next three years. Not until 1978 did a major university, UCLA, win the women’s title. In 1973, however,

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AIAW reversed its no-scholarship policy and the shadow of Title IX drove many smaller schools that did not have a football program (football being the largest scholarship recipient) to offer scholarships to women athletes, and basketball benefited. For various reasons, the NCAA, university athletic departments, and the media had long left women athletics alone, content with the separate but not equal treatment. As the Mighty Macs continued winning national championships, the media began to take notice. Television covered the Mighty Macs’ 1975 regular-season game against the University of Maryland, and the game against Queens College at Madison Square Garden drew 12,000 spectators. Perhaps most satisfying to women athletic administrators and AIAW officials was a $12,000 profit from the 1975 championship. They might not have expected a financial success but the profit demonstrated that women sports, at least basketball, did not have to drain the resources of any athletic department—a major argument for the opponents of Title IX. The positive outlook in women’s college basketball attracted interests from the corporate world as well. In 1976 Eastman Kodak sponsored the Kodak All-American Award presented annually to the top female basketball player. With the increasing attention to AIAW basketball, the NCAA and some athletic departments began to notice women basketball. In 1974 Ann Myers became the first female basketball player to receive a four-year scholarship from a major school, UCLA. While women’s basketball had come a long way, it had nevertheless been under the shadow of the men’s game. Critics argued that the women’s game was inferior. They pointed to the fact that the ball was smaller than the men’s, and women could not dunk the ball. In other words, the men’s version was still a standard against which all was to be measured. Nancy Lieberman, for example, was an exceptional player who, at the age of seventeen, was selected to represent the United States in the 1976 Olympic Games. She then led Old Dominion University to two consecutive (1979 and 1980) AIAW titles and was a three-time all-American. Despite all her achievements, she was dubbed “Lady Magic,” a title that on the surface put her at the same level as Magic Johnson in the men’s game. Yet this nickname also privileged the men’s game by making it the version to be emulated.

Football Professional Football As MLB owners struggled to maintain their power in the 1970s, professional football rose to prominence and, some would argue, overtook baseball as the new national pastime. By and large, the popularity of football could be attributed to its marriage with television, especially for the professional leagues. Indeed, no sport benefited from television more than the National Football League (NFL) in the 1970s. A regional and working-class entity for most of its existence, the NFL under Commissioner Pete Rozelle transformed itself to appeal to a national audience through television. Game attendance steadily increased from 11 million in the late 1960s to almost 20 million by 1977. By the late 1970s, NFL broadcasts had the highest Nielsen ratings of all televised American sports programs. Furthermore, the NFL championship game, the Super Bowl, attracted more and more viewers

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1970–1979

each year. Television’s first live nationally broadcast Super Bowl game took place in 1973, drawing approximately 75 million people. In Super Bowl VII the Miami Dolphins played the Washington Redskins in Los Angeles before a sold-out crowd on January 14, 1973. Throughout the 1972 regular season and the subsequent playoffs, the Miami Dolphins had not lost a game. Commissioner Rozelle decided that the game could be broadcast live in the Los Angeles area since all the tickets had been sold very early on. The success of this broadcast led the league to modify its blackout rule in the following season, allowing games to be broadcast live in the local area if all the tickets were sold seventy-two hours before game time. Led by the “No-Name Defense,” the Dolphins won the contest 14 to 7, the lowest-scoring championship game since the first Super Bowl. The 1972 perfect season still stands as a record as the 2007–8 New England Patriots failed in this pursuit by losing their one and only game to the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII. Televised NFL games were so popular that by 1977 Rozelle managed to negotiate with the three major television networks, NBC, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), for a four-year television package worth $656 million. Each team received $6 million per year from this negotiation, up from $2.3 million in the last television contract. The increasing popularity of the NFL, the accompanying prosperity, and the league’s symbiotic relationship with television was nowhere more evident than in ABC’s Monday Night Football program. First aired in 1970, the program drew large audiences as its producer, Roone Arledge, broke the conventions of sport broadcasting by introducing innovations such as multiple cameras, increased number of commentators, and slow-motion replays. Arledge hired the controversial Howard Cosell as one of the broadcast crew and Cosell’s abrasive and argumentative manner elicited strong emotions among viewers. His frequent and heated exchanges with another broadcast crewmember, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, Don Meredith, generated comments and debates among fans long after the broadcasts. Arledge also sought to appeal to audiences beyond die-hard professional football fans. In 1973, for example, Arledge invited two celebrity guests, who were unrelated to the NFL, to a broadcast as John Lennon of the Beatles and Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, appeared with the broadcast crew. This practice of including nonfootball celebrities fit nicely into Arledge’s strategy of promoting football as entertainment and reaching out to audiences who might have minimal or no interest in football. Indeed, Monday Night Football became such a culturally important event in the 1970s that it altered people’s social lives. On Monday nights, attendance in movie theatres dropped, some restaurants closed, and bowling leagues moved their games to Tuesdays. Despite the good times, the NFL, like professional baseball, was not without its own labor troubles. Facing a more demanding labor force, NFL owners tried to break the players union, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). In 1971 the NFLPA hired Ed Garvey as its first executive director. Garvey, an attorney from a Minnesota law firm, had helped the NFLPA to get certified by the National Labor Relations Board in the previous year. One of his first accomplishments was to get rid of the “Rozelle Rule,” which restricted free agency. In essence, the rule gave the commissioner power to compensate a team that lost a player through free agency from the team that signed him. Depending on the

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player, the compensation could include more than one player or future draft choices. Hence, few teams dared to sign any free agents because they did not know what the compensation would be. Between 1963 and 1976, only four players moved to a different team after their contracts had expired. In 1972, however, John Mackey, the star tight end of the Baltimore Colts, with a group of mostly black players, filed suit against the NFL at the Minneapolis Federal District Court claiming the Rozelle Rule essentially restrained competition. In 1976, a federal court ruled in favor for the plaintiffs against the owners’ appeal of a lower court’s decision and urged the NFL and the NFLPA settle the issue through collective bargaining. At the same time, two other antitrust suits filed by NFL players confirmed the players’ right to free agency. These developments forced the NFL to negotiate a settlement with the union in 1977. Opting for better pension and insurance coverage, the NFLPA agreed to a free-agency system whereby a player’s old team had a right of first refusal by matching the offer to the free agent. Moreover, the team losing the free agent was entitled to compensation of draft choices depending on the “worth” (years of service and new salary offer) of the free agent. As a result, bidding for free agents remained scarce as the new system did not really enhance the players’ bargaining power. While judicial actions consistently favored the NFL players, the NFLPA as a labor organization fared less well. Prior to the final Mackey ruling, NFL owners were unwilling to negotiate any concessions to the union. In 1974 the NFLPA struck on July 1 after unsuccessful bargaining sessions for a collective agreement with management. The 1974 strike revealed the weakness of the union. Whereas player representatives from each team voted for and supported the strike, not all rank-and-file members agreed with the decision. In fact, nearly 20 percent of union members crossed picket lines one month after the strike began. By early August, the strike was over and the union conceded defeat. The consequence for the striking players and especially union officials were harsh and immediate. Twenty union officers and player representatives, for example, were either cut or traded by their teams. Both the 1974 strike and the Mackey lawsuit exposed the racial tensions within the NFL. Although African Americans constituted about 45 percent of the NFL players by 1980, their earnings on average were below those of their white counterparts. As early as 1966, a federal government study revealed that black athletes lagged far behind white athletes in endorsements and other financial opportunities unrelated to their sport. While these opportunities increased somewhat in the 1970s, they still did not match proportionately to the percentage of black athletes in professional sports. Besides unequal opportunities, black players often suffered overt and covert racism, such as stacking, a practice of placing players in positions based on false racial stereotypes. African Americans were deemed to lack the intelligence and leadership required in central positions, such as quarterback or center. In 1979 the Tampa Bay Buccaneers became the first post–World War II team to use an African American, Doug Williams, in the starting quarterback position and he led the usually underachieving Bucs to the playoffs immediately. Yet Williams was an exception rather than the rule. Given the barriers they faced, African American athletes had more to gain from challenges to the existing structure of professional sport Although player solidarity was questionable and NFL owners’ control was still solid, a short-lived opportunity to improve the players’ power occurred in 1974.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1970–1979

Gary Davidson, the sport entrepreneur who had started rival leagues in professional basketball and hockey, created the World Football League (WFL) in 1973; league play began the following year. Capitalizing on the American demographic shift from the Northeast to South and West, the desire of civic boosters in the growing cities for a professional football team, and the slow pace of NFL expansion, the WFL initially granted twelve franchises. Only four, New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, were in the traditional northeastern and midwestern industrial belt. (Before the first season ended, New York had moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.) By early 1974 WFL franchises began persuading NFL players to jump leagues by offering better salaries. Using the same money tactic of the AFL in signing Joe Namath in 1965, the WFL signed three Miami Dolphins, Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, and Paul Warfield, to lucrative contracts totaling $3.884 million. In the WFL, Csonka’s salary increased almost eightfold. These three players were considered to be the heart of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins team and would give the WFL (and the team that signed them, the Memphis Southmen) instant credibility. Besides the lure of higher salaries, the NFL players were facing a potential strike in 1974. For some, accepting the WFL’s offers seemed to be the logical choice. Yet a majority of the WFL owners did not have adequate capital for the long-term survival of the league and their franchises. Before the first season was over, only two teams could claim financial stability. Two other teams folded and two more moved their franchises to a different city because they were in financial troubles. The league operated for another year; and when the NFL rejected the idea of a merger, the WFL went out of existence. Although ineffective, the WFL demonstrated the public thirst for professional football franchises. Indeed, professional football’s popularity could be attributed to its on-field product televised to millions of households. Pittsburgh, Oakland, and Miami with its perfect 1972–73 season were the dominant teams in the American Football Conference (AFC). Between the three teams, they appeared in the Super Bowl eight times, winning seven of them. For the National Football Conference (NFC), Dallas, Los Angeles, and Minnesota were either champions or runners-up in the conference sixteen times and Dallas won two Super Bowls (1972 and 1978). Pittsburgh, in particular, established itself as the football dynasty of the second half of the decade. Combining a strong defense, labeled the Steel Curtain, and a talented and balance offense that included quarterback Terry Bradshaw, running back Franco Harris, and wide receivers Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, head coach Chuck Noll guided the team to four Super Bowl victories (1975, 1976, 1979, and 1980), and its battles against the NFC teams, especially the Dallas Cowboys, galvanized the pride for a city that had been decimated by the demise of the steel industry. With so many cities clamoring for an NFL franchise, owners contemplated expansion. Although demand for an NFL franchise far outstripped supply, some owners were leery about sharing the considerable television revenues with any additional clubs. After much deliberation and under pressure from politicians and civic boosters, the NFL granted two franchises, Seattle and Tampa Bay, in 1974 for $16 million each, almost twice the price tag of the previous expansion in the late 1960s. Besides franchise fees from new admissions into the league, owners also took advantage of the favorable market conditions in another way. They played city authorities against one another by promising to move the team to the city that

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offered the best incentives. The New York Giants moved to East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1972 and the Los Angeles Rams relocated across town to Anaheim in 1978. In turn, Los Angeles lured the Oakland Raiders to occupy the Rams’ place in 1980, which eventually led to an antitrust law suit filed by the Oakland owner, Al Davis, against the NFL when the league blocked the move. Others, such as the Baltimore Colts’ owner Robert Irsay and the Minnesota Vikings’ owner Max Winter, extracted concessions and stadium improvements from their respective local authorities by merely considering moving their teams. The decade of the 1970s was good to the NFL and its franchise owners, who weathered labor challenges and court defeats with their control over professional football more or less intact.

College Football College football had been inextricably tied to the creation and the history of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) since the early twentieth century and this close relationship manifested itself prominently again in the sport in the 1970s. Television played an important role in changing the organizational and power structure within the NCAA and involved schools with major football program. Title IX also challenged college football’s place within intercollegiate athletics (see below). Despite the defenders of college football’s role in higher education, the developments in the 1970s further separated major football programs from the education mission of their parent universities and put in place a structure that had little difference between college and the early professional football leagues. During the 1970s, college football faced a financial crisis. Part of a larger problem of university athletic departments across the country, increased expenses due to inflation, rising tuition costs, decreased enrollment (and hence reduced student activity fees), and Title IX compliance to fund women’s sports put pressure on athletic department budgets. The financial pressures were especially hard for smaller schools with limited resources. While college football had been generating more revenues than other sports, it was not immune to examination and criticisms of its share of the athletic department’s budget. In 1971 NCAA executive director Walter Byers called for reform in college football. He proposed changes in limiting scholarships and staff for college football, which promptly drew fire from schools with major football programs. Any attempt to restrict football scholarships could adversely impact dominance on the gridiron. In order to solve the financial crunch and placate the big-time football schools, the NCAA first revoked the freshman rule, thus allowing freshman football players to participate in scrimmages and games. In 1973 members in the NCAA came to a compromise by dividing the membership into three tiers: Division I, II, and III, hoping that the divisions would allow schools with similar resources to govern themselves. For the top football schools, however, the restructuring of membership was wholly unsatisfactory since there would be 237 schools in Division I. As professional football reaped the financial windfall from television broadcasts, major football schools wanted to keep the college football television revenues, which had reached $16 million in 1974 and would increase to $29 million in 1978 and $$30 million in 1980, for themselves. Schools with televised games were receiving as much as $450,000 for a national broadcast and $350,000 for a regional broadcast, and they feared others in Division I would dilute their profits. For schools that did not have

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televised games or did not belong to a conference that shared television and bowl games revenues, however, maintaining a football program became almost an impossible proposition. When a proposal to share revenues among all Division I football programs was being circulated in 1975, commissioners of major football conferences gathered to discuss possible alternatives. In April 1976 sixty-three college football programs, with the exceptions of schools from the Pac-10 and Big Ten conferences, formed the College Football Association (CFA) as an advocacy group for major football schools. Its demand to separate itself from nonmajor football schools finally materialized in 1978 when the NCAA subdivided Division I into Division IA, with 105 schools, and Division IAA. The CFA, however, would morph from an advocacy group for major football conferences into a semiautonomous negotiating representative of its own television broadcast contracts in the next decade. For college football, the NCAA’s efforts did not necessarily produce the intended consequences. As part of the reform movement, the NCAA limited football scholarships to 105 in 1978. While this measure could potentially reduce the impact of football in the athletic budget, reducing the number of scholarships did not lessen the coaches’ control over players since these scholarships were not based on a student-athlete’s financial needs. With a limited number of scholarships combined with the one-year renewable term, coaches had tremendous power over their charges. Indeed, abuses of athletes by some football coaches came to surface at the beginning of the decade when Dave Meggyesy, formerly of Syracuse University, and Gary Shaw, formerly University of Texas, published critical accounts of their college football experiences (Out of Their League and Meat on the Hoof respectively). Moreover, the NCAA had lowered the admission standards for college athletes in the previous year, replacing the previous eligibility requirement that employed a combination of high school GPA, SAT scores, and type of course work with the a new standard. This opened the door for coaches to recruit talented players who were academically suspect. It also created temptations for football programs to keep these athletes eligible, by any means, since many of them were academically unprepared to enter college. As an indicator of the success of African Americans in college football, eight of the ten Heisman Trophy winners were African Americans between 1971 and 1980 and included future football stars such as Tony Dorsett (Pittsburgh and Dallas Cowboys), Earl Campbell (Texas and Houston Oilers), and Billy Sims (Oklahoma and Detroit Lions). Yet, this success was only superficial and woefully ineffective in opening opportunities for African Americans. Since many of the African American players were ill-prepared for college, most did not benefit fully from a higher education as demands from football conflicted with demands to catch up with their studies. For some, college football served as a path toward a career in professional football and often college recruiters would promote their programs as such. In reality, only a minority of college players made it to the professional rank and even for those who did make it, a professional career was usually short and unpredictable.

Professional Hockey In the 1970s, the marketplace also opened opportunities and created problems for the National Hockey League (NHL), the dominant professional hockey organization. Long considered a Canadian passion and a regional league in the United

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States, the NHL began a phase of expansion late in the 1960s that lasted until the mid-1970s. From a mere six teams in 1967, the NHL grew to twenty-one teams by the end of the 1970s. Demographic shifts, a rival league, lure of television revenues, and threats of antitrust action drove this expansion. By 1967 the NHL had doubled its size to twelve teams seizing on the demographic shifts to the West and pacifying untapped American markets that had a long history of hockey. The NHL added Vancouver and Buffalo franchises in 1970 after Buffalo promised to compensate Toronto for infringing on its territory. By the beginning of the 1970s, then, fourteen teams made up the NHL. In 1972 the league added two more franchises. Based on the Toronto-Buffalo market dynamic, New York argued for and received a second franchise, the Islanders. The other addition, however, departed from the cautious approach of the NHL expansion thus far. Instead of placing a team in traditional hockey markets, which were usually located near the Canadian-U.S. border or cities that had some tradition of the sport, the NHL granted the city of Atlanta a franchise as the league began to recognize the importance of the demographic movement from the Northeast to cities in the South and West. Moreover, the league also hoped the spread of hockey to nontraditional markets would make itself more appealing to major television network. Important also was the staking of major markets to pre-empt a rival organization’s intrusion into the industry. Indeed, the need to fight off the rival league prompted further expansion in 1974 when the NHL added Kansas City and Washington, DC. Sensing the conservative nature of the NHL owners who had jealously been guarding professional hockey and its profits from others since World War II, U.S. entrepreneurs Dennis Murphy and Gary Davidson founded the World Hockey Association (WHA) in 1971. They witnessed how the American Football League had forced the NFL to recognize and negotiate with its rival and believed that this business model might work in professional hockey as well. And unlike the NFL, which had thirteen teams before the creation of the AFL, the NHL had only six. A second professional hockey league looked promising indeed. Both Murphy and Davidson had no previous experience in the hockey industry, however. Hence, they recruited Canadian businessman Bill Hunter into their partnership. To take advantage of the Canadian public’s displeasure with the American-focus NHL expansion scheme, the WHA announced four Canadian franchises—Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg—besides eight American ones. By the start of the league’s first season in 1972, however, there had been changes in the franchise locations already. Of the twelve planned franchises, four had to be moved to other cities; Calgary to Cleveland, Dayton to Houston, Miami to Philadelphia, and San Francisco to Quebec City. These maneuvers speak volume about the speculative nature of the WHA and its doubtful long-term survival. Despite the WHA’s problem of finding qualified franchises, the NHL faced a competition nonetheless. Not only did the WHA place franchises in existing NHL markets such as Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, it also ignored NHL contracts, emboldened by an antitrust investigation of the NHL by the U.S. Department of Justice and a slew of lawsuits, and actively pursued NHL star players. Two of the most revered NHL stars, Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings and Bobby Hull of the Chicago Blackhawks, jumped to the WHA. For the players, a rival organization meant competitive bidding and presented opportunities

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for a raise in salary. Although professional hockey had a players’ union in the 1970s, the overall welfare of professional hockey players did not improve as much as it did in professional baseball. A major reason for this lag was the owner- and league-friendly union director, Alan Eagleson. Bobby Hull signed with the Winnipeg Jets for $1 million over ten years, an astounding figure in hockey circles. Other than star players, regular players’ salaries rose as well. NHL players’ salary averaged $28,500 before the WHA but jumped to $44,000 in 1972. This amount would increase to $96,000 in 1977. Moreover, the existence of the two rival leagues meant more job opportunities that extended both to the junior leagues and overseas. As a professional league, the NHL had traditionally relied heavily on Canadian players who came out of a network of development youth leagues. Out of necessity, the WHA began recruiting European players, mostly from Scandinavian countries because the Cold War prohibited recruiting inside the Iron Curtain. The importing of European players began to erode the myth that only Canadian players who had come through the baptism of the Canadian junior programs had what it took to play in the professional ranks. By the late 1970s, some NHL coaches began adding talent from Europe and elsewhere. Indeed, several of the American gold-medal team members from the legendary 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games went on to successful NHL careers. This development did not end the preference for Canadian players. In fact, the competition for talent was so fierce that the WHA allowed its teams to sign underage players. In 1978, for example, the Indianapolis Racers signed the underage sensation, Wayne Gretzky, to a contract.

Wayne Gretzky Born in 1961 in Brantford, Ontario, Wayne Douglas Gretzky was the dominant player in professional hockey. Even when he was a young child, Gretzky’s talent as a hockey player surpassed players of his age group. In 1978 the Indianapolis Racers of the upstart WHA signed Gretzky as an underage player. Unlike other hockey contracts, Gretzky’s was a personal service contract to the Racers’ owner Nelson Skalbania. Skalbania ran into financial problems during the season and sold Gretzky’s contract to the Edmonton Oilers, where he led the team in scoring and finished third in the league. With Gretzky, the Oilers made it to the WHA final, only losing the championship to the Winnipeg Jets four games to two. Prior to the Oilers became part of the NHL-WHA merger in 1979, Oilers’ owner Peter Pocklington extended Gretzky’s personal-service contract to twenty years, the longest professional contract in sport at the time. Although Gretzky was very successful in the WHA, critics doubted whether he could compete in the established NHL especially Gretzky’s physique. As an eighteenyear-old, Gretzky stood at six feet weighing only 160 pounds. In his first NHL season, however, Gretzky won the league’s Most Valuable Player, an award he would win for the next seven seasons. He also tied with Marcel Dionne of the Los Angeles Kings for the scoring title although Dionne received title because he had scored more goals than Gretzky. For the 1980–81 season, Gretzky surpassed his previous season’s scoring prowess and registered 164 points with 55 goals and 109 assists. In the nine seasons as an NHL Oiler, the Great One broke all kinds of records, many of which remain unbroken today, and helped to establish the Oilers’ hockey dynasty in the 1980s.

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Despite its ability to sign young talent, the WHA remained an unstable league. In the same season that Gretzky made his WHA debut, only six teams remained and negotiations for a merger with the NHL began. In 1979 the NHL agreed to absorb four WHA teams, Edmonton, Hartford, Quebec, and Winnipeg, and paid the remaining two WHA franchises, Cincinnati and Birmingham, $1.5 million each as compensation. Although labeled as a merger, the terms were fairly one-sided favoring the NHL. All four WHA franchises had to pay a new franchise fee and NHL teams could reclaim players who had jumped their NHL contracts. Thus, the NHL ended its expansion by the end of the decade with twenty-one teams spreading across the North American continent. The 1970s and ’80s saw the last glory days of dynasties. Continuing its dominance from the 1950s and ’60s, the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in 1971 and 1973 and, beginning in the 1975–76 season, garnered four more titles consecutively. Then the New York Islanders, an expansion franchise, had its own run as Stanley Cup winners Wayne Gretzky. (Courtesy of late in the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Yet, the Islanders Photofest) were not the first expansion team to win the league championship. Rather, that honor went to the Philadelphia Flyers, who won in 1974 and again in 1975. Known, affectionately by their fans and distastefully by their critics, as the “Broad Street Bullies,” the Flyers employed a physical style of play that intended to intimidate their opponents. This strategy often led to mass brawling between the Flyers and their opponents. The Flyers’ strategic violence contrasted sharply with the European style, which emphasized skating, puck-handling, and passing. Although NHL fans had witnessed the Europeans’ capability with a sprinkling of Scandinavian players, it was the Soviets, the pre-eminent power in international hockey, who epitomized this type of play. As the NHL was not involved in any international tournaments such as the Olympic Winter Games or the World Championship, the test between the different approaches to the sport came to a head in September 1972 when the NHL and the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation agreed to play a Summit Series pitting an NHL all-star selection against the Soviet national team. In the context of the Cold War, the series occurred under intense nationalistic feelings, especially because the Soviets represented the first real test between the best in professional against the best in amateur hockey. To defeat the Soviets would be an affirmation of Western ideals and, important for Canadian hockey fans, confirmation of the superiority of NHL (translation: Canadian) hockey. For many followers of the sport, they expected no less than a complete annihilation of the Soviet national team by the NHL all-stars. To the surprise and dismay of Canadians and NHL fans in North America, the NHL all-stars managed only one victory, one tie, and two losses in the first four games played in Canada. Criticized and jeered by Canadians at home, the NHL all-stars traveled to the Soviet Union for the remaining four games. Frustrated by the losses, some players on the team resorted to physical intimidation. In an ugly incident in game 7, Bobby Clarke of the Philadelphia Flyers deliberately

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swung his hockey stick at the Soviet star Valery Kharlamov and fractured Kharlamov’s ankle. People may still debate whether Kharlamov’s injury affected the outcome as the NHL All-Stars managed to eke out an overall tournament victory. They won three out of the four remaining games, with a thrilling 6–5 victory in game 8 that was forever memorialized in hockey lore when Paul Henderson scored the game-winning goal with only thirty-four seconds left. The victory by the NHL all-stars over the Soviets seemed to confirm the superiority of the NHL brand. More introspective hockey observers in Canada realized, however, that the European style of play could be just as effective. Moreover, the success of the series in terms of viewership convinced both professional hockey owners and the Soviets that this type of competition could be profitable. Indeed, the WHA, whose players were excluded in the 1972 series, held its version of the Summit Series in 1974. The NHL initiated the Canada Cup in 1976, which continued into the 1980s. Soviet club teams also toured North America, bringing their style of play to franchises located in Canada as well as the United States. While these exchanges did not help to end the Cold War, more and more NHL fans came to appreciate the European style, which aided in the acceptance of European players as well as American college hockey players. Despite the challenge of a new league and the emergence of the Soviets and Scandinavians as hockey powers, the NHL thrived in the 1970s. Aided by a moreor-less compliant union, the league expanded its territories and helped in securing network television contracts with CBS (1968–72) and NBC (1973–75). Yet the NHL remained on the margin of a major-league status. By the middle of the decade, U.S. television networks gave up on the NHL as part of their programming because of consistently poor ratings. Whereas local television broadcasts in some of the traditional American hockey markets were profitable, the league found attracting new adherents to the NHL brand a difficult task. With rising salaries because of the bidding war between NHL and AHL, the NHL governors selected John Ziegler, a lawyer, as the new league president in 1977, replacing the retired Clarence Campbell. Ziegler became the first American to hold that post. Although Ziegler moved the NHL head office from Montreal to New York, he was no more successful in landing a network television contract than his predecessor. The difficulty in broadening the appeal of the NHL in the United States and the concomitant absence of a network television deal for a national audience would impact the NHL’s growth as a major league in the United States in the next decade and beyond.

The Olympic Games All three Summer Olympic Games in the 1970s had their share of political problems. Many groups used these sporting spectacles as opportunities to promote their political agendas, knowing that television would provide a captive international audience. For the 1972 Games in Munich, West Germany, the organizing committee and the country hoped to present a new Germany that promoted peace and renounced its racist, anti-Semitic past. Indeed, one of the highlights of the Games was American swimmer Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals. Of Jewish heritage, Spitz set a world record in every one of the seven events. His achievement was celebrated in Germany and symbolized a change in attitude in a country that systematically persecuted Jews only some thirty years earlier.

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On September 5, however, Palestinian gunmen belonging to a group called Black September entered the Olympic Village and held eleven Israeli athletes and officials hostage. They demanded the Israeli government release Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for the hostages. As the hosts of the Games, the Germans were horrified, as it seemed once again Jews were in peril on German soil. When the Israeli government refused to negotiate with the Palestinian hostage-takers, the German government decided to rescue the hostages who, along with five hostage-takers, died in a shootout in an airport. The killing of the Israeli athletes and officials pointed to the reality that an international spectacle such as the Olympic Games could be used by disgruntled groups to make a political statement. In the handling of the crisis by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or, more precisely, IOC president Avery Brundage, the Mark Spitz holds five of the seven gold medals he ideologues of amateurism struck back. Amid calls won at the Olympics in Munich, Germany. In an for the cancellation of the Games, Brundage declared that “the Games must go on.” Speaking interview on July 2, 2008, with the Associated Press, the star of the 1972 Munich Games left lit- in the memorial service for the slain Israelis on September 6, he lamented the encroachment of tle doubt that he expected his thirty-six-year-old mark to be on the Olympic books for only politics and commercialism into the Olympic another month or so. Michael Phelps broke Games. Yet he assured the world that the IOC Spitz’s record of seven gold medals at the Olymwould not surrender to these intrusions. Brundpics in Beijing. (AP / Wide World Photo) age and other like-minded proponents of amateurism were fighting against the evils and cynicisms of the world in order to preserve all that is good in sport and, as the 1972 Games massacre of the Israelis showed, they were barely holding on. Of course, money and politics had been with the Olympic Games long before 1972. Even though the mixture of politics and sport was most visible in the hostage crisis as television cameras followed the incident, politics had also quietly ousted Rhodesia’s Olympic membership before the 1972 Games began. Amidst a wave of anticolonial, anti-imperial sentiments at home, the African nations convinced the IOC and, against Brundage’s wishes, barred the Rhodesians, who had already arrived in Munich, from participating in the Games. The expulsion of Rhodesia clearly attested to the utilization of sport in achieving a political aim. In 1970 the IOC had stripped South Africa of its membership because of its racist apartheid policy. Rhodesia, however, had no such policy for its sport programs and Olympic team. Yet, other African nations wanted to bring down Rhodesia’s white minority government and one strategy was to isolate the country in the international sporting community. In the face of a possible boycott of the 1972 Games by twenty-one African teams, the IOC voted to exclude the Rhodesians. The Africans were not the only ones to use the Olympic Games as a platform to advance an agenda. Especially in the highly heated atmosphere during the Cold

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1972 Olympic Basketball Since the introduction of basketball as an Olympic sport in 1936, the United States had never lost a game. Its teams dominated the tournaments. Having handily disposed most of its opponents, the American team faced the Soviets in the final game on September 10, 1972, in Munich. The Soviets led the game most of the way until three seconds were left on the clock. Doug Collins then made two free throws to give the American team a 50–49 lead. The officials, however, stopped the game with one second left after the Soviets put the ball into play after Collins’s free throws. Apparently, the Soviet coach had asked for a timeout in between the free throws but the referees never acknowledged it, so the officials added two more seconds to replay the last three seconds. When the Soviets put the ball in play a second time and missed a shot from half court, the horn sounded, signaling the end of the game, and the Americans began celebrating. The Soviet coach, however, protested that the timekeeper never reset the clock to three seconds. Under the intervention of the president of basketball’s international federation (FIBA), R. William Jones of Great Britain, the officials ordered the teams to back onto the court. Confusion reigned and the American coaching staff questioned the ruling. In the end, the two sides lined up for yet another in-bound play. The Soviets then threw a long pass down the court and scored just as time expired, winning the contest 51–50. Immediately the American delegation filed a protest, which was rejected by FIBA’s five-member panel in a vote of 3 to 2. All three Communist-bloc members (Hungary, Poland, and Cuba) on the panel voted against the United States with Italy and Puerto Rico voting for. Feeling that they had been wronged, the Americans decided not to accept the silver medal.

War, the Soviet-led Communist bloc and the Western nations–specifically the United States—treated the Games and the achievements of their athletes as testaments to the strength of their respective nations. Indeed, failures in the Olympics, especially in events that each nation had traditionally dominated, became national disasters, which often prompted public outcry and indignation. In 1972 the U.S. basketball team lost the gold medal against the Soviet Union in a controversial final. In addition, two American sprinters, Eddie Hart and Rey Robinson, both of whom had run 100 meters in under ten seconds, missed their second-round heats because they were given an outdated schedule. Both were therefore disqualified. Worse, a Soviet sprinter won the 100-meter final the next day. Since both basketball and men’s sprints in track were considered America’s sure bets toward the total metal tally, Congress held hearings into the fiasco and in 1978 passed the Amateur Sports Act that restructured the United States amateur sport organization at the elite level, creating, among other initiatives, the U.S. Olympic Training Center at Colorado Springs. Boycotts or threats of boycott of the Olympic Games based on political expediency continued throughout the 1970s. For the 1976 Games in Montreal, the Chinese and New Zealand questions dominated the IOC discussions and resulted in the absence of both the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese Olympic teams. On the other hand, the presence of New Zealand led to a boycott by twenty-eight African nations who perceived New Zealand’s sport ties, the South African rugby

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tour in particular, as a slight to Africans’ determination to isolate South Africa from the world. While America had little involvement in the 1972 and 1976 boycotts, it was the chief instigator for the boycott in the 1980 Moscow Games. The IOC’s selection of Moscow as the site to host the 1980 Games was a controversial one. With the Cold War still raging, there had been calls in the West to boycott the Games or change the venue after the IOC awarded the Games to Moscow in 1974. By 1979 President Carter’s administration had been besieged by domestic and diplomatic problems. Carter was seeking re-election, but the American public had lost faith in him as his approval rating sagged to as low as 25 percent. As a demonstration of his abilities as a leader, Carter called for a boycott of the Moscow Games, citing the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December as a threat to America’s security. About three weeks before the opening of the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York, Carter announced that the Soviets had to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan or the United States would organize a boycott of the Moscow Games. Under an atmosphere of heightened patriotism (driven by the Cold War and the recent Afghanistan invasion) in Lake Placid, the American Olympic hockey team came from behind to defeat a highly touted Soviet Union squad in the medal round by a score of 4–3, and then defeated Finland in another come-from-behind victory two nights later to ensure the second-ever Olympic gold medal in hockey for the United States. With a successful Winter Games in the United States over, Carter began to push for the boycott of the Moscow Games in earnest. Because the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) was (and is) a private organization, Carter had no authority over it. Hence he resorted to a combination of threats, persuasion, and appeal to patriotism. Under intense government and public pressure, the USOC voted overwhelmingly to boycott the 1980 Games, although the athletes were divided in their opinions. Carter also tried to convince other noncommunist nations to follow America’s lead. Great Britain’s government could not prevent its Olympic team from going to Moscow. Whether the boycott was successful or not remained in doubt as the French, Italian, and most of the non-Islamic African states also chose to participate. Sixty-five countries eventually stayed home but eighty did show up in Moscow. Politics were not the only intrusion into the amateur foundation of the Olympic Games. As the international sporting spectacle became a more and more important event, the commercialization of the Games and the participating athletes also helped to dilute the amateur ideal. To stage a world-class event such as the Olympic Games requires financing. In the 1970s television broadcast fees, together with government support, underwrote the spectacles. For television networks in America and abroad, sport events were ready-made programming and had an identifiable target audience with which the networks could sell advertising to corporations. And the Olympics had additional appeal to American audiences. As a major international sporting occasion, the Olympic Games presented a testing ground for the Cold War and a chance for unbridled national chauvinism. Especially in head-tohead competitions against the Soviet Union, such as the Lake Placid hockey game, victories were projected as proof to the superiority of American democracy over Soviet communism. For those who were leery of the social and political turmoil since the 1960s, the amateur idealism of the Olympics reminded them of a time, though mythical, when sport represented all that was virtuous.

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Roone Arledge began producing the Olympic Games for ABC at the 1968 Games and brought his innovations in televising other sport programs to the 1972 and 1976 summer Olympic broadcasts. The success of these broadcasts, in turn, drove all three major American networks into frenzied bidding for the Games’ television rights. Broadcast fees had increased from $13.5 million (from ABC) for the Munich Games to $25 million (ABC) in Montreal to $85 million (NBC) in Moscow. (NBC did cancel the broadcast in compliance with President Carter’s request to boycott the Games.) Increasingly, these rising television revenues became a sore point among the IOC, the various organizing committees, and the international sport federations. Although money had driven a wedge among the different “amateur” sport governing bodies, the amateur ideal did not forbid them from benefiting financially. Only when athletes acquired financial gains from their athletic prowess did the heavy hand of amateurism come down upon them. In fact, there were few Olympic athletes who were not financially sponsored either by the government or private money. While the IOC turned its head away from government-sponsored athletes such as those in the Communist-bloc countries or the NCAA scholarships, it frowned on private money, especially commercial endorsements by athletes, even as the organization chased them itself. In the 1972 Sapporo (Japan) Winter Games, IOC president Brundage chose to make an example out of Austrian skier Karl Schranz for transgressions against amateurism. Brundage originally wanted to ban more than forty skiers. Fearing a boycott and a fiasco, Brundage came down hard on Schranz. Accusing him of receiving money from ski manufacturers in exchange for endorsement—a common practice among top caliber skiers—Brundage banished Schranz from the Games. Unable to get a hearing with Brundage, Schranz publicly chastised Brundage for embracing an ideal that would only allow the rich to participate in the Games. He also questioned why Brundage banned him from the Games, when the Communist-bloc athletes were heavily subsidized by their governments, not for their supposed positions in the armed forces or industry, but their athletic skills. Some 200,000 Austrians greeted Schranz in a hero’s welcome when he returned to Austria, seeing Brundage as the villain in this drama. Schranz’s disqualification at the Sapporo Games represented a last hurrah for Brundage and his hard-line stance against professionalism, however, since his term of office as IOC president expired after the Summer Games in Munich. Although not one to promote professionalism, Brundage’s successor, Lord Killanin (Ireland), did not pursue the question of amateurism as fervently as Brundage. Under Juan Antonio Samaranch (Spain), who took office in 1980, the Olympic Games would eventually distance themselves from the issue of amateurism as a condition to participate in the Games. Although the fight for amateurism gradually faded into the background, a different battle against the violation of “pure” sport began to take shape in the 1970s. In the 1976 Games, the East German women’s swim team dominated the field by winning eleven gold and five silver medals in the thirteen-event meet and, in the process, destroyed the pretournament favorite Americans. The team’s star, Kornelia Ender, corralled four gold medals and set a world record in each one of them. East Germany was equally superior in women’s track and field. In fact, Communist-bloc countries won all except one event in this sport. Immediately, rumors and accusations against the Soviet bloc, and especially the East German, women athletes of

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using anabolic steroids began to surface. While the Soviets led the medal count of the 1976 Games, many people were suspicious of East Germany’s achievements. With only 16 million people, East Germany placed third in total medals won (89) behind the Soviets (124) and the Americans (94). But it had the second most gold medals (40). Only the Soviets had more with 49. Despite extensive drug testing during the Games, no one on the East German swim or track and field team failed these tests (though many were discovered after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989). On the other hand, the IOC disqualified eight weightlifters for testing positive for anabolic steroids. These disqualifications happened to athletes in Communist and non-Communist countries alike. Of the eight, two were Americans.

Women’s Sports: “I am woman, hear me roar!” Australian singer Helen Reddy released her hit song, “I Am Woman,” considered by some as the unofficial anthem of the women’s rights movement, in 1972 and Congress passed the Educational Amendments Act in the same year. Included in the legislation was Title IX. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon on June 23, Title IX states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Although Title IX did not specifically address sports, the consequences would indeed be far-reaching in intercollegiate athletics, impacting its organization and administration. Not only did college athletics feel Title IX’s impact, the subsequent struggles to enforce and to undermine this legislation by defenders and opponents of Title IX provided a very salient reminder of the issue of gender beyond the sports world. One year prior to the passage of Title IX, intercollegiate athletics for women had undergone a transformation. Deviating from the long-held ideal of de-emphasizing elite-level competition, a group of woman athletic administrators established the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). Although AIAW instituted national championships in women’s athletics, its leaders were determined to avoid the pitfalls of the men’s intercollegiate athletics, namely, the corrupting influence of commercialism and the overemphasis on winning at all cost. As they saw it, one way to counter these evils was the prohibition of athletic scholarships. Having long ignored college women athletics, the NCAA nevertheless initially tried to establish some kind of relationship with the AIAW. In a bitter struggle against the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for control of amateur sports in the United States, the NCAA wanted to legitimize its ambition but that meant NCAA had to offer both men’s and women’s programs. Since it never had any interest in women’s athletics, the NCAA saw the AIAW as an answer and invited the women leaders to discuss possible affiliation in 1971. Yet the two sides could not come to an agreement because the AIAW viewed the proposed affiliation by the NCAA as a threat to its autonomy and control over women’s athletics. Since the AIAW’s stance on scholarship contradicted NCAA practice also, the two organizations decided to go their separate ways. After Title IX came into existence, however, the NCAA amended its regulations to make governing women’s sports possible. Although the NCAA changed its mission by including athletic championships for women in 1972, it did not entirely welcome Title IX, as its members equated

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gender equity to diversion of funds from the men’s programs. Even before the legislation’s enforcement, NCAA actively lobbied Congress and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), the agency charged with enforcing the new law, to exempt athletic programs. Through the generally friendly media and sympathetic politicians, the NCAA argued that applying Title IX to athletic departments would destroy intercollegiate athletics. More specifically, athletic departments just did not have enough resources to fund both men’s and women’s programs. Women’s programs had traditionally been housed in the physical education department and had little financial resources. Since the athletic department did not believe women’s programs would contribute to any significant revenues, adding women’s programs would only take away funding from the other men’s programs. Similar cries of doom extended beyond colleges and universities and into interscholastic athletics. In 1975, HEW issued the final Title IX regulation that included specific provisions against sex discrimination in sport programs. All institutions were given three years to comply before sanctions took effect. Efforts by the NCAA and its allies to derail and circumvent Title IX continued through the decade however. Together with Dewey Bartlett (R-Oklahoma) and Roman Hruska (R-Nebraska), Sen. John Tower, for example, again introduced a bill to exempt men’s football and basketball from the law in 1977. Without exception, these efforts did not bear fruit, but the resentment toward Title IX continued into the next decade when these dissenting voices received a much warmer response in the Reagan administration. Failing to stop Title IX in the political arena, the NCAA took a different tack. It challenged the interpretation of the legislation. Since most athletic departments did not receive federal funding directly, the NCAA argued that intercollegiate athletic programs and their administration were exempt from the law. In 1976 the NCAA filed suit against the HEW, alleging HEW had overstepped its bounds in applying Title IX to college athletics and that the HEW’s interpretation of the law was faulty. In January 1978, federal District Court Judge Earl E. O’Connor dismissed the case because the NCAA could not prove Title IX actually harmed the men’s athletic programs. Although NCAA had failed in the courts, its challenge on HEW’s Title IX regulations revealed the ambiguity of the original statute. The spirit of the law was meant to eliminate discrimination based on sex; but how would HEW and the courts determine if the schools were complying with the law? It took another year before HEW issued a policy interpretation on Title IX and intercollegiate athletics. In December of 1979, HEW released a set of guidelines that provided three avenues in which a school could be deemed as compliant with the legislation. Known as the Three-Prong Test, they examined if athletic opportunities for each sex were substantially proportionate to student enrollment; if the institution had demonstrated a continual expansion of opportunities for the underrepresented group; and if the interests of the underrepresented groups had been accommodated. Despite this attempt to clarify compliance, controversy over interpretation continued after the 1970s. The continuous and unsuccessful attempts by the NCAA to stall and to reverse Title IX would significantly impact the governance of intercollegiate athletics, for both men and women. Fearing government sanctions, NCAA began to examine the feasibility of initiating women’s programs. In the latter part of the decade, the

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NCAA began to consider seriously instituting women’s championships on its own and, in 1980, the NCAA voted to host championships in all three divisions. For the AIAW, the intrusion of the NCAA into women’s sports posed dangerous challenges. Despite the prevailing negative attitude about women in competitive sports at the time, the AIAW had seen its membership grow in this decade. Within five years of the passage of Title IX, the number of college women athletes had doubled. AIAW membership had grown from the 278 original charter members to over 900 in 1980. AIAW forbade the granting of athletic scholarships. In 1973 Fern Kellmeyer, the director of physical education at Marymount College in Florida, and eleven female tennis players from two colleges (Marymount and Broward Community College) filed suit, naming among the defendants AIAW. In an ironic twist, they charged that the AIAW policy of prohibiting athletic scholarships amounted to discrimination and violated the equal protection provision in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution as well as Title IX. Since male athletes at these schools could receive scholarships, the AIAW policy of no scholarships created a separate group with unequal treatment. Knowing that it would lose the case in court, the AIAW abandoned the policy and the court dismissed the case. Yet the Kellmeyer case was the first step toward a shift from the idealistic educational model that had its roots in the late nineteenth century to the male commercial model so abhorred by women sport leaders in educational institutions. Indeed, AIAW would begin acquiring sponsorships and contracts for televising its championships. In 1977 the AIAW formalized this change by creating a promotions committee whose goal was to seek endorsements, and Eastman Kodak became the first major corporate sponsor of AIAW. The shift from an educational to a commercial model by AIAW presaged the eventual demise of the AIAW early in the next decade. When the NCAA announced that it would start hosting national championships, many of the top universities and colleges decided to abandon AIAW for the NCAA in 1980. With the decrease in members, the AIAW’s attractiveness to sponsors and television networks also diminished, and the AIAW would cease to operate within two years. Although the AIAW no longer exists, its legacy, coupled with the empowerment of Title IX, to women athletics is significant. At a time when women sports were being belittled and ignored, a group of dedicated women decided to promote the possibilities and joy of competition. Moreover, it promoted not only women athletes but also offered opportunities to women in athletic administration, coaching, and officiating. Whether one agrees with AIAW’s educational model or not, the number of girls and women participating in sports in the 1970s increased by leaps and bounds. AIAW’s creation came at a time when women in general sought a greater voice in society. Both the organization’s and Title IX’s effectiveness were significant enough that they generated a backlash against gains by women in the next decade under the Reagan administration. Between 1971 and 1980, the number of women athletes in intercollegiate sports increased from just under 30,000 to over 74,000. More dramatically, the participation rate in interscholastic sports jumped from about 300,000 to nearly 2 million. Yet, women’s increasing assertiveness in the world of sports extended beyond the ivied walls. Little League Baseball abandoned its “boys only” policy in 1974 amid lawsuits and public condemnation for excluding girls. Between 1976 and 1980, the

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International Women’s Professional Softball Association had franchises located from coast to coast. In 1978 the Women’s Professional Basketball Leagues began operations. Riding the wave of the women’s rights movement and Title IX, women outside the confines of educational institutions also broke through age-old restrictions and perceptions on their capabilities and abilities.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing Professional boxing also enjoyed a period of success during the 1970s. American humiliation in international politics, advances in women’s causes in challenging gender roles, changing attitudes in racial issues, and American penchant for sport entertainment put the heavyweight division, in particular, in the spotlight as the title holder represented a confirmation in the relationship between hypermasculinity and individual success. Since most of the heavyweight contenders and all the title-holders were Americans, many Americans could boast American superiority in an otherwise international sport. This decade witnessed dominance of a number of boxers as well as highly-promoted rivalries. Television, of course, played a part in promoting boxing but noted promoters also played their part. As a lightning rod of the changes in American society, Muhammad Ali perhaps represented a most visible symbol of shifting public acceptance of differences. Vilified by many for his conversion to Islam and refusal to be inducted into the armed services, Ali had drawn many more supporters in the 1970s, as the Vietnam War became more and more unpopular. In 1967, the U.S. government had taken away Ali’s passport and Ali was waiting for the appeal of his five-year prison sentence for refusing to be drafted into the army. When Ali’s legal team successfully challenged the New York State Athletic Commission’s refusal to grant Ali a boxing license, promoters immediately arranged a championship bout dubbed “Fight of the Century” between Ali and the champion, Joe Frazier, in March 1971. The media characterized Frasier as the representative of patriotic America who took on a rebel. Long absent from the ring since he was banned from fighting, Ali lost a close decision to Frazier, but the match was a dream for the promoters who took in more than $20 million. Ali, however, would have another shot at the title. In June 1971 the Supreme Court in an 8–0 decision accepted Ali’s argument that his refusal to join the army was based on religious grounds, thus overturning his conviction and jail sentence. With his name cleared, Ali sought another opportunity to challenge for the heavyweight championship again. Ali had to wait though. After the Fight of the Century, Frazier had accepted a challenge from George Foreman, a title bout that Frazier lost. To prepare his shot for the heavyweight title, Ali also fought Ken Norton, who broke Ali’s jaw in a twelve-round decision. In 1974, Ali’s camp chose Don King to arrange a title match. King was a newcomer to boxing promotion and his highest-profile match until that time was a championship bout in March between George Foreman and Ken Norton. As a black entrepreneur, King had positioned himself as a promoter of black interests. Arguing that boxing was benefiting only the white, New York–based minority who controlled the sport, King was determined to break that influence. He stunned the boxing world when he announced a $10-million title bout between

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Don King Don King (b.1931) grew up in a Cleveland ghetto and made himself into one of the most powerful figures in the boxing world. In his early years, King ran a numbers operations. He was twice convicted of killing another person. The first incident happened in 1954 but the court ruled that the killing was a justifiable homicide as King shot one of three men trying to rob his numbers operations. In 1966 the court found him guilty of beating a man who owed him money to death and sentenced him to four years in prison. After his release from prison, King turned to promoting boxing. His first contact with Muhammad Ali was a request to the former champion to put on an exhibition to raise money for the Forest City Hospital, which faced closure because of lack of funds. King had a knack for befriending good African American fighters, at least initially, as some, including Ali, sued him later on. One reason was that he offered fighters a much bigger purse than they usually received. He promised Ali and Foreman $5 million each, an unheard-of sum in boxing at the time, for Rumble in the Jungle in 1974. King’s detractors, however, argued that the promoter was exploiting the fighters, like most boxing promoters, and he was just as corrupt. In 1976 ABC signed with Don King Productions, Inc., an exclusive contract to broadcast a series of boxing matches to determine U.S. champions in various weight classes. Charges of manipulation of boxers’ rankings resulted in a federal grand jury and Federal Communications Commission investigations as well as congressional hearings. Although investigations showed there had been false rankings and kickbacks to agents, no indictments were leveled against King. Despite his occasional legal troubles, King remained a power in the boxing world well beyond the 1970s and indeed, his fame was such that Jimmy Carter courted King, seeking support and endorsement, during his presidential campaign in 1976.

Foreman and Ali to be held in Kinshasa, Zaire. In selecting Zaire, King took advantage of rising African nationalism and black consciousness in America. (Zaire dictator and president Joseph Desire Mobutu promised to back the purse). No doubt it was also a slight to the current boxing power in the United States, which could present possible barriers to the fight. On October 30, 1974, Ali knocked George Foreman out in the eighth round in the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Although the event lost money, the Zaire fight was significant for several reasons. Until the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ali, his passport was held by the government and he was restricted to traveling in the United States only. As government and boxing authorities denied Ali a license to box, Ali in effect had no opportunity to make a living from boxing. The fight in Zaire symbolized Ali’s freedom to travel and fight anywhere. Moreover, Ali’s victory rebuked his critics who had written him off after his defeats at the hands of Frazier and Norton. Important also, the crowd and many locals in Zaire rooted for Ali, despite the fact that both fighters were Americans. This adoration affirmed Ali as a symbol and a champion for those who had been wronged and oppressed, but persisted and finally prevailed. For the Zairian government, the Rumble in the Jungle was a chance to

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demonstrate the capability of an African country to host a world-class event and, hopefully, an elevation of the country’s status in the world stage. While it is questionable whether Zaire’s reputation had improved because of the title bout, Don King certainly had increased his status as a boxing promoter, and he would follow the Rumble in the Jungle with another boxing spectacle, the “Thrilla in Manila,” a third match between Ali and Frazier, on October 1, 1975. (In order to challenge Foreman for the heavyweight title, Ali had beaten Frazier in a rematch held on January 28, 1974.) Unlike their first encounter in 1971, the “Thrilla in Manila,” by and large, did not have the same political undertone as American involvement in Vietnam had ended and many Americans had changed their views on Ali. Yet the animosity that had been building between the two combatants made this match a most memorable event. Broadcast live for the first time by a television network, Home Box Office (HBO), via satellite, the match went to fourteen rounds before Frazier’s trainer stopped Boxer George Foreman. (Courtesy of Photofest) the fight. In the last few rounds, Ali’s punches to Frazier’s head had disfigured his face and Frazier could hardly see with the swelling. Frazier, however, refused to go down. Instead, he kept coming after Ali. This bout so captivated the American public that in next year, the American Bicentennial, both fighters shared the honors of “Fighter of the Year.” Sportswriters, editors, and broadcasters named Ali the greatest boxer in history, over such notables as Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, and Joe Louis. The era of Ali and Frazier came to a close when Joe Frazier retired from the ring in 1978. Ali announced his retirement the following year but not before he lost his heavyweight title to Leon Spinks in Las Vegas on February 15, 1978. Ali then regained it in a fifteen-round match in September in the Louisiana Superdome, making him the first three-time heavyweight champion. Aside from Ali’s record, the second Ali-Spinks bout also indicated the organizational problem and corruption in professional boxing. In the 1970s two governing bodies, the World Boxing Association (WBA) and the World Boxing Council (WBC), ruled professional boxing. As an organization created in the United States, American influence dominated the WBA until the mid 1970s when Latin Americans gained control of the organization. On the other hand, the WBC retained a significant American influence. While each crowned its own champions in different weight classes, on occasions they agreed to sanction unification bouts where the winner would be declared the undisputed world champion. The first Ali-Spinks match was such an example of cooperation between the two governing bodies.

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When Spinks decided to fight Ali in the rematch, however, the WBC stripped his title because it had ordered Spinks to fight the next WBC title contender, Ken Norton. Since Spinks fought Ali instead, the WBC declared Norton heavyweight champion without Norton fighting against the current champion. At the time, there were rumors that Don King was behind the dismissal as he represented Norton, and King wanted to promote a Norton-Spinks title bout. Some even charged that the WBC had become a supporting organization for King’s boxing enterprise. Still, there were two heavyweight champions, Norton and Ali, for the first time in this decade. Norton subsequently lost his title to Larry Holmes in June 1978. In October 1980 Ali came out of retirement and challenged Holmes, who scored a technical knockout against the thirty-eight-year-old former champion. Holmes would continue as champion in the early 1980s whereas Ali would fight one more time (losing) in 1981 before he retired for good. With the dispute between rival boxing organizations and the retirement of Ali, boxing, at least in the heavyweight division, would not generate the same kind of publicity and excitement for some time to come despite Don King’s knack for promotion.

Golf On January 31, 1971, Commander Alan Shepard of Apollo 14 took a shot at a golf ball with a six-iron on the surface of the moon in the third moon landing. While the Apollo 14 mission represented the United States’ growing success in the space program, Shepard’s golf shots indicated the growing popularity of the sport. Arnold Palmer, the charismatic professional, had converted many middle-class sport enthusiasts to take up golf since the 1960s, despite the sport, like tennis, being traditionally associated with upper-class lifestyle and country clubs. Like tennis, golf had its share of notable players that helped in the popularity of the sport and Jack Nicklaus was probably the most popular of them all in the 1970s. Although Nicklaus had started his golf career in the early 1960s, he really blossomed late that decade and into much of the 1970s. In 1971 Nicklaus became the first player to have won all four major championships in men’s golf, the U.S. Open, the British Open, the Masters, and the Professional Golf Association (PGA) championship, twice in a career; and he bettered this feat in 1978 by being the first person to have won each majors three times. Referred by the media as the Golden Bear, Nicklaus had a powerful drive as well as an accurate short game that made him a formidable player. He accumulated nine major titles between 1971 and 1980, winning twice in the Masters (1972, 1975) and the U.S. Open (1972, 1980), once in the British Open (1978), and four times in the PGA championship (1971, 1973, 1975, 1980). Although golfers like Nicklaus helped to popularize the sport, it was rare to see African American players in the majors. Lee Elder changed that when he became the first black golfer to compete in the Masters in 1975. Elder first became a member of the PGA when the organization abandoned its Caucasians-only policy (introduced in 1943) in 1961. In 1972 Elder accepted an invitation to play in the South African PGA tournament after its organizers agreed to have an integrated gallery and Elder and his wife enjoyed the same freedom as the South African white population while there. (At the time, the South African government had an official policy, apartheid, which legalized racial segregation and discrimination.)

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Elder then won the 1974 Monsanto Open, which automatically qualified him for the Masters, held annually at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. Created for America’s social elite, the Augusta National Golf Club was a private retreat for the wealthy besides being the host of the annual Masters tournament. Membership was (and still is) by invitation only. In 1973 a group of politicians, including U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, had urged the president of the Augusta National Golf Club to invite an African American to the Masters, naming Elder in the process. That request was denied. When Elder qualified, the media and other notables such as Jim Brown showed up in force. Like the treatment that Jackie Robinson received by the African Americans, the black workers at the club were in awe of Elder and catered to his every need. Elder, however, did not make the cut to the final round. While Elder played there in 1974 (and qualified again in 1977), the club had no African American members. Although the Masters was a prestigious tournament, the club hosting the tournament also represented the closed, white-only, old-boys elite clique in industry and politics. Similar to Jackie Robinson in baseball, Elder thus became the first African American to cross the racial barrier in “major-league” golf. After Elder’s last appearance in Masters in 1977, no other player of African American descent would appear in Augusta for the next twenty years. Women playing golf faced problems similar to those women faced in tennis. Between 1971 and 1980, women’s professional golf purses had increased from $558,550 to $5,150,000 and the number of tournaments rose from twenty-one to forty. Yet, the number of major tournaments with large purses for women remained few. At the beginning of the decade, there were only two major tournaments, the U.S. Open and the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) championship. In 1972 Colgate sponsored the Dinah Shore Winners Circle and offered a purse of $110,000, the first six-figure prize in women’s golf. In 1979 the du Maurier Classic was added as a major tournament for the women’s circuit. While there is no doubt that women’s golf saw advances, these paled in comparison to men’s gains. Arnold Palmer had earned over $1 million in career earnings in the late 1960s. Jack Nicklaus became the first golfer to win more than $200,000 in a single season in 1971 and at the end of the decade Tom Watson established a new mark of $500,000 in one season. Watson had been the top money earner of the PGA tour between 1976 and 1980. On the other hand, Kathy Whitworth, one of the most successful female golfers whose professional career spanned from the late 1950s to the 1980s, did not surpass the $1-million career-earning mark until 1981. Judy Rankin topped the $100,000 single-season earning in 1976 and not until 1980 did women golfers (Donna Caponi, Amy Alcott, and Nancy Lopez) reach the $200,000 mark. In 1972 Kathy Whitworth earned $65,000 from playing in twenty-nine tournaments whereas Jack Nicklaus won $320,000 from just nineteen. In 1975 LPGA hired Ray Volpe, a former vice-president of marketing of the NHL, as the commissioner for the organization, thus taking the administration of the LPGA away from the golfers themselves. Volpe’s job was to market the LPGA and women golfers to the public and corporate businesses in the hopes of raising LPGA’s profile and much-needed sponsorship money for the tours. Despite the discrepancies in earning power, women did take to golf, in part due to the passage of Title IX. Golf had the first women’s intercollegiate championship

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in 1942 and the sport became part of efforts by many colleges to comply with Title IX’s mandate of equal opportunity in women athletics. As women and girls took advantage of increased collegiate and scholastic athletic programs, golf would reap the benefits in the next decade as many top professional women golfers such as Betsy King (Furman University), Pat Bradley (Florida International University), and Nancy Lopez (University of Tulsa), came from the collegiate ranks. Ironically, many in the LPGA did not take to the feminist movement that contributed to the passage of Title IX. Since professional golf for women predated Title IX and since golf was an individual sport, they did not readily identify with the movement and, in fact, some viewed feminists with suspicion. Lopez, as a Hispanic, also illustrated the sport’s Eurocentric root and lack of diversity. Similar to tennis, there were few women of color in golf. When Lopez first turned pro in 1977, she made news as she won nine tournaments and was named Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year. The media presented her to the public and golf followers as a model of a more enlightened sport in which minorities were welcomed and could succeed even though many golf clubs around the nation still would not admit minorities as members.

Tennis For all the breakthroughs in women sports, none was as dramatic, symbolic, and visible in demystifying gender stereotypes in women tennis when Billie Jean King battled Bobby Riggs on the tennis court in 1973. Although tennis had been one of the few sports that allowed co-ed participation, the sport nevertheless had an entrenched gender divide that was crouched in upper- and middle-class Anglo gentility and gender roles. Most notably, American tennis, through its governing body, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), advocated amateurism even though major tournaments had been paying top amateur players under the table and men had been playing professionally for a long time. In the late 1960s, the international governing body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), classified some of the tournaments as open, thus allowing professionals and amateurs to compete against one another. Women tennis players, on the other hand, were discouraged from turning professional because, among other reasons, women tennis was simply not attractive enough as an entertainment. Hence, there would not be a demand for women professional tennis. Behind this rationale, of course, lay the assumption that men were better athletes. In tennis, the question of women’s professional tennis had to do with the institutional control of the sport. USLTA, a conservative, male-dominated organization, had steadfastly refused to endorse professionalism openly even though many female tennis players were receiving prize money. Although the USLTA supported the ILTF’s idea of open tournaments when it staged the U.S. Open in 1968, the number of tournaments offering prize money to women players remained few. Moreover, the prize money for women players was only a fraction of the men’s. In 1970, for example, the Pacific Southwest Championship men’s single winner took home $12,500 compared to $1,500 for the women’s champion. The total prize money for women in this tournament was a meager $7,500, which was only available to those in the quarterfinals and beyond. This inequity existed in all tennis tournaments that offered prize money.

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To complicate this matter more for those women who wanted to make a living playing tennis, there did not appear to be any rationale in determining one’s status. Some players were able to receive prize money and participate in amateur tournaments while others could not. Frustrated with confusing eligibility rules, limited opportunities, unequal treatment, and an unresponsive USLTA, Billie Jean King and eight other players each signed a one-dollar, one-week contract as employees of Gladys Heldman, owner of World Tennis Magazine, in 1970 and their job was to play in a $5,000-purse tournament—a tournament that the USLTA refused to sanction. The purse was subsequently raised to $7,500 when Joe Cullman, the head of Philip Morris and a friend of Heldman, agreed to sponsor the tournament. After the tournament was over, the USLTA suspended all eight players. (One of the nine players, Patti Hogan, did not sign with Heldman but was supportive of the others). Instead of asking the USLTA for reinstatement, these eight women pros decided to band together and set prices for any tournament that wanted women professional players—$5,000 for an eight-woman event, $10,000 for sixteen players, and $18,000 for thirty-two. Their solidarity defied the USLTA’s jurisdiction as the sole governing body in tennis. Since these eight players possibly represented the top eight in woman tennis, the USLTA eventually relented and lifted the suspensions. This initial relationship with Heldman by the women pros, however, led to the creation of the Virginia Slims Tour in 1971. Initially a series of eight tournaments across the country with a total purse of $75,000, the Virginia Slims circuit became the cornerstone in increasing women tennis players’ earnings. Although the USLTA momentarily avoided confrontation by welcoming the eight women pros back, tensions remained. In 1972 the USLTA signed an agreement recognizing the women professionals as an autonomous group in return for the women’s promise to stay within the USLTA and abide by its rules and regulations. Later that year, conflicts between Heldman and the USLTA prompted the establishment of the Women’s International Tennis Federation (WITF). Largely backed by the Virginia Slim circuit, the WITF attracted and signed many of the top American and European female tennis players including King and Margaret Court, the world’s number 1– and 2–ranked players. By 1973 the Virginia Slims circuit, as a result of good marketing and favorable public response, had grown to eighteen tournaments each with a purse of at least $25,000. To offset the breakaway group, the USLTA retaliated by setting up its own women circuit that included established players such as Virginia Wade, Evonne Goolagong, as well as a rising young talent, Chris Evert; and the ILTF, as the international governing body, sided with the USLTA and threatened to suspend all the WITF players from major championships such as the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. Similar to professional team sports, women tennis now had two competing organizations. While the USLTA had the backing of ILTF, the WITF had most of the big-name players. At the Wimbledon tournament in the summer of 1973, around fifty top international players, led by King, formed the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), replacing the WITF, and King became its first president. Besides the creation of a separate women tennis governing body, the 1973 Wimbledon tournament also brought to light the turmoil in men’s tennis. Although men’s tennis enjoyed much more prosperity, different groups struggled to control the sport in the early 1970s. By the beginning of the decade, two organizations, ILTF and the World Championship Tennis (WCT), had their own circuits. Players

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under contract to WCT competed in WCT tournaments. For those who were not under contract, they entered in the ILTF’s Grand Prix circuit as independent professionals. Caught in the struggles between the opposing organizations, the players organized the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). In 1973 ATP threatened a player boycott of the Wimbledon tournament because ILTF supported a ban of the Yugoslavian tennis star Nikki Pilic by his own national association. After failed negotiations between ATP and ILTF prior to the beginning of the tournament, thirteen of the top sixteen seeds withdrew. A total of seventy-nine players left the tournament, which now consisted mostly of players from the Communist-bloc countries and non-ATP players such as two young stars, the nineteen-year-old American Jimmy Connors and seventeen-year-old Swede Bjorn Borg. Despite the absence of many top male players, Wimbledon attendance did not suffer partly because the top female players were still there. It was under this context of rising power of women tennis and chaos in men’s side that the King-Riggs match occurred. Like King, Robert Larimore (Bobby) Riggs was also a world-class tennis player. But at fifty-five in 1973, his glory days had long passed. Yet he claimed that even at that age he could beat the best woman tennis had to offer because women were inherently inferior. He first challenged King, who refused. Although King declined, another top female tennis player, Margaret Court, accepted Riggs’s challenge and lost to Riggs in straight sets, 6–2 and 6–1. Riggs’s remarks and challenges came a year after the passage of Title IX and immediately created controversy polarizing people on both sides of the gender equity issue. With Court’s defeat, King felt compelled to meet Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes,” as the media hyped the match, at the Houston Astrodome on September 20. In front of a crowd of over 30,000, the biggest audience ever to attend a tennis match at the time, and a worldwide television broadcast, King defeated Riggs in straight sets, 6–4, 6–3, 6–3. Despite the organizational power struggles in both men’s and women’s tennis, the 1970s had been a glorious time for the sport. Besides the media-driven Battle of the Sexes, notable players in both men’s and women’s ranks helped to increase the popularity of tennis. Stars from the previous decade such as the Australian John Newcombe and American Arthur Ashe continued their successes and were now joined by other young talent like Stan Smith, Jimmy Connors, and John McEnroe. On the women’s side, young stars such as Goolagong, Evert, and Martina Navratilova added to the excitement generated by King, Court, and Wade. Between 1971 and 1980 Americans did very well in major tournaments, winning the men’s singles title in the U.S. Open six times, the Australian Open four times, and the Wimbledon three times. On the women’s side, Americans won the women’s singles title in the U.S. Open nine times, the Wimbledon seven times, and the French Open five times. This American success, however, was challenged by other nations’ tennis stars, especially in the latter half of decade. Beginning with his first victory in the French Open in 1974, Swedish sensation Bjorn Borg dominated tennis from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s, winning five consecutive Wimbledon’s men’s singles titles (defeating three Americans in four of those matches, Jimmy Connors in 1977 and 1978, Roscoe Tanner in 1979, and John McEnroe in 1980), five French Open singles (1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, and 1980) and runner-up in the U.S. Open three times. His two 1980 Grand Slam (Wimbledon and U.S. Open) title matches against McEnroe became legendary. In July

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Renee Richards, the transsexual tennis player, returns the ball, September 1, 1977, during the U.S. Open Competition at Forest Hills, NY. Richards was defeated by Britain’s Virginia Wade, 6–1, 6–4. The loss marked her debut at the U.S. Open. (AP / Wide World Photo)

Borg defeated McEnroe in the Wimbledon final in a grueling five-set match. In the U.S. Open, McEnroe reversed the fortune by beating Borg, also in five sets. On the women’s side, Chris Evert was the dominant player in the latter half of the decade. Between 1974 and 1980, she won eleven Grand Slam singles titles, including four French Open (1974, 1975, 1979, 1980), two Wimbledon (1974, 1976), and five U.S. Open (1975, 1976–78, 1980) and her success continued into the mid-1980s even with the emergence of Martina Navratilova as the premier woman tennis player in that decade. In the context of the 1970s, Evert became a very popular player with many fans and media. Compared to King’s prominent stance on feminism and Navratilova’s Czech origin, Evert’s good looks and quiet demeanor represented an updated version of American womanhood—a competitive and successful woman who also exuded femininity—a version more acceptable to many Americans than what King and Navratilova symbolized. The fact that Evert and Navratilova often faced each other in major tournaments made their tennis rivalry as fierce as the one between McEnroe and Borg. And the tennis establishment took a most public stance in promoting its definition of femininity when the U.S. Open banned Renee Richards from the 1976 tournament. Renee Richards was born Richard Raskind (b. 1935) and was a competitive tennis player before a man-towoman sex change. In fact, Raskind had married, fathered a son, served in the navy, and was an eye surgeon before his banishment from the U.S. Open. He had sex reassignment surgery in 1975. Richards’s former identity as a man was discovered in an amateur tennis tournament and she was subsequently barred from all women’s tournaments, including the U.S. Open. There was a public outcry

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and fear about the possibility that Richards would overwhelmed the other “women” players (even though Richards was forty years old at the time) and might even lead to other men-turned-women into the women’s tennis world. When the courts ruled for Richards, she entered in the 1977 Women’s Open but lost in the first round. Since Richards was never dominant in women’s tennis, as some critics feared, the controversy about her presence in the tennis circle eventually died down. To further clarify what women’s tennis meant, the United States Tennis Association (USTA, formerly USLTA) created a “women-born-women” policy that was ruled illegal by the New York State Supreme Court when Richards filed suit. This tension between womanhood and athlete remained a debate for many Americans and the media throughout this decade and beyond.

Thoroughbred Horse Racing The 1970s was the decade of the Triple Crown. The last Triple Crown winner, Affirmed, won all three races in 1978, ridden by Steve Cauthen. In each race Alydar finished second and the two horses met ten times in their careers, with Affirmed winning seven of the ten. After winning the Triple Crown, Affirmed raced in the fall in the Marlboro Cup Invitational Handicap, where the field included Seattle Slew. Slew had won the Triple Crown the previous year (1977) and few would have guessed that the next thirty years would bring no more Triple Crown winners. Seattle Slew defeated Affirmed by three lengths and then, a few weeks later, Slew won again. The two would never meet again. The next year Affirmed was named Horse of the Year as a four-year-old, then was retired to stud. Earlier in the decade (1973) Secretariat had also won the Triple Crown, the first of the three Triple Crown winners in that decade. Coming close were Canonero II, who won the Derby and the Preakness in 1971; Riva Ridge, who won the Derby and the Belmont in 1972; Bold Forbes, who won the Derby and the Belmont in 1976; and Spectacular Bid, who won the Derby and the Preakness in 1979. Ron Turcotte, who rode Riva Ridge and Secretariat, had the best record in the three races in the decade, while Steve Cauthen and Ron Franklin were also highly successful.

Auto Racing What had been largely a southern phenomenon began to gain more adherents nationally in the 1970s. Formula One racing was more of a European sport, but stock-car racing, under the leadership and control of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) grew to from its roots to a large national following. The Charlotte 600 and the Daytona 500, the two most well-known of the NASCAR races, were won most often by Richard Petty (six times) in the 1970s, but Darrell Waltrip, Buddy Baker, and Bobby Allison were also top drivers. The Indianapolis 500 race, held every Memorial Day weekend, consists of a different class of autos, called Indy class or open-wheel race cars. Some drivers cross over from NASCAR and vice versa, while others do not. In the 1970s, the Unser brothers, Al and Bobby, were the most successful drivers with Al taking three and Bobby, one Indianapolis 500. John Rutherford won the race twice in the decade and A.J. Foyt won both an Indy race and a Daytona 500 during the decade.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1970–1979

A NATIONAL(?) SPORTING CULTURE On September 7, 1979, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN), a twenty-four-hour, all-sports television station, began broadcasting from its Connecticut base. ESPN was unique at the time because its programs were available through subscriber-only cable television, a relatively new medium, whereas major networks aired their programs for free, recouping financially by selling advertising air time. More important, ESPN was one of the few television stations in the 1970s that employed a new business model in the television industry, narrowcasting–television that specialized on one type of programming. Seizing on the tremendous growth and popularity of sport in the United States, ESPN founders Bill and Scott Rasmussen believed that an all-sport channel could fill a desire by the American public since major networks devoted relatively little time to sport news and sport programs had to compete with other television programs for air time. While ESPN struggled initially to find enough programs to meet its needs, its eventual development into a major cable network in the next decade indicated that the Rasmussens had successfully tapped into the cravings of an existing national sporting culture. As a mass medium, television of course contributed to the making of an American national sporting culture. Broadcasts of sport programs, especially through skilled producers such as Roone Arledge, helped to popularize certain sports by reaching beyond the sport fandom and the physical confines of the contests. People needed not be residents of Miami or Cincinnati to be fans of the 1972 Dolphins or the 1975 Reds. Besides MLB and NFL, television had contracts with the NBA and the NHL. Indeed, all four major professional team sports, the most visible manifestations of this national sporting culture, had franchises located from coast to coast by the end of the 1970s. These expansions were driven in part by the need of television to reach a national audience. The content and the target of these broadcasts, however, focused overwhelmingly on a world of white, middle-class males, although African Americans and women did have some coverage. Moreover, increased television broadcast of sport and sport news also contributed to the erosion of the amateur ideal. While sport newscasters and commentators almost always hailed amateurism as a noble idea, television networks also carried news of labor strife, politics, and commercialization. Through mass media coverage also, modern sports such as baseball and football became normalized and standardized as what sport was supposed to be. Implicitly, the social hierarchies and relationships as well as sports’ values and beliefs that existed in this male-dominated realm also became normalized and standardized. In laymen’s term, they became part of the “tradition” of sport. Beginning in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, however, these traditions came under intense fire. In the 1970s, breakthroughs in race and gender in sport offered previously marginalized groups to participate in the national sporting culture even though changes in many people’s preconceived notions about women and African Americans occurred in an incredibly slow and uneven pace. People often pointed toward the likes of Billie Jean King, Title IX, and Muhammad Ali as evidence of progress. Despite the highprofile coverage of these personalities and events, many African Americans and women still faced discrimination and exclusion based on long-held stereotypes in sport and in the larger society or, as in the case of women’s golf, reverted back to a sexist view in hope of greater acceptance.

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SUMMARY Throughout the 1970s, the optimistic idealism of the 1960s had turned flaring activism to a simmering grind. While changes did occur, increasingly those who benefited from the status quo began to organize more effective ways to resist reforms. They realized that some changes would be hard to turn back and compromised. On other issues, they allied with and mobilized people who were sympathetic to their positions. In the main, those who lamented the erosion of traditional values, whatever they meant, felt besieged by the changing social tapestry. In the next decade, they would organize and, with a sympathetic Reagan administration in the White House, create a backlash.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Barney, Robert K., Stephen R. Wenn, and Scott G. Martyn. 2002. Selling the five rings: The International Olympic Committee and the rise of Olympic commercialism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Bodo, Peter. 1995. The courts of Babylon: Tales of greed and glory in a harsh new world of professional tennis. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Cruise, David, and Alison Griffiths. 1992. Net worth: Exploding the myths of pro hockey. Toronto: Penguin Books. Dickey, Glenn. 1982. The history of professional basketball since 1896. New York: Stein and Day. Festle, Mary Jo. 1996. Playing nice: Politics and apologies in women’s sports. New York: Columbia University Press. Gruneau, Richard, and David Whitson. 1993. Hockey night in Canada: Sport, identities and cultural politics. Toronto: Garamond Press. Guttmann, Allen. 2002. The Olympics: A history of the modern Games. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ham, Eldon L. 2000. The playmasters: An unauthorized history of the NBA from sellouts to lockouts. Lincolnwood, IL: Contemporary Books. Hamilton, Neil A. 2006. The 1970s. New York: Facts on File. Harris, David. 1986. The league: The rise and decline of the NFL. New York: Bantam Books. Hogshead-Makar, Nancy, and Andrew Zimbalist, eds. 2007. Equal play: Title IX and social change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Holt, Joan S., and Marianna Trekell, eds. 1991. A century of women’s basketball: From frailty to Final Four. Reston, VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 1991. Kahn, Liz. 1996. The LPGA: The unauthorized version, the history of the Ladies Professional Golf Association. Menlo Park, CA: Group Fore Productions. Kirchberg, Connie. 2007. Hoop lore: A history of the National Basketball Association. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Lumpkin, Angela. 1981. Women’s tennis: A historical documentary of the players and their game. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing. Miller, David. 2003. Athens to Athens: The official history of the Olympic Games and the IOC, 1894–2004. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Miller, Marvin. 2004. A whole different ball game: The sport and business of baseball. New York: Carol Publishing. Preston, Joseph G. 2004. Major League Baseball in the 1970s: A modern game emerges. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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Rader, Benjamin G. 2002. Baseball: A history of America’s game. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2004. American sports: From the age of folk games to the age of televised sports. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. 1989. Winning is the only thing: Sports in America since 1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sammons, Jeffrey T. 1988. Civil rights to rebellion to reaction: The era of Muhammad Ali. In Beyond the ring: The role of boxing in American society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Schulman, Bruce J. 2001. The seventies: The great shift in American culture, society, and Politics. New York: Free Press. Sperber, Murray. 1990. College sports inc.: The athletic department vs. the university. New York: Henry Holt. Steen, Sandra, and Susan Steen. 2003. Take it to the hoop: One hundred years of women’s basketball. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century Books. Stewart, Mark. 1998. Basketball: A history of hoops. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts. Voigt, David Quentin. 1983. American baseball: From postwar expansion to the electronic age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Ware, Susan. 2007. Title IX: A brief history with documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Watterson, John Sayle. 2000. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Whitson, David, and Richard Gruneau, eds. 2006. Artificial ice: Hockey, culture, and commerce. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Wushanley, Ying. 2004. Playing nice and losing: The struggle for control of women’s intercollegiate athletics, 1960–2000. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Films Ali. 2001. Dir. Michael Mann. Billie Jean King: Portrait of a pioneer. 2006. HBO. The Bronx Is Burning. 2007. Dir. Jeremiah Chechik. The Life and Times of Secretariat, an American Racing Legend. 2005. Dir. Leonard Lusky. Munich. 2005. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Vintage World Series films of each year from Major League Baseball Vintage films.

Web Sites ESPN. http://www.espn.com. Kareem Abdul Jabbar. http://kareemabduljabbar.com. Muhammad Ali. http://ali.com. Wayne Gretzky. http://www.gretzky.com.

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CHAPTER 12

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989 Sarah K. Fields

OVERVIEW New political leadership marked the beginning of the 1980s, signifying a shift in cultural and social policies from the decline of the liberal movements of earlier decades to a more conservative era. The Republican governor of California, Ronald Reagan, won the 1980 presidential election against incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter after running a campaign that promised smaller government, free market ideals, family values, and a return to American dominance in the world. With Reagan’s election, America in the 1980s changed course for the new decade. Reagan would serve two terms in office and be succeeded by his vicepresident, George H. W. Bush, who won election in 1988, making the Reagan-Bush White House the political power for the entire decade of the 1980s. Immediately after Ronald Reagan took the presidential oath on January 20, 1981, Iranian militants, who had held American citizens captive in the U.S. embassy in Tehran for 444 days, released the hostages. This event, timed deliberately by the Iranian militants to further humiliate the Carter administration, seemed to signify the beginning of a new era after the turbulence of the 1970s. President Reagan promised a return to a happier era, and the new decade was different from the 1970s in part because the 1980s was an era of excess and advancement in the United States. Under Reagan’s guidance, economically the country did vastly improve over the course of the decade. A few years into the decade, inflation and unemployment rates dropped and increased military spending by the federal government helped to increase production rates. Although Reagan had run on a platform to make government smaller, the federal government and, more significantly for the economy, federal spending increased dramatically. The Reagan administration increased defense spending particularly, which had two major impacts: it escalated the Cold War and competitive military spending between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it pumped money into the American economy. Many Americans saw their economic status rise, and Reagan won re-election in 1984 in part by asking voters if they were better off than they were

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four years earlier (before Reagan’s election). Underpinning the economic growth, however, were vast increases in the federal deficit because the Reagan administration’s increased spending was not matched by an increase in revenue or taxes. The increased money in the economy meant a growth in the stock market and disposable income of the wealthy and the middle class. The result was a rise in consumerism and the appearance of the Yuppies (Young, upwardly mobile—or Urban—Professionals). Generally mocked by the cultural pundits of the day, these youngest of the baby boomers focused on obtaining wealth and material objects as quickly as possible. Their celluloid counterpart Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street, announced “Greed is good.” The phrase would seem to sum up attitudes toward wealth in the 1980s. The challenge of balancing change and excess in the decade was symbolized in part by the overt political alliance between the Republican party and the evangelical religious right, a group credited in large part with Reagan’s election. The Moral Majority, a religious political action group, was founded in 1979 by the Reverend Jerry Falwell, but the group came to power in the 1980 presidential election and helped gain over two-thirds of the white evangelical vote for the Reagan-Bush ticket. The Moral Majority, which would disband in 1989, lobbied for more conservative social values that matched those espoused by Reagan during the election. They called for abortion to be outlawed, governmental resistance to women’s and gay rights, and governmental support and promotion of “family values.” The power of the group was only minimally affected by scandals involving popular televangelists of the decade. Jim Bakker, founder of the Praise the Lord television station, was indicted for bilking investors in his religious-based theme park, Heritage USA, out of $158 million. He suffered even more in the court of public opinion after confessing to paying his church secretary Jessica Hahn thousands of dollars in hush money after a sexual affair. Jimmy Swaggart, a rival televangelist whom Bakker blamed for his problems with Heritage USA, had his own problems after admitting to consorting with prostitutes. The political link between the Republican Party and the evangelicals was sharpest when Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of the 700 Club, ran in the Republican primaries for the 1988 presidential nomination against eventual winner, Vice President George H. W. Bush. Swaggart’s confession in 1988 came right before the southern primaries and generally hurt Robertson’s campaign because the two shared the same religious calling. Robertson appeared with Swaggart as a show of support after his admission of involvement with prostitutes. Health and social conservatism issues merged in the 1980s with the appearance in the United States of what would eventually be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The disease, which appeared first in communities of gay men and intravenous drug users, initially baffled the medical community. The first official notice of the disease came in June of 1981 when the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted an outbreak of a rare and fatal form of pneumonia striking gay men. Because the initial victims were those on the fringes of American society, early federal funding for research into the disease was limited, and a number of conservative pundits and religious leaders suggested that the disease was divine vengeance against those who violated traditional family values. Eventually research revealed that the disease was blood-borne and impossible to acquire via casual contact, but much of society in the 1980s fearfully shunned

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those who contracted it. One famous face of AIDS was Ryan White, a white boy from a small town in Indiana who contracted the disease from a blood transplant to treat his hemophilia. When his community learned that he had the disease, he was prohibited from attending school and social functions. Eventually he won the court battle for the right to attend school, but upon his return he was greeted with hostility, taunts, and threats. The family moved to a more welcoming community. Ryan, in the meantime, had become a national hero for his public battle for his right to live with dignity. He died in 1990, but in part because of his efforts, the country began to treat the victims of AIDS with greater compassion and respect. Sport was not immune from the specter of AIDS either. Although he would not publicly reveal that he had the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to AIDS, until 1991, basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson likely contracted the disease from a casual sexual encounter in the 1980s. Tennis legend Arthur Ashe likely contracted the disease in 1983 when he received a blood transfusion after heart bypass surgery. In the early 1980s the nation’s blood banks had not been screening for the disease, so those receiving transfusions were at risk of contracting AIDS or HIV. One of the most lasting advances of the 1980s was the rise of the computer. In 1981 IBM released the first personal computer (PC) and in 1985 Apple released the rival Macintosh computer for home use. Prior to the PC and the Mac, home computers seemed unfathomable. In 1983 Bill Gates’ company, Microsoft, released the first version of Word and Windows for the PC; Gates would eventually become the world’s richest man. The computer would become ubiquitous in American life.

Sports and Political and Social Changes in the 1980s Sports, like the economy, grew in the 1980s. Socially, the 1980s saw a rise in cultural concerns with fitness and self-improvement. Self-help books were so popular that the New York Times gave them their own category on the best-seller lists. The federal government began campaigns against tobacco usage and the Reagan administration declared “war” on drugs. When University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose in 1986, just days after being the first pick in the National Basketball Association (NBA) draft, the catch phrase “just say no [to drugs]” took on new meaning for young people. The professional leagues began dealing with the effects of street drugs on their players, and several instituted drug-testing policies. Health, however, was more than just avoiding drugs. It was also fitness. Companies like Nike recognized that the fitness craze could be profitable. In 1980 Nike became a public corporation and used that money to go international. By 1981 the company offered over 200 kinds of shoes and 200 pieces of fitness attire. By the mid-1980s Nike recognized the importance of product endorsements by superstar athletes like the NBA’s Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley, both of whom would have signature shoes with the company. At the end of the 1980s, Nike introduced its marketing slogan: “Just do it.” The phrase would become ubiquitous and would always be linked with the company. Nike not only sold sport and fitness to men, but they recognized a potential market in women. Fitness was linked to beauty, and women, especially, were encouraged to exercise. Aerobic exercise swept the country and those who did not join gyms and exercise groups could work out in their own homes, exercising with celebrity fitness stars like Jane Fonda via videocassette tape recordings.

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The home-video revolution, beyond making the family television room an exercise room, made it easier for athletes to tape themselves for self-improvement and promotion. Capturing, editing, and viewing with film took a greater degree of money and effort than capturing, editing, and viewing with videotape. Once people had access to hand-held video cameras, they could record and edit their own material. High school and youth teams had parents record games so the coaches could go over the tape with the players and so that the players could pass the tapes along to college scouts. Videocassettes were only part of the change in communication and mass media in the 1980s. Prior to the decade, most Americans had limited television-viewing options; they could watch three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) via overair signals. In 1986 Fox Broadcasting became the first nationwide network to join the big three as on over-air competitor. The 1980s also saw the vast expansion of cable television. Before 1980, about 16 million households had cable television and the affiliated nationwide “superstations” like TBS, which broadcast Atlanta Braves baseball games. After Congress passed the 1984 Cable Act, cable became vastly more accessible and millions of dollars were spent wiring the country. By the end of the decade over 90 percent of Americans had access to cable, and about 60 percent (53 million households) subscribed to cable services. Cable networks increased from twenty-eight to seventy-nine (History of cable TV). One of those cable networks, ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network), would have a powerful influence on sport in America. The network began broadcasting twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week in 1980, becoming the first dedicated sports programming channel in history. Early programming was challenging, given the exclusive contracts that the major networks had with professional sports leagues; therefore, early programming was often creative, showing minor sports and inventing sports like the “Strongest Man Competition.” In March 1980 the network aired early rounds of the men’s basketball tournament for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship, giving ESPN more cachet and more power in the market. The station’s centerpiece, SportsCenter, became the showcase for sports highlights of the day and gained a strong following among sports fans. It also allowed national sports coverage, which was vastly superior to the usual coverage on the local news because it ran for a full hour and because it provided nationwide and sometimes worldwide results that the traditional local news did not have time to cover. Over time, the programming options for ESPN increased with their viewership and financial power. In 1984 the station began broadcasting college football games. The next year, the National Hockey League (NHL) agreed to have ESPN televise games. In 1987 ESPN won the rights to broadcast National Football League (NFL) games and in 1989 ESPN began broadcasting Major League Baseball (MLB) games. ESPN continued to cover lesser-known sports, including the 1986– 87 America’s Cup yachting competition. By the end of the decade the network had expanded into international coverage with ESPN International and ESPN Latin America. The network was not just the first with dedicated twenty-four hours per day sports programming, it was also the largest, and it helped expand viewing opportunities for sport and helped promote sport in America by providing increased exposure. In addition, it influenced the creation of similar sports networks in Europe and other areas of the globe.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

Beyond technological evolution, the 1980s was a decade of involvement for women in both political life and in sport. American attitudes toward gender equality, however, seemed mixed. Although the Reagan administration blocked reconsideration of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, which would have made it unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of gender, President Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female justice on the Supreme Court in 1981. He also appointed two women to his cabinet, Elizabeth Dole as secretary of transportation and Margaret Heckler as secretary of health and human services, in 1982. Sports saw a similar paradox. The number of women coaching women’s college teams decreased from 54.2 percent in 1980 to 47.7 percent in 1989. The number of women and girls participating in high school and collegiate sport, however, continued to increase. For example, NCAA colleges and universities offered an average of 6.46 teams for women in 1982; that number increased to 7.24 by 1990 (Carpenter and Costa 2005). Politics continued to entangle itself in gender equity issues in sport. In 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Grove City College v. Bell that only programs that directly received federal funds were required to comply with Title IX, a law prohibiting gender discrimination in federally funded educational settings. On a practical level this meant that Title IX did not apply to athletic departments in schools and colleges. In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed, over President Reagan’s veto, the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987. This law stated that if an institution received any federal funding, then the entire institution needed to comply with Title IX, which now meant that athletic departments were required to comply with the law and provide equitable sporting opportunities for both men and women.

Major Sports in the 1980s The 1980s saw a growth in consumption of and participation in sport. Thanks in part to ESPN, more people watched more sports on television than ever before. The most popular sports of the decades were baseball, basketball, and football. The dominant popular institution in baseball was Major League Baseball (MLB), although minor-league baseball and college baseball also enjoyed a resurgence. For both football and basketball, many in America enjoyed both the professional leagues and the college programs. Both levels of both sports saw more time on television and enjoyed increased revenues. Other major sports of prior decades continued throughout the 1980s, and several professional leagues saw increases in popularity and revenue. Much of the success and popularity of these sports can be attributed to the greater number of sports channels, which gave sports more exposure to a broader audience. For many in the 1980s, watching sports was excellent entertainment, but participating in sports was even better. Given that few Americans could compete at the elite levels of the big three, other sports received their attention and participation.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball Major League Baseball faced highs and lows in the 1980s. The decade began with labor strife and ended with a World Series disrupted by an earthquake.

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In between the players saw remarkable salary increases, and the owners saw increased fan attendance as well as record revenue production from the media. The decade was marred by drug usage, the banning of an icon, and the death of a commissioner.

Economics of Baseball While free agency in MLB had first appeared in the 1970s, the labor strife in the 1980s continued to clarify how the new post–reserve clause MLB would work. In the early 1980s, the players’ union and the owners could not agree on a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Even though revenue and salaries were both increased since the 1976 court decision allowing free agency, the owners wanted to return to limited free agency as much as possible and the players vowed to fight to remain free agents. The key sticking point was compensation: if team A lost a player to team B in free agency, the owners wanted team B to give team A a different player as compensation for the loss. The players feared that a compensation plan would hinder free agency. Would teams aggressively pursue and pay the best players if they had to give up someone else in exchange? The owners feared that a complete free agency would undermine, if not destroy, a team’s ability to grow and nurture young talent, suspecting that after a team devoted time and resources to developing a young player, the player would bolt to another team as soon as he reached some of his potential. Both players and owners were convinced that their fears were legitimate and that the other side’s concerns were baseless. In 1981 the negotiations over the compensation plans failed completely, and the owners decided to unilaterally implement their plan for compensating teams that lost players to free agency. If a player left one team for another as a free agent, the first team would be assigned a compensatory player from a pool of players designated at the beginning of the season. The players were opposed to the plan and on June 11, 1981, a fifty-one-day strike began. The players lost millions of dollars in salaries, although many later recouped their losses in higher salaries. The owners lost even more money in canceled games, money that they did not directly see again. Cities and stadiums lost game-day revenues. The strike ended in August when the players agreed to a lesser version of the compensation plan, and the season resumed with the All-Star game in August. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn was left to determine how to handle the divided season. He concluded that the best method would be a split season with the winners of the first half and the winners of the second half meeting in a best-of-five game miniseries to determine who would play in the regular playoffs. As a result the team with the best overall record of 1981, the Cincinnati Reds, failed to make the miniseries because they won neither the first nor second half (just the combined seasons). The Los Angeles Dodgers would ultimately win the World Series over the New York Yankees. The labor problems in MLB would briefly reappear in 1985 when the CBA that the players and the owners had agreed upon in 1981 expired. The two-day strike was quickly resolved when the owners abandoned their compensation plans (settling instead for using draft picks) and the players agreed to a minimum salary of $60,000 instead of $48,000. In exchange, the owners were able to retain a greater percentage of media compensation. Although some twenty-five games had been canceled for the strike, all were made up.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

The new bargaining agreement did not mean, however, that the owners played fair with free agency. By the early 1980s, the players’ union and the courts had successfully dismantled the reserve system and introduced free agency into baseball. After the 1984 season, all of the MLB clubs signed free agents from other teams– precisely the way the system was intended. After the 1985 season, however, very few free agents were signed by different clubs, and as a result all but four free agents re-signed with their original club. The players’ association suspected that the sudden stall in free agent movement was not coincidental and argued that the owners had colluded (agreed among themselves) not to sign free agents unless their original team had decided to let the player go. Collusion would violate the CBA that the owners had agreed to just that season. The owners argued that they had not colluded; the stall in free agency came from a depressed market and a lack of desire on the part of the players to move. The neutral arbitrator disagreed and concluded that the only explanation for such a universal lack of movement was collusion. Evidence that Kirk Gibson had been approached by two different teams about leaving the Detroit Tigers before the October owners’ meeting, but then was told that neither team was interested in free agents after the meeting, did not help the owners’ case. After the 1986 season, the stagnant free agent market in early 1987 continued, and a new arbitrator concluded the owners were continuing to collude. The arbitrator was particularly influenced by the fact that free agent salaries actually decreased in 1987 compared to previous years. In the 1987–88 off-season, the owners tried a new tact: keeping a data bank on all free agents, which allowed owners to know the negotiation status on each player. Yet another arbitrator found this to be collusion. Thus the owners were found guilty of collusion for their behavior after all three seasons. In 1990 the owners and the players’ union agreed to a $280-million settlement for the three years of collusion. Although the settlement was huge, the impact of collusion on the players’ salaries was profound. Essentially for three years, the owners artificially kept salaries low. Given how quickly salaries were rising and how quickly they skyrocketed after the collusion, it is unclear how much money the players lost. Further, after the settlement was announced, over 800 players filed claims asking for more than $1.3 billion, well over the settlement money total.

Consumption of the Game: Media and Fans Television and media revenue increased dramatically in the 1980s. Effective in 1985, NBC and ABC agreed to pay MLB $1.1 billion for a five-year deal to alternate broadcasting the All-Star Game, the playoffs, and the World Series on the radio and television. This meant that between 1985 and 1989 each of the twenty-six MLB franchises would receive between $5.7 and $7.9 million annually, beyond what they earned from selling their own local media rights (Alexander 1991, 324). Not only did media revenue increase, but also, despite the labor strife, attendance at major-league games generally grew throughout the decade. The growth may have been perhaps in part because no single team dominated the decade. Although the St. Louis Cardinals played in three World Series, the most of any team in the decade, they won only the 1982 Series, losing in 1985 to the Kansas City Royals and in 1987 to the Minnesota Twins. Also, the venues changed during

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Cincinnati Reds batter Pete Rose waves one finger as he celebrates at first base after singling in the first inning of the game to break Ty Cobb’s hits record in Cincinnati on September 11, 1985. (AP / Wide World Photo)

this time. In 1982 the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, the new home for the Minnesota Twins, opened in Minneapolis. In 1987 when the Twins won the World Series with four home wins after having the league’s best home record, some credited the noise in the dome, which audiologists discovered was twice that of outdoor stadiums. In 1988 venerable Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, abandoned its fight against progress and installed lights, which allowed night games for the first time in the club’s history. In 1989 the SkyDome in Toronto (home of the Blue Jays) opened with a retractable roof, the first in MLB history. Pete Rose’s quest to pass Ty Cobb’s record for the most hits in baseball also increased fan attendance as he got closer to the record. Amid great fanfare, he broke the record in 1985 as the player-manager of the Cincinnati Reds. Financially, MLB did quite well.

Scandals With labor strife relatively minimal after the 1981 season, the new problem in the clubhouse was the use of cocaine. Cocaine was not a new drug, but in the 1980s it became an increasingly popular recreational drug among wealthier Americans. Keith Hernandez, the first baseman on the 1982 World Series–winning St. Louis Cardinals, estimated that as many as 40 percent of MLB players had at least experimented with cocaine. He and twenty other ballplayers testified in federal investigation after being given immunity; seven non–baseball players were later indicted in Pittsburgh on cocaine-trafficking charges. Because, however, the league had no drug-testing policy, drug usage by the players was initially dealt with inside

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the franchise, unless the player was arrested. Many, including Hernandez, were simply traded when their managers grew tired of the drugs. Eventually in 1986, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth persuaded the players’ union to agree to sanction the thirty-one players who admitted to using drugs: those individuals were fined up to 10 percent of their 1986 salaries, performed community service, and agreed to submit to random drug testing. Race and racism were other challenges for baseball in the 1980s. In the 1980s baseball enjoyed a resurgence: more people were watching games and the game was enjoying unprecedented success on the silver screen. Films like The Natural (1984), Bull Durham (1988), Eight Men Out (1988), Major League (1989), and Field of Dreams (1989) were popular with both critics and filmgoers. Some baseball scholars argued that baseball was regaining its status as “America’s Game,” a position it had seemed to be losing to the National Football League (NFL). Baseball, however, seemed to be becoming an increasingly white sport for both players and spectators. A 1987 survey found that a smaller percentage of fans at MLB games were African American than at NFL and National Basketball Association (NBA) games, despite the fact that MLB tickets were cheaper. Further, the percentage of African American players declined in 1980s. In 1980 20 percent of players were African American, but in 1989 only 16.6 percent of players were African American (Alexander 1991, 349-50). The racial problem was exacerbated in 1987 when Al Campanis, the director of player development for the Los Angeles Dodgers, appeared on the ABC news program Nightline and announced that former black players did not have the same capacity to be managers as former white players did. He was fired within twenty-four hours, but his statements highlighted the fact that, to that point, only three black men had ever been MLB managers, and none held that position in 1987. MLB responded quickly by hiring Harry Edwards, a black sociologist, as a consultant for minority affairs. A much greater number of nonwhite coaches, scouts, trainers, instructors, and front-office personnel were hired after Campanis’s statement. In 1988, Bill White, an African American, was named president of the National League. Commissioner Ueberroth stepped down at the end of his five-year contract in 1988, and he was replaced by A. Bartlett Giamatti, the president of the National League and the former president of Yale University. Giamatti’s reign would be short but significant: he would be the man who banned Pete Rose from baseball. The Pete Rose affair began after the 1988 season when rumors began circulating that he was gambling heavily and betting on baseball games. The popular former player known as “Charlie Hustle” for his scrappy approach to the game was, at the time, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. In response to the rumors, Giamatti appointed Washington attorney John M. Dowd to investigate the matter. Dowd’s report, submitted in May 1989, made a compelling case against Rose. Perhaps most compelling, although they would have been inadmissible in a court of law, were the betting slips stolen from Rose’s home by one of his associates. Written on the slips in handwriting that an expert testified was Rose’s were the words CINCY W with dates. Further, phone records from Rose’s home confirmed that he had made multiple brief phone calls to known bookmakers. Additionally two of Rose’s associates, both convicted felons, testified that they had placed bets on baseball for him. Circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that Rose had bet on both baseball and on his own team, the Reds, although he seemed to have always bet that the Reds

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The 1989 Earthquake Series The 1989 World Series could have been memorable simply because it was the first time that both Bay Area teams were in the World Series. The Oakland Athletics had easily won the American League pennant with ninety-nine victories. The team was filled with All-Stars like Rickey Henderson, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dave Stewart and Dennis Eckersley. The team coasted through the playoffs beating the Toronto Blue Jays, four games to one, to go to the World Series. The Giants won the National League pennant in five games over the Chicago Cubs. The Series began well for the Athletics. They won the first two games in Oakland in dominant fashion, winning 5-0 and 5-1. The Giants were eager to return to their home field of Candlestick Park on October 17 where they hoped to get their back on track. At five o’clock in the evening both teams took the field for pregame ceremonies and introductions in front of more than 60,000 fans. At 5:04 P.M., the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. Registering 6.9 on the Richter scale, it was the worst earthquake in North America since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Al Michaels was on the air broadcasting the game nationally for ABC television when the earthquake hit. Inside the stadium, the press box swayed and the power went out, but the stadium, though shaken, stayed intact, and remarkably the fans remained reasonably calm. Eyewitness testimony reported the fans applauded after the earthquake ended. Fortunately when the earthquake occurred, it was still light and the people were evacuated before darkness fell. When ABC was able to restore its feed, Al Michaels continued reporting; he would be nominated for a news Emmy award for his work. Outside the stadium was devastation, a section of the Bay Bridge and several sections of freeway collapsed. Damage was estimated at $3 billion for San Francisco alone. Sixty-seven people were killed. Commissioner Fay Vincent decided to postpone the Series, despite objections from some who felt the event should be canceled. Before the Series could continue, though, power needed to be restored to the area, and a structural evaluation of Candlestick Park needed to be made. Ten days later on October 27, the Series resumed in Candlestick Park, and the Athletics continued their domination of the Giants, winning 13-7 and 9-6. Out of respect for the victims of the earthquake, the Athletics did not celebrate their victory with champagne.

would win. Rose, though, would deny betting on baseball at all throughout the investigation. Although the investigation was extensive, Commissioner Giamatti made mistakes during its course that did not always place him in the best light. Prior to receiving the Dowd Report, he wrote a letter to a federal court urging leniency for one of Rose’s associates who was awaiting sentencing for tax fraud. In the letter Giamatti praised the man’s assistance in the Dowd investigation. The judge who received the letter, however, was a Cincinnati Reds fan who thought the letter proved that Giamatti had prejudged Rose and could not be fair in Rose’s cases. Had Giamatti not sent the letter or had he phrased it differently, he would have had complete control of Rose’s fate in baseball as the commissioner. As soon as the allegation was made, with the letter as evidence that Giamatti was biased, the door was opened for Rose to try to have Giamatti replaced. Rose filed a series of lawsuits trying to do just that, but he had also been indicted on tax-fraud charges

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and the two-front legal battle was expensive. Finally, Rose agreed to settle with MLB and agreed to a lifetime ban from the game, but he offered no admission to betting on baseball. The agreement left open the possibility of a future reinstatement into baseball and a possible future election to the Hall of Fame. Rose later pled guilty to tax fraud and agreed to prison time. The scandal took its toll on the commissioner as well: Bart Giamatti died of a heart attack on September 2, 1989, just nine days after suspending Rose. Deputy Commissioner Fay Vincent succeeded Giamatti and presided over the remainder of the season and the playoffs. The 1989 season had several bright points. Vincent “Bo” Jackson played in two professional sports leagues: baseball for the Kansas City Royals and football for the Oakland Raiders. He was the MVP of the MLB All-Star game in 1989. Ken Griffey Jr. and Ken Griffey Sr. were the first father-son combination to play in MLB simultaneously that season as well. Jim Abbott was a .500 pitcher with the California Angels in his 1989 his rookie season, but his presence was notable because he lacked a right hand. The season ended with the Oakland Athletics sweeping the San Francisco Giants in four games. The series itself was notable because it was interrupted for ten days after North America’s worst earthquake since 1906. For MLB, the 1980s were both a challenging and rewarding decade. Marred by strikes and collusion, players and owners enjoyed an uneasy co-existence. The players did profit from the first decade without the reserve clause. Despite three years of owner collusion in lowering the value of free agents, the average player’s salary increased by 137 percent salary increase over the course of the decade (Fort 2003, 179). Even though the cocaine scandals and the Pete Rose affair seemed to threaten the integrity of the game, media revenue increased as did fan attendance at the games. Major League Baseball weathered the 1980s quite well.

Basketball The 1980s were a kind of golden era for basketball in the United States. The members of the National Basketball Association (NBA), both owners and players, saw a jump in revenue and popularity. College basketball also continued to do well. The NCAA women’s tournament, held for the first time in 1982, grew more than was anticipated, and the men’s regular season and tournaments garnered large audiences and television fees. Much of the success of basketball in the 1980s was the confluence of increased media exposure and great players.

The NBA The decade began with extremely high hopes. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson had captivated the nation during the NCAA championship duel at the end of the 1978–79 season and were set to enter the NBA together for the 1979-80 season. The Boston Celtics had drafted Bird, and Johnson was joining an already talented Los Angeles Lakers team. Not only were the two men outstanding basketball prospects, but they seemed to epitomize what the NBA wanted to be: they came from working-class backgrounds, believed in practicing and playing every game to their best abilities, and tried to be consummate team players. Although some saw the situation as racialized—Bird was occasionally called “The Great White Hope” in a

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Lakers-Celtics Domination 1980–1990 From the 1980–81 through the 1989–90 seasons, either one or both of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics played in the NBA finals. The Lakers won four titles and the Celtics won three. They played each other for the finals on three occasions, with the Celtics winning one and the Lakers winning the other two. It was a two-team rivalry that the NBA could not have scripted more beautifully. The rivalry began when Larry Bird began playing with the Celtics and Magic Johnson began playing with the Lakers in the 1979–80 season. Both rookies were remarkable players who fit in well with their teams. Bird joined a team that was made significantly better just prior to the 1980–81 season when the team traded its number 1 pick in the draft for center Robert Parrish and in the number 3 draft pick chose Kevin McHale. Johnson also had an all-star cast with him on the Lakers, in center Kareem Abdul Jabbar and forward Jamaal Wilkes. The Lakers got even better in the 1982 draft when they selected James Worthy with the number 1 pick. The Lakers’ games, and sometimes the team itself, were called Showtime because of the team’s fast-paced and brilliant offense. The first of the highly anticipated Lakers-Celtics finals arrived in the 1983–84 season. Bird had won the first of three straight league MVP awards and McHale won the first of

Los Angeles Lakers center Kareem Abdul Jabbar shoots a sky hook in a game against the Utah Jazz in Las Vegas on April 6, 1984. (AP / Wide World Photo)

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

two straight Sixth Man awards. The Lakers had cruised under Coach Pat Riley through the playoffs to the finals, having lost only three postseason games. The finals were a hardfought affair, culminating in a Boston victory in game 7. The next year, 1984–85, both teams easily made the playoffs and then the finals. The teams were essentially the same, except that Boston coach K.C. Jones had added Danny Ainge as a guard, and the Lakers had added Byron Scott. Although the Celtics destroyed the Lakers in game 1, the Lakers won the next four behind Abdul Jabbar’s MVP performance. The two teams would next meet in the finals in 1986–87. The Lakers had added A.C. Green to the team in the interim. The Celtics, meanwhile, were playing without their number 1 draft pick. The Celtics’ dynasty was over, and they did not make the finals again. The Lakers repeated their title the next season over the Detroit Pistons, but they would fail to repeat for a third time in 1989–90, losing to the Pistons.

league that was about 80 percent African American—basketball fans and the NBA focused on their skills. The growth and popularity of the league would continue with the entrance of Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, and John Stockton from the 1984 draft—all of whom would become All-Stars and eventually enter the Hall of Fame. Jordan and Barkley particularly profited from product endorsements that made them household names beyond their basketball skills.

Economics of NBA Basketball The NBA, in fact, initially assumed that Bird and Johnson could carry the league. To avoid comparisons with the defunct and flamboyant American Basketball Association, the NBA prohibited players from wearing jewelry on the court and began play with a dull orange ball (in contrast to the ABA’s multicolored ball). The league, under Commissioner Larry O’Brien, installed the three-point shot but in the early season it was not utilized much. Although Bird and Johnson were popular, they were but two players in a large league, and perhaps because of limited marketing or the subdued style of the league, attendance at games declined from 1980 to 1982. Fortunately for the league, television revenue was increasing. In 1982 CBS paid almost $92 million for a four-year deal and ESPN and USA Network each signed deals, which added another $11 million in television revenue (Kirchberg 2007, 174). Player salaries had increased (they would eventually increase 191 percent over the course of the decade) (Fort 2003, 180). Declining attendance and increased salaries, however, meant that in 1982 a number of NBA franchises were in trouble. After all, Bird and Johnson could only play for two teams. San Diego, Cleveland, and Kansas City were all on the verge of collapse, and the San Diego Clippers pulled in less than half of the average attendance at NBA games. Over all, only six teams in the league were making a profit (Kirchberg 2007, 174). The CBA between the players’ union and the owners was set to expire during the 1982–83 season, and rumors circulated that a strike was eminent. Commissioner O’Brien and players’ union leader Bob Lanier, however, negotiated a deal that pleased both sides: the players agreed to a salary cap and the owners agreed to guarantee that the players would receive more than half of the league’s gross revenues, including gate and media revenue from all games. Plus the players would get an additional $500,000 from licensing agreements.

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Settling the labor concerns allowed the season to finish without a labor stoppage. The Philadelphia 76ers, led by Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Moses Malone, would go to the finals against the Los Angeles Lakers and Magic Johnson, who was trying for his third title. The 76ers swept an injury-ridden Lakers team, giving Erving his only NBA title. In 1987 the CBA had to be reconsidered again with Commissioner David Stern representing the owners. Stern had replaced O’Brien as commissioner in 1984. As was typical of player-owner negotiations, the dealing was contentious. The players wanted a significant change (if not an end) to the salary cap and free agency sooner. The owners wanted to cut the college draft down to three rounds and wanted no changes to the salary cap or free agency. Both sides threatened the other: the owners briefly stopped signing players and the players threatened an antitrust lawsuit. In the end, however, an agreement was reached without a strike. The salary cap remained and players continued to get 53 percent of all revenues. The college draft was reduced to three rounds, and players were eligible for free agency sooner. Additionally more retired players were added to the pension program. The financial challenges of the franchises resulted in several relocations. In 1984 the Clippers moved from San Diego to Los Angeles, and in 1985 the Kings moved from Kansas City to Sacramento. In both cases, the initial cities had lost their fan support and each finished their last season in their old city drawing very few fans to the games. No team, however, folded, which meant that the 253-player minimum that the league had guaranteed in the 1983 contract was not problematic for the league. Players in the 1980s profited from personal and product endorsements to a degree no other basketball players in history had. Julius Erving was among the first to endorse shoes; he signed with Converse in 1981, but the company did little to publicize the relationship as they expected little profit from it. They also signed Larry Bird and Magic Johnson but again expected little profit from the relationship and did almost nothing to promote the relationship to the public. In 1984 after Michael Jordan was drafted, Nike signed him to a five-year $2.5-million shoe deal. Nike both developed the first Air Jordan shoe and introduced the “Jump Man” insignia of a silhouette of Jordan flying through the air to dunk the ball. Nike discovered the relationship was hugely profitable and netted $130 million in 1985 for all things Jordan. This success opened the door for athletes to commercial endorsements. Jordan would perhaps profit the most with endorsements from Spaulding to McDonald’s and Chevrolet. He would make three times his salary in endorsements in 1986 alone, and the ratio would become even more skewed as he career progressed. Eventually he would become one of the wealthiest athletes in the 1980s and one of the world’s most recognizable people.

Scandals Basketball, like baseball, was more concerned about its players’ use of street drugs than their use of steroids. Basketball was particularly plagued with story after story of talented players whose lives were destroyed by drugs, especially cocaine. Spencer Haywood, whose lawsuit had opened the NBA to players not yet finished with college, had been a huge success with the Seattle SuperSonics in the 1970s, but would end his career in the NBA, twice, because of cocaine. First he was

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

kicked off the Los Angeles Lakers, just days before they began their 1980 championship run, because of his cocaine use (which had begun earlier while he was a New York Knick). Haywood claimed he was not the only player who used cocaine on that team but that he was the only one to ask the coach and management for help. Coach Paul Westhead said he was waived because of his performance. After spending a season in Europe, Heywood returned to play with the Washington Bullets in 1982, but his cocaine habit continued and the team released him in 1983. Rumors circulated that more than half the players used cocaine and other recreational drugs. The league took the problem seriously. In 1981 the league and the players’ union jointly offered a twenty-four-hour counseling service for players and their families for drugs and other problems, but drug testing had not yet been instituted. During the CBAs prior to 1983, the union initially opposed drug testing. The year after the agreement, however, the union agreed to the most extensive drug-testing program in U.S. professional sports at the time. A player who voluntarily admitted a drug problem was provided treatment without penalty. After a second admission, he was suspended, and after the third admission he was banned. Any player caught using drugs would be automatically suspended. An independent agency was allowed to randomly or with cause test any player up to four times during a six-week period without notifying the player. Later the program was expanded to include all league employees, including coaches and owners. Players were given an amnesty period until the end of 1983 to admit their drug problems and receive treatment without it counting toward their three strikes. In 1984 both John Drew of the Utah Jazz and John Lucas of the Houston Rockets were suspended after testing positive for cocaine in a drug test. Micheal Ray Richardson of the New Jersey Nets would become the first player banned in 1986 for his repeated use of cocaine. After two years of banishment, players could apply for reinstatement. In 1988 the league and the union agreed to test all rookies during training camp; a positive test for heroin or cocaine would result in a one-year suspension. Unlike the NFL, steroid rumors did not haunt the NBA. The league’s 1980s drug-testing policy did not include steroids, in part because Commissioner David Stern had no evidence that it was problematic. He was more worried about combating the cocaine and heroin use by his players and saving the league’s image. In addition to drugs, the NBA had to deal with the periodic race issue. Larry Bird faced additional challenges in 1987. Isiah Thomas, the African American point guard for the Detroit Pistons who won back-to-back titles in 1989 and 1990, echoed comments from his teammate Dennis Rodman, who suggested that Bird received greater attention and praise from the press because he was white. Thomas added that, although Bird was talented, he was not particularly talented compared to the black players in the league. Thomas later clarified his statements, arguing that he was not critiquing Bird himself but rather a society that credited Bird’s success to his intelligence and work ethic, while simultaneously suggesting black players’ success was due solely to athletic talent. The race issue was also discussed periodically when the topic was marketing a predominantly African American league to a predominantly white audience. Commissioner Stern could point to increased attendance and television audience throughout his early tenure to prove that the color that mattered most to NBA fans in the 1980s was that of their team. Michael Jordan’s enormous endorsement

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success suggested that race was not a barrier when it came to nonbasketball financial success.

College Basketball The 1980s saw great growth in men’s college basketball. Part of this was the result of having Michael Jordan play at the University of North Carolina. As a freshman in 1982 he hit the winning shot in the championship game against Georgetown. His sophomore and junior years he was named player of the year. He also led the United States to a gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. He would be drafted in that year and go third in the first round to the Chicago Bulls where he would achieve great success. Indiana (1981, 1987) and Louisville (1980, 1986), each won two men’s NCAA titles while the Big East, Big Ten and ACC were seen as the top leagues of the

Women’s Basketball Great Cheryl Miller In the 1980s women’s basketball in the United States was just beginning to get noticed by the general public. Cheryl Miller was a major reason why the game got more attention. Born January 3, 1964, in Riverside, California, the young Miller grew up playing basketball with her family. Her younger brother Reggie would eventually grow up to be an All-Star in the NBA with the Indiana Pacers. Miller herself had remarkable talent; she combined grace and athleticism into a game that was unparalleled in the decade. Her national accolades began in high school where in four years of play at Riverside Polytechnic High, her team had a record of 132-4. She was awarded the Dial Award for the national high school scholar-athlete of the year in 1981, and she was the first athlete ever to be named a Parade High School All-American for four years. Her talent eclipsed the local competition: she once scored 105 points in a high school game. Miller played college basketball as a forward at the University of Southern California, where her success continued both on the collegiate and the international stages. As a collegian, she was a four-time All-American and three times was named Naismith Player of the Year. As a freshman and sophomore in 1983 and 1984, she led the Lady Trojans to the NCAA national championships. She was named Most Valuable Player of each of those final four tournaments. Miller also led the U.S. women’s national basketball team to unprecedented success. The team won the 1983 Pan American Games in Caracas, Venezuela, and then on an even bigger stage, the team became the first U.S. women’s basketball team to win the gold medal at the Olympics. In 1986 the national team won the gold medal in the Goodwill Games and the title in the Women’s World Basketball Championship. Miller was the recipient of the YWCA Silver Achievement Award in 1986 and was voted the 1984–85 ESPN Woman Athlete of the Year. In 1986 Sports Illustrated named her the best college player (male or female) in the country. She graduated from USC in 1986 with a degree in broadcasting. She was the first basketball player, male or female, at USC to have her number retired. Later she would be enshrined in both the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. After graduating, Miller was drafted by a number of leagues, including men’s leagues. A serious knee injury in 1987, however, ended her playing career, and she moved into coaching and broadcasting instead.

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era. In the women’s brackets, Southern California, led by Cheryl Miller, and Louisiana Tech were the top squads of the early 1980s, but by the end of the decade, Tennessee and Stanford had surpassed them both. All three networks and ESPN and other cable stations were televising men’s college basketball. Women’s basketball generally was only televised nationally for the semifinals and finals of the NCAA tournament, but their share of the television audience was increasing. Unlike with football, colleges and universities seemed happy to let the NCAA negotiate television deals for the NCAA championship tournaments. In 1981 ESPN bought the right to televise some of the firstround games, and with the national audience, more of America often saw teams from outside their geographical region. The tournament was becoming so popular that the format was expanded in 1985 from forty-eight teams to sixty-four. In 1987 CBS agreed to pay about $50 million annually to televise the men’s tournament, up from the $19 million they had been paying since 1981. As television revenues increased, however, college basketball endured another point-shaving scandal. In 1985 John “Hot Rod” Williams, a star forward at Tulane University, was arrested for manipulating point spreads in at least three games in the previous season in exchange for at least $8,550 and cocaine. Two other players were also indicted and testified against Williams. He was never convicted on the charges of sports bribery or conspiracy and moved directly onto a successful career with the NBA. Tulane, however, was terribly shaken by the scandal. The entire coaching staff as well as the athletic director resigned, and the university decided to disband the basketball team just days after the scandal broke. The team was not resurrected until the 1990-91 season. Basketball, both professional and college, grew economically in the 1980s. Although scandals ranging from cocaine use to bribery plagued the game, in general basketball held up well. Television ratings increased, which helped increase television revenue. More stars moved through the ranks from men’s college level to the professional ranks, and when they arrived at the pro level, they benefited from increased salaries and endorsement opportunities. Women’s basketball also gained more national attention at the college level in the 1980s after the NCAA began offering scholarships and networks televised the championship. Although women who wanted to play professionally in the 1980s had to leave the United States, the growing popularity of the game offered some hope for more successful women’s pro leagues at home in the future.

Football In the 1980s football in America saw a decade of change. In the ranks of professional football, the National Football League (NFL) was challenged by the U.S. Football League (USFL), and the NFL itself saw three teams move to new cities. Sometimes the separation was friendly and sometimes it was not. Additionally, the NFL saw the 1982 season shortened by a labor dispute, and another dispute marred the 1985 season. On the positive side, salaries for NFL players increased over the decade, the league saw huge increases in television and radio revenue with the addition of cable programming, and the financial values of the NFL teams increased. At the collegiate level, football had an explosion of popularity, thanks in large part to the increased number of games on television, but college football

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was also wracked by scandal as schools balanced a desire to win with the collegiate mission to educate. Despite some problems, in the 1980s football seemed poised to become America’s favorite sport. The decade began, in fact, with reports that American sports fans preferred football to baseball by a margin of 48 to 31 percent (History: 1981–1990).

Economics of Professional Football Professional football was slower to develop free agency than major-league baseball. Although the NFL’s reserve clause had been struck down in the 1970s, the NFL players’ association had negotiated a CBA that allowed a form of the reserve clause to remain. The compensation clause allowed teams to essentially have first right of refusal on free agents in that the original team had the option of matching any free-agent offers the player received, and if a player left through free agency, the original team was compensated with draft picks. The result was little free-agent movement; in fact, between 1977 and 1988 out of the 125 to 150 players who annually announced their free agency, only three players changed teams (Quirk and Fort 1992, 200). The CBA was due to expire in 1982, and the players’ union head proposed a minimum salary level based on position and seniority to help circumvent the compensation rules that limited free agents’ salaries. The two sides were unable to reach a compromise, and the players went on strike on September 21, 1982. They remained away from the field until November 17 in the longest (fifty-seven days) strike in U.S. professional sport history. The players in this agreement accepted the compensation rules in exchange for increases in pension payments and severance pay. To deal with the eight weeks and the hundreds of games lost, the NFL decided to shorten the season to just nine games and to expand the playoffs to eight teams from each conference. This format sent two teams (the Detroit Lions and the Cleveland Browns) to the playoffs with losing records and allowed the St. Louis Cardinals a playoff appearance for the first and only time in their history. All three lost in the first round. The Washington Redskins defeated the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XVII. In 1987 negotiations for the CBA were set to begin, and free agency remained the central issues for the players. The owners, who had successfully limited free agency for years, were unwilling to budge from their position, insisting on keeping a compensation plan. Given the impasse, the players went on strike again, but this time, after canceling one week of games, the owners continued the season with “scab” players—retired players, minor-league players, and unsigned former college players. A number of NFL players crossed the picket lines as well. Games were still televised and public support for the players was limited. After three weeks, the players’ union gave up and ended the strike. The two games with replacement players counted toward season standings, and the Washington Redskins defeated the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXII. The union refused, however, to negotiate with the owners and turned to the courts after the CBA expired in 1988. The judge at a preliminary hearing suggested that the players would likely prevail in their struggle for free agency if the case went to trial. Just before the 1989 season, the owners announced a new free agency system—Plan B—in which 65 percent of players on a roster were reserved but the

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

The Catch: The 49ers take on the Cowboys, 1982 In 1982 the San Francisco 49ers were facing the Dallas Cowboys in the National Football Conference (NFC) Championships. The 49ers had won thirteen of their sixteen regular-season games under Coach Bill Walsh and held home-field advantage for the playoffs. They had won the divisional playoff game fairly easily against the New York Giants in the first playoff game for Joe Montana, the 49ers young quarterback. The Dallas Cowboys were the second seed in the NFC playoffs, having won twelve of their sixteen games. They had held the Tampa Bay Buccaneers scoreless in their divisional playoff game. On January 3, 1982, the two teams met in the much-anticipated conference championship game. The game was close, with Dallas leading by three points at the half. The second half was a back-and-forth affair with the 49ers regaining the lead in the third period only to give up ten points to Dallas in the fourth quarter. With just under five minutes to play, trailing by six points, the 49ers had the ball on their own eleven-yard line. In just ten plays, Montana shepherded his team to Dallas’ thirteenyard line. On the first play, Montana’s pass missed an open receiver in the end zone, and his usually stoic head coach jumped and shouted in frustration on the sidelines. The next play netted seven yards but left the 49ers short of both a first down and a touchdown. Just under a minute remained in the game. On third down with three yards to go on Dallas’ six-yard line, Montana rolled to his right with three Cowboys chasing him. Wide receiver Dwight Clark, one of Montana’s favorite targets that season, was in the back of the end zone running right as well. Montana flung the ball off his back foot and was knocked to the ground. Montana never saw anything but Clark’s feet touching the ground, but he heard the home crowd roar. Replays would show Montana what the fans saw that day; Clark leapt high in the air, twisted, and caught the ball on his fingertips. The successful extra point gave San Francisco the lead with fifty-one seconds left in the game. After the catch, Dallas was unable to move the ball against the 49er defense, and when the Cowboy quarterback lost a fumble, the game was over. Joe Montana and the 49ers would go on to defeat the Cincinnati Bengals in the Super Bowl. The catch marked a shift in NFL powerhouses. That 1981–82 season would be the first of three Super Bowl victories for Montana and the 49ers, the beginning of a dynasty. Montana was beginning a Hall of Fame career, as this first Super Bowl win was also the first of his three Super Bowl MVP awards. The game also marked the end of the Dallas Cowboys’ dynasty.

remaining 35 percent would be true free agents. The Plan B free agents actually did switch teams, and salaries increased. The 1980s was also a decade of movement. Three NFL teams physically moved locations during the decade. The first to go was Al Davis’s team, the Raiders. Davis was not happy with the facilities at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, which lacked lush, revenue-producing, luxury box seating, nor was he happy with the lease agreement. In 1978 the Los Angeles Rams had moved out of the Los Angeles Coliseum, and Davis had begun negotiations with the city of Los Angeles as well as its coliseum to move there from Oakland. At the time, NFL ownership rules required a 75 percent approval from other owners before a team could be moved, but when Davis asked for approval in 1980, he was overwhelmingly rejected. As a result, almost everyone involved filed lawsuits: the city of Oakland

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and the Coliseum wanted to keep the Raiders, Los Angeles wanted the Raiders, and the Raiders themselves wanted to move. Multiple legal arguments were put forward. In the end, the city of Los Angeles and Al Davis won, and in 1984 the Raiders moved out of Oakland. Similarly, after a long and successful history in Baltimore, Colts owner Robert Irsay announced the team would be moving to Indianapolis, where the city had promised to build a domed stadium, after negotiations with Baltimore about building a new stadium failed. The city of Baltimore responded quickly, filing lawsuits. The state got involved when the Maryland state legislature passed a law allowing the city to seize the team via eminent domain, but that new law would provoke Irsay into moving quickly. That very night, March 28, 1984, in a snowstorm, the team packed everything it owned into moving trucks and left for Indianapolis without warning and without league permission. The city of Baltimore felt betrayed and devastated, but the Colts stayed in Indianapolis. In 1988, after a long and protracted argument over the city’s failure to build the Cardinals a new football-only stadium in St. Louis, owner Bill Bidwell moved the team to Tempe, Arizona, where the community promised to build a new state-of-the-art facility. Unlike the flight of the Colts, many in St. Louis were

Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams is about to let go of a pass January 31, 1988, during the first quarter of Super Bowl XXII with the Denver Broncos in San Diego. (AP / Wide World Photo)

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

just as happy to see the team go. The St. Louis Cardinals had not been nearly as successful as the Baltimore Colts, and Bidwell was commonly seen as an owner who never spent any money on talented players and coaches. Plus, in a city with a strong economic grounding in brewing beer, Bidwell was not popular for his desire to stop selling Budweiser at Busch Stadium, which was owned by the same family that owned the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. Although the 1980s saw labor strife, franchise movement, and the rise and fall of another professional league, in general the decade was good for football on both the professional and the collegiate level. For the NFL, television viewership and media revenue grew, especially after ESPN debuted Sunday Night Football in November 1987. African Americans also gained more prominence and power in the NFL throughout the decade. Breaking traditional racial stacking at certain positions, in 1983 Dwight Stephenson became the first black center named to the Pro Bowl. In 1988 Doug Williams with the Washington Redskins became the first black quarterback to win the Super Bowl when his team beat the Denver Broncos. Williams was also named the game’s Most Valuable Player. African Americans also made strides in coaching, particularly after San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh made a point of hiring black coaches. In 1989 Al Davis named Art Shell the Los Angeles Raiders head coach, making Shell the first African American head coach in the NFL since Fritz Pollard in the 1920s. Such improvements, along with increased revenue and player salaries, helped the sport.

USFL: The Other Pro Football League The NFL had long been the dominant professional football league in the United States, and although other leagues had challenged its supremacy, none had succeeded in usurping its position. In 1982 David Dixon, a New Orleans antique dealer who had helped get the NFL Saints team to the city, founded a new league, the U.S. Football League. Unlike its failed predecessors, the USFL took a different approach; the league played in the spring and not in the fall. Dixon hoped the USFL would fill a gap in the appetite of the American football fan by playing when no high school, college, or pro football teams had regularly scheduled games. The USFL lasted only three seasons (1983, 1984, and 1985) and the turnover in ownership of the teams was quick. In just three years, two of the teams were each sold five times. Originally the USFL hoped to compete in NFL cities, but during the NFL off-season, but by the third season only six teams remained in NFL cities; the rest had moved to smaller markets. Revenue for the USFL was varied. Although some teams had strong attendance, most did not. The league had hoped each team would average 30,000 fans at each game, but only the New Jersey Generals achieved this minimum each season. The league average ranged just over 25,000 fans per game. Additionally the USFL television contracts were not nearly as lucrative as the NFL contracts. In 1983 the USFL had contracts with ESPN and ABC that brought in $1.4 million per team but the NFL television revenue averaged out to $11.12 million per team (Quirk and Fort 1992, 357–58). The league featured some big-name players and owners. University of Georgia Heisman Trophy–winning running back Herschel Walker signed with the USFL after leaving school a year early. In signing Walker before he used up his college

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eligibility, the USFL broke an informal, long-standing NFL policy of not drafting college players early. Walker played for the New Jersey Generals, owned by real estate mogul Donald Trump. Quarterbacks Jim Kelly and Steve Young and defensive end Reggie White would all join the league and would all eventually become members of the Football Hall of Fame. Heisman Trophy winner Doug Flutie would also join the USFL. As a result of these high-profile signings, the quality of play in the league was quite high. The product had potential. Some of the unexpected financial struggles of the league, however, stemmed from the unexpectedly high player salaries. The talented young college players chose the USFL over the NFL because the USFL promised to be more lucrative. The USFL decided to move to a fall schedule in 1985 but several teams disbanded and, for practical purposes, the league was finished. An unwise expansion from twelve teams to eighteen teams in the third season had not helped the league’s stability. The USFL did not officially disband, however, until the conclusion of its antitrust lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL argued that the NFL had violated antitrust laws by pressuring the television networks not to broadcast USFL games. Additionally, the upstart league argued that the NFL had conspired to harm the franchises in cities with NFL teams. The USFL asked for $567 million in actual damages, but in antitrust cases damages are automatically tripled to punish the wrongdoer. This meant that if the USFL won, league owners hoped to get about $1.7 billion, which would have bought years of time to grow and expand their fan base. In fact, although the jury ruled that the NFL had monopolized professional football, it also concluded that the league did not pressure the networks to avoid the USFL and the NFL did not conspire to harm any specific teams. As a result, the USFL was awarded just one dollar. On appeal, the USFL won court costs but no changes to the original verdict. The USFL officially folded after the appeal was rejected.

Steroid Scandal Football in the 1980s saw a new scourge. Steroids and performance-enhancing drugs, which had already become prevalent in weightlifting and bodybuilding, became prevalent in NFL locker rooms. A number of players from that decade have admitted using steroids and have estimated their use at anywhere from 20-90 percent of players, varying by position. Steve Courson, a former Pittsburgh Steeler, blamed a heart condition on steroid use in his playing days. He would testify before Congress in 2005 about steroid use and reiterate what he had written in his biography after his retirement. Courson traced the history of steroid use in the NFL to a strength coach, Alvin Roy, who had begun working with the Olympic weightlifting team. When Roy moved to the NFL, Courson claimed that steroids followed him wherever he went, and that word quickly spread of their benefits. Jim Haslett, a former NFL linebacker, and later an NFL coach, admitted to using them for at least one season as a player to gain size and strength; he estimated half the players and all the lineman took them at some point. Perennial All-Pro lineman Lyle Alzado, who would later die of brain cancer that he attributed to his steroid use, insisted that NFL coaches and administrators knew of steroid use, but liked the results so they said nothing. Confirming his story, one of Alzado’s coaches admitted he knew of the drug use. NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle did take the steroid problem seriously. Arbitrarily, and over the union’s objections, the NFL began testing for steroids in 1987. In

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1991 Dr. Forest Tennant, the drug advisor to the NFL in the 1980s, said that in 1986 30 percent of all players tested positive for steroid usage. Echoing Alzado, he also insisted that owners and coaches had not done enough to stop the drugs’ spread. He noted that in 1986 the league, motivated by the cocaine overdose of NBA draftee Len Bias, was more concerned about the use of cocaine and tested for that. Players were not suspended for the use of steroids until 1989 after the Players’ Association finally agreed to a formal drug-testing and punishment policy. Any prior positive steroid tests were forgiven. Random, year-round testing began in 1990. The drug policy in the NFL was one of the first and more stringent in American professional sports.

College Football Much of the increase in college-football revenues and fan base came from the Supreme Court decision in 1984, which concluded that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) could not unilaterally negotiate broadcasting rights for all its membership. The Court concluded that each individual school or, if it chose, each conference could sell its own broadcasting rights. This decision, in conjunction with the growth of ESPN and cable television, increased the number of televised games and allowed fans to see more teams on television more often. Prior to the decision, the NCAA had generally limited teams to just a few appearances nationally on television, but after the Supreme Court decision, teams and television stations had a plethora of options, which allowed the market to dictate the number of television appearances and the contract fees for those appearances. While scandal in college football was nothing new, the increased media presence in the 1980s increased the value of a winning team and it also increased the media attention when schools did violate NCAA rules or when athletes behaved illegally. News about college sport scandals was now front-page material, and ESPN was happy to highlight the scandal on SportsCenter as well. Abuses at schools like the Universities of Georgia and Oklahoma were played out in the news. In 1986 Jan Kemp, a professor at the University of Georgia, won a huge lawsuit against the university. Kemp had been fired after she complained that the grades she had given football players had been changed over her objections. The players had been enrolled in a remedial English program and, despite Kemp’s failing nine of them, each was promoted out of the program. Kemp sued the university for violating her right of freedom of speech, and an Athens, Georgia, jury awarded her $2.58 million. The case highlighted the attitude of many big-time sports colleges when university administrators testified that the athletes were only at the university as raw materials for the sports machine. The case may have been doomed when the university lawyer’s opening statement included the assertion that “we may not make a university student out of [an athlete]. But if we can teach him to read and write, maybe he can work at the post office rather than as a garbage man after he gets done with his athletic career” (Neff and Sullivan 1986). Given that the football players at issue were African American, the racial implications did not help the university’s case. Elsewhere, stories of football players running wild scandalized the nation. At the University of Oklahoma, Coach Barry Switzer presided over teams that won

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football championships and also racked up impressive crimes. In 1988 star linebacker Brian Bosworth claimed that Switzer rented an off-campus apartment for players’ use and also offered cars. He also claimed that some players, with Switzer’s knowledge, used the team apartment to snort cocaine. Switzer denied this allegation, but there was not much he could do to deny the crimes of his other players. One player shot another after an argument, three players allegedly raped two women in the football dormitory, and the quarterback was arrested after selling cocaine to an undercover police officer. In 1989, after the NCAA put the university on probation, Switzer resigned. The University of Colorado, meanwhile, also had its problems. Between 1986 and 1989 twenty-four football players were arrested for crimes ranging from burglary to assault. One player was arrested for rape and was a suspected serial rapist. Despite the criminal activities of the players, the Associated Press named the Colorado football team the 1990 National Champion (Georgia Tech University would win the championship given by the Coaches’ Poll). The Buffaloes’ record that season of eleven wins, one loss, and one tie, however, was marred by controversy on the field. In the middle of the season, Colorado was losing to the University of Missouri as time was running out in the game. Colorado scored to take a two-point lead as time expired, but they did so on a fifth down; the officiating crew had lost count of the number of downs. After the game, Colorado refused to forfeit the game, claiming in part they would have scored earlier if Missouri’s field conditions had been better. Their coach, Bill McCartney, would later retire from coaching to promote his evangelical ministry, and several years into that, he apologized for accepting the victory. From the NCAA’s perspective, however, the most damaged football program in the nation was at Southern Methodist University in Houston, Texas. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the SMU Mustang football team was a powerhouse. Between 1980 and 1986, the team’s record was fifty-two wins, nineteen losses, and one tie. The team was undefeated in the 1982 football season. Winning, however, was coming perhaps because of NCAA violations. Despite multiple probation periods, allegations of additional violations arose in 1986. The problem seemed to be largely that university boosters were paying players. In 1985–86, one booster seems to have paid thirteen players over $47,000. Additionally, recruits, players, and their families were given other illegal inducements; players were given cars and families were flown to games. In 1986 the NCAA gave SMU football the “death penalty”— eliminating all scholarships and prohibiting the team from playing a single game in 1987. In 1988 the team’s season was canceled because of a lack of players. SMU football never reached the same levels of national success again, and the NCAA has not utilized the death penalty subsequently. On the college level, football did well also. Increased media coverage made the game quite popular, and it allowed on-field heroics like Boston College quarterback Doug Flutie’s “Hail Mary” touchdown pass to defeat the University of Miami in 1984 to be replayed repeatedly. Football fans continued their argument that football had replaced baseball as America’s Game.

Hockey Professional ice hockey saw some growth in the 1980s. The game had long been the province of Canada more than the United States, but the popularity of the

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

sport grew a bit the United States in the 1980s. In 1980 the dominant professional league, the National Hockey League (NHL), expanded after a rival league failed. The World Hockey League (WHL) lasted throughout much of the 1970s, but like many startup leagues, lacked sufficient funding to really challenge the NHL longterm. The league did, however, increase players’ salaries by providing competition, and it recruited underage and European players. The WHL had prided itself on an offense-oriented game. After the WHL failed, the Edmonton Oilers, the Winnipeg Jets, the Hartford Whalers, and the Quebec Nordiques joined the NHL in 1980. The Oilers would bring the man who could be credited with vastly raising the profile of professional hockey in the United States—Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky had played one year in the failed WHL (where he won Rookie of the Year) and after the WHL ended in 1979, Gretzky’s team, the Edmonton Oilers, joined the National Hockey League (NHL) and Gretzky was on his way to becoming a legend. With Gretzky the Oilers won the Stanley Cup championship four times (and played and lost in another final) in the 1980s. Gretzky, nicknamed “the Great One,” held or would eventually hold almost every scoring record in the league. He led the league in scoring in eight of the ten years of the 1980s and came in second in the other two. He was a hockey god. In 1990 the Associated Press would name him the Male Athlete of the Decade. In 1988 the Edmonton Oilers traded Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings. Some speculated the owner traded him for the cash, and other speculated that Gretzky himself had asked for the trade to help advance his American wife’s acting career. Regardless of why it happened, Canada as a nation was devastated. As crushed as Canada was, however, Gretzky’s move jump-started hockey in Southern California. The Kings, prior to Gretzky’s arrival, had not been terribly good or terribly popular. Gretzky’s arrival made them competitive and resulted in a string of sold-out seasons. The NHL in the decade saw changes in terms of their teams’ locations and in terms of their television visibility. Not only did the WHL four teams join the league in 1980, but the next season an existing NHL team, the Colorado Rockies, relocated to New Jersey and became the Devils. In 1989 the Nashville Predators would be formed as an expansion team. Most credit Gretzky’s star power with giving the NHL enough momentum to place a franchise in the mid-South—a place with no history of hockey and one that rarely saw ice outside of the rink. Any increase in hockey’s popularity in the United States was not likely because of television, however. No over-the-air network broadcast an NHL game between 1981 and the end of the decade. From 1980 until 1985 USA (formerly the Madison Square Garden Network) channel broadcast NHL games, and then ESPN broadcast games until 1988; at that point the NHL made the unfortunate choice of signing an exclusive contract with SportsChannel America. That contract doubled the contract money that ESPN had been paying, but SportsChannel America had only one-third the viewership that ESPN had because many cable companies across the country did not carry it. The NHL president believed that regional cable sports television was the best way to make money and to promote interest in the NHL, but some thought that the large check cost the league more than it gained in terms of national exposure. In 1990 the All-Star game would be aired on NBC, but that would be the only game of the decade available to viewers without cable. That said, the NHL generally remained stable, and the average player salary increased 33 percent over the decade (Fort 2003, 180).

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The Olympics The United States, after boycotting the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 would attend each of the Olympic Games subsequently. In 1984 Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, hosted the Winter Games, and Los Angeles hosted the Summer Games. In 1988 Calgary, Canada, hosted the Winter Games, and Seoul, South Korea, the Summer Games. All of these were fundamentally different from previous Games in that they were part of the new “open” era. Prior to 1983 most international sport federations required that athletes who wanted to compete internationally be amateurs and receive no compensation for their victories or any but family or self-support for their training. The Soviet bloc had avoided the challenge of keeping an athlete’s amateur status by using state support. For example, many Soviet and Communist athletes were part of the military system and their

The Record-Breaking Hurdler Edwin Moses In the 400-meter hurdles, conventional wisdom said an athlete should take fourteen steps between hurdles. Edwin Moses was a physics major at Morehouse University who trained on public tracks, and he wondered if fourteen steps were really necessary for him. They were not. Born on August 31, 1955, in Dayton, Ohio, Moses would become one of the greatest hurdlers of all time. He appeared out of nowhere for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and won the 400-meter hurdles, a fact even more remarkable because he had not raced that event regularly before March 1976. He set a world record in Montreal and was the only American man to win an individual track event. After the Olympics, he continued to train, essentially on his own, while he completed his double major in physics and business administration at Morehouse. He broke his own world record at a meet in 1977. That same year, Moses competed in an event in Berlin and lost the 400-meter hurdles. That loss was significant because Edwin Moses would not lose another race for almost ten years. During that time he won 122 consecutive races and countless awards, including the Jesse Owens Award, the James E. Sullivan Award, Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year, as well as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year. Although he did not win the 1980 Olympic gold because of the U.S. boycott of the event, he broke his own world record that year in Milan. He would win his second gold medal in Los Angeles in the 1984 Olympics. In June of 1987 he would lose for the first time since that race in Berlin. He would continue to race, though, and at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, he won the bronze medal. Moses’ success on the track, however, is not necessarily his most important impact on the sport of track and field. In the early 1980s, he lobbied for change in reforming international and Olympic eligibility rules so that athletes could train full time while earning direct stipends, payments, and commercial endorsement money. Prior to that, Olympic track athletes could not accept any payment for competition, endorsements, or victories, or they risked losing their amateur status and their eligibility to compete in international events. Moses presented the plan to the president of the International Olympic Committee and the plan was ratified in 1981. Several years later, he recognized the invasion of performance-enhancing drugs into his sport, and he lobbied again for change. He spoke out against drug usage and encouraged the international body to develop more stringent tests. In 1988 he helped develop amateur sports’ first random out-of-competition drug testing program.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

Olympic figure skater Brian Boitano leaps in the air, touching his skates during the free skating competition on February 20, 1988, in Calgary, Canada, during the XV Winter Olympics. (AP / Wide World Photo)

job was to train for their sport, but they were compensated and supported as a member of the military. Western Europe and North American athletes were stymied by the system; many could train and compete as scholarship holding members of their college track teams but once they ran out of eligibility, they lost their meal money and free coaching. In 1983, the International Olympic Committee acknowledged the problems of the amateur system and encouraged the international sports federations to redefine eligibility. By the end of the decade almost every federation allowed any athlete (professional or amateur) to try to qualify and compete internationally. In Sarajevo, American athletes had one of their better Winter Olympics, winning eight medals. Brothers Phil and Steve Mahre took gold and silver in the slalom, and Scott Hamilton won the gold in men’s figure skating. Hamilton had had an odd childhood illness that caused him to stop growing; eventually he grew to 50 200 and he weighed about 110 pounds during his competitive years. His gold medal at the 1984 games was not surprising, as he had won the world championships every year since 1981. Athletes on the U.S. team were extraordinarily successful in the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, largely because the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc of Communist countries boycotted the games in what most people perceived as retaliation for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow games four years earlier. The Soviets’ official reason was their worries about the security of their athletes, given the political tensions between the two countries. Despite the absence of the Communists, a record 140 countries participated in an Olympics filled with firsts. American Joan Benoit won the inaugural women’s marathon and New Zealander Neroli Fairhall became the first paraplegic athlete to compete in the Olympics. She finished thirty-fifth in the archery competition.

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FloJo—Florence Griffith Joyner (1959–1998) Florence Griffith Joyner, known as FloJo, first appeared in the American eye in 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics. Born December 21, 1959, in Los Angeles, California, she enrolled at the University of California–Los Angeles and trained with Bob Kersee. Kersee was married to Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who herself would ultimately become queen of the heptathlon. In the 1984 Olympics, Griffith Joyner caught the public eye not so much because of her performance (she won silver in the 200-meter sprint), but because she had flamboyant racing suits and long brightly decorated fingernails. Her self-designed racing suits were, like others of the era, racing tights, but unlike others, FloJo favored suits with one leg in tights and one leg bare. After the Games, she drifted away from training and entered a quasi-retirement. FloJo’s life would change dramatically in 1987. She married Al Joyner, who was Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s brother and gold medal winner of the 1984 Olympic triple jump himself. The two would later have a daughter, and the Joyner and Kersee clans would be considered the first family in track and field. FloJo leaped back into training with Al as her new coach and changed her regime, undertaking an intensive weightlifting program and changing her starting technique for the sprints. She saw immediate improvement and became a household name because of her speed rather than her appearance. In the 1988 Olympic trials, she set a world record in the 100-meter sprint, and beat her own personal best by more than half a second. At the Seoul Olympics, she dominated the women’s sprints, winning gold medals in the 100-meter, 200-meter, and the 4100-meter relay. She also won a silver medal in the 4400m relay. Her winning time in the 200-meter also set a new world record. That year she won the Sullivan Award for the top amateur athlete. She would retire the next year in 1989. Tragically, on September 21, 1998, FloJo died in her bed in her Mission Viejo, California, home. The coroner’s report concluded that she had suffocated after having an epileptic seizure. The seizure had been caused by a congenital defect in her brain.

Largely because of the lack of competition, the United States won 174 medals in the games compared to the fifty-three medals won by the country with the second highest total, Romania. That said, many U.S. athletes had excellent games. American Carl Lewis won four gold medals in the two sprints, the long jump, and the 4100-meter relay event, becoming the first man to win four gold medals in a single Olympics since Jesse Owens did it in 1936. Mary Lou Retton became the first American woman to win the All-Around gymnastics gold medal, securing her medal with perfect scores in both the floor exercise and the vault. American athletes won six medals in the 1988 Calgary Games. Despite the low total number, the games had memorable moments. Brian Boitano won the gold medal in men’s figure skating after entering the final free skate tied with Canadian Brian Orser for first place. Both men skated outstanding programs, and Boitano won the gold medal after the judges, by a score of five to four, concluded he was the better skater of the day. Debi Thomas became the first African American woman to win a medal at a Winter Olympics when she won the bronze medal in the women’s figure-skating competition. Bonnie Blair, who would ultimately win more speed-skating Olympic medals than any other American woman, won a gold

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

medal with a world record in the 500-meter sprint and then won a bronze medal in the 1000-meters. She was the only double medalist for the United States in Calgary. In Seoul, most of the sporting world gathered at the Summer Olympics for the first time since the 1976 Montreal Games. The United States did well, earning ninety-four medals as the third-leading medal winner behind the Soviet Union and East Germany. The American teams won both the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments in what would be the last of the amateur basketball teams. Soon after the Seoul games, the basketball federation (Federation Internationale Basketball Amateur) opened international competition to professionals. Americans also did well in the track- and field event with Carl Lewis adding two more gold medals and a silver one to his name. Jackie Joyner-Kersee would win gold in the heptathlon, breaking the world record, and the long jump. Joyner-Kersee had won the silver medal in Los Angeles in the heptathlon and would compete in two subsequent Olympics after Seoul. Seoul, however, would become infamous for steroid usage. Although the International Olympic Committee had tested for drugs since the 1968 Winter Games, Ben Johnson, a Canadian sprinter who had at first won the 100-meter gold medal,

USA jumper Jackie Joyner-Kersee of East St. Louis, Illinois, leaps in the early round of the women’s long-jump competition in Seoul, September 29, 1988. Joyner-Kersee moved past the twenty-onefoot mark as she sought her second gold medal of the games. (AP / Wide World Photos)

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tested positive for steroid use in Seoul. He was the first major track and field athlete to test positive. The Olympic community was shocked, and the IOC began investigating stiffer drug tests and more complete testing protocols; however, the shadow of drug use would linger over the Olympics of this and subsequent decades.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing Although boxing in the 1980s did not hold the same prominence in American culture as it had in the past, the decade had a number of memorable fights and characters that kept it, for good and bad, in the public consciousness. Part of the challenge for boxing in the 1980s was replacing Muhammad Ali, the self-proclaimed “Greatest” who helped keep boxing into the public eye. The other part was a shift from televising boxing matches on over-the-air networks to televising major boxing matches on cable and payMike Tyson (Courtesy of Photofest) per-view television, taking the event away from the casual observer. The heavyweight division lost a star when Muhammad Ali finally retired for good in 1982, and Larry Holmes held the heavyweight titles for the first part of the decade. Holmes, however, was not the same larger-than-life figure that Ali had been and many Americans lost interest in the division. That same year, long-time over-thetop sports commentator Howard Cosell, a long-time friend and admirer of Ali, retired from calling boxing matches because he was dismayed at the quality of the heavyweight fights. The heavyweight division would revive when Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in 1986 at the age of nineteen. For a brief period Tyson seemed unbeatable; in 1988 he knocked out previously undefeated Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds and earned himself $20 million for his effort. While it was an impressive display, its brevity did not thrill the millions who had paid extra to see the match on cable. Tyson’s dominance would abruptly end in 1990 when little-known Buster Douglas knocked him out. Although Tyson would remain in the news, he was never the same fighter as he was for that brief span. The void of personality in the heavyweight category, however, allowed some of the lighter boxers to gain recognition. More of the lighter categories were carried on network television as well, expanding their audience. Middleweights “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearnes, and Sugar Ray Leonard would dazzle the audience with their speed and footwork as they passed around the middleweight titles. Each would also win titles in different weight categories, gaining and losing weight to expand their competition.

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1980–1989

Boxing also saw tragedy in the 1980s. In 1982 Ray Mancini retained his lightweight title with a fourteenth round knock out of Duk Koo Kim. Kim died five days later, and boxing mandated a twelve-round maximum on fights and instituted elimination via the standing eight count. The fight, in Las Vegas, had been televised by CBS, which made the country much more aware of the event than it might have been. The next year another boxer died after a bantamweight title fight in Los Angeles. The victorious Alberto Davila was so distraught he stayed with the downed fighter’s family at the hospital until Kiko Bejines died three days later. While tragedy did not define boxing during this decade, the lack of a dominant heavyweight, the lack of prominent boxers on over-the-air network television, and the range of sporting options contributed to the sport’s decline in popularity.

Golf In the 1980s, the three dominant and most lucrative professional golf tours were in the United States. The Professional Golf Association (PGA) was the home for the best male golfers in the world, the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) was the women’s tour, and the Senior PGA Tour, founded in 1980, was for male golfers aged fifty or above. Golf in the United States was played predominantly by white Americans from comfortable middle-class backgrounds. In the 1980s the PGA did not see any single dominant player, but generally those who were most successful were Americans. Curtis Strange, from Virginia, won more events (sixteen) than any other golfer and won consecutive U.S. Open titles in 1988 and 1989. He also was the first on the money list for three years in the decade and in 1988 became the first man to earn a $1 million in one year on the tour. Tom Kite from Texas won thirteen titles from 1981 through 1990, and showing his consistency across the decade, he also led the money list in both 1981 and 1989. Calvin Peete was the only African-American on the PGA Tour. Although he never won a major, he won eleven tournaments in the decade and had the lowest average score of all golfers in 1984, earning him the Vardon Trophy. Similarly, the LPGA did not have any single dominant player over the course of the decade, but it did have several players who dominated single years. Like the PGA, the winners on the LPGA in the 1980s were generally Americans. For example, Pat Bradley from New Hampshire had an excellent year in 1986 when she won five titles including three of the four major tournaments. She was the first member of the LPGA to earn $2 million in her career (which started in 1974) as well and would top the money list. Although Bradley did not dominate the tour again in the same way, she was consistent; in 1990 she would be the first member to reach $3 million in career earnings. Despite being diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder, she won nineteen tournaments and five major tournaments from 1981 though 1990. Similarly, Betsy King from Pennsylvania had several good years and a solid decade. She was the leading money winner in 1984 and 1989. Over the course of the decade she won four majors and twenty-three tournaments. During this decade, Nancy Lopez, the first great Latina LPGA golfer, solidified her status as a top player by winning twenty-five tournaments, including the LPGA Open twice, and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1987. The Senior PGA was designed to allow some of the more popular male golfers to continue their careers and to continue to attract fans to golf as they aged. Aside

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from the age restriction, the Senior Tour generally has only fifty-four holes over three days (except for the major events) instead of the PGA’s usual seventy-two holes over four days. In the early 1980s some players who had been lesser stars on the PGA found their niche on the Senior Tour. Miller Barber, from Louisiana, won twenty-four Senior tournaments from 1981 through 1990 versus the eleven tournaments he had won in his entire career on the PGA Tour. Similarly, Don January from Texas only won ten times in his years on the PGA Tour but he won twenty-three times in the 1980s on the Senior Tour. Other popular players from the PGA Tour continued their careers on the Senior Tour. Chi-Chi Rodriquez from Puerto Rico won sixteen events from 1986 through 1990. Rodriquez had long been a fan-favorite because of his flamboyant approach to the game; after scoring a birdie or eagle he would wave his putter like a matador stabbing a bull. Foreign golfers were quite successful on the Senior Tour as well. For example, New Zealander Bob Charles won fifteen Senior tournaments from 1987 through 1990 and was twice the leading money winner.

Tennis Larger-than-life characters, fierce rivalries, and youth characterized professional tennis in the 1980s. Although the sport at the professional level was truly international with players from and events located over all parts of the globe, several American players were dominant throughout the decade on both the men’s and the women’s side of the sport. John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors were among the top ten players of the year according to the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) computer rankings for seven of the ten years. McEnroe was one of the bad boys of tennis; his nickname was Superbrat. At conservative Wimbledon in 1981, he appeared for the finals match on July 4, Independence Day for the United States but just another day for the United Kingdom, dressed in blue and white tennis clothes with a red headband. Despite his victory, the All England Club, not at all amused by his antics, declined to offer him the traditional honorary membership into the club. McEnroe was also infamous for complaining loudly about official calls during the match and for abusing officials and his equipment. In 1990 he was ejected from the Australian Open because of his abuse toward the officials. Regardless of his manners, McEnroe was a talented player who had a superb year in 1984, winning thirteen of the fifteen tournaments he entered, including Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Connors, who had begun his dominance in the 1970s, continued to be successful in the 1980s. He won consecutive U.S. Open titles in 1982 and 1983 and remained a consistent enough player to rank in the ATP Top 10 until 1988. He too had a bit of a “bad boy” reputation, but his was not as extreme as McEnroe’s. He had a history of flashing the occasional obscene gestures to officials when he disagreed with their calls, but, as he aged in the 1980s (and compared to McEnroe), Connors’s on-court behavior calmed down. McEnroe and Connors faced each other repeatedly, and the younger player, McEnroe, would have the edge, beating Connors twenty times in thirty-three meetings. Similarly, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova were two powerful forces in women’s professional tennis in the 1980s. Evert, who was married to John Lloyd

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until 1987 and competed as Evert-Lloyd during that time, was a consistently strong player. According to the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) year-end rankings, she ranked among the top three players every year of the decade until her retirement in 1989. She won each of four major tournaments (Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the French Open, and the Australian Open) at least once in the 1980s. Perhaps more than any other American tennis player of the era, she enjoyed consistent popular support, in part because of her reputation as a sweet girl from California. She also became the first major rival for Navratilova, who had defected from Czechoslovakia and became a U.S. citizen in 1981. Navratilova was arguably one of the best women’s player in history, and in the 1980s, she was at her most dominant. From 1981 through 1990, she won three Australian Opens, three consecutive French Opens, six consecutive Wimbledon titles, and two pairs of back-to-back U.S. Open titles. She was also a remarkably successful doubles player, winning twenty-six major doubles titles in the decade and eight mixed-double major titles. She would finish in the top three of the ATP annual rankings each year from 1981 to 1990. Evert and Navratilova faced each other in eleven major finals in the decade before Evert’s retirement; Navratilova won eight of those contests. American youth also made their mark on professional tennis in the 1980s. In 1981, at the age of eighteen, Tracy Austin, who had already been a two-time semifinalist at Wimbledon, won her second U.S. Open title, defeating Navratilova. Austin, however, would drop out of the Top 10 rankings in 1983 before she turned twenty-one and would never recapture the success she had as a youngster. Along with Austin, Andrea Jaeger also had success at a young age. She reached the finals or semifinals of each of the four major tournaments in 1982 and 1983; she was seventeen and eighteen years old during the run. Her career in tennis ended abruptly in 1983 with a major shoulder injury. On the men’s side, in 1988 eighteen-year-old Andre Agassi won six singles titles; in 1989 he reached the finals of both the U.S. and French Opens. He chose not to play at the Australian Open or at Wimbledon those years. Off-court, Agassi sported long blond hair and boasted of his rebel image, enhanced by his endorsement deal with Canon for the “Rebel” camera. Michael Chang made history when he won the French Open in 1989 at the age of seventeen, and he was the first American man to win since 1955. It would be his only major title. American tennis in the 1980s was predominantly white and the men made more money. Only two African American women had much success in the decade: Zina Garrison and Lori McNeil. Garrison had a solid career; although she did not win a major singles title, she competed in the five finals. She also won three mixeddouble major titles in the decade. McNeil was not quite as successful, appearing in only two major-event singles finals and winning only one mixed-double major title. No African American men had much success, but Michael Chang was of Chinese descent and was the only successful Asian on the tour at the end of the 1980s. Continuing the history of gender segregation in tennis, the men continued to earn more than women at many tournaments. Although men and women competed for equal purses at the Australian and U.S. Opens, Wimbledon and the French Open continued to pay the men more. Part of the justification was that the men played the best of five sets while the women only played the best of three. Just as occurred with other professional sports, tennis in the United States benefited from the increased sports coverage from new sports-format television.

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Thoroughbred Horse Racing The 1980s were eminently forgettable regarding all-time great horses or races. After the excitement of three Triple Crown winners in the 1970s, the 1980s began the long stretch of having none in a decade. Only two horses won the first two legs of the crown, Pleasant Colony in 1981 and Sunday Silence in 1989. Pleasant Colony won two close races with Jorge Velasquez aboard, before finishing third in the Belmont. Sunday Silence defeated Easy Goer in the first two races, the second by a nose, but Easy Goer won the Belmont by eight lengths to end any hopes of a Triple Crown. Still, Sunday Silence was the Horse of the Year for 1989. Two other horses won two legs of the Triple Crown, Swale and Alysheba. In 1984 Swale, a son of Seattle Slew, won the Derby, but finished seventh in the Preakness. He came back to win the Belmont, but eight days later died of a massive heart attack, during a bath. Alysheba won the Derby and the Preakness, before finishing fourth in the Belmont Stakes. Like the horses, there were no real standouts among the jockeys of the decade. Ed Delahoussoye and Laffit Pincay won the most Triple Crown races with four each. Delahoussoye won two Derby victories and one victory in the Preakness and one in the Belmont. Pincay had wins in the Belmont and one victory in the Kentucky Derby.

OTHER SIGNIFICANT SPORTS Sport in the 1980s grew in many ways. Participation at the youth and college levels increased, especially among girls and women. College sport grew as well and continued to become a defined product. Professional leagues, however, saw some variation in their levels of success in the 1980s.

Soccer Soccer in the United States saw huge growth in young people’s participation rates. Youth soccer, which gained popularity throughout the 1970s, continued to grow in the 1980s, and as more young people who had played soccer as small children entered high school and college, their schools began adding soccer teams. Women’s soccer in college exploded in the 1980s. In 1981 only 12.5 percent of NCAA schools offered women’s soccer teams, but in 1990 41.3 percent offered the sport. Soccer was one of the fastest growing sports in terms of participation in the 1980s. Although soccer was growing in popularity, the men’s U.S. national team did not have much success in international play. In 1984 the Olympics allowed men’s teams from outside of Europe and South America to utilize any player they wanted, including professionals. The United States replaced most of its players with professionals but was still unable to advance out of the first round. The team failed to qualify for the 1986 World Cup. Although the team did qualify for the 1990 World Cup, they failed to win a single game and were eliminated in pool play. In 1985 the U.S. women’s national soccer team played their first international match, and in the next decade, when the women could compete in World Cup

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and Olympic tournaments, the women’s team would attain much greater international success than the men’s team ever did. On the professional level, soccer did not fare well in the United States. The North American Soccer League (NASL), which had enjoyed some success in the 1970s with older international stars like Pel
e and Franz Beckenbauer, folded in 1984, largely because of overexpansion and escalating player salaries. Part of the salary escalation came because of the rise of a competitor league: Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL). The indoor soccer game was very different than the outdoor game, with quicker, higher-scoring games that appealed to the American audience for a while. The MISL had begun in the late 1970s and would last until 1992. Although American children and young people played the game in great numbers, professional leagues failed to draw a lasting audience.

Wrestling Wrestling faced a period of change in the 1980s. Youth wrestling and high school wrestling saw the first girls asking for the opportunity to compete in the sport, and schools addressed the sudden coeducational wrestling issue in one of three ways. Either they let the girls wrestle against the boys or they encouraged girls to wrestle against each other. Both of these approaches were acceptable under the law and sometimes resulted in enough of an increase in girls’ participation to have gender segregated wrestling programs be viable. Occasionally schools and state athletic associations banned girls from participating in the sport, arguing that the sport involved touching that would be inappropriate for coed matches. In 1988, however, a federal district court in Kansas ruled that girls could not be excluded from the sport simply on the basis of their gender. A coach could cut a girl from a team because of her performance or attitude, but she had to be allowed to try out for the team. The court endorsed either coed teams or gender-segregated teams, but noted that if wrestling was offered as a school activity for boys, then it had to be available for girls. On the collegiate level, men’s wrestling saw lower participation rates and a number of college teams were cut. In 1981–82, NCAA membership offered 363 teams for 7,914 athletes, and each squad averaged 21.8 members. In 1989-90, NCAA membership offered 273 teams for 6,737 athletes, and each squad averaged 24.2 members (NCAA Year-By-Year). Many wrestling supporters blamed Title IX and its mandate that more women’s sports be offered for the decline, arguing that that colleges cut men’s wrestling to add women’s sport. While some schools may have chosen to cut men’s programs and add women’s sports because of budget constrictions, these choices were administrative ones and were not forced by the law. At the time, however, wrestling periodicals blamed the sport itself for being boring and called for rule changes and an increase in media attention. Professional wrestling, however, saw a huge resurgence. Although one could argue that professional wrestling is more entertainment than sport, Vince McMahon’s purchase of existing leagues and his creation of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) reignited the event’s popularity. WWF quickly gained coverage on cable television stations and became popular pay-per-view events. McMahon created brilliant, flamboyant characters to populate his league, and these characters, like Hulk Hogan, quickly became household names, particularly in families with younger white males in the household.

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College Sports The NCAA was the major college sports organization in the 1980s. The “elder statesman” of men’s sport, however, faced change and challenges in the decade. Having focused exclusively on men’s sport, in 1981 NCAA officials were considering what role, if any, the organization should play in the growing area of women’s college sport. Additionally, having faced a number of scandals in men’s football and basketball, the NCAA faced a public skeptical of the true nature of amateur sport in the college ranks. To combat this public perception of athletes being separated from students, the NCAA made major rule changes. The 1980s marked a dramatic shift for the administration of women’s collegiate sport. Prior to 1981–82, the NCAA had focused exclusively on men’s sport and had repeatedly refused to offer women’s championships at any level. In the early 1980s the female-controlled Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) provided administration and championships for women’s sport. The AIAW had been founded on the premise that women’s sport could and should be different than the traditional model of male collegiate sport. The AIAW had initially opposed college sport scholarships, arguing that athletic scholarships put too much emphasis on winning and elite sport and not enough emphasis on academics and sport participation. In the early 1980s, however, the NCAA decided that because of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting gender discrimination in athletics, and the growth of amateur sport in general that the NCAA should begin offering championships for women. Both organizations offered championships in 1981–82, but after that the much larger and economically stronger NCAA replaced the AIAW. The AIAW filed a lawsuit arguing that the NCAA had violated antitrust laws in pressuring their member organizations to use the NCAA for both men’s and women’s sport and in pressuring television networks not to televise the AIAW events. After losing the case, the AIAW officially disbanded in 1983. The end of the AIAW meant that the mostly male NCAA now ran women’s collegiate sport. As the NCAA expanded to include women’s sports in its realm, it faced the challenge of dealing with embarrassing scandals involving its student-athletes. Not only were there individual schools and players who violated NCAA rules as well as state and federal laws, but public perception was that college athletes were treated differently in general than regular students. The NCAA needed to reform that reputation. In 1983, in an effort to make sure that college athletes were prepared to be college students, the NCAA adopted Proposition 48. Prior to Prop 48, as it was called, any athlete could be awarded a college athletic scholarship provided he had a 2.0 grade point average (GPA) in high school as reported after six, seven, or eight semesters. The GPA requirement was cumulative and could be the result of a mix of academic and nonacademic courses, provided that same standard for calculating GPA was used for all students. As a result, promising athletes often avoided rigorous courses to protect their GPA. In 1982 an NCAA committee proposed an idea that would become Prop 48: the new rule would require a set of core academic courses for each student from which a GPA would be calculated. It also required a minimum test score on one of the standardized college aptitude tests. Some people, including Georgetown University men’s basketball coach John Thompson, charged that the standard was problematic because they believed those standardized tests

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were racially biased and that African American students would be disproportionately negatively affected by the rules. Regardless of the opposition, the rule took effect in 1986. All high school students who wanted to be considered for college athletic scholarships had to submit their high school transcript to the NCAA clearinghouse, which examined the transcript and calculated a GPA based on the core courses. Test scores were then submitted to the clearinghouse so that the athlete could be declared eligible. The NCAA argued that the rule was good because it forced student-athletes to be better prepared when they entered college, which meant more athletes could succeed academically in school and graduate with college degrees. Combating the allegations of a disparate racial impact, the NCAA noted that college graduate rates for African American student athletes increased after Proposition 48 took effect. College sports were making more money because of the increase in media revenue and more schools were investing in more sports for men and women throughout the decade. The NCAA worked hard to keep the reputation of its student-athletes as clean as possible in order to keep the market interested in the product of college sport generally.

SUMMARY The 1980s saw a strong growth in sports, thanks largely to a stronger economy giving Americans more disposable income, and because of the technological advances that brought cable television and sports programming to more of America. The big three sports—baseball, football, and basketball—all did well at both the professional levels and the lower levels. Player salaries increased for the professionals and each level saw an increase in television viewers. Other sports, like hockey, tennis, and golf, also did well. College sport focused on reform and on adding women’s championships, which increased the number of women competing in collegiate sport. The 1980s, however, would also serve as a kind of transition decade and act as a springboard for sports to expand in the 1990s in even more directions. In the 1980s niche sports like marathons, triathlons, motor sports, and alternative sports (like skateboarding and freestyle skiing) would slowly grow nationwide. More cities and more people would participate in long-distance running, like marathons. The growth of that sport was such that the women’s marathon had enough worldwide appeal to be named an Olympic sport in 1984. The triathlon combined distance swimming, running, and cycling into a single event. The longest triathlon was the Ironman competition in Hawaii, founded in 1978, in which competitors swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 miles, and then ran a 26.2 mile marathon. The Ironman and other triathlons grew in popularity throughout the 1980s. As a new sport, it included a women’s division from almost the first events. Motor sports, particularly auto racing in the NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) series and CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams—open-wheel Formula One cars), predated the 1980s but had solid growth throughout the decade. NASCAR especially did well, beginning to reach beyond its regionalism in the southern Atlantic states with personalities like Dale Earnhart and Darrell Waltrip who dominated the series in the decade.

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The King of Skateboards, Tony Hawk Born in San Diego, California, on May 12, 1968, Tony Hawk became the posterboy of vertical skateboarding and living proof that athletes could make a profession out of competing in “alternative” sports. Skateboards predated Hawk, but when he was given his first board at the age of nine, no one knew he would reinvent the sport, particularly in vertical skateboarding on large half-pipe structures. Soon after Tony received that first skateboard, his father built a skating ramp in the backyard. A selfdescribed overactive youth, Tony was highly competitive and physical, and skateboarding provided him an outlet for his excess energy. His parents supported his skateboarding and took him to competitions throughout his youth. At one point his father became frustrated with the skateboarding organizations, so Frank Hawk founded both the California Amateur Skateboard League and the National Skateboard Association (NSA). The NSA organized events with cash prizes and gave the sport new visibility. Tony Hawk was the face of skateboarding in the 1980s. He got his first sponsor at the age of twelve, turned professional at the age of fourteen, and by the age of sixteen was generally considered to be the best skateboarder in the world. He was particularly famous for the tricks he invented, which helped him win the vast majority of the competitions he entered. Vertical skateboarding, done on large ramps, emphasizes aerial maneuvers and manipulations with the skateboard on the top edge of the ramp. Hawk was highly skilled at both. With the skateboarding victories came financial rewards as well—he bought his first house when he was a senior in high school. Although vertical skateboarding waned at one point in favor of street skateboarding, when vertical skateboarding regained its popularity Tony Hawk bounced right back with it. Eventually he would have his own skateboard production company, skate tour, various video games, and a skate park–themed rollercoaster would be named after him. Perhaps most important, Hawk was the iconic figure of skateboarding. He was one of the first skateboarders to become a household name, and he led the way in promoting what had been a marginalized sport into the mainstream of America. Inspired by Hawk, countless kids across the country built their own ramps in backyards, and communities were pressured into building skate parks.

Alternative sports would be a youth revolution. Young suburban boys, particularly white, middle-class boys, would begin building ramps and jumps in their backyards to practice skateboarding moves and BMX bicycle tricks. In the mountainous regions, some young skiers would take to snowboarding and freestyle skiing, involving tricks and jumps rather than sticking with traditional downhill ski events. Girls tended to be more involved in the winter alternative sports than they were in skateboarding and BMX competitions. Throughout the 1980s the participation rates in these sports would increase at the grassroots level so that in the next decade, the alternative sports would explode into popular culture. The 1990s would build on the sporting successes of the 1980s as technology continued to improve and expand and as the media continued to look for new programming to sate consumer cravings for sport.

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RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Alexander, Charles C. 1991. Our game: An American baseball history. New York: Henry Holt. Bahreke, Michael S., and Charles Yesalis. 2002. Performance enhancing substances in sport and exercise. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Carpenter, Linda J., and Vivian Costa. 2005. Title IX. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Collins, Bud, and Zander Hollander, eds. 1994. Bud Collins’ modern encyclopedia of tennis. Detroit: Gale Research. Fort, Rodney D. 2003. Sports economics. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kirchberg, Connie. 2007. Hoop lore: A history of the National Basketball Association. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. MacCambridge, Michael. 2004. America’s game: The epic story of how pro football captured a nation. New York: Random House. Neff, C., and R. Sullivan. 1986. Scorecard: On trial in Georgia: Academic integrity. Sports Illustrated (January 27): 13, quoted in Quirk 1996, 64. Prine, Carl. 2005. Courson says super Steelers were on steroids. Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, April 25. Quirk, Charles E., ed. 1996. Sports and the law: Major legal cases. New York: Garland. Quirk, James, and Rodney D. Fort. 1992. Pay dirt: The business of professional sport. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Timothy. 1991. Football: NFL’s Steroid Policy Too Lax Doctor Warns.” New York Times, July 3. Schaller, Michael. 2007. Right turn: American life in the Reagan-Bush era, 1980–1992. New York: Oxford University Press. Thelin, John R. 1994. Games colleges play: Scandal and reform in intercollegiate athletics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Watterson, John Sayle. 2000. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whitson, David, and Richard Gruneau. 2006. Artificial ice: Hockey, culture, and commerce. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press.

FILMS Bull Durham. 1983. Dir. Ron Shelton. Eight Men Out. 1988. Dir. John Sayles. Field of Dreams. 1989. Dir. Phil Alden Robinson. Major League. 1989. Dir. David Ward. Michael Jordan: Come Fly with Me. 1989. NBA Videos. The Natural. 1984. Dir. Barry Levinson.

WEB SOURCES Bray, Corey. 1982–00 Participation statistics report. NCAA Web site. http://www.ncaa.org/ library/research/participation_rates/1982-2000/009-052.pdf (accessed Jan. 6, 2008). Carpenter, Linda J., and Vivian Costa. 2006. Women in intercollegiate sport: A longitudinal, national study twenty-nine year update, 1977–2006. http://webpages.charter.net/ womeninsport/AC_29YearStudy.pdf (accessed Dec. 11, 2007). History of cable TV. http://www.k-state.edu/infotech/cable/history.html (accessed Dec. 11, 2007).

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History: 1981–1990. NFL Web site. http://www.nfl.com/history/chronology/1981–1990 (accessed Dec. 11, 2007). Iversen, Eve. 2007. An oral history of the Presidio of San Francisco during the Loma Prieta earthquake. http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist2/presidio.html (accessed Dec. 13, 2007). Larry Bird. http://www.larrybird.com. LPGA Players. LPGA Web site. http://www.lpga.com/players_index.aspx (accessed Dec. 27, 2007). Olympic Games. Olympics Web site. http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/index_uk.asp (accessed Dec. 27, 2007). PGA Players. PGA Tour Web site. http://www.pgatour.com/r/players/ (accessed Dec. 27, 2007). Sugar Ray Leonard. http://www.sugarrayleonard.net Teams. NBA Web site. http://www.nba.com. Wayne Gretzky. http://www.gretzky.com.

CHAPTER 13

AMERICAN SPORTS, 1990 TO THE PRESENT Jaime Schultz, Callie Batts, Perry Cohen, Sarah Olson, Amie Chaudry, Jaime Ryan, and Caitlin Shannon

OVERVIEW As the world witnessed the simultaneous ending of a decade, a century, and a millennium, a great buzz surrounded the projected “Y2K” or the Year 2000 problem. There was widespread fear that as the date rolled over from 1999 to 2000 computer systems would break down and cripple U.S. finance, government, and electrical power. The concern, and the related media hype surrounding Y2K, quickly abated when very few problems occurred; however, the anxiety illustrated the increasing reliance on computer technology. Indeed, from 1990 to the present day, our culture has been significantly changed by the prevalence of personal computers and the time Americans spend “on line.” In 1992 the World Wide Web became available for home use and millions began “surfing the ’net,” sending emails to one another, conducting business transactions, and forming virtual communities. Webcasts of events, online gaming, Internet gambling, and fantasy sports leagues are some of the ways that the Web has affected sports. The instant access and dissemination of information democratized knowledge and communication, but also gave rise to a host of related problems. Over the past nearly two decades, too, mobile telephones have moved from status symbols in the hands of few to indispensable devices glued to the ears of many. More televisions in American homes are now connected to cable and dish networks that allow viewers access to highly specialized channels, including the introduction of several devoted to sports. On the airwaves, Oprah Winfrey continues to probe the collective psyche. Shows like Seinfeld, Friends, ER, and The Sopranos, among many, have garnered high ratings. Reality programs have brought a new era in television entertainment, starting with shows like The Real World on MTV and growing to new game shows (The Weakest Link), talent shows (American Idol), and competitions featuring average citizens in extraordinary situations (Survivor). As grunge, techno, teen pop, and hip-hop styles of music took center stage, the music industry has faced the dilemma of how to handle consumers’ ability to burn their own CDs and illegally download music from online file sharing. As Generation X

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gave way to Generation Y, Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation engaged in console wars in attempts to corner the video game market. Also since 1990 the stock market has taken some dramatic turns and the world’s population has surpassed six billion. HIV/AIDS has reached epidemic proportions around the globe and athletes like Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Greg Louganis, and Tommy Morrison serve as powerful reminders that no one, including America’s sporting heroes, is immune to the disease. Scientists began the Human Genome Project, produced genetically engineered crops, and cloned Dolly the Sheep—all of which present both significant advancements and ethical dilemmas for humanity. Politically speaking, two Bush presidencies book-ended the era: George Herbert Walker Bush’s first term came to an end in 1993. His son, George Walker Bush, left office after two terms, on January 20, 2009. The junior Bush originally increased his public profile as part owner of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers and then as governor of Texas. His initial occupation of the White House started with a controversial election against then–Vice President Albert Gore in 2000; although Gore won the popular vote, Bush won the electoral vote by a narrow margin. In between the Bush presidencies, President William Jefferson Clinton led the country during a long period of economic prosperity and peace. The second half of Clinton’s presidency was marred by allegations of sexual misconduct and his detractors attempted to remove him from office with charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. At the same time, women made great strides in politics. For instance, in 1993 the Senate confirmed Janet Reno as the first female attorney general of the United States and in 1997 Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. Secretary of State. The Clinton administration also affected sports in a number of ways, including support for Title IX legislation and advocating the retirement of Jackie Robinson’s number 42 jersey in all Major League franchises. A number of devastating tragedies struck the country, ranging from natural disasters, to domestic catastrophes, to international terrorist threats. There were a number of horrific school shootings, the most lethal of which occurred at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, when two teenaged gunmen took the lives of fourteen students and one teacher. Ted Kaczynski, dubbed the “Unabomber,” was captured in 1996 after a series of bombs that killed three and injured twenty-three. The Olympic Games, held twice in the United States between 1990 and 2007 (Atlanta in 1996 and Salt Lake City in 1998), have frequently become the target of terrorist attacks, as a bombing at the Atlanta Games demonstrated. In 1993 Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and others, sympathizers with an antigovernment militia movement, killed 168 people and injured another 850 when they detonated a truck filled with explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was the single deadliest act of terror against America on U.S. soil until the horrors of September 11, 2001. On that day, a series of attacks orchestrated by al-Qaeda, an international coalition of militant extremists working to end foreign influence in Muslim countries, forever changed the course of history in America. Terrorists hijacked four commercial jet airliners, crashing one into the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, and another into a field in rural Pennsylvania as passengers heroically tried to wrest the controls from the hijackers and thwart the intended mission. Terrorists piloted the other two planes directly into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center and the world watched in horror and disbelief as cameras captured the

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collision and destruction of the buildings. The unfathomable death, injury, and destruction caused by the attack continues to resonate, even as 9/11 memorials have begun to be established and opened. In all, nearly 3,000 people died in the September 11th attacks and many remain missing. The events shook the foundation of the country. Feelings of security and safety were forever altered, and many people were affected by the loss of life and destruction of property caused by the crashes. The attacks also exacerbated racial tensions; the number of hate crimes and incidents of harassment directed toward Middle Easterners increased dramatically in the wake of the incident. The U.S. government instituted a number of efforts to reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks, including the Homeland Security Act, the PATRIOT Act, and increased scrutiny of foreign nationals living in the United States. Perhaps most significant, however, was that September 11th also prompted the United States to wage a global “War on Terror.”

Sports, War, and Terrorism In noting the close links between sport and war, scholar Gamal Abdel-Shehid (2002, 317) argues that “two of the most important cultural and political roles in the United States are athlete and soldier.” During the period between 1990 and 2005, the roles of athlete and soldier embodied American cultural values in a complex time of war, terrorism, and fear. Sport played an integral part in mobilizing support for war, uniting the country, and creating cultural heroes who exemplified American nationalism. The connections between sport and war were further strengthened after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Following lengthy debate on the importance of sport in the aftermath of such a tragedy, the National Football League and Major League Baseball decided to resume their full schedules after a short period of postponement. Just seven weeks after the attacks, the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks met in the World Series, providing an arena of escapism and catharsis for New York City and, arguably, for the entire nation. The fear of additional terrorist attacks, and the resulting increases in security, manifested at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. Government and Olympic officials considered relocating or canceling the Games in response to the terrorist threat, but they decided to increase the amount and intensity of security surrounding the Games. In response, security personnel outnumbered the athletes, police snipers ringed the venues, and the flight zone immediately above Salt Lake City was restricted. A final example of the links between sport and war is the case of Pat Tillman (November 6, 1976–April 22, 2004). A former NFL football player for the Arizona Cardinals, Tillman declined a three-year, $3.6-million contract to volunteer for the Army after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He joined the Army Rangers in 2002 and was killed in friendly fire while serving in Afghanistan in 2004. Tillman was the first high-profile American professional athlete to die in military service since former Buffalo Bills lineman Bob Kalsu in Vietnam in 1970. Tillman’s image as both an athlete and soldier was held up as the ideal American hero, the perfect representation of sacrifice, strength, and dedication. Questions later surfaced about the nature of Tillman’s death and how the United States military manipulated and exploited his memory.

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While human-made tragedies afflicted the country around the turn of the twenty-first century, there were also a number of natural disasters during this time: The Northridge Earthquake, with a magnitude of 6.7, hit Los Angeles in 1994, killing sixty-one and leaving thousands homeless. Wildfires blazed in California, Colorado, New York, Florida, Oregon, and Arizona. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew slammed into the Florida and Louisiana coasts. Its power and damage to both property and human life ranks second in U.S. history, placing it behind the terrible devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Katrina struck the north-central Gulf Coast in 2005, causing severe damage to a number of Louisiana and Mississippi cities, including Gulfport, Biloxi, Long Beach, and Pascagoula. Hardest hit was New Orleans, whose levee system proved woefully inadequate, causing flooding in over 80 percent of the city. Bridges collapsed, roads were damaged, nearly 2,000 people were killed, and looting violence, murders, assaults, and other crimes ensued in the hurricane’s aftermath. The Louisiana Superdome, home to the NFL’s New Orleans Saints, became “shelter of last resort” for the thousands of citizens evacuated from their homes. At the stadium, they were met with unsanitary and unsafe conditions, a lack of power, water, and medical supplies, and additional flooding as the dome’s roof began to peel back. Although many sports franchises have been dubbed “America’s Team,” the Saints truly earned the moniker in 2005. The extensive damage to the Superdome forced the team to be itinerant throughout the season, setting up temporary residence in Texas and without the chance to play any “home” games. The U.S. government’s reaction to the storm and its aftermath was roundly criticized, particularly in connection to race, as the majority of those most affected by the catastrophe were African Americans. Always a volatile issue in U.S. history, race was brought to the fore in several other high-profile events. Following the 1992 acquittal of four white police officers for the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King, riots rocked Los Angeles and left fifty-eight people dead. The trial of football great O.J. Simpson, an African American accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, both of whom were white, highlighted the racial divide in the United States, as did the confirmation of Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas, the 1995 Million Man March, and the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of America. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, ending the Cold War that had existed since the end of World War II, but real conflicts continued. Throughout the 1990s, American troops were deployed to Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and elsewhere. Following the Iraqi invasion of oil-rich Kuwait, the United States waged the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm and successfully forced Iraq’s withdrawal. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush ordered what he termed a global “War on Terror.” The first step in this campaign was the invasion of Afghanistan in order to overthrow the Taliban regime, destroy Al-Qaeda, and capture their leader, Osama bin Laden. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush identified Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” that threatened world peace. With support from more than twenty other nations, the United States invaded Iraq, took control of the capital city of Baghdad, and ended the regime of Saddam Hussein. It has been a controversial war, dividing the nation and affecting all facets of American life. It is against this backdrop that present-day sport developed in America, and the dialectical relationship between sport and society is evident in a number of

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situations. While sport has been affected by the triumphs and tragedies of history since 1990, at the same time, we must acknowledge that sport is not just a product of society, but a producer as well, influencing the course of history in a number of significant ways.

TEAM SPORTS Baseball The history of American baseball since 1990 is characterized by globalization, soaring salaries, record-breaking feats, innovative architecture, new opportunities for women, and doping scandals. The popularity of baseball during this time fluctuated as fans abandoned the game after the 1994 players’ strike, came back to follow the 1998 home-run chase, and expressed disappointment at the alleged widespread use of steroids in the game. Faced with the rising dominance of football and basketball, Americans questioned the status of baseball as the national sport. Yet the health of baseball remains strong and the game perseveres.

Expansion and Globalization One of the most significant developments in professional baseball during this time was the increasing globalization of the American game. Many teams opened training academies in such places as the Dominican Republic and Australia to scout talent, and Major League Baseball (MLB) created an international arm of business operations in 1989 with offices in New York, London, Sydney, and Tokyo. The expansion of baseball contributed to this development by adding more teams and tapping new fan markets. Players from such countries as Japan, Korea, and Venezuela entered the major leagues and found a strong fan base among the numerous ethnic and immigrant groups in the United States. No longer was baseball exclusively an “American” sport (if it ever was)—its global character was now directly expressed through the players, the fans, and the business strategies of MLB. After a rigorous selection process completed in 1991, MLB decided to expand for the 1993 season, adding the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins to the National League. A second round of expansion occurred in 1998, with the addition of the Arizona Diamondbacks to the National League and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to the American League. Some critics argued that this rapid growth depleted the talent pool and caused an overall decrease in the quality of play. Proponents of expansion countered that the game was enriched with new fans, increased opportunities for players, and diverse regional representation. In addition to expanding domestically, MLB expanded its operations abroad as well. In 1992 the World Series traveled outside of the United States for the first time when the Toronto Blue Jays hosted the Atlanta Braves. Toronto defeated Atlanta to become the first Canadian team to win the World Series, and the Blue Jays repeated as champions in 1993 after beating the Philadelphia Phillies. The 1999 season started in Monterrey, Mexico, as the Colorado Rockies and San Diego Padres traveled south to play the first regular-season games in Mexico. One year later, the 2000 season opened in Tokyo when the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs played to sold-out Japanese crowds. The traveling continued in 2004 when the Florida Marlins and Houston Astros played a series of spring training games in

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Mexico City. By reaching out to international markets, MLB hoped to increase interest in baseball and secure additional media outlets and merchandising opportunities. New players also reflected this globalized character. In 1994 Chan Ho Park became the first Korean-born major leaguer when he earned a spot on the Los Angeles Dodgers’ roster. The Dodgers also featured Hideo Nomo, the first Japanese-born player to appear in a major-league game since 1965, when he pitched in an early season game in 1995. Between 1990 and 2005, a total of seventeen players born in Australia made their debut in the major leagues. Perhaps the player with the most international impact during this time was Ichiro Suzuki, an outfielder from Japan, who signed with the Seattle Mariners in 2001. Suzuki was an instant hit with the fans, both because of his playing skills and his ability to relate to the large Asian American fan base in and around the Seattle area. His games were followed widely by the Japanese media; sushi became a regular item at the stadium concession stands, and his stardom crossed international borders. By 2005 over 45 percent of all professional baseball players (minor and major leagues) were born outside of the United States. Just over 29 percent of all majorleague players were foreign born, and a total of thirty-three different countries were represented on opening day rosters of professional baseball teams in the United States. The leading countries included the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Perhaps Tommy Lasorda, former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, best captured the increasing tide of globalization by remarking with good humor: “For starting pitchers we have two Dominicans, one Italian, one Mexican, and one Japanese. In the bullpen we have a Venezuelan, a Mexican, a guy from the United States and a guy from St. Louis.” Lasorda probably intended to be humorous, but his comment held truth about the growing diversity of professional baseball.

Economics and Legal Issues With the freedom to sell their skills to the highest bidder on the free agent market, professional baseball players saw their salaries balloon after 1990. The effects of commercialization and globalization garnered increased revenues as teams capitalized on merchandise and media rights. The wealthier teams were then able to court the best players, enticing them with promises of large contracts and performance bonuses. This trend of increasing salaries is evident when comparing the highest-paid players and the teams with the biggest payrolls. For example, in 1990, Robin Yount was the highest-paid major-league player with an annual salary of $3.2 million; Cecil Fielder was tops in 1995 with a salary of $9.2 million. In 2000 Kevin Brown was paid $15.7 million for a season’s worth of work; his salary was more than the entire payroll for the Minnesota Twins ($15.6 million). The salary boom reached a new height in 2001 when Alex Rodriguez (known as “A-Rod”) signed the richest contract in American sports history. His ten-year deal with the Texas Rangers was worth $252 million, equating to approximately $25 million per year. Just eleven years earlier, the Kansas City Royals had the highest-overall payroll in MLB with a total expenditure of $23.8 million. And now Rodriguez, an individual, would be paid more than the entire Kansas City team earned in 1990. By 2005 the New York Yankees had the largest payroll at $208 million and Rodriguez remained the highest-paid player after being traded to the Yankees when the Rangers could no longer afford to pay his salary.

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One of the major reasons that player salaries and team payrolls increased so dramatically during this time was the impact of the 1994 players’ strike. Beginning in the middle of August, the strike lasted for 232 days and caused the cancellation of 938 games, including the 1994 playoffs and World Series. As such, Major League Baseball became the first professional sport to lose an entire postseason due to a labor dispute. The players decided to strike after a series of negotiations between team owners and the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA—the union representing players and their families) broke down. To cut expenditures and encourage parity, the owners demanded the imposition of a salary cap. In addition, the owners wanted to share local broadcasting revenue to secure financial equity among the teams. The enactment of a salary cap, which reduced the amount of money any one player could receive, would keep operating costs down and allow small-market teams such as the Kansas City Royals to compete more equally with large-market teams such as the New York Yankees. This plan required the approval of the Players’ Association for ratification, but the athletes did not support the salary cap because they believed it hampered their right to seek full market value for their skills. The Players’ Association thus rejected the owners’ plan. In response, the owners voted to withhold $7.8 million from the players’ pensions and benefits plans and the players decided to strike. During the course of the strike, both the players and the owners were vilified for being greedy millionaires, and many fans resolved to abandon baseball forever. The strike resulted in a loss of $580 million in revenue for the teams and $230 million in player salaries. The Montreal Expos suffered the worst effects of the strike and could not bear the financial deficits from the lost season. The team was forced to cut its payroll for the 1995 season, its fan base all but disappeared, and the players languished in obscurity. The Expos never recovered from the strike, leading MLB to purchase the team in 2001 before facilitating its relocation to Washington, DC, in 2004. As a result of the strike, players could seek the best deal available without the restriction of a salary cap. The free agent market has thus produced a substantial rise in salaries and the occasional mega-deal like the one signed by Alex Rodriguez. It exposed the hidden economics of baseball and revealed the desire of the players and the owners to maximize their own financial interests. The strike also alienated many fans. Yet, the game returned and the economic excess of professional baseball became an accepted fact. Aided by the incredible feats of Cal Ripken Jr., Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, baseball eventually recovered from the 1994 strike to retain its place in American popular culture.

Records and Remembrances Several significant events in American baseball history have occurred in recent history. Long-held records were broken, new personalities have emerged to shape the character of the game, and old favorites were remembered. These are the stories that become part of American cultural lore and help to form the fabric of baseball history. Rather than existing merely as factual occurrences or statistical data, these events give color to the game and contribute to the collective American sporting memory.

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One of the most remarkable moments in professional baseball occurred in 1995 when Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played when he started his 2,131st straight game. Ripken’s accomplishment helped reinvigorate interest in baseball after the 1994 players’ strike and provided a powerful piece of history for fans to savor. Between 1990 and 2005 Ripken achieved iconic status in the game and cemented his place as one of the best to ever play the game. Two other iconic figures took center stage in 1998, when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire enthralled the country with their chase to break the single-season homerun record set by Roger Maris in 1961. Sosa, a black outfielder from the Dominican Republic, and McGwire, a white first baseman from California, played for different teams but were united in their attempt to break the record of sixty-one home runs in one season. McGwire reached the record first and ultimately ended the season with seventy homers, setting a new single-season mark. Sosa ended with sixty-six,

The Iron Man: Cal Ripken Jr. On September 6, 1995, Calvin Edwin “Cal” Ripken Jr. (born August 24, 1960) of the Baltimore Orioles broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played when he appeared in his 2,131st straight game. Long thought to be an impossible record to break, the streak came to define Ripken and his style of play. Known for his workmanlike approach to the game, he embodied the qualities of perseverance, loyalty, and commitment. He started his run in 1982 and officially ended it in 1998 after playing in 2,632 consecutive games. Over this sixteen-year period, Ripken never missed a start for the Orioles and became an iconic figure in Baltimore and across the country. While Gehrig had been known in the popular press as the “Iron Horse” for his physical prowess and determination, Ripken earned the nickname “Iron Man” to symbolize his similar strength and unyielding dedication. Ripken’s career was unusual in that he played for only one team. In the modern age of free agency, it is common for professional athletes to accept the most lucrative offer they receive, regardless of team allegiances or preferences. Ripken, a native of Maryland, chose to spend his entire career with the Orioles, due in large part to his affinity for the region and his family ties to the team. Ripken’s father, Cal Sr., spent most of his adult life in the Orioles’ organization as a minor-league player, scout, coach, and manager. Ripken’s brother Billy enjoyed eleven seasons as a major-league second baseman and played with the Orioles from 1987 to 1992. During the 1987 season, Ripken Sr. became the first father to manage two sons on the same major-league team when he took the helm of the Orioles. Thus, for Ripken, playing for the Orioles was not merely his job, it was a connection to family, region, and identity. Ripken retired from professional baseball in 2001 after twenty-one seasons in the major leagues. In addition to setting the new record for consecutive games played, he also garnered numerous awards and honors. Ripken became only the seventh player in major-league history to collect 3,000 hits and 400 home runs. He was also a nineteen-time All-Star, a two-time MVP of the American League, and a two-time Gold Glove winner for defensive excellence at shortstop. In a ceremony before the final home game of the 2001 season, the Baltimore Orioles retired Ripken’s jersey number 8, a fitting tribute to a player whose career accomplishments will long be remembered. Ripken was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

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also eclipsing the record set by Maris. The gracious relationship that Sosa and McGwire shared throughout the chase captured the collective imagination. Each player celebrated the success of the other, imbuing their competition with a sense of respect and admiration. The excitement, unpredictability, and genial air of the home-run chase exhilarated baseball fans and made the 1998 season truly special. Like Ripken in 1995, Sosa and McGwire helped to reignite a national passion for baseball after the debilitating effects of the 1994 players’ strike. While emotionally compelling and deeply meaningful, Ripken’s impact hit at the end of the season and for only two nights. Fan interest was piqued, but not consistently sustained. In 1998 Sosa and McGwire battled for weeks, steadily building fan fervor and excitement until the explosive end. By the end of the 1998 season, MLB games had attracted a total of approximately 70.6 million fans. Just two seasons prior, in 1996, the total was 60 million. Undoubtedly, Sosa and McGwire’s home-run chase had a significant Chicago Cubs Sammy Sosa connects for a two-run impact on bringing fans back to baseball and home run on a pitch from Colorado Rockies starting pitcher Darryl Kile in the first inning of the Cubs’ imbuing the game with vitality. Impressive as it was, McGwire’s home-run 4-3 victory in Denver’s Coors Field on Sunday, record stood for only three years. In 2001 August 30, 1998. It was Sosa’s fifty-fourth homer of Barry Bonds hit seventy-three homers to set the season. (AP / Wide World Photos) the new single-season record and later broke Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record of 755, finishing with 762. During the 2001 season Bonds also set new records for highest-slugging percentage at .863 and total number of walks at 177. In addition, at the age of thirty-seven, Bonds became the oldest player to lead the National League in home runs. In honor of his incredible season, Bonds was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player, a title he retained for the next three seasons, as he won seven MVP awards. By 2003, however, Bonds faced intense scrutiny over allegations of his use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Sportswriters, fans, and baseball officials began to question the authenticity of Bonds’s records from 2001, wondering if he achieved those feats through honest effort and hard work or through the use of illegal steroids. Former home-run kings McGwire and Sosa later confronted similar accusations, leading to a comprehensive review of Major League Baseball’s drug policy and skepticism about the legitimacy of the home-run records. A December 2007 report, authored by former senator George Mitchell, done for Major League Baseball, named almost 100 players alleged to have used steroids or other drugs. A counterpoint to the distressing steroid controversy emerged at the end of the 2004 season when the Boston Red Sox shattered one of baseball’s most enduring myths upon winning the World Series. The Red Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals

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in four games to win the crown, the team’s first World Series title since 1918. For eight-six years, the Red Sox had suffered from the “Curse of the Bambino,” the supposed bad luck that followed the team since trading Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920. The 2004 Red Sox team, an eclectic bunch of veteran players, created a jovial atmosphere within the clubhouse. As writer Dan Shaughnessy observed, “[T]hey were raggedy men who proudly called themselves ‘idiots’” (Shaughnessy 2005, 4). Rather than promote an image of cool and detached professionalism, the members of the 2004 Red Sox team displayed their exuberant personalities on and off the field, captivating baseball fans all over the world. Three years later, the Red Sox returned to the World Series and won their second title in three years, defeating the Colorado Rockies (in their first appearance in the championship) in four straight games. A number of pitchers also deserve mention during this time. Both Randy Johnson and Roger St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire Clemens are five-time Cy Young Award winners, acknowledges the crowd in Busch Stadium after given annually to the best hurler in each league hitting his sixty-second home run of the season, of professional baseball. Clemens’s dominance Tuesday, September 8, 1998, in St. Louis. The homer, off Chicago Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel, spanned three decades and he won the award for broke Roger Maris’ single-season home-run record the American League’s Red Sox in 1986, 1987, set in 1961. (AP / Wide World Photo) and 1991. In 1997 and 1998 he earned the title with the Toronto Blue Jays and won again in 2001 with the New York Yankees. Johnson began in the American League with the Seattle Mariners, winning the Cy Young Award in 1995. He moved to the National League’s Arizona Diamondbacks, claiming the prize in 1999, 2000, 2001 (when they won the World Series), and 2002. In 2008 Clemens faced questions regarding his truthfulness regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs and other questionable issues of personal judgment. Other pitchers of note include four-time Cy Young winner Greg Maddux (Chicago Cubs, 1992; Atlanta Braves, 1993, 1994, 1995—when the team won the championship) and Pedro Martinez (Montreal Expos, 1997; Boston Red Sox, 1999, 2000). This pitching has contributed to several World Series–championship teams, though between 1990 and 2005 the New York Yankee claimed four of fifteen titles (excluding the missed series of 1994). The Toronto Blue Jays and the Florida Marlins have each won two championships during this era as well.

Architecture Starting in 1990, the landscape of American of baseball changed dramatically as teams constructed new stadiums at a rapid pace. Between 1990 and 2005, a total of seventeen new major-league ballparks were constructed. With the building of the

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new came the abandonment and destruction of the old. For example, Comiskey Park in Chicago, built in 1910, was demolished in 1991 to make way for U.S. Cellular Field. Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, built in 1912, was deserted in 1999 as the team moved downtown to Comerica Park. Across the country, from Baltimore to San Francisco, new stadiums opened at the rate of more than one per year. This distinct period of new ballpark design and construction marked a return to traditional architectural styles. It also signaled a belief that the economic power of sport could facilitate urban revitalization and generate community development. As major pieces of the built environment, ballparks reflect the cultural tastes and values of society at the particular time they were constructed. Thus, they are not simply a passive stage upon which the drama of baseball unfolds. Each ballpark is an active part of its community and a piece of urban American history. In 1990 stadium designers ushered in a new era of ballpark construction. Drawing inspiration from the past and playing upon powerful emotions of nostalgia, architects incorporated classical elements into the new parks and created a neotraditional style characterized by asymmetrical field dimensions, traditional building materials like brick and cast iron, and smaller seating capacities. These new stadiums combined the best features of classic parks such as Wrigley Field and Fenway Park with the modern amenities that fans expect and demand. Most of these new parks were sited in the urban core of the community, a deliberate planning decision to draw people into downtown and encourage economic development. The pioneering ballpark of this phase was Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Completed in 1992 at a cost of $205.5 million, it was the cornerstone of urban development efforts to revitalize downtown Baltimore. By offering an alternative to the sterile, multipurpose super stadiums popular in the 1960s and 1970s, Oriole Park at Camden Yards successfully blended tradition with modernity. The fans responded with curiosity and excitement, as the average attendance rose to over 43,000 during the first decade of the park’s existence. The success of Oriole Park at Camden Yards spurred a neotraditional ballpark boom. Other teams and cities followed the trend of building new urban ballparks that featured unique historical elements and the best of modern amenities. Another aspect of ballpark architecture unique to this period of history is naming rights, which became an important strategy in financing the wave of new ballpark construction. The right to affix a particular name to a stadium is granted in exchange for financial support, primarily from large corporations. As taxpayers demanded more financial restraint from the municipalities that previously financed many professional sports teams and stadiums, teams were forced to seek alternative means of funding and turned to national and international corporations. In exchange for multimillion-dollar capital investments, companies received exclusive naming rights to the parks. In addition to the advertising that corporations receive from their naming rights deals, they are also able to leverage their investments beyond a simple name. For example, at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, Coors is the only beer sold at the park. Perhaps the most controversial case of naming rights occurred in 2001 when the Houston Astros struggled to name their new park. In 1999 the naming rights were sold to the locally based energy corporation Enron in a thirty-year, $100-million contract. The park was thus known as Enron Field. Two years later, Enron collapsed in one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. The team

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bought back the naming rights from Enron, temporarily called the park Astros Field, and searched for a new corporate sponsor. In 2002 Minute Maid, the juice subsidiary of Coca-Cola, acquired the naming rights on a twenty-eight-year contract and the park was renamed Minute Maid Park. In the span of only two years, Houston’s ballpark was known by three different names.

Women in Baseball Beginning in the early 1990s, women’s baseball experienced an increasing degree of organization, formalization, and professionalization. Women have played baseball since the introduction of the game in the nineteenth century, but have rarely had the opportunity to compete at the high school, collegiate, or professional level. In addition to playing the game, women have also occupied a place in baseball as fans, journalists, umpires, and administrators. Throughout the 1990s, women gained increasing access to baseball through these various means and made significant contributions to the game both on and off the field. At the amateur level, after 1990 women’s baseball leagues both grew and consolidated across the country. In 1992 a group of players and volunteers formed the American Women’s Baseball Federation (AWBF) to organize and promote baseball as a mainstream and lifetime sport for women. The AWBF serves as an umbrella organization for more than twenty-five women’s teams from Boston to Seattle, providing networking services for the teams and overseeing domestic and international tournaments. In 2001 the AWBF played an instrumental role in creating the Women’s World Series, an international competition held from 2001 to 2004 that attracted elite teams from the United States, Australia, Canada, and Japan. In 2004 the newly formed Women’s World Cup of Baseball eclipsed the Women’s World Series as the premiere international tournament. Sanctioned by the International Baseball Federation to run on a biannual basis, the Women’s World Cup was first held in Edmonton, Canada, in 2004 and featured teams from the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan. Bulgaria and India were also scheduled to compete but withdrew before the tournament began. The team from the United States, chosen by officials from USA Baseball, won the gold medal. With support from the International Baseball Federation, the Women’s World Cup will be held through at least 2012. Prior to the advent of organized women’s teams and leagues, girls and women interested in playing baseball had to find ways to play with boys and men. In the 1990s Julie Croteau and Ila Borders were pioneers in securing a woman’s right to play baseball with men. Croteau grew up playing Little League baseball and intended to play baseball on the boy’s varsity team in high school. In 1988 the high school coach cut her from the team on the grounds that baseball wasn’t an appropriate sport for a girl. In response, Croteau sued the school for the right to play on the boys’ team. She lost the case, but she did not lose the desire to keep playing baseball and walked on to the men’s baseball team at St. Mary’s College (Division III) in 1989, where she played first base for three seasons. By doing so, she became recognized as the first woman to play men’s NCAA college baseball on a regular basis (in 1985, Susan Perabo had pitched in one game for Webster College). After college, Croteau continued her career in baseball by coaching the men’s teams at Western New England College (Division III). In 1995 she joined

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the coaching staff at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst as an assistant, thereby becoming the first woman to coach men’s baseball at the NCAA Division I level. Since 2004 she has worked as a coach for the U.S. women’s national baseball team, helping to ensure that future generations of girls and women have the chance to play baseball at the highest levels. Like Croteau, Ila Borders had to fight to play baseball. After being rebuffed by her local high school’s baseball team, Borders enrolled in a private high school and made the boys’ varsity team as a freshman. She played on the boys’ team throughout high school and received the team’s MVP award as a senior in 1993. Eager to continue playing baseball, Borders accepted an offer to play ball at Southern California College (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics). Her pitching debut came in 1994, accompanied by constant media attention and opposing players unhappy at the prospect of striking out against a woman. Borders played at Southern California College for three seasons and then transferred to Whittier College (Division III) for her final collegiate season in 1997. At Whittier College, Borders pitched in seventeen games and recorded thirty-eight strikeouts. Immediately following her college graduation, Borders signed with the St. Paul Saints of the Independent Northern League, fulfilling her dream of playing professional baseball. She became the first woman to pitch in a men’s professional baseball game in the summer of 1997. In 1999 Sports Illustrated named Borders among the 100 top female athletes of all time for her groundbreaking play and dedication to baseball. After spending three seasons in the Northern League, she moved on to the Western Baseball League in 2000. Halfway through the season, exhausted by life on the road and ready for a new direction, Borders retired from professional baseball. Her accomplishments are recognized in a display on women in baseball at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. While Croteau and Borders negotiated the terrain of men’s collegiate and professional baseball, another group of women became part of an experiment to create an all-women’s pro baseball team. Formed in 1994, the Colorado Silver Bullets was the first all-women’s professional team to play in the United States since the folding of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1954. It was also the first and only all-women’s team to be officially recognized by the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, a distinction that opened up playing opportunities for the team across the country. Sponsored by the Coors Brewing Company and managed by former major league pitcher Phil Niekro, the Silver Bullets recruited players through a series of open tryouts held in eleven cities. Of the approximately 1300 women who tried out, Niekro chose twenty-four for the final roster. Starting in 1994, the team played a barnstorming schedule of games against minor-league, semipro, college, and amateur men’s teams. In their first season, the Silver Bullets played forty-four games but won only six. By 1997 the team achieved a winning record and won a total of twenty-three games. After four years of sponsorship during which it invested $8 million in the team, the Coors Brewing Company withdrew its financial support after the 1997 season. Unable to find a sponsor for the 1998 season, the team disbanded after four years of play. Although the experiment was short-lived, the Colorado Silver Bullets proved that women could play baseball at the men’s professional level. Perhaps more important, the members of the Silver Bullets embodied the notion that baseball is a sport accessible to all.

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Doping in Baseball Similar to other sports such as cycling, swimming, and track and field, baseball is not immune to doping scandals. The troubles and speculations began in late 1998 when Mark McGwire admitted to using the performance-enhancing drug androstenedione, or “andro.” At the time, andro was not illegal in MLB so McGwire did not receive an official reprimand. His public reputation, however, was tainted. Journalists, fans, and casual observers who had been so electrified by McGwire’s home-run chase during the 1998 season now questioned the authenticity and honesty of his efforts. Responding to such speculations, MLB implemented random drug testing in its minor-league system in 2001 to determine the use performance-enhancing drugs and recreational drugs. Charging that this program did not adequately address the issue of doping in professional baseball, the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee convened a hearing in 2002 to demand the negotiation of a major-league drug-testing program. After collaborating with the MLBPA to construct an appropriate policy, MLB began survey testing in 2003 to gauge the use of steroids at the major-league level. The anonymous tests were administered to all major-league players at the beginning of the 2003 season. Ultimately, the survey reported that 5–7 percent of the players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, though no one was punished. The need for an overarching drug testing program became clear in early 2003 when Steve Bechler, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, collapsed and died during a spring training workout. An autopsy revealed that Bechler had died of cardiac arrest brought on by the abuse of the performance-enhancing drug Ephedra. As a result of Bechler’s death, MLB (and other professional organizations and universities) placed Ephedra on its list of banned substances but did not implement a formal drug-testing program at the major-league level. In December 2003 ten majorleague ballplayers testified before a grand jury in the case against the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), a private company under investigation for providing illegal performance-enhancing drugs and steroids to prominent athletes. Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield were among the ballplayers who testified against BALCO. None of the players were charged with using steroids, and none of them were sanctioned for their involvement with the drug company. The BALCO scandal prompted the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee to take action again in 2004. The committee held a second hearing on MLB’s drug program and concluded that the existing policy was not strong enough to deter drug and steroid use. In conjunction with the Committee and the Players’ Association, MLB drafted a new Joint Drug Agreement. Under this agreement, players were guaranteed anonymity upon a positive test and the punishment for a first offense was counseling. While this agreement appeased the committee, it lacked a structure for repeated offenses and sheltered guilty players from the public. The problem of doping in baseball was further reiterated in 2004 when Ken Caminiti, a former MVP of the National League, died at the age of forty-four from the combined effects of opiates, cocaine abuse, and coronary disease. Later in the year, President Bush signed the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004. In response, MLB adopted the list of banned substances recorded in the act. Pressured to strengthen its drug policy, MLB formulated a new program of testing and penalties in early 2005. Major-league baseball players would now be subject

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to random testing for performance-enhancing drugs. Upon the first positive result, the player’s name would be released to the public and he would be suspended for ten days with no pay. A second offense netted a thirty-day suspension, the third offense resulted in a sixty-day suspension, and a fourth offense equated to a oneyear ban from the game. Speculations about rampant drug use in baseball rose after the 2003 release of former major leaguer Jose Canseco’s book Juiced, an expos
e that detailed his use of steroids and implicated several of his teammates. When MLB officials refused to investigate the allegations in Canseco’s book, the U.S. Congress decided to intervene. The House Government Reform Committee then issued subpoenas to MLB executives and players in an effort to determine the extent of the drug problem in professional baseball. Players who testified at the hearing included Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa. Later hearings in 2008 followed the release of the Mitchell Report for Major League Baseball in December 2007. This named more than seventy-five major-leaguers who seemed to have used prformance-enhancing drugs, including two top pitchers on the New York Yankees, Andy Pettite and Roger Clemens. Shortly after the 2004 hearing, Alex Sanchez became the first major league player to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs under the Joint Drug Program. Per the policy, his name was released to the media and he was suspended for ten days. By the end of the 2005 season, a total of eight major-leaguers tested positive and received suspensions; in the minor leagues, eighty-two players tested positive. Clearly, drug use in American professional baseball had become a matter of significant concern. By November 2005 Major League Baseball, the Players’ Association, and Congress had reached an agreement on a substantial overhaul of the existing drug program. The new policy included stringent penalties and authorized testing for amphetamine use. Upon testing positive for the first time, a player’s name will be released to the public and he will be suspended for fifty games without pay. A second offense results in a 100-game suspension, and the third offense is just cause for a lifetime ban from the game. This strong policy was the next step in a continually evolving process of monitoring and preventing the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. In the course of seven years, the issue of drug and steroid use went from minor concern to major problem.

Basketball Since 1990 significant changes have occurred within U.S. basketball. At the NBA level, a generation of superstars left and younger athletes took the league to unforeseen levels of popularity and success, both at home and abroad. Along with that success, players, teams, and leagues saw unprecedented amounts of money change hands through contracts, ticket sales, media contracts, and merchandising. Women established professional leagues and the NCAA Final Four became the largest revenue-producing annual women’s sporting event in the country. Nike’s sales outpaced Adidas’ for the first time, largely due to its contract with Michael Jordan. Across all levels the concept of the “three-peat” became a hallmark of successful competition: the NBA’s Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, and Houston Comets, and the University of Tennessee Lady Volunteers and the University of Connecticut Huskies women’s basketball teams all accomplished this at least once.

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The San Antonio Spurs and the Duke University Blue Devils men’s basketball team also won at least three nonconsecutive championships of their own. Though basketball was predominantly an American game in 1990, it is now a global phenomenon. Its international significance was demonstrated by the dramatic increase of foreign players drafted into the NBA, moving selected preseason NBA games to Asia, the United States’ failure to win the gold medal in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and the possibility of five new European franchises in a new NBA European division.

The National Basketball Association The concept of “sportainment”—the blurring of boundaries between what constitutes sport and what constitutes entertainment—is particularly apparent in professional basketball. During much of the 1990s there was a division among NBA athletes between those classified as “competitors” such as Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olujawon, and Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls in action. those considered “entertainers” such as Charles (Courtesy of Photofest) Barkley and Dennis Rodman. The “competitors” were perhaps best known for their achievements on the court while the “entertainers” were known almost equally for their basketball prowess as for their off-the-court words, behaviors, and personalities. As Shaquille O’Neal once said, “I’m a basketball player slash entertainer. Basketball is entertainment.” Perhaps no other team reflects this sentiment better than the Los Angeles Lakers, who revived their ascendancy in the mid- to late 1990s with the addition of O’Neal, wunderkind Kobe Bryant, and coach Phil Jackson, winning three consecutive championships in 2000, 2001, and 2002. One of the NBA’s most successful franchises in terms of both performance and economic success, the Lakers have a large number of celebrity fans in attendance at their home venues (the Forum until 1999 and later the Staples Center), which underscores the elision of sport and entertainment. Lakers coach Phil Jackson established himself as one of the greatest in the game during his tenure with the Chicago Bulls from 1989 to 1998. His six NBA titles with the Bulls, combined with his additional three with the Lakers, tied him with famed coach Red Auerbach for the record number of championships. By no means was Jackson the sole ingredient for the Bulls’ success, for he was joined by some of the best players the game has ever known, including “His Airness,” Michael Jordan. The Bulls began their first run in the 1990–91 season when they totaled a franchise-record sixty-one wins en route to a five-game championship over the Lakers. The Bulls’ second title of this era came the next season against the

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Portland Trail Blazers, and they capped their “three-peat” over the Phoenix Suns the following year. Though he did not do it alone, Jordan was awarded the Finals MVP and scoring champion in each of the three championships. Jordan briefly retired in 1993 following the murder of his father, and then rejoined the Chicago Bulls with a succinct press release: “I’m back.” The next two years belonged to the Houston Rockets. Coached by former-Rocket player Rudy Tomjanovich, players including Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, who had been former teammates at the University of Houston, claimed the 1994 and 1995 championships. In 1995 Jordan rejoined his Bulls teammates and, along with Scottie Pippen, Ron Harper, Luc Longley, and the always-controversial rebound specialist Dennis Rodman, the team began another streak—their second “three-peat” in 1996, 1997, and 1998 over the Seattle SuperSonics, and twice over the Utah Jazz, respectively. The Bulls also had an NBA record-setting seventy-two wins in the 1995–96 season. The end to the Bulls’ dominance was punctuated by Jordan’s shot over Utah’s Byron Russell in the last seconds of the championship game. After the 1998 victory Chicago’s roster was dismantled. The Bulls traded Pippen, Longley, and Steve Kerr and did not re-sign Rodman. Phil Jackson left the game and vowed never to return to coaching (he changed his mind after a year to coach the Lakers) and Jordan entered his second retirement, but again his hiatus was brief. He returned to the NBA to play two final seasons with the Washington Wizards, for a remarkable professional career that spanned three decades. Jordan tested his talents in many different arenas during his two short retirements, including a short stint playing minor-league baseball. He also played himself in the lead role of the movie Space Jam, the message of which was consistent with Jordan’s public persona: if you believe in yourself and work hard, anything is possible. During his second retirement, he joined the front-office staff of the Washington Wizards. In addition to his advertising campaigns, his own shoe and apparel line, and his front-office work, Jordan has also published several autobiographical books. Throughout this long and successful career, Jordan established himself as not only the most talented and competitive player in the league, but also the most marketable player in NBA history. He has supplemented his lucrative, record-setting contracts with the Bulls with endorsement deals estimated at several hundred million dollars. But as much as he has profited from these deals, those who employed him have profited more. Tickets to Bulls’ games, both home and away, consistently sold out when Jordan donned their red and black uniform. In addition, studies demonstrate that the products for which he serves as the spokesman have made over $1 billion because of the association with “His Airness” (Mathur, Mathur, and Rangan 1997). The amount of money involved in professional basketball as a part of the entertainment industry has increased drastically since 1990, as reflected in the salary demands of younger players like Kevin Garnett. Taking advantage of what became known as the “Larry Bird Exception” (a rule that allowed a team to exceed the NBA’s salary cap to re-sign a player) Garnett inked a six-year contract extension with the Minnesota Timberwolves for an unprecedented $126 million in 1997, following the expiration of his rookie contract. This would become a primary dispute between owners and players, resulting in a lockout during the 1998–99 season. The result of the lockout was a drastically shortened season and a new collective

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Air Jordan, Michael Jordan Although there were many amazing athletes in the NBA from 1990 to 2005, none created or epitomized the ideals of American basketball more than Michael Jordan (born February 17, 1963). Quite simply, he stands as the league’s undisputed “greatest of all time.” According to an ESPN survey he is North America’s top athlete, in any sport, of the twentieth century (“Top North American Athletes of the Century”). Jordan’s individual athletic accolades are simply too numerous to list in the space provided here; suffice it to say that they include multiple MVP and All-Star honors, scoring and steals titles, defensive awards, two Olympic gold medals, and appearance on a record forty-nine Sports Illustrated covers. Beyond the court, Jordan’s charisma, talent, and playing style have been channeled into unprecedented, and unparalleled, marketing campaigns by the NBA, Nike, Gatorade, Coca-Cola, Ballpark Franks, McDonalds, Wheaties, Chevrolet, Hanes, and others. As a young shooting guard poised to redefine the world of basketball, Michael Jordan was drafted by the Chicago Bulls from the University of North Carolina in 1984. His prolific scoring and unbelievable slam-dunks, in which he did not just jump, but seemed to defy gravity, earned him the nickname “Air Jordan,” which he parlayed into his own brand of shoes. First released in 1984, Nike has put out a version of “Air Jordans” each subsequent year, which have been in consistent consumer demand, often selling for hundreds of dollars. By 1990, he was an international sporting celebrity, scoring a personal record sixty-nine points in a single game. In the midst of winning the first of his six championships with the Chicago Bulls in the 1990–91 season, Jordan signed a marketing deal with Gatorade, appearing in a commercial featuring a jingle on the desire to be “like Mike,” a sentiment that resonated with a large segment of the population. Indeed, many people—in all sports and, indeed, all walks of life—are quick to cite Jordan as their role model, athletic or otherwise. Although we can try to quantify the number of titles he has earned, points he has scored, endorsement deals he has landed, and impact he has had on sport and society, in truth, the influence of the Jordan factor is incalculable. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Michael Jordan’s importance to the game of basketball or to overemphasize his enormous talent. As Laker’s star, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, once remarked, “There’s Michael Jordan and then there is the rest of us.”

bargaining agreement (CBA) restructuring the salary cap regulations, all but eliminating the “Larry Bird Exception.” Under the new agreement, players are limited to the amount of money they can earn from their teams, based on their years of playing experience, years played for a particular team, and how valuable their talents are perceived to be to that team. The NBA also grew in global significance during this time, influenced by the marketing success of Michael Jordan, as well as Commissioner David Stern’s commitment to his “Basketball Without Borders” campaign. Though international players in the NBA were not a new phenomenon in 1990, by 2007 the percentage of NBA players, especially NBA stars whose preprofessional basketball training occurred entirely overseas, increased significantly. Following in the footsteps of players like Vlade Divac from Yugoslavia and Arvydas Sabonis from the former USSR, Toni Kukoc, a Croatian and NBA champion with Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, was one of the most touted internationally trained picks of the 1993 draft. Around

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the turn of the twenty-first century, rising stars such as Dirk Nowitzki from Germany, Tony Parker from France, Yao Ming from China, and Manu Ginobili from Argentina were perceived to be the next generation of NBA superstars. The global popularity of Ming, the first player from an international league to be the number 1 selection in the draft, inspired the NBA to begin to play selected preseason games in China. The NBA also opened up All-Star voting to international fans via the Internet and Ming broke Jordan’s record for most All-Star votes in a season. As international talent flooded the NBA, Americans searched for the next homegrown talent to fill the void left by Jordan’s exit. Though many players such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, Allen Iverson, and Tracy McGrady took turns as the leading candidate for this title, it was a teenaged player who captured fans’ attention and inspired ESPN to start national broadcasting of high school games. LeBron James, who dominated Ohio high school basketball and became the first overall selection by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2003, was compared and contrasted to Jordan in many ways. Aside from their undeniable talents, James had been born after Jordan’s rookie season and was drafted just months after Jordan’s final retirement. Money was another part of the equation, including James’ $100 million in endorsement contracts—the most money any first-year player had been guaranteed before securing his first NBA contract. In 2007 he led his Cleveland Cavaliers team to the NBA Finals where they lost to the San Antonio Spurs. The 2003 draft was the last time that players were allowed enter the league straight out of high school. Despite the enormous increase in the marketing of the league and its superstars, the NBA did not escape negative publicity. Several high-profile incidents, including the rape trial of Kobe Bryant—charges that were ultimately dismissed— damaged the reputation of the sport and the individuals involved. Another blow to the NBA’s profile occurred in 2004 when, during the second half of a tightly contested game between the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons, members of both teams erupted in violence that spilled off the hardwood. The brawl continued, involving both players and fans, and the game was called off. The NBA gave Pacers’ Ron Artest, who entered the stands and punched a spectator, a season-long suspension and served several other players with various sanctions. Both players and fans were investigated and, when deemed appropriate, were charged with assault in a Michigan court. Yet despite this and other troubles that have plagued the league in recent years, the NBA boasts some of the most successful and exciting competition in all of sport.

Women’s Professional Basketball In the late 1990s women’s basketball was taken to unprecedented heights with the launch of two professional leagues. During the winter of 1996–97 the American Basketball League (ABL) played its first season, promoting the best talent and largest salaries available in women’s basketball to cities where college and high school teams had already established success. Despite concerns about competing with the NBA, the NHL, the NFL, and both NCAA football and basketball, organizers decided that the women’s professional league would benefit most from playing during the traditional winter basketball season. Unfortunately, this would

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later be one of the largest factors leading to the ABL’s collapse following its second season of competition. The other issue that sank the ABL was the success of the second women’s professional league, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), which had the financial backing of the NBA. The WNBA began its inaugural season during the summer of 1997, competing with the ABL for talent from international leagues, the 1996 Olympic team, and the college level. Due to the higher salaries and a longer season, most of the high-profile, highly sought athletes signed with the ABL. Stars Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, and Rebecca Lobo, however, opted to join the WNBA, citing the summer season and the financial endorsement of the NBA as significant decision-making factors. Since then, the league has grown in excitement, talent level, and sustainability; indeed, former NBA great Bill Russell once predicted that the WNBA might someday overcome the NBA in popularity due to its emphasis on fundamentals and team WNBA basketball players (from left) Lynette Woodard (Detroit Shock) and Sheryl Swoopes play that basketball purists crave. (Houston Comets), shown in 1998. (Courtesy of The WNBA began with eight teams in 1997 Photofest) and has consistently added teams (and lost two) to create the fourteen-team league of today. There are seven Western Conference teams and seven Eastern Conference teams that begin their season in May, hoping to meet in the October finals. The league began with the advertising slogan “We Got Next,” referencing the playground call for “dibs” on the next game on the court and staking their claim on the future of the sport. Within a few years, the league’s marketing catchphrase became “We Got Game,” a claim that cannot be disputed once fans have the opportunity to witness the phenomenal level of play that these athletes consistently exhibit. In order to remain economically viable, however, the WNBA must develop a successful strategy to market its product and increase its fan base.

The College Game With the opportunity to play professionally and the prevalence of athletic female role models, the popularity of the sport at the youth level has increased accordingly and collegiate women’s basketball has never been more exciting. The same year that the WNBA and the ABL were launched, ESPN signed a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract with the NCAA for the television rights to the women’s Final Four. At the time, this contract was the largest in women’s sports history. Led by Pat Summitt’s University of Tennessee Lady Volunteers, college women’s basketball experienced extreme growth during the 1990s. The winningest coach in

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NCAA history, Summit took her team to three consecutive national championships in 1996, 1997, and 1998, a streak perhaps not possible without the phenomenal talents of players like Chamique Holdsclaw. But Tennessee’s dominance was challenged by the formation of a new dynasty: the University of Connecticut Huskies. After winning the first national championship in school history in 1995, the team, led by coach Geno Auriemma, repeated the accomplishment in 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004. In fact, between 1995 and 2008, aside from UConn and Tennessee, the only other teams to win national championships were Purdue University (1999), Notre Dame (2001) Baylor (2005), and Maryland (2006), with Tennessee winning in 2007 and 2008. As such, the rivalry between the Vols and Huskies is incredibly intense, which has led to the airing of their regular-season games on network television and the public recognition of names like Diana Taurasi, Jennifer Rizzotti, Tamika Catching, Swin Cash, Candace Parker, and Sue Bird. Not to be left out, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team also won the national championship in 2004. Led by international player and Rhodes scholar Emeka Okafor, the University of Connecticut became the first NCAA Division I institution to win both the men’s and women’s titles in the same season. The victory of UConn’s men’s team temporarily drew attention away from perennial powerhouse teams like Duke, University of Kentucky, University of North Carolina, University of Kansas, and UCLA. Duke won national championships in 1991, 1992, and 2001, and multiple ACC championships, and made several Final Four appearances under the tutelage of “Coach K” (Mike Krzyzewski), who began his reign in 1981. Duke’s rivalry with the University of North Carolina Tar Heels—with just eight miles separating the two campuses—is among the most exciting in all of sport. Duke boasts the all-time consecutive appearance record at the NCAA tournament with twenty-seven straight performances between 1975 and 2001. In addition to exciting competition, men’s college basketball in the years between 1990 and 2007 was also marred by several scandals. The college game was not immune to the increasing commercialization of sport and, with role models like Jordan, James, and Garnett, many boys and young men dreamed of million-dollar paychecks. In 1992 the University of Michigan made history by starting five freshmen (nicknamed the “Fab Five”) in the national tournament and the group repeated their NCAA Finals appearance in 1993. Later, it was revealed that the players, the school, and supporters of the program had been involved in illegal activities, and the investigative findings resulted in the negation of their success in the early 1990s. Suspicions involving the Michigan basketball program first arose when players were involved in a car accident. There were immediate concerns about whether player Robert Traylor owned the expensive car that he was driving at the time of the crash and it was soon determined that players involved had taken a recruit to visit Michigan booster Ed Martin—an NCAA violation. A subsequent investigation revealed that Martin had given hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and other gifts to members of basketball team and their families, including future NBA star Chris Webber, who profited from the corruption while still in high school. Furthermore, Martin’s money came in part from his illegal gambling operation, which he then laundered by giving it to those associated with Michigan’s program as well as potential high school prospects. The scandal rocked the world of collegiate

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athletics and it was arguably the largest, most corrupt, and most flagrant infringement of NCAA rules in the history of sport. As a result, Michigan voluntarily forfeited 112 regular-season and tournament wins, as well as its semifinal victory in the 1992 NCAA tournament. The school took down the associated banners from its arena, removed mention of the accolades from its programs and media guides, and returned the $450,000 awarded by the NCAA for its postseason play. The NCAA handed down additional sanctions, including suspending the program from postseason play in the 2003–4 season, placing it on probation for four years, eliminating one scholarship, and requiring the school to disassociate itself from the four players named in the scandal for the next ten years. The issue of players’ age and experience level was again brought to public attention after Kevin Garnett became the first player drafted straight out of high school into the NBA and college basketball faced greater challenges in recruiting young talent. This, as well as the demand for high-caliber basketball, contributed to a series of NCAA violations. When the NBA created the age requirement for the 2004 draft, it was greeted with mixed emotion among colleges and universities. Some welcomed the opportunity to coach the nation’s best high school players even if it was only for a year, others warned against the detriments of this rule and the implications that the college game would be reduced to a farm system for the NBA. In a related controversy, Division I men’s college basketball reports an abysmally low college graduation rate. It is argued that the belief that college basketball can be used as a stepping-stone to the professional level—whether that dream is achieved or not—is a contributing factor to the lack of players receiving their diplomas. Other scandals in college hoops revolve around academic dishonesty and gambling. In the 1990s Arizona State University and Northwestern University basketball players were embroiled in point-shaving and bribery controversies. The day before the University of Minnesota was scheduled to compete in the 1999 NCAA tournament, a local newspaper reported that an academic counselor at the school claimed that over the course of several years she had written hundreds of papers for at least twenty athletes on the Gopher squad. Several players were suspended and disqualified from the tournament and the university launched an investigation into the allegations. A number of prominent members of the Gophers’ athletic department resigned or lost their jobs as a result, including the athletic director and others; the university bought out head coach Clem Haskins’s $1.5-million contract. In 2000 Haskins admitted to paying the academic counselor $3,000 for her services. Further evidence surfaced to suggest the coach had been involved in mail fraud, had given money to his players, covered up allegations of sexual harassment against his athletes, and attempted to inflate his players’ grades in order for them to remain eligible to compete. The NCAA conducted further investigations and determined that the school would forfeit all awards and titles dating back to the 1993–94 season. Other coaches involved in controversies during this time included Jerry Tarkanian, who repeatedly clashed with the NCAA throughout his career. Tarkanian, who coached at UNLV from 1973 to 1992, brought the Running Rebels their first and only national championship in 1990. He also brought the school numerous NCAA sanctions. Leaving UNLV in 1992, he returned to his alma mater Fresno

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State, where he coached the Bulldogs from 1995 to 2002. Following his retirement, the NCAA found that the school had committed a number of violations during Tarkanian’s reign and placed the school on probation. A friend and peer of Tarkanian’s, Bobby Knight—“The General”—deserves mention for both the success he achieved and the controversies he caused in men’s college basketball. Knight spent the majority of his career at the University of Indiana, where he coached the Hoosiers from 1971 to 2000, winning three national championships in the process. Currently, Knight has won more NCAA Division I men’s basketball games than any other coach in history, but a number of high-profile, damaging events have dotted his career. These incidents came to a head in 2000, when a former player asserted that the coach had choked him during a 1997 practice, a charge later substantiated by videotaped evidence of the assault. In response, Indiana’s president announced a “zero tolerance” policy for Knight’s behavior. The policy was enacted shortly thereafter, when Knight allegedly physically and verbally assaulted an IU student who the coach felt did not show him proper respect (it was reported the student addressed him by saying “Hey, Knight, what’s up?”). Though Knight denied he had touched the student, he was asked to resign. He refused and IU stripped him of his post. Thousands of Indiana students converged to protest his dismissal and Knight remains a popular figure in the state. He continued his career at Texas Tech University and although his coaching techniques and dictatorial style are often critiqued, with Knight at the helm the program quickly improved. It should also be noted that despite his often less-than-praiseworthy behavior, the NCAA has never sanctioned Knight for any recruiting violations and his teams consistently boast higher-than-average graduation rates.

Professional Football American football during the 1990s and first years of the twenty-first century was characterized by organizational changes, economic growth, phenomenal athletic achievements, and tremendous expansion. Technological advances surged and the media infiltrated every aspect of the sport. The NFL crossed continents, women’s professional football leagues were established, and collegiate football endeavored to crown an undisputed national champion.

The National Football League The post-1990 NFL experienced incredible change, and football fans witnessed some of the most legendary performances by coaches and players to date. With professional football frequently named the favorite spectator sport of the American public, the NFL took great strides to ensure its continued popularity. One of the most notable ventures occurred in 1993 with the signing of the CBA by the NFL and the NFL Players Association. The agreement marked the most extensive benefits package in professional sports and secured more than $1 billion in health, pension, and retirement assistance for active and retired players. The agreement was extended five times between 1993 and 2006. Numerous record-breaking performances took place during this time as well. While not necessarily a boast-worthy accomplishment, the Buffalo Bills suffered

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four disappointing losses in the 1991–94 Super Bowls, a league record. More positively, Don Shula became the winningest coach in NFL history on November 14, 1993, when his Miami Dolphins beat the Philadelphia Eagles. The win marked Shula’s 325th, putting him ahead of a record set by the legendary George Halas nearly three decades earlier. The Dallas Cowboys became the first NFL team to win three Super Bowls in four seasons with their 1993, 1994, and 1996 victories, and the New England Patriots became the second team to achieve this feat with their 2002, 2004, and 2005 Super Bowl wins. John Elway and the Denver Broncos took home back-to-back Super Bowl championships in 1998 and 1999, giving the team its first titles after four failed attempts. Quarterback Steve Young broke out in 1991 with an opportunity to fill in for the legendary San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback, Joe Montana. In the years that followed, Young would throw for 3,000 or more yards in six of his eight starting seasons with the 49ers, rushing for forty-three touchdowns en route to a Super Bowl XXIX victory in 1994 and two NFL MVP titles (1992, 1994). He earned six passing titles between 1991 and 1997, tying him with Sammy Baugh for the most passing crowns in league history. Young was inducted into the Football Hall of Fame in 2005, the first left-handed quarterback to be selected.

Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway warms up before the team’s 40-14 victory over the Oakland Raiders in Denver’s Mile High Stadium on November 22, 1998. Elway became the second quarterback in NFL history to surpass the 50,000-mark in passing yardage during the victory, which moved the Broncos’ season record to 11-0. (AP / Wide World Photo)

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Any discussion of professional football would be incomplete without mentioning the Dallas Cowboys. Dubbed “America’s Team” in the 1970s, the Cowboys reached a low point in franchise history in the 1980s, leading new owner Jerry Jones to fire hallof-fame coach Tom Landry in 1989. Under the helm of the new coach, Jimmy Johnson, along with the acquisition of standout athletes like Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith, the Cowboys quickly regained their prominence in the league. In 1992 and 1993 the team met the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl finals, coming out on top in both matchups. With Johnson’s win in Super Bowl XXVII, he became the first football coach to win championships at the collegiate (as coach at the University of Miami) and professional level. Constantly clashing with owner Jones, Johnson surprised the country by announcing his resignation following Super Bowl XXVIII (1994) and was replaced by the University of Oklahoma’s coach Barry Switzer. The team won Super Bowl XXX for their fifth title, but began a downward slump in 1997. Despite this trend, the Cowboys won more games in the 1990s than any other team in the NFL. Professional football experienced expansion both at home and abroad. The league introduced four new franchises: the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars in 1993, the new Cleveland Browns in 1998 following their relocation to Baltimore and renaming to Ravens in 1996, and the Houston Texans in 1999. This growth caused a realignment of the thirty-two-team league into eight four-team divisions in 2001. In 1991 the NFL went global, forming the World League of American Football, which consisted of ten teams competing in the United Stated and Europe. The league took a two-year break in 1993 and reestablished itself for the 1995 season as the World League and became NFL Europe in 1997, NFL Europa in 2006, and terminated shortly thereafter in 2007. Along with expansion, the NFL experienced a number of other organizational alterations. Draft eligibility was changed during the 1990 season, allowing college juniors to enter the draft but requiring them to relinquish their collegiate eligibility. This decision was hotly debated because of the rising numbers of college athletes who failed to graduate as a result of turning professional. The playoff format was also modified that year, with the addition of two wild-card teams, one for each conference, bringing the total to six wild-card spots. The use of limited instant replay was eliminated in 1992 after six consecutive seasons in the league, and a new system would not be put into place until 1999. Instant replay was once again permitted and allowed coaches the opportunity to challenge referee calls on the field and be penalized with the loss of a time-out if their challenge did not result in an overturned call. Leading up the 1994 season were a series of rule modifications designed to increase offensive production, including the introduction of the two-point conversion, moving the kick-off point back to the thirty-yard line, and modifying roughing-the-passer rules. That same year the NFL launched one of the most comprehensive drug and alcohol policies ever seen in professional sports. League administrators strengthened this policy even more in 2005 when the NFL announced it would be adopting Olympic testing standards to combat illegal steroid use. This increased the number of random drug tests players could be subjected to during the off-season from two to six, added several substances to the list of banned products, and made it possible to test for what had been previously undetectable “designer” drugs. Advances in media technology and aggressive advertising allowed American football to reach new markets, increasing both the commercialization and

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popularity of the sport. Television contracts have been at once lucrative for the league and costly for television networks as revenue generated by advertisements during the games fail to meet the astronomical costs required to secure broadcast rights of the NFL. Agreements authorized in 1990 between the NFL and ABC, NBC, CBS, TNT, and ESPN for broadcasting the 1990 to 1993 seasons totaled $3.6 billion and were the largest in television history. The satellite channel NFL Network was launched in 2003, becoming the first television programming service entirely devoted to the sport. In 1993 CBS, which had aired National Football Conference (NFC) games for thirty-eight years, lost the broadcast rights to FOX Network in a bidding war that reached $1.58 billion over a four-year period. The deal made FOX a major player in network television, while CBS felt a tremendous loss. FOX extended this contract in 1998, paying $4.4 billion over the next eight years to the NFL. CBS, still reeling from the loss of NFC programming, acquired the rights to American Football Conference (AFC) games in 1998, a move that squeezed out NBC from broadcasting NFL games. Audience records were surpassed nearly every year between 1990 and 2007 and the Super Bowl became one of the most anticipated annual television broadcasts. Contributing to the entertainment value of the broadcast were the commercials that aired and sponsors cashed in on the interest in the ads; in 2008, a thirty-second commercial during the Super Bowl sold for $2.6 million. In addition to the game, the commercials, and the opportunity to gather with friends and family, the Super Bowl halftime show generates significant viewer interest. The Super Bowl has featured a number of popular and high profile artists through the years, including Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Tom Petty and many others. It seems, however, that no halftime show generated more interest, more controversy, or will linger in American memory longer than the 2004 performance of Janet Jackson and Justine Timberlake. At the end of their sexually charged duet “Rock Your Body,” Timberlake tore a piece off Jackson’s costume and revealed her breast to millions of spectators. Both claimed that the nudity was unintentional, calling it a “wardrobe malfunction,” and no one could have predicted the ensuing aftermath. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received over 535,000 complaints from viewers regarding the incident and multiple lawsuits were launched against Timberlake and Jackson regarding the so-called indecency of their actions. Although both performers, as well as Viacom (the parent company of CBS and MTV), the NFL, and the show’s sponsor, AOL, apologized, the FCC fined Viacom $550,000: $27,500 for twenty of the CBS-owned television stations that broadcasted the exposure. The NFL refunded AOL the $10 million they had paid to sponsor the event and forbade MTV from ever producing another half-time show. Viacom paid an additional $3.5-million settlement regarding the event and the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that raised the maximum penalty for FCC violations from $27,500 to $325,000 per violation. As a result, many networks now require time delays for live broadcasts.

Women’s Professional Football In 1999 the “No Limits” Barnstorming Tour featured some of the best women athletes across the country competing in football exhibition games. The success of the experimental season resulted in the formation of the Women’s Professional

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Football League (WPFL), an eleven-team, two-conference, four-division league in 2000. The year 2000 also saw the formation of two additional football leagues for women, the National Women’s Football Association (NWFA) and the Independent Women’s Football League (IWFL). Created by sport entrepreneur Catherine Masters, the NWFA originated with two teams, the Alabama Renegades and the Nashville Dream, who showcased six exhibition games from October to December 2000. Another eight teams were added for the 2001 season, eleven more for 2003, and eventually as many as thirtyfive teams operated under the NWFA. The IWFL was created in 2000 with the intent to foster a safe environment for women athletes and bring nationwide credibility to the emerging sport of women’s tackle football. Operating on a different level than the other leagues, the IWFL works as a nonprofit organization that allows member teams and their owners to operate independently and focus on each team’s strategic local marketing needs. The number of different leagues and teams have been a detriment to the women’s game, with many folding as rapidly as they develop, and the lack of coherent organization, media attention, and longevity has kept the sport from developing popularity around the country.

Gender and the Football Spectacle As legitimate women athletes fought to play legitimate football, other women took to the field in a sexualized, commercialized, and exploitative form of the game: the Lingerie Bowl. The first Bowl aired as a pay-per-view special during the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime special and featured “Team Dream” and “Team Euphoria,” made up of models clad in lingerie and protective gear (helmets, joint pads and shoulder pads), playing tackle football. From this first controversial event stemmed the Lingerie Football League and a reality television series based around which team would compete in the next Lingerie Bowl. In 2005 the league expanded from four to eight teams and elected former NBA player Dennis Rodman to serve as commissioner. Rodman played into the sexism that permeated the “sport,” announcing he would conduct mandatory uniform inspections and random cosmetic surgery checks throughout the season. The Lingerie Bowl continues to air annually on pay-per-view during the Super Bowl halftime show and does little to promote women’s athletics to the predominantly male audience. Rather, they perpetuate the objectification of women’s bodies and detract attention away from the achievements of women in the professional football leagues, and women athletes in general. While the Lingerie Bowl emphasized sexualized femininity, the XFL (for “Xtreme Football League”) glorified violent hypermasculinity. In early 2000 World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon announced his intentions for the league as a return to “old-time smash mouth football,” with fewer rules and no penalties for roughness in order to make the game more violent and thus, arguably, more exciting. The league also standardized the salaries players would receive, citing that “real football players” played for the love of the game. There was a hierarchy of pay based on the position one played: kicking specialists earned $3,500 per week, quarterbacks earned $5,000 per week, and all other players earned $4,000 per week. Winning teams received bonuses to be divided among the players and the league championship competition was named “The Million Dollar Game,” in recognition of the cash purse awarded to the winning team.

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The league’s opening game took place February 3, 2001, and was broadcast on NBC, a co-owner of the league. The XFL debut recorded an estimated 14 million viewers, double what NBC had guaranteed investing advertisers and significantly more than those who tuned in for the NFL Pro Bowl. Almost immediately, however, ratings dropped to embarrassing numbers. Some critics blamed the poor quality of play. Others faulted the lack of organization and the continual modification of rules throughout the season as a detriment to viewership. But the sentiment that rang loudest was the fact that the XFL was the brainchild of Vince McMahon, a personality who was constantly derided for his involvement in the “fake” world of professional wrestling. Audiences questioned whether or not a league game was scripted in the way WWE matches always were. Whatever the reasons may have been, NBC announced it would not broadcast a second season of the XFL as planned, alluding to significant monetary losses and poor judgment. McMahon publicly announced May 10, 2001, that the league would no longer continue.

College Football Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, football has remained “king” on college campuses across the nation. But with money, power, and prestige often comes corruption, and in the past two decades college football has seen a number of scandals, including recruiting violations, gambling, sexual misconduct, and drug use. Several women competed on men’s collegiate teams and the University of New Mexico’s Katie Hnida became the first woman to score in a Division I game. Hnida’s success, however, came after she transferred from the University of Colorado where she alleged she had been the target of sexual harassment and assault. Later, she, along with a group of other women, accused her former teammates of sexual molestation and rape. Ultimately, no charges were filed against the players but the allegations contributed to the already-tarnished reputation of Colorado’s football program. Coach Gary Barnett’s handling of the charges against his athletes was roundly criticized for being both sexist and insensitive, adding further fuel to the fire. The coach was temporarily suspended and placed on paid leave, but was reinstated before the start of the 2004 season. Barnett was fired in 2005 as a result of a string of losses during the season. The Colorado Buffaloes, winning their first and only national championship in 1990, faced several football-related scandals over the years. The rape allegations, brought by several different women beginning in 2001, were part of a larger controversy made public in early 2004 that uncovered the team’s strip-club visits, as well as the prevalence of alcohol, exotic dancers, and sexual contact at parties for recruits. There was evidence to suggest that several officials connected with the school had knowledge that these things went on and the negative attention these events brought to the school served warning on other big-time college football programs. Another controversial incident concerning an athlete’s violence and the response of a coach concerned University of Nebraska’s Lawrence Phillips. After amazing performances during his freshman and sophomore years, in which he led his team to a national title, the running back was named a contender for the prestigious Heisman Trophy in 1995. In the midst of the season, however, Phillips was charged with assaulting his then-girlfriend and was temporarily suspended from the team by Coach Tom Osborne. That he was not permanently removed from

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Nebraska’s roster drew much criticism of Osborne, who further outraged detractors by allowing Phillips to rejoin the team and start in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl, where he produced a spectacular performance and then became the number 6 pick in that year’s NFL draft. His career was continually plagued with legal transgressions and Phillips was unable to achieve success as a professional athlete.

The Quest for a National Champion The NCAA sponsors twenty-three sports in each of the Division I, II, and III levels and, with the help of expert coaches and administrators, organizes eightyeight total championships through end-of-the-season tournaments. However, football in the Division I–Football Bowl Subdivision (Division I-FBS, formerly called Division I-A) is the only NCAA-sponsored sport without an NCAA-organized tournament to determine a national champion. This has been the topic of heated debate, as various attempts to award an uncontested national championship have resulted in controversial rankings and matches. Because big-time college football does not rely on a postseason playoff system to determine a national champion, there have been a number of discrepancies in declaring which team deserves the number 1 title. In 1990, for instance, the Associated Press (AP) poll declared the University of Colorado the national champion, while the United Press International (UPI) awarded the crown to Georgia Tech. The following year, the polls split again, so that different organizations claimed that the University of Washington and Florida State University each was the country’s victor. In order to stage a game that would determine a clear-cut winner, organizers established the Bowl Coalition in 1992 to match teams in postseason play for both conference finals (Atlantic Coast Conference, Southeastern Conference, the Big 8, the Southwest Conference, the Big East, and Notre Dame, which remains independent of any conference) and determining an overall national champion. A major flaw in this system was that it did not include the Pac-10 or Big Ten conferences, the winners of which were contractually committed to participate in the annual Rose Bowl. This proved especially problematic in 1994 when undefeated Big Ten team Penn State, ranked second in the nation, was obligated to play the much lower ranked Pac-10 winner Oregon in the Rose Bowl rather than the University of Nebraska in the national championship Orange Bowl. Although both Penn State and Nebraska emerged with undefeated seasons, the Bowl Coalition determined Nebraska to be number 1. In an effort to create more equity, the Bowl Alliance replaced the Bowl Coalition in 1995. The Alliance still did not include the Pac-10 and Big Ten conferences, but it did dissolve the contractual commitments that previously prohibited highly ranked conference teams within the coalition from playing one another. This modification was intended to increase the likelihood that the top two teams would meet one another in the championship game. But the Big Ten’s University of Michigan football team experienced the stinging limitations of the Bowl Alliance in 1997 when it was ranked number 1 and invited to play in the Orange Bowl championship game against eventual champion Nebraska. Due to contractual obligations, however, Michigan had to play Pac-10 champion Washington State in the Rose Bowl. Without the inclusion of the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences, the

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Bowl Alliance, much like the Bowl Coalition, failed to provide a true national champion in big-time college football. At the conclusion of the 1997 season, the Pac-10 and Big Ten conferences agreed to integrate into the existing Bowl Alliance to structure to create what was informally referred to as the “Super Alliance,” which eventually became known as the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). The Rose Bowl would now rotate hosting responsibilities of the national championship game along with the Orange, Sugar, and Fiesta bowls. Again, like the Bowl Coalition and the Bowl Alliance, the BCS was designed with the intention of pitting the top-ranked teams against one another in a national championship game. The concept of the BCS was unique in that a mathematical formula was used to arrive at the rankings. These composite rankings were determined by analyzing team records, schedule strength, three computer-ranking systems, and the Associated Press (AP) and ESPN-USA Today Coaches’ polls. Fairness within the new ranking system was quickly questioned, given that the six BCS conference champions (ACC, Big East, SEC, Pac-10, Big 10, and Big 12) received automatic Bowl game berths, leaving only two spots to be filled by the remaining five non-BCS Division I-A conference football teams. By 2004 the overwhelming feeling was that it would be nearly impossible for a non-BCS conference team to be given the opportunity to play in the national championship game, as four non-BCS conference teams had finished the regular season undefeated since 1998 and were never awarded the chance. Problems arose long before the injustices felt in 2004. In the first year of BCS action, the Kansas State University Wildcats finished third in the final BCS rankings, but were denied participation in all of the bowl games; however, the fourthand eighth-ranked teams did get to partake in bowl games that year. In response, the BCS adopted the “Kansas State Rule,” which ensured an invitation to a bowl game for the third-ranked team in the final BCS standings. But the controversies continued to erupt. Despite ranking first in the final regular season AP and Coaches’ polls, the University of Southern California was denied a shot at the national title game. The mathematical formula employed by the BCS had ranked two other teams, the University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, ahead of USC. Those teams played for the national championship title with LSU coming out on top, while USC defeated fourth-ranked University of Michigan in the Rose Bowl. In an attempt to smooth over the chaos the USC incident created, the BCS reconfigured its ranking systems to put more weight on human rather than computer polls. The Associated Press responded to the commotion by disallowing the use of its polls as part of the BCS ranking formula. Shortly thereafter ESPN removed its name from the Coaches’ poll. While the BCS system is still in place as of this writing, BCS administrators continuously adapt the formulas and rules for which teams are invited to particular bowl games, but it seems nearly impossible to imagine a situation that would take into account the various results, schedules, anomalies, and outcomes, as well as the conference configurations that keep changing. The amount of money the games generate for the teams who play in the bowls, as well as for their respective conferences, makes it likely that the system—in one form or another—will continue to exist for some time. At the same time, the BCS system has only worked out as planned twice since its 1998 inception, with two

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teams remaining undefeated by the end of the regular season in 2002 and 2005. There has been strong support for a college football playoff system, but this has been met with arguments that playoffs would reduce the importance of regular-season games and incite the same kind of lackluster performance by NFL teams that play their second and third string toward the end of the regular season when a loss will not hurt their chances of playoff action. Division I-FBS football remains the subject of great contestation and with the continual use of flawed ranking systems it may never be able to truly determine a national football champion.

Success in College Football In spite of the controversies involving the BCS, a number of teams achieved success and notoriety between 1990 and 2007. The University of Southern California leads the pack in terms of the number of BCS appearances—winning five of the six matchups in which they competed. Currently, Ohio State, Oklahoma, and Florida State have also participated in six BCS bowl games. Between 1998 and 2007, the BCS has named (in chronological order) the following champions: University of Tennessee, Florida State, University of Oklahoma, University of Miami (FL), Ohio State University, Louisiana State University, University of Southern California, Texas, Florida and LSU, making it difficult to claim that one team has been particularly dominant in Division I-FBS. Based on polls from 1990 to 2003, national co-champions were named three times: Colorado and Georgia Tech in 1990, Washington and Miami in 1991, and Michigan and Nebraska in 1997. Two other times during this era, Nebraska was named the sole consensus national champion (1994, 1995), making it the most prominent team of the time. Much of the credit goes to Nebraska coach Tom Osborne who, at the time of his retirement in 1997, boasted the best winning percentage among active NCAA Division I-FBS coaches with 83.6 percent and a 60-3 record over his final five seasons. An online poll conducted by ESPN in 2007 named Osborne the “greatest college football coach of all time.” Attesting to his popularity in his home state, in 2000 Nebraskans overwhelmingly voted him into the U.S. House of Representatives. To date only one coach has reached 200 victories in fewer games than Osborne: Penn State’s Joe Paterno. Paterno began as an assistant coach in 1950, taking the head position in 1966 and by 2008 he had celebrated his forty-third anniversary in that role. During this time he appeared in more bowl games than any coach in history, boasts the record for most bowl games won, has won two national championships, and has coached the Nittany Lions to five undefeated seasons. Eddie Robinson coached at Grambling from 1941 to 1997 and accumulated 408 victories. Grambling, however, was not an accredited institution until 1949 so Robinson is only credited with 363 wins. Also among the top coaches ranks Florida State’s Bobby Bowden, currently tied with Paterno as the winningest coaches in Division I-FBS history. He has garnered two national titles (1993 and 1999) and the Seminoles were named one of the top five teams by the AP poll for fourteen straight seasons (1987–2000). The team has produced two Heisman Trophy winners: Charlie Ward (1993) and Chris Weinke (2000), both of whom played quarterback. But in terms of Heisman trophies, USC leads the pack with seven (sharing the number 1 position with Ohio State and Notre Dame) and as college

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football transitioned into the twenty-first century, the Trojans were among the most dominant teams in the nation. Coach Pete Carroll took the helm in 2001 and, despite having the 2002 Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback Carson Palmer, the nation’s top defense (led by Troy Polamalu), a tough schedule, tying for first place in the Pac-10 Conference, and an 11-2 record overall, USC finished the season with a number 5 ranking in the BCS system. The following season again provided USC with BCS frustrations. Although the AP poll ranked the Trojans as the best in the nation, the BCS located them at third, placing the University of Oklahoma at the top spot, and setting a matchup against number 2 Louisiana State (LSU won the 2003 national championship 2114). USC went on to beat Michigan 28-14 in the Rose Bowl and split the national title with LSU, prompting a handful of corporate sponsors to push for a competition between the Trojans and the Tigers, which the NCAA did not allow. Finally, following the 2004 season, USC was declared the undisputed national champion. With Heisman winner Matt Leinart at quarterback, along with running back Reggie Bush, who finished fifth in the Heisman voting that same year, the undefeated Trojans squared off against the also-unbeaten Oklahoma, with Jason White at quarterback—the winner of the 2003 Heisman Trophy. It marked the first time in history that two players who had already won the coveted award faced one another. USC went on to win, 55-19, and again competed for the national title in 2005, losing 41-38 to the Texas Longhorns in the Rose Bowl, despite the talents of Reggie Bush, who won that year’s Heisman award. In the end, the booming popularity and sweeping expansion of American football witnessed between 1990 and 2005 was incredible. Fantastic record-making moments characterized this era. The formation of multiple women’s leagues, the brief existence of the XFL, and the overseas NFL Europe venture allowed for new groups to get a taste of what the NFL and NCAA has experienced for so long. The debate surrounding the Bowl Championship Series and its fallibilities raised questions about the best way to crown a true national champion. Within professional football, continual modifications have been made in an effort to improve the structure and function of the organization. Along with strengthening the foundation of the NFL, the advance of media technology and its symbiotic relationship with the league reinforced football as the prevailing sport in American homes. If American football experiences another fruitful time period like that of 1990 to 2005, there is no telling what new limits may be pushed in terms of leagues, expansion, and record.

Hockey Professional Ice Hockey Ice hockey, as one of the “big four” sports in North America that includes basketball, baseball, and football, has never enjoyed the same popularity in the United States that it has in Canada, though there are regional pockets where the game is widely celebrated, especially in New England and the Midwest. There were both highs and lows for the United States’ ice hockey community. Women made great strides while the men’s professional league, the National Hockey League (NHL), faced several major blows, including notable acts of violence, two major player lockouts, and a substantial decrease in television viewership and overall popularity.

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But the NHL landscape was not entirely bleak; it was particularly brightened by some of the greatest athletes the sport has ever known. There is a bit of truth to the old joke, “I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.” While combat and excessive violence are penalized, it is nonetheless common for players to break into on-ice fighting. Many argue that the potential for violence spurs enjoyment of and attention to the sport, though this may detract from the amazing skill and athleticism players exhibit. In one extreme example of such violence, Boston Bruins player Marty McSorley was suspended during the 1999–2000 NHL season after a vicious stick to the head of Vancouver Canucks’ player Donald Brashear, causing a loss of consciousness and severe concussion. Aside from its brutality, what made the act unique was that McSorley was then charged in federal court and convicted of assault with a weapon. Four years later another brutal act of violence made headlines. The Canucks’ Todd Bertuzzi attacked Colorado Avalanche player Steve Moore, which caused serious injuries, including three fractured vertebrae and a severe concussion. Bertuzzi was suspended from the NHL indefinitely and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) extended the NHL suspension into their jurisdiction, thus barring Bertuzzi from international play. Like McSorley, Bertuzzi was charged with assault by authorities outside of hockey. The NHL experienced additional negative press during this period because of two player lockouts, which combined to devastate the league’s seasons and tarnished its image. The first occurred in the 1994–95 season as a result of the controversy over the players’ salary cap. NHL owners wanted to establish a maximum amount that players could earn in a season and, not surprisingly, the athletes were opposed, arguing that they would not be paid their real worth if a ceiling was placed on their wages. Contract negotiations were at a deadlock for 104 days during what should have been the regular season, cutting the number of games from eighty-four in 1993–94 to only forty-eight in 1994–95. Owners and players eventually came to an agreement halfway through the season and the cap was not enacted. The event, however, laid the foundation for future disputes between NHL players and franchise owners. In 2004 the NHL made history with its second lockout of the past ten years—at 310 days, it was the longest in North American major professional sports history. As it had earlier, the 2004–5 lockout occurred over a labor dispute between the players, represented by the NHL Players Association (NHLPA), and the league. Citing financial deficits caused by players’ salaries, the NHL once again fought for a salary cap to combat the league’s financial crisis. The opposing sides finally came to an agreement just in time for the 2005–6 season, but even with the return of the NHL’s regular season, many argue that the game and its presence in U.S. society have been forever changed. In May 2005, one of the major consequences of the strife became evident when ESPN terminated its $60-million television deal with the NHL. In response to the decrease in viewership, the NHL endeavored to make hockey more appealing. The best example of the league’s efforts was in its overhaul of the sport’s rules. Several major changes for the 2005–6 season made the game faster, encouraged more offensive scoring, and make the game more exciting overall. Some of the adaptations included forcing a victor in the event of a tie through a shootout, decreasing the size of the goalie’s pads and gloves, and altering official

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rink dimensions. Although the changes were met with general praise, to date, the league’s tactics have not successfully increased ratings and game attendance continued to decline. Despite the general decline of the NHL in the 1990s, one athlete continued to stick out: Wayne Gretzky, “the Great One.” Widely regarded as the greatest player of all time, during his twenty-one-year career Gretzky racked up scoring titles and records, MVP awards, All-Star appearances, and playoff records, and set or tied sixty-one NHL records, many of which pundits deem untouchable. At the time of his 1999 NHL retirement he had a career point total of 2,857, which is over 1000 points higher than the next all time leading scorer, Gordie Howe. He earned nine Hart trophies, the NHL’s version of the MVP award, which is three more than any athlete in the NHL, NBA, NFL, and MLB. He was a phenomenon in the world of ice hockey and Pittsburgh Penguins’ Mario Lemieux celebrates afhis incredible athletic prowess paired with his ter Martin Straka scored an overtime goal to lift clean-cut image was a winning media frenzy forthe Penguins to a 4-3 win over the Washington mula. The NHL retired his number 99 from all Capitals in game 6 of their first-round playoff seteams—he is the first and only player in the ries in Pittsburgh on April 23, 2001. (AP / Wide World Photos) league to be awarded this honor. The Canadian-born Gretzky was a long-time star for the Edmonton Oilers. In the late 1980s, however, “The Trade” as it came to be known, included his move to the Los Angeles Kings. This action greatly disturbed many Canadians, so much so that they attempted to force government intervention. South of the border, Gretzky’s performance for the Kings invigorated American’s interest in the sport, momentum that continued as he joined the St. Louis Blues in 1996 and concluded his stellar career with the New York Rangers, where he joined other greats, including Mark Messier and competed against the likes of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Mario Lemieux, who overcame multiple injuries, bouts with cancer, and severe pain to become one of the most dominant players in the game.

Amateur Ice Hockey Amateur hockey experienced tremendous growth during this period, particularly with the formation of the first U.S. National Women’s Ice Hockey Team. The team competed in the 1990 International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) World Women’s Championships, which was the first IIHF-sanctioned international women’s competition. The United States made a successful inaugural showing, which brought them the silver medal behind Canada’s gold. Their performance also changed the international rules of women’s ice hockey. Prior to the 1990 World Cup tournament, full body-checking was allowed within women’s hockey. The American women were so physically dominant against many of their matchups that

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competitors argued the body-check gave them an unfair advantage. The IIHF recognized this disparity and eliminated the full-body check in an effort to level the playing field. Throughout the decade the popularity of women’s ice hockey’s grew globally. The 1998 Nagano Japan Olympic Games marked the first time that women’s ice hockey was recognized as an Olympic medal sport. The U.S. national team stepped onto the international stage and dominated the tournament, winning the gold medal. Their success put hockey into the spotlight and brought positive attention to the sport. Four years later Team USA Women and Men’s Ice Hockey teams continued their international success when both teams won the silver medal at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. The success of women’s hockey at the 1998 and 2002 Olympic Games encouraged the NCAA to recognize women’s ice hockey as a sanctioned sport. In 2001 the first women’s collegiate ice hockey championship, or “Frozen Four,” was held with the University of Minnesota–Duluth Bulldogs skating away with the title. Since that time there has been considerable growth in the number of collegiate women’s hockey programs offered at Division I, II, and III levels.

Soccer Soccer is far more popular throughout the rest of the world than in the United States. Up until the mid-1970s’ North American Soccer League (NASL), the United States did not have any premiere professional leagues. There are several arguments concerning soccer’s relative lack of success and popularity at the national and professional levels. Some cite the foreign development and dominance of the sport. Others believe that Americans find it less exciting and slower paced than other popular sports because it is typically a low-scoring sport. Despite these arguments, 1990–2007 saw an explosion in U.S. soccer participation and it became the fastest growing sport at both the high school and collegiate levels. This surge was influenced by two factors: 1) the incredible success of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer team and; 2) the United States hosted several international championships, including the 1996 Olympic Games, and the Women’s and Men’s The F
ed
eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup tournaments. The U.S. Women’s soccer team experienced unprecedented success throughout this fifteen-year period, consistently dominating international competitions and demonstrating the success of Title IX legislation. Their supremacy began with the dawn of the first FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament in 1991. Twelve national teams vied for the title in hosting country China and the United States trounced the competition, winning gold and encouraging interest in soccer back in the United States. The popularity of soccer was rising nationwide in the mid- to late 1990s and its climax came in 1999 as the United States hosted the FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament. The United States fielded an all-star team of veterans who had played the better part of the decade at the national level. The tournament was held in seven different areas across the United States and game attendance smashed previous records. A sold-out crowd at the Pasadena Rose Bowl, along with a substantial television audience, watched the final match between as Team USA dramatically beat China in a shootout for the title. The nation rallied around its new sport

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heroes and the team won accolades never before awarded to women in the world of sport. Out of this media frenzy, several stars emerged, most notably Mia Hamm, the all-time leading scorer for Team USA with 158 international goals. Her athletic success catapulted her into the media spotlight and Hamm became a popular icon. While other players such as Michelle Akers, Julie Foudy, Tiffany Milbret and Kristine Lilly also gained fame, Brandi Chastain seemed to garner a disproportionate amount of attention. Chastain scored the winning penalty kick in the U.S.-China shootout and, in a fit of excitement, tore her shirt off and celebrated in her sports bra, an action that came under immediate scrutiny, often distracting attention from the significance of her accomplishment and that of her teammates. As the women found international success, the U.S. men’s team fought to claim respect during this period. Throughout much of the twentieth century the U.S. men’s national soccer team struggled to stand out from the global pack. In an effort to turn the program around and inspire stateside “soccer madness,” the United States hosted the 1994 FIFA Men’s World Cup. This decision came under tremendous international scrutiny because of the perceived lack of interest from U.S. fans.

Michelle Akers, Women’s Soccer Champion When considering the history of sports, it is important to acknowledge the contributions of Michelle Anne Akers (born February 1, 1966) who, from the beginning of her career, set the tone for the U.S. women’s dominance in soccer. During her time at the University of Central Florida she was a four-time National Soccer Coaches Association of America All-American and the first woman to win the prestigious Hermann Trophy in 1988, awarded to the top soccer player in the United States. Without the benefit of a U.S. league, she traveled to Sweden to become the first American woman to play professional soccer, competing for Tyresco Club for three years. She began playing for the U.S. National team in 1985 and scored her first international goal, which was also the first time any U.S. player had scored against Denmark. Through the late 1980s, Akers continued to lead the United States in international play, but her talent came to the fore in 1991 when she amazed the world at the first FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament, scoring ten goals in six matches and leading the U.S. women to victory. Akers played in two more FIFA Women’s World Cups in 1995 and 1999. Team USA finished with a disappointing bronze medal in the 1995 tournament, in part because Akers was injured. However, many believe it was this loss that motivated Akers and the team to come back at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games to win gold. Akers’s final international tournament was the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup where she once again helped the Team USA win gold in the tournament by scoring on a crucial penalty in the semifinal match. Akers retired after the 1999 FIFA win with 153 international appearances, 105 career goals, 37 assists, and 247 total points. She was named FIFA Women’s Player of the Century in 1999 and in 2004 she and Mia Hamm were the only two women, and the only two Americans, included in the FIFA 100, a list of the top living soccer players in the world. She was inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2004. Akers’s incredible fifteen-year career is a testament to how opportunities to participate in sport can empower girls and women.

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The world questioned whether a country that did not have a premiere professional soccer league could or should host a major international competition. In order to prove their competency, the United States founded Major League Soccer (MLS) in 1993 and play began in 1996. The men’s national team also stepped up their play and began to see moderate international success. Beginning with ten teams in 1996, MLS created three expansion clubs by 2005 and with a possible two additional teams slated for the 2009 season. Although the league faced dwindling attendance numbers after its first few seasons, the unexpected FIFA World Cup success of the U.S. men’s team in 2002 reestablished interest in the American premier league. The creation of the MLS was highly publicized and strategically planned. From its onset MLS teams were purposely placed in cities with high immigrant populations in order to plug into an already established soccer fan base. Soccer-specific stadiums were built for many of the MLS clubs, which Mia Hamm, forward on the U.S. National Women’s Soccer Team, gets ready to unleash a shot has encouraged greater profitability. In addition, on net against the Russia National during first young superstars such as Brian McBride, DaMar- half action in the Nike U.S. Women’s Cup ’98 cus Beasley, and Landon Donovan were highly at Frontier Field in Rochester, NY, on September marketed to both general sport audiences to gen- 18, 1998. Hamm scored 100th and 101st career erate interest in the league. international goals as the United States toppled The women also tried their hand at a profes- Russia 4-0. (AP / Wide World Photo) sional league with the Women’s United Soccer Association, or WUSA. Play began between eight teams across the country in April 2001. With the incredible popularity and the sellout crowds of the 1999 FIFA World Cup, promoters and players alike anticipated successful attendance and support. However, this was not the case and due to the general lack of fan and financial support, the league was forced to suspend play after its third season in 2003, though it is expected that play will resume in the spring of 2009. Overall this time period featured rapid growth for the sport of soccer in the United States for both men and women. Soccer’s popularity continues to grow with increased interest in FIFA World Cup and premiere professional soccer leagues such as MLS. The sport’s momentum is supported by strong youth, high school, and collegiate organizations.

Title IX Comes of Age By the mid- to late 1990s, girls and women began to reap the athletic benefits of Title IX, the law passed in 1972 banning sex discrimination in education. In 1996, there were 2.4 million girls participating in high school athletics, representing 39 percent of all athletes at that level, an eightfold increase since 1971. At the

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college level, more than 100,000 women played sports by the time Title IX celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. The increasingly dynamic rivalry between the University of Tennessee and the University of Connecticut women’s basketball teams brought unprecedented media coverage and, therefore, public attention to the sport. The University of North Carolina soccer team earned the title of “dynasty” by winning eight national championships in the 1990s (overall, the team has a total of nineteen national titles). Indeed, women’s soccer in the 1990s was the fastest-growing sport at both the high school and collegiate level for girls and women during this decade. But perhaps nowhere was the success of Title IX legislation more apparent than on the international stage. The public could not help but take notice of the excitement generated by women’s sport in 1996, dubbed “The Year of the Female Athlete” and that year’s Olympic Summer Games in Atlanta became “The Women’s Games.” It was the first time that soccer was an Olympic sport for women and the United States secured the gold medal in front of a crowd of more than 76,000 spectators. Softball debuted as well, and the American team kicked off a string of three consecutive first-place performances. At the inaugural hockey tournament of the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, Team USA turned in a perfect 6-0 record to secure the championship, an accomplishment replicated by the U.S. women’s basketball team. In the end, American women won a record number of medals in swimming, synchronized swimming, gymnastics, and track and field, but it was the gold-medal winning performances in the team sports of soccer, softball, hockey and basketball in 1996 and 1998 Games that particularly owed their success to “Title IX babies”—the first generation of women to fully benefit from the legislation during their elementary school, high school, and college years. The successful performances sowed the seeds for professional women’s leagues. In 1996 the American Basketball League tipped off its inaugural season, employing many Olympic athletes. This was followed in 1997 by the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association). In 2000, the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA) announced it would begin play the following year. Sadly, the ABL folded in 1999 and the WUSA suspended operations in 2003. Only the WNBA remains as the opportunity for women to play professional team sports in the United States. Despite the progress of women in sport, things are far from equal. At the high school and college levels, boys and men continue to enjoy the majority of athletic opportunities. Reports from the NCAA demonstrate that the money invested in men’s sports, particularly football and basketball, eclipses that devoted to women’s sports. The percentage of female coaches and administrators continues to decline and there are vast discrepancies in the salaries that they earn in comparison with their male counterparts. Evidence suggests that women of color have not benefited from Title IX to the extent that white women have. There must also be considerations made for girls and women who are differently abled or disabled and continue to lack athletic opportunities. Furthermore, Title IX legislation is under constant threat from lawsuits and politicians. In 2005 the Bush administration allowed colleges to comply with Title IX by showing they were meeting the interests of their students through email surveys. This is a highly problematic method, not the least of which is because a lack of student response is interpreted as a response of

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noninterest, which severely skews the results of the survey and excuses schools from providing more opportunities for women. As we celebrate the great strides female athletes have made since 1972, we must be constantly vigilant about the future. As former Olympic and professional basketball player Cheryl Miller stated, “Without Title IX, I’d be nowhere.” The country cannot afford to leave over half the population stranded in the middle of “nowhere.”

THE OLYMPIC GAMES Between 1990 and 2005, Olympic Games were held twice on U.S. soil (Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996 and Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2002). Throughout the majority of the Games’ history, the Summer and Winter Olympic Games were held during the same calendar year on a four-year cycle. In 1992, however, the rules changed and the events now alternate every two years. By the 2002 Summer Games, 44 percent of Olympic athletes were women and had made further strides at the organizational level of Olympic committees. Anita DeFrantz, an attorney who had been a bronze-medal winning member of the 1976 Olympic rowing team, was the first African American and the first American woman to serve on the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In 1997 DeFrantz became the first female vice president of the IOC and Sandra Baldwin became the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2000, making her the first woman to hold that position in the 106-year history of the organization. Despite these milestones, the IOC remains a predominantly male enclave and the total number of Olympic sports for men still outnumber those for women: In 1992 men competed in 171 compared to 98 events for women; in 1996, men could enter 174 events, while women could enter 108. By the turn of the twenty-first century that gap closed a bit more, with 180 events for men and 132 for women.

Summer Games The year 1996 marked the 100-year anniversary of the modern Olympics. Boxing great Muhammad Ali lit the cauldron in the host city of Atlanta to kick off the event. At the time, it was the largest Games in history and security was tight. Officials had ratcheted up their safety measures following the explosion of TWA Flight 800, just two days before the opening ceremonies began, yet tragedy still struck the Games when a pipe bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park, where people had gathered to listen to a concert. The blast killed one person and injured 111 more. Officials decided that the Games should continue, though flags were flown at halfmast in observance of what President Clinton called an “evil act of terror.” The number of events at the Summer Games continued to increase for male and female participants between 1990 and 2007. Women’s softball, soccer, hockey, beach volleyball, triathlon, and epee (a type of fencing) were added to the program during this time period. Women ran the 5000-meter races for the first time in Olympic history in 1996. In 1992 baseball became an Olympic sport (but will be removed, as will softball, after the 2012 Games in London); two years later, mountain biking premiered at the Games. Tennis was reintroduced in 1988, marking the end of a sixty-four-year hiatus. Andre Agassi won gold in 1996 on the men’s side. On the women’s side, Americans won three straight Olympics’ singles titles:

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Jennifer Capriati (1992), Lindsay Davenport (1996) and Venus Williams who in 2000, along with her sister Serena, took home a second gold in the doubles event. But in 2004, Americans won only one tennis medal at the Athens Games.

Track and Field In 2000 the International Amateur Athletic Foundation (IAAF) added women’s hammer throw and pole vault (America’s Stacy Dragila took home the gold) to the track and field lineup and for the first time men and women competed in the same number of Olympic field events. The year 2000 also marked the first time that there were the same number of team events for women as there were for men. The breakout star of the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, was Marion Jones. Before the Olympics, Jones predicted she would win five gold medals, but finished with three gold (100- and 200-meter sprints, 1600-meter relay) and two bronze medals (long jump, 400-meter relay), becoming the first female track and field athlete to win five medals in a single Olympics. Jones translated her popularity and charisma into lucrative endorsement deals and was a favorite of fans and the media alike. She did not compete in the next Olympics and turned in disappointing finishes in 2004. Her vow to return in 2008 would not materialize; plagued by doping allegations throughout her career, Jones tested positive for banned performance-enhancing substances at the 2006 USA Track and Field Championships. She confessed to steroid use in 2007 and was stripped of all the medals she won in 2000. Her name no longer appears in the record book. To single out Jones for the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs, however, is unfair. Incidents of doping have cropped up in numerous sports—in many different countries—and track and field has been especially marred by such scandals. It would also be unfair to focus on just the scandalous side of track and field, for a good number of American athletes performed well at the Games between 1990 and 2007. Evelyn Ashford, who won her first gold medal at the 1984 in 100-meter event and the 400-meter relay, finished her illustrious career in 1992 with another victorious result. At age thirty-five, Ashford became the oldest woman to win a gold medal for her performance in the 400-meter relay. She joined such noteworthy teammates as Gail Devers, Gwen Torrance, and Jackie Joyner Kersee in producing amazing performances as members of the U.S. track and field team. There were impressive performances by male athletes as well. In addition to winning nine world championships, Michael Johnson racked up five Olympic gold meals, beginning his streak in 1992. Four years later he became the first male sprinter to win both the 200- and 400-meter races at the same Olympics, surging to victory in a custom-designed pair of Nike racing spikes that earned him the nickname “The Man with the Golden Shoes.” He defended his title in the 400-meter event in 2000, adding another gold to his collection in the 1600-meter relay race before retiring from the sport. Perhaps the greatest male track and field athlete competing during this era was Carl Lewis, whose lengthy international career began in 1979 and continued until 1997. His sprinting and long-jumping career ascended in the 1980s and his two gold medals in 1992 brought his total to eight. With his gold-medal long jump in 1996, his fourth Olympics, he became one of only three athletes to win the same individual event four times. His total of nine Olympic medals left him just one shy

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Doping in Sports Lamentably, it is impossible to discuss American sports in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first without mentioning the rising prevalence of steroids, blood doping, and other illegal, performance-enhancing tactics. The ingestion of substances to give one athlete an edge over others is certainly not a new phenomenon; however, with constant advancements in science and technology, the stakes have increased dramatically. New drugs came to the fore around the end of the twentieth century, forcing the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) to continually update their list of banned substances. In particular, the use of human growth hormones (HGH) and anabolic steroids like tetrahydrogestrinone (THG or “The Clear”), designed to increase muscle building, regeneration, and enhance physical strength, have led to the disqualification and additional castigation of several high-profile U.S. athletes in such sports as baseball, running, and cycling. Established in 1984 by Victor Conte, the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) is arguably the most well-known American source of performance-enhancing drugs. Between 1986 and 2000 BALCO distributed a supplement called ZMA that, while not banned at the time, was an important precursor to the development of subsequent substances. Later, BALCO began manufacturing and selling “The Clear,” so called because it was initially undetectable. In 2003 a series of investigative reports by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, journalists for the San Francisco Chronicle, including allegations against athletes like Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, and Jason Giambi, led to an investigation of the laboratory. Since then, a staggering number of athletes have been alleged to have used The Clear, many of whom have tested positive and faced severe retributions. The information brought to light by the BALCO scandal additionally contributed to the initiation of the 2005 U.S. Senate hearings on steroids in baseball. The hearings were an embarrassment for the major leagues, with many of its top stars admitting to using performance-enhancing drugs. Although the BALCO case primarily involved track athletes and professional baseball players, its ramifications reverberated throughout the sporting community and have traveled into cycling, tennis, and golf. One significant revelation from the BALCO case was that athletes had used performance-enhancing drugs without registering positive test results, primarily because the technology to produce the drugs outpaced the technology to detect them. Not just professional and Olympic athletes have become pharmacological guinea pigs, with increasing evidence of performance-enhancing drug use at the collegiate level and, according to a survey by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, steroid use among high school students more than doubled between 1991 and 2003. Such practices have been linked to physical and psychological damage to athletes, as well as to premature death.

of the all-time record set by Ray Ewry, who won ten in the early twentieth century. Carl Lewis set numerous world records and held sixty-five consecutive victories in the long jump. In addition to his many awards and achievements, the International Olympic Committee voted him “Sportsman of the Century,” the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF), track and field’s international governing body, declared him “World Athlete of the Century,” and Carl Lewis was declared “Olympian of the Century” by Sports Illustrated.

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Swimming and Diving With successful performances from Misty Hyman, Megan Quann, Brooke Bennett, and Laura Wilkinson, the U.S. swimming and diving fared well in international competition, and Amy Van Dyken and Jenny Thompson developed particularly noteworthy careers. Van Dyken swam her way to four gold medals in 1996. Thompson represented the United States in the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 Olympic Games, winning a total of twelve medals during her illustrious career and becoming the most decorated U.S. Olympian in history. Male swimmers contributed additional victories to the U.S. medal count. Swimmers like Tom Dolan, Ian Crocker, and Lenny Krayzelburg thrilled fans with amazing races, as did Michael Phelps who, at age fifteen, failed to medal in the 2000 Games. He more than made up for it the next time around. At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Phelps won a record-number eight medals, including six gold medals (100-meter butterfly, 200meter butterfly, 200-meter individual medley, 400-meter individual medley, 4200-meter freestyle relay, 4100-meter medley relay). Phelps’s 400-meter freestyle relay team finished in third place and he added a bronze-medal performance in the 200-meter freestyle. In the 2008 Games in Beijing, Phelps set a new record with eight gold medals in one Olympiad.

Gymnastics Shannon Miller, the most successful U.S. gymnast in history, won five medals in the 1992 Games—three bronze (team, uneven bars, floor exercise) and two silver (all-around, balance beam) medals. In 1996 she joined Amy Chow, Amanda Borden, Dominique Dawes, Dominique Moceanu, Jaycie Phelps, and Kerri Strug to make up the “Magnificent Seven”—the only American gymnastic team to finish first in the Team Competition. Miller added another gold to her collection in 1996 in the balance beam, making her the only American to win the event at the Olympics. She remains the most decorated gymnast, male or female, in U.S. history. Despite Miller’s brilliance, many will remember the 1996 women’s gymnastic competition for the dramatic style in which Kerri Strug completed her vault, despite having injured her ankle in her first attempt.

Softball and Baseball Both softball and baseball are recent additions to the Olympic program and, unfortunately, their appearance was short-lived. Softball was introduced in 1996, and the American women won the event in 1996, 2000, and 2004. Baseball, a long-time Olympic exhibition sport, was granted medal status for the 1992 Games. The American men finished first in 2000, though Cuba has been the dominant team in the event, winning in 1992, 1996, and 2004. In 2005, the IOC determined that both sports would be discontinued following the 2008 Olympic competition.

Basketball Throughout the history of the Olympics, the men’s team from the United States has dominated basketball competition. In 1989 the International Basketball Federation declared that professional NBA athletes would be eligible to compete in the Games. This announcement paved the way for the “Dream Team” of the 1992

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Barcelona Games, an incredible assemblage of the top players in the sport including Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, Chris Mullen, Clyde Drexler, David Robinson, John Stockton, and Christian Laettner, the only collegiate player of the bunch. To report that the team won a gold medal does not do its performance justice. Quite frankly, the Dream Team dominated their opponents. The United States won their games by an average of forty-four points; their thirty-two-point victory over Croatia for the gold medal was their closest competition of the tournament. Five members of the original team (Barkley, Malone, Pippen, Robinson, and Stockton), along with several talented additions, repeated their supremacy in the 1996 and 2000 Games. In the 2004 Summer Games, however, the United States took home a disappointing bronze medal. The U.S. women’s basketball team has also been impressive and between 1994 and 2006, they did not lose a match in international competition. They won a bronze medal in 1992, followed by three consecutive gold-medal performances in 1996, 2000, and 2004.

Winter Games Between 1990 and 2007, four Winter Olympics took place and the Games continued to evolve in many ways. Skeleton was reintroduced in 2002 after a fifty-four-year absence from the program and curling came back in 1998, appearing as a competitive sport for the first time since 1924. The moguls became an event in 1992, as did women’s ice hockey in 1998. Events like snowboarding have been added, demonstrating the increasing popularity of “alternative” sports. In 2002 the Games were held in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was the first Olympics following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and, as a result, the competition required extra security measures and took on extra significance. The opening ceremony included a flag that had been at Ground Zero in New York, though some felt this ran antithetical to the ideals of the Olympics that, ostensibly, are to be separate from politics. Women’s bobsledding also debuted at the Salt Lake Games, a competition won by American teammates Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers. Flowers, a talented track and field athlete in college, became the first black person to win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics. This is at once an important milestone and a reminder of the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in the Games. Contributing to the racialization of the event, representatives from many countries are disadvantaged by their geography and climate when it comes to training for and competing in the Winter Games. In addition, there was the 2002 Olympic Games bid scandal, in which it was determined that Salt Lake organizers had bribed members of the IOC to be the host city. As a result, ten members of the IOC were expelled, another ten were sanctioned, and the organization adopted stricter rules to govern the bidding process. There were also doping scandals and controversial judging in the pair figureskating event resulted in an unprecedented awarding of two gold medals.

Hockey The American men came in second at the 2002 Games, edged out by Canada. NHL players enjoyed much success at the Olympics beginning in 1998, when the

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league temporarily suspended operations in order to permit its players to compete. The women’s event was added in 1998 and Team USA took home the inaugural gold, followed by a silver in 2002.

Downhill Skiing Three-time Olympian Picabo Street has been called the greatest downhill skier in U.S. history, with nine World Cup wins and a gold medal in the 1996 world championships. She placed second in the Olympic downhill event in 1994 and won gold in 1998 in the Super Giant Slalom or “Super G,” an event that incorporates downhill and giant slalom racing. Street suffered a series of potentially careerending injuries prior to the 1998 Games, but persevered. Shortly after the Games, she experienced the worst crash of her career—one that left her left femur broken in nine places and tearing the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her right knee. Miraculously, after two years of rehabilitation, Street came back to the sport and proved just how talented and tough she really is, striving to be the first U.S. skier to win a medal in three straight Olympics. Street announced her retirement from competitive skiing after a disappointing sixteenth-place finish in the 2002 downhill event

Skating Bonnie Blair began her Olympic career in 1984, the first of four consecutive games in which she would compete. In the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France, Blair won her second and third gold medals in the 500- and 1000-meter events. Her latest victory in the 500-meter race made her the first U.S. athlete to win the same event in three straight Olympics. Blair added two more gold medals to her collection, making her final count six—five gold and one bronze. Winning countless awards and setting several world records during her illustrious career, Blair set an American record in her final race before retiring in 1995. In her absence, speedskater Chris Witty medaled in the 1998 Olympics and won a gold medal in the 1000-meter event in 2002, setting a world record. A multifaceted athlete, Witty also competed in the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, placing fifth in the 500-meter cycling time trials. At the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Apollo Anton Ohno emerged as the silver- and gold-medal winner in the 1000-meter and 1500-meter races, respectively, though both events were fraught with controversy. In the 1000-meter competition, Ohno had taken the lead, but a fall by South Korea’s Ahn Hyun Soo as the skaters rounded the final corner took out Ohno and two other athletes, allowing Australia’s Steven Bradbury to become the first person from the southern hemisphere to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics. Scrambling to his feet, Ohno won the silver. He would improve his standing in the 1500-meter, but only after South Korea’s Kim Dong-Sung had been disqualified for blocking Ohno, sparking a massive debate.

Figure Skating Women’s figure skating celebrated a number of great champions between 1990 and 2007, beginning in 1992 with Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold medal. Michelle Kwan,

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the most decorated figure skater in U.S. history, won nine U.S. Championships and five world championships, placing second at the 1998 Games and third in 2002. Kwan’s silver in 1998 put her just behind Tara Lapinski, who became the youngest gold medalist in the history of the Winter Olympics. Sarah Hughes added to America’s medal count with her 2002 first-place finish. Figure skating typically draws the largest television audience of the Winter Olympics In addition to the many American triumphs, women’s figure skating also gave audiences one of the biggest scandals in the history of sport. In 1994 Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were among the best U.S. skaters, providing sports fans with fantastic competition. Harding, although known for her amazing triple axels and powerful skating, is perhaps best remembered for her role in the attack on Kerrigan before the 1994 Olympic trials, when an assailant clubbed Kerrigan in the knee with a metal baton. It was soon discovered that the attacker had been hired by Harding’s then-husband. Kerrigan was forced to drop out of the event Nancy Kerrigan performing in “Disney on Ice,” because of her injury and Harding went on to 1994. (Courtesy of Photofest) win. Kerrigan recovered to take a silver medal in the Olympics, while Harding failed to place. Later that year, Tonya Harding pled guilty to helping cover up the assault. The U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped her of her title and issued a lifetime ban, barring her from competing or coaching at sanctioned events. It is unfortunate that the Harding-Kerrigan debacle received the lion’s share of attention during the 1994 Games, because it meant that fantastic stories of athletic accomplishment during that time went relatively unnoticed and reduced women’s sport into a titillating soap opera.

Paralympics As American Olympic athletes experienced success, failure, and redemption between 1990 and 2007, so too did American Paralympic athletes. Existing parallel to the Olympic movement, the Paralympic movement seeks to provide a space for international competition for elite athletes with physical disabilities. The Paralympic Games occur immediately following the Olympic Games, hosted by the same city and using the same facilities and venues. While not as large or well known as the Olympics, the Paralympics have gained increasing prominence since their inception in 1960. The scale of the Paralympics grew steadily between 1990 and 2007, both in terms of participation and the number of events. For example, the 1992 Summer Paralympics in Barcelona, Spain, attracted a total of 3,020 athletes from eightytwo countries competing in fifteen sports. Eight years later, the 2000 Games in

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Sydney, Australia, featured 3,824 athletes representing 122 countries. These Games included a total of eighteen sports, including the debut of wheelchair rugby as a medal event. The Winter Paralympics experienced similar growth, but on a much more modest scale. During the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France, approximately 365 athletes from twenty-four countries competed in only two sports, alpine and Nordic skiing. By the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, sledge hockey had been added to the program and 416 athletes from thirty-six countries participated. The 2002 Games also marked the international debut of delegations from Andorra, Chile, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, and People’s Republic of China, making it the most diverse Winter Games yet. Throughout this time period, the dominance of the American Paralympic teams wavered. Long accustomed to sitting atop the medal tables, the American teams faced increasingly strong competition in both the Summer and Winter Games. In 1992 the United States topped the Summer and Winter medal tallies, garnering 45 medals in the Winter events and 175 medals in the Summer. With more athletes participating and the level of competition improving, the United States lost its dominant grip and slipped to fourth place in the total medal tally in the 1998 Winter Games, behind Norway, Germany, and Japan. In the 2000 Summer Games the United States finished third with 109 medals, following host country Australia and Great Britain. China displayed its rising success as a sporting nation during the 2004 Summer Games, amassing a total of 141 medals, 63 of which were gold. The United States finished fourth in the 2004 medal table, behind China, Australia, and Great Britain. While these medal tallies do not provide a comprehensive account of a nation’s sporting achievement, they do indicate a pattern of growth and diversity in the international Paralympic movement. The preeminence of the United States was no longer a guarantee; the previous dominance of the American teams became increasingly challenged as more countries developed Paralympic training programs and entered the Games. The Paralympic movement within the United States received a boost of financial and organizational support upon its integration into the governance structure of the USOC. Spurred by the passage of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1998, this restructuring allowed the Paralympic movement to weave into the wider framework of the USOC. Prior to this act, the USOC was not directly involved in any aspects of Paralympic competition. The various sportgoverning bodies and disabled-sport organizations held responsibility for running events, selecting competition sites, and choosing the national team athletes.

SPORTS FOR INDIVIDUAL COMPETITORS Boxing In both record and title, the 1990s belonged to Roy Jones Jr., named by Boxing Magazine as the “Fighter of the Decade.” The organizations that sanction fights and crown champions become a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms and Jones’s success is illustrative of the different boxing associations: he has been the middleweight, super middleweight, and light heavyweight International Boxing Federation (IBF) champion. In the light-heavyweight division, he has also been the titleholder in the World Boxing Council (WBC), the World Boxing Association (WBA), the

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IBF, the World Boxing Foundation (WBF), the International Boxing Organization (IBO), and the International Boxing Association (IBA). Jones was also named the WBA heavyweight champion, showing his dominance over four different weight classes. Jones began his professional career in 1989 and knocked out several opponents en route to a unanimous decision over Bernard Hopkins for the IBF middleweight title in 1993. The following year, Jones beat James Toney for a unanimous decision and the IBF super-middleweight title, which he defended in 1994. Jones suffered his first professional loss in 1997 when he was disqualified for twice punching opponent Montel Griffin while he was down on the canvas. The disqualification stripped Jones of his title, but he quickly regained it in a rematch with Griffin. There was also a series three highly acclaimed fights with Antonio Tarver, with Jones taking a majority decision in 2003, Tarver knocking out Jones in 2004, and Tarver winning a majority decision in 2005. Throughout his career, Jones has been plagued with allegations that he has not always faced the toughest challengers and, as a result, the number of viewers who have shelled out money to watch his fights on pay-per-view television has declined. Despite these charges, as well as speculations that he devotes too much time to extra-boxing activities such as his rap career and short-lived stint as an HBO boxing commentator, he is among the elite to be referred to as the “pound-for-pound” best fighter in the world, joining the ranks of Hopkins, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Oscar De La Hoya, so named by Ring magazine in 1997. Ring had previously crowned De La Hoya the 1995 “Fighter of the Year,” adding to his list of accolades. De La Hoya first captured American attention with his performance in the 1992 Olympic Games, when he took home the gold medal in the lightweight division. As a professional fighter later that year, he won the WBO junior-lightweight title. He moved up in weight class again to challenge WBC junior-welterweight champion Julio Cesar Chavez, a fight stopped in the fourth round because of a cut to Chavez’s eye, which gave De La Hoya the victory. He then went on to take the welterweight title from Pernell Whitaker in 1997, a title that he defended several times. In 1999 De La Hoya faced the undefeated IBF welterweight champion Felix “Tito” Trinidad for what was billed as the “Fight of the Millennium.” In the end, Trinidad won a controversial majority decision in contest that grossed the most of any nonheavyweight fight in the history of the sport. De La Hoya regained the WBC welterweight trophy before moving up to the junior-welterweight division, where he knocked out rival “Ferocious” Fernando Vargas in a contest both admired and celebrated in the boxing world. Once again, De La Hoya changed weight classes and won a unanimous decision over WBC middleweight champion Felix Sturm. He then knocked out by IBF, WBA, and WBC middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins in 2004, and his career has continued in the years that followed. The career of heavyweight champ Mike Tyson was at its apex in the 1980s, but the tenth decade of the twentieth century began a downward spiral for the onetime “Baddest Man on the Planet.” In 1990 Tyson lost his title to James “Buster” Douglas and 1992 an Indiana jury convicted Tyson of sexual assault, sentencing him to six years in prison. Tyson served half of that sentence before his release, at which point he endeavored a comeback. Heavily favored against Evander Holyfield in 1996, Tyson lost on a technical knockout (TKO). The next year, the two

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fighters met for a rematch in what was, at the time, the largest purse in boxing: Holyfield earned $35 million; Tyson was to take home $30 million, and the fight grossed $100 million. The match, however, was stopped in the third round when Tyson was disqualified for biting both of Holyfield’s ears, ripping off a substantial piece of one. As a result, the Nevada State Athletic Commission temporarily revoked Tyson’s boxing license and fined him $3 million plus court costs. Tyson again faced incarceration in 1999 after assaulting two motorists following a traffic accident. He served nine months of a one-year sentence and, upon his release, faced Lennox Lewis, who held the WBC, IBF, and IBO heavyweight titles. Tyson was thirty-five years old at the time and lost that fight. His last victory in the ring took place in 2003. In 2005 he surprised the boxing world by announcing his retirement just before the start of the seventh round against Kevin McBride, stating he no longer possessed “the fighting guts or heart anymore.” Women boxers have faced an uphill battle, not just for the sporting world and the general public to recognize their accomplishments, but to simply have the right to fight. In 1992 Gail Grandchamp was finally granted the opportunity to box, but only as the result of an eight-year Massachusetts court battle. Sadly, by the time the Superior Court judge ruled that it was illegal to deny an athlete the right to box based on gender, Grandchamp had turned thirty-six years old, which meant she was ineligible for amateur competition. The following year, sixteen-year-old Dallas Malloy took her case to court and overturned USA Boxing’s bylaw that forbade women from competing. The New York Daily News Golden Gloves tournament first allowed women to fight in 1995 and many consider the Christy Martin–Deirdre Gogarty match of 1996 to be the birth of modern professional women’s boxing. Christy Martin, billed as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” (a nickname that accurately describes her West Virginian background), is a former collegiate basketball player and “Tough Woman” champion who began her professional boxing career in 1989. Starting with a three-round knockout of Beverly Szymansky in 1993, Martin became the WBC junior-welterweight champion, a title she successfully defended several times. Throughout her career, she has had many marquis matchups with other high-profile athletes. In 2002 she won a ten-round decision over Mia St. John. Because St. John had appeared in Playboy (1999) and Martin had previously graced the coveted cover of Sports Illustrated (1996), the fight was billed as the “Battle of the Covergirls.” Martin also fought Lucia Rijker, nicknamed the “Million Dollar Lady,” one of the most successful female boxers in history. Martin defended her title against prominent female boxers including Deirdre Gogarty, Laura Serrano, Melinda Robinson, and Sue Chase before losing to Sumya Anani in 1993. Anani would go on to win the IBA lightweight title as well as Women’s International Boxing Association (WIBA), International Female Boxing Association (IFBA), IBA, and Global Boxing Union (GBU) welterweight titles and in 2003, Ring magazine listed her as the best female pound-for-pound boxer. Martin also faced Laila Ali, the daughter of the legendary Muhammad Ali, in 2003. Ali, who began her professional career in 1999 by knocking out April Fowler in the first round, knocked out Martin in four rounds. Prior to that victory, Ali had won a majority decision against Jackie Frazier-Lyde, the daughter of the great Joe Frazier and one-time rival of Muhammad Ali, in 2001. Over the years, Laila Ali has been named the Super Middleweight Champion by the IBA, WIBA, and the IWBF, though she has been criticized for avoiding the top contenders.

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Between 1990 and 2007, there were a number of scandals in boxing involving drug use and steroids. Promoter Don King was sued by several boxers that he represented and faced criminal charges based on his alleged association with organized crime. These issues have contributed to the sport’s decline in U.S. popularity, but the biggest criticism of boxing comes from medical concerns regarding the brutality of the sport. Several countries have made boxing illegal and it seems the majority of the world’s medical community supports those decisions. For instance, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the most widely circulated medical journal in the world, has urged the banning of boxing for decades and the British Medical Association, which represents 84 percent of the doctors in the United Kingdom, also opposes the sport. Certainly boxers, as in other sports that involve some type of impact or collision between athletes, risk cuts, broken bones, and internal bleeding; however, it is the brain damage that results from boxing to which there is the greatest attention. Doctors have labeled such damage as chronic, severe, catastrophic, and permanent. Boxers periodically die as a direct result of a match, but it is the sustained injuries to their brains that accounts for diminished capacity and, arguably, fatalities in later life.

Horse Racing The coveted Triple Crown of thoroughbred racing (the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes) is among the most illusive in all of sport. Indeed, only eleven horses have ever won all three events in a single year and 1978 marked the last of the Triple Crown champions. Twenty-one horses have won two of the three events, coming achingly close to the esteemed triumvirate. Of those twenty-one, five horses ran away with two-thirds of the Triple Crown between 1990 and 2005. Interestingly, each of those five has failed to win the Belmont Stakes, the longest of the three races at 1.5 miles, held annually at Elmont, New York’s Belmont Park. In 1997 Silver Charm took home the Kentucky Derby title at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. The Derby, called “the most exciting two minutes in sport,” is held the first Saturday of every May and is steeped in pageantry and tradition. Two weeks later, organizers stage the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico racetrack in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1997 Silver Charm won that race as well. Three weeks after the Preakness, the third American Grade I stakes race for three-year-old thoroughbreds is held at Belmont (called “The Test of the Champions”) where Silver Charm, like many others, fell short of the Triple Crown. Two years later, a horse named Charismatic followed nearly the same pattern, but the outcome at Belmont would prove a bit more tragic. Beating the odds to win both the Derby and the Preakness, Charismatic was favored to take the last event and, in the final furlong, it looked as if he just might do it, but he began to fade and finished a disappointing third. At the end, jockey Chris Antley sensed something had gone wrong. He quickly dismounted and discovered that Charismatic’s leg had been broken in two places. Antley’s discovery may have saved the horse’s life, but following surgery, he would never race again. In 2002, after victories in the first two legs of the Triple Crown, War Emblem stumbled at the beginning of the Belmont and was unable to win the third. The next year, Funny Cide became the first New York horse to win the Derby, and

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followed with a triumphant performance at Preakness, only to come up short at Belmont. In 2004 Smarty Jones, whose pedigree includes several former Triple Crown winners, seemed to generate tremendous excitement in horse racing and even graced the cover of Sports Illustrated after his Derby win. When he followed up with another victory at Preakness, many thought that the Triple Crown drought would finally end. Alas, Smarty Jones would finish second at Belmont. The 2004 Belmont race brought up charges of unethical behavior when a review of the film suggested that two jockeys “rode not to win” but to deny Smarty Jones the victory. Although such tactics are not illegal, this type of behavior in “the sport of kings” is considered unscrupulous, particularly when Triple Crown winners are so rare. Other controversies in horse racing are indicative of the more general changes in sport. Jockeys have sued to be allowed to wear advertising patches during races, a practice that began in 2004. The horse racing community has been rocked with scandals involving gambling and the doping of the animals. Recently, the Kentucky Derby introduced prerace testing for the presence of performanceenhancing drugs in the horses. A new issue arose in 2007 and 2008 and it was whether horses were being treated cruelly in the way they were prepared and trained for racing. The concerns were magnified when Eight Belles, a filly, finished second in the Kentucky Derby, but broke both her legs directly after the race and had to be destroyed while still on the track. Earlier, in 2006, Barbaro won the Derby, but broke three bones in his right hind leg at the start of the Preakness. The efforts to save his life extended for eight months and captured the hearts of millions. Unfortunately, he was unable to fully recover and was euthanized in January of 2007. Finally, it is not just the horse that deserves credit for a successful performance, but rather a strong relationship between the animal, its trainer, its owner, and the jockey. Between 1990 and 2007, several jockeys rode with amazing distinction, including Kent Desormeaux, Gary Stevens, Julie Krone, Jerry Bailey, Chris Antley, and Pat Day, who has won nine races in the Triple Crown series. Among trainers, Bob Baffert has conditioned an astonishing number of champion horses while D. Wayne Lukas is one of the most successful in the business, winning the year’s top money fourteen times. Lukas was also the first trainer to be inducted in both the Thoroughbred and the Quarter Horse Halls of Fame.

Golf As Michael Jordan is to basketball, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods is to golf, and the amazing talents and commercial success of these athletes are impossible to ignore. A golfing prodigy who began playing at age two, Woods was a six-time Junior World champion. At just fifteen years old, he became the youngest U.S. Junior Amateur Champion and proceeded to win the event for the next two years. In 1995 Woods attended Stanford University and amassed titles such as Pac-10 Player of the Year and NCAA First Team All-American. The following year he won the NCAA individual championship and declared his professional status, which included $40-million and $20-million endorsement deals with Nike and Titleist, respectively. With the addition of other sponsorships that include Buick and TAG Heuer, Woods has become the highest paid professional athlete. He is also involved in a number of philanthropic endeavors: with his father and mentor, Earl

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Woods, he established The Tiger Woods Foundation, which aims to help disadvantaged children through programs including “In the City” golf clinics, the “Start Something” character development program, and the “Tiger Woods Learning Center” among other initiatives. In 1997 Woods won his first major, the Masters, by twelve strokes and became number 1 in Official World Golf Rankings. In 2000 he won the U.S. Open by fifteen strokes, breaking a record that had been held since 1862, and 2001 marked his Grand Slam, or “Tiger Slam” achievement. Between his professional debut and 2005, Woods accumulated a staggering number of titles: four-time winner of the Masters (1997, 2001, 2002, 2005), three-time winner of the U.S. Open (2000, 2002, 2008), the British Open (2000, 2005, 2006), and four times at the PGA Championship (1999, 2000, 2006, 2007). He has literally changed the game of golf. In an effort to hamper Woods’s success, courses began to “Tiger-Proof” their tees and fairways by adding yardage in attempts to make the game more difficult for him to win. His victory at the U.S. Open in 2008 in sudden death after an eighteen-hole playoff, while playing with a broken leg, is already the stuff of legends. In addition to Woods, many other notable golfers excelled during this era. Phil Mickelson is one of the best golfers of this time period, winning three majors and over thirty tournaments on the PGA Tour. Davis Love III has won nineteen events since turning professional in 1985, including the 1997 PGA Championship and the Players Championship in 1992. Jim Furyk, known for his consistent play and interesting swing, reached number 2 in 2006 after winning his first major in 2003. Mark O’Meara, who credits Woods as an inspiration for his career, has also reached the second position. David Duval, hit the links and joined the PGA Tour in 1995, achieving seven second-place finishes in two years. Rounding out the ranks of these impressive golfers was William Payne Stewart, whose prolific career was cut short on October 25, 1999, when he was tragically killed in a plane crash. The knickerbockers-tam-o’shanter-kneesock-wearing tour favorite, Stewart was a two-time men’s U.S. Open and PGA champion and, at the time of his death, was ranked in the top ten of the Official World Rankings. The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) organizes the major women’s tournaments, most of which are held in the United States. With the increasing presence of international players like Lorena Ochoa, Annika Sorenstam, and Karrie Webb, American women have struggled to gain prominence in the sport since the mid-1990s. Between 1990 and 1995, however, Betsy King, Beth Daniel, Dottie Mochrie, and Pat Bradley racked up titles and honors. Alison Nicholas’s win in the 1998 U.S. Open, with a score of 274, marked the lowest score in the fifty-two-year history of the tournament. Juli Inkster, who won thirty-one tournaments on the LPGA tour, became the first woman emerge victorious in a professional golf tournament in which men and women competed against one and other. Nine years later she became only the second woman to complete a career Grand Slam. The same year, golfer Beth Daniel shot a 66 to win the LPGA Championship and a $150,000 purse, the largest to date, helping her to amass $5 million dollars in career earnings by 1996. In 2002, golfer Michelle Wie qualified for her first LPGA tournament. Two years later, during her ninth-grade year in school, she became the youngest female ever to play in a PGA Tour event. In 2005 Wie turned professional, signing

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sponsorship contracts with Nike and Sony worth about $10 million per year. Rules and regulations prohibit her from becoming an official member of the LPGA Tour until she turns eighteen years old, thus limiting her to six LPGA events annually. Wie’s youth, talent, and Korean ancestry have brought comparisons with Tiger Woods as both athletes challenge the white hegemony of American golf and exemplify the increasingly multiracial character of American society. Woods is careful and proud to articulate his multiracial heritage, explaining that he invented his own term to describe himself: Cablinasian, which refers to his Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian heritage. In his 1996 “Hello World” campaign for Nike, Woods reminded viewers that “There are still courses in the US I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin.” Despite his Chinese, Thai, African American, Native American, and Dutch background, Woods is often ignorantly and problematically coded as a “black golfer.” Perhaps no other incident highlighted this better than golfer Frank “Fuzzy” Zoeller’s comments following Woods’s 1997 Masters’ victory, in which he referred to him as “that little boy” and urged Woods not to order fried chicken or collard greens for the next year’s Champions Dinner. Zoeller was roundly criticized for the comment and lost his sponsorship from Kmart as a result, but his careless remark emphasized the undeniable persistence of racialized ideologies in sport and U.S. society. As another example, the Shoal Creek golf club near Birmingham, Alabama, had no African American members until 1990. This was hastily rectified, but only because the club was to host the Professional Golfers’ Association championship and television sponsors threatened to pull their support unless a black member was admitted. Subsequent polls have demonstrated that Shoal Creek is not alone in regards its racial makeup, and country club sports remain, primarily, the domain of white, upper-class men. Women’s exclusion from membership at the most prestigious golf clubs received nationwide attention in 2002 when Martha Burk, chairperson of the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) challenged the “good old boys” legacy at Augusta National Golf Club in Atlanta, host of the renowned Masters tournament. While women could play at Augusta as guests, they could not become members (like Shoal Creek, Augusta had admitted its first black member in 1990). Club chairman William “Hootie” Johnson stood firm in his opposition, arguing that it was a private club with the right to extend membership to whomever it liked. Burk did not disagree with this stance, but countered that by hosting the Masters, which was broadcast on network television, Augusta opened itself up to the public. The NCWO urged corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, IBM, and MasterCard, to support its cause. In response, the Masters aired on CBS without advertisements, shielding sponsors from having to come down on one side or the other, and the event went on as scheduled. To date, Augusta has not changed its membership policies.

Tennis The racial makeup of the top competitors in tennis is markedly similar to that of golf. A sport with a legacy of social elitism and exclusion, there are very few successful, professional tennis players of color or from working-class backgrounds. Sisters Venus and Serena Williams, however, turn that logic on its ear. Coached by their father on the public tennis courts in Compton, a suburb of Los Angeles, until

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Casey Martin Playing Winning Golf with a Disability In 1997 professional golfer Casey Martin (born June 2, 1972) engaged in a legal showdown with the Professional Golf Association (PGA). Martin, because of a rare congenital circulatory disease called Klippel Trenaunay Weber syndrome, has difficulty walking the golf course. After a successful collegiate career at Stanford, during which the NCAA allowed him to ride in a cart to accommodate his disability, Martin went on to the three-stage PGA qualifying tournament called the Q-School. During this time, Martin requested that the PGA permit him to make use of to a golf cart for professional matches. Unlike the NCAA, the PGA was unwilling to acquiesce to Martin’s request, arguing that the cart would grant him an unfair advantage. The PGA contended that Martin would be better rested than the other golfers forced to walk the course and, therefore, his level of play would be higher. Citing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, Martin brought a formal lawsuit against the PGA accusing the organization of discrimination. The case went through several years of appeals until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, at which time the Court ruled in favor of Martin, stating that the PGA is subject to the regulations of the ADA despite its status as a private club. This win was important, not just for Martin and his professional golf career, but for the larger community of athletes with (dis)abilities. Martin’s case brought considerable media attention to the struggles of the ADA. It also raised important debates about how we define disability and what types of accommodations are to be made under the purview of the ADA. It is not a matter to be taken lightly, as organizations ranging from the NCAA to Little League baseball struggle with the best ways to treat athletes equitably.

moving to Florida to train with top coaches like Rick Macci and Nick Bolletieri, the women are among the most decorated athletes, most decorated women, and most decorated African Americans in sport. The elder, Venus Williams, turned professional in 1994 at age fourteen and began appearing regularly at tournaments in 1997, where she made it to the final round of the French Open. By the end of 1998, Venus had reached the quarterfinals of the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open and was ranked in the top ten of women’s tennis, but it was her younger sister, Serena, who claimed the first Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) title in the Williams family. With her 1999 U.S. Open victory, she became the first African American since Althea Gibson to win a Grand Slam singles title. Between 1990 and 2005, the women racked up championships and titles including Wimbledon (Venus, 2000, 2001, 2005; Serena, 2002, 2003), the U.S. Open (Venus, 2000, 2001; Serena, 1999, 2002) French Open (Serena, 2002), and the Australian Open (Serena, 2003, 2005). Always supportive of one another, the Williams sisters have frequently found each other on the other side of the net in championship matches and have teamed up to practically dominate doubles competitions. Their talents are not limited to the tennis court. Both attended the Art Institute of Florida to study fashion design, one of their passionate pursuits. Indeed, the women have received quite a bit of press for their style of dress and adornment

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throughout their careers. In addition, Serena has launched her own designer clothing label (Aneres) as well as lines for Puma and Nike. Venus has also become a fashion entrepreneur, with her EleVen line, in addition to being the CEO of a design firm called “V Starr Interiors” Another U.S. woman who enjoyed success and acclaim was Jennifer Capriati, who made her mark in 1990 when she became the youngest woman to win a match at Wimbledon and the youngest Grand Slam semifinalist. She followed up by winning a gold medal at the Barcelona Olympics. Shortly after this, her career began to crumble, which some suggested was due to such intense pressure to succeed at such a young age. Capriati began her comeback in the late 1990s and won the Australia Open in 2001 and 2002 and the French Open in 2001. Lindsay Davenport is another athlete who warrants discussion, for her illustrious career spans 1990 to 2005. Davenport made her professional debut in 1991 and in 1998 captured her first Grand Slam title, becoming the first American woman to win the U.S. Open since Chris Evert’s 1982 victory. In 2004 Davenport Venus Williams, 1998. U.S. Open, New York. became the tenth woman to win forty individual (Courtesy of Photofest) titles and in 2007 she remained only the tenth woman to win fifty career singles titles. Named Tennis magazine’s greatest player from 1965 to 2005, Petros “Pete” Sampras, was the sport’s superstar in the 1990s. During his fifteen-year career, he won fourteen Grand Slam titles, Wimbledon seven times, and the U.S. Open five times. Sampras turned professional in the late 1980s and won his first career title in 1990. In 1993 he was ranked as the number 1 player in the world and, with Andre Agassi, dominated men’s tennis during this time. The Sampras-Agassi rivalry is one of the most intense and exciting in all of sports and brought a number of new fans and special interest to the game. Agassi, who boasts eight Grand Slam singles tournaments as well as an Olympic gold medal, is one of an elite group that won all four Grand Slam singles titles. Though his career was plagued by a number of injuries and setbacks, his longevity in the sport is a testament to his skill and dedication. Sampras and Agassi, who had once played each another in a junior tournament in 1979, met again in 1990 as their professional careers were on the rise. Their competition peaked in 1995, as one continually ousted the other from the number 1–ranked position. During that year, they faced off in the finals of the Australian Open, the U.S. Open, the Canadian Open, and Indian Wells. The matchups between the two men brought in the highest television ratings the sport had seen and the pair continued to meet up in major competition through 2002 until Sampras retired in 2003. Agassi continued his career until bowing out in 2006. Both athletes were successful in commercial endorsements as well, but Agassi’s are perhaps the most memorable, particularly his “Image Is Everything” campaign

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for Canon cameras. Agassi came on the scene with what was considered a “rebel” image in tennis: he sported long hair, an earring, and colorful clothing among the prevalence of tennis whites, bringing a new sensibility and fan base the sport as a result. This placed him in further contrast to Sampras, who boasted a more clean-cut image. The sporting and commercial world capitalized on the differences between the men, as well as the phenomenal athleticism they displayed on the court, and Sampras and Agassi appeared together in a number of Nike commercials. Most recently, men’s tennis has been dominated by Roger Federer, a Swiss national who had won thirteen Grand Slam titles, matching Sampras, as well as five Wimbledon championships in a row. In 2008, after a nearly five-hour match, Federer lost at Wimbledon to Spain’s Rafael Nadal. On the women’s side, the surge of top young players from Eastern Europe has been most pronounced from 2004 to 2007, though Venus Williams won her fifth women’s singles championship at Wimbledon in 2008, beating her sister Serena in the match.

Cycling Although cycling is not often considered one of the major sports in the United States, between 1990 and 2005 American cyclists experienced great success on the international circuit. Cycling can be subdivided into road biking, mountain biking, BMX, track racing, and cyclocross racing; however, this section focuses on road and mountain biking because from 1990 to 2005, these were the most influential forms of cycling in the United States. Although there are many great American success stories in cycling, most notably Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, perhaps cycling is equally known in the United States for its many doping scandals and accusations. Although the bulk of his success occurred in the 1980s, it is important to note that prior to the worldwide celebrity of Armstrong, Greg LeMond was the most decorated and revered American road-bike racer. In 1990 he capped his career by winning his third Tour de France, arguably the most prestigious bicycle race in the world. After winning his third Tour, Sports Illustrated named LeMond one of the forty most influential people in sports in the past forty years. In 1990 ABC’s Wide World of Sports named LeMond “Athlete of the Year” and in 1999 Fox Sports Network included him in their list of “50 Greatest Athletes of the Century.” The year after LeMond’s monumental third Tour win, Lance Armstrong, the reigning U.S. National Amateur Champion, turned professional and began one of the most storied careers not just in cycling, but in all of sport. Although Armstrong was successful on the professional road-biking circuit and as a triathlete, it was not until his return to sport from his battle with cancer that he reached celebrity athlete status and won his seven Tour de France Yellow Jerseys. In October 1997 Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer that had metastasized to his lungs and brain and although doctors gave him less than a 50 percent chance of recovery, an aggressive treatment of chemotherapy proved successful in forcing Armstrong’s cancer into remission. Despite his extended absence from the professional cycling tour, many of Armstrong’s major sponsors, such as Nike and Oakley, honored their contracts and continued their endorsement partnerships with Armstrong during his illness. In 1997 the U.S. Postal Service team signed Armstrong and laid the foundation for what would prove to be one of the most dominant cycling teams

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in all of professional cycling—Team Discovery. Upon his return to racing, Armstrong had two goals. The first was to was to win the Tour de France which, from 1999 to 2005 he did, winning a record seven consecutive Maillot Jaune (Yellow Jerseys). Armstrong’s second goal was to raise awareness about cancer through the creation of the Lance Armstrong Foundation. The LIVESTRONG “Wear Yellow Live Strong” campaign began as a joint venture between Nike and the Lance Armstrong Foundation in 2004. In 2005 the foundation sold over 55 million wristbands at a cost of one dollar each, with the majority of proceeds going toward cancer survivor programs. At the close of 2005 the foundation had a value of just under $65 million. The Lance Armstrong Foundation and the LIVESTRONG yellow bracelet campaign not only created a clear connection between sport and philanthropy, it paved the way for many other causes to adopt fundraising bracelets such as the green Save Darfur, the pink Breast Cancer, and red HIV/AIDS awareness bracelet campaigns. Although the LIVESTRONG campaign was successful in its attempt to increase funding for cancer research, several organizations have criticized it for being but another tool in Nike’s lifestyle brand marketing philosophy. Still others have suggested that the Lance Armstrong Foundation and the LIVESTRONG campaign are ways of deflecting doping accusations frequently levied against him in favor of more positive publicity. Despite his amazing success as a cyclist, his storybook tale of overcoming cancer to win arguably the world’s most difficult sporting event, and his dedication to the fight against cancer, Lance Armstrong has not escaped the suspicions and accusations of other cyclists and media outlets. In September 2005 French journalist Damien Ressiot published a controversial story in L’Equipe, a well-respected Parisbased sports daily, alleging that he had proof that Armstrong had used performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his 1999 Tour de France victory. He argued that his proof came from a leak at France’s top antidoping lab, the Laboratiore National de Depistage du Dopage (LNDD). Although the tests and samples were anonymous and labeled only with numbers, Ressiot claimed that he had the doping control records, which linked sample numbers to rider names. In response to the accusations, Armstrong and his supporters argued that he had never used any performance-enhancing drugs. Along with the implications this testing had for Armstrong, it raised larger issues about athletes’ rights to privacy and the fair and consistent application of antidoping rules. Several of Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service (later to become Team Discovery) teammates, such as George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer, went on to have their own successes at the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the Tour of Georgia, among others; but none of Armstrong’s former teammates experienced the successes or the perils like Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis. Hamilton was slated to be cycling’s next Lance Armstrong after he won the individual time trial at the 2004 Athens Olympics while racing for the United States. Although initial tests determined that Hamilton had evidence of blood doping in his sample, the case was dropped when the backup sample contained too few red blood cells to analyze. In September of 2004 Hamilton again tested positive for an illegal blood transfusion and was banned from cycling for two years. Hamilton was, however, allowed to keep his Olympic gold medal because the positive Olympic test was never corroborated with a second positive sample. Perhaps the biggest hit to Hamilton’s

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reputation and career as a professional cyclist came in 2006 when he was linked to Operation Puerto, the Spanish bust of a major cycling doping ring. Although Hamilton maintains his innocence, it is unlikely he will ever race professionally again. No American cyclist has faced greater humiliation than Floyd Landis, who is the only cyclist to have his Tour de France win and Yellow Jersey revoked. Landis had a storybook win in the 2006 Tour de France. Despite being more than eight minutes behind the leader, Landis rode a miraculous Stage 17 to earn the leader’s Yellow Jersey for the remainder of the 2006 Tour. As with all stage winners, Landis was tested for doping after his victory and the test subsequently revealed the presence of synthetic testosterone, which he hotly disputed. Despite his many attempts to salvage his win and clear his name, in 2007 Landis lost his appeal to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) arbitration committee and was stripped of his 2006 Tour win. While men’s cycling remains a prominent international sport, women lack the same level of opportunity and competition. There are few major events for women road cyclists and even fewer professional teams for women to compete on. As a result, the Olympics are the major cycling events for women and U.S. riders have historically fared poorly. American women have, on the other hand, experienced great success in mountain biking. Perhaps the most famous U.S. mountain biker is Missy Giove, who won a record fourteen NORBA (National Off Road Biking Association) downhill races and remains second on the World Cup list with eleven race wins. Known as “The Missile,” she embodies the rebellious antiestablishment mountain-bike culture through her dress, style of speech and her habit of wearing the skeleton of her deceased pet piranha, Gonzo, on a chain around her neck. Giove was one of the best-paid mountain bikers, male or female, with endorsement contracts in the $1 million range and actual prize winnings well over $100,000. Giove was as important a figure in women’s mountain biking as she was to the lesbian community. She was one of the first openly gay athletes to not only compete and win international events, but to do so with the support of major corporate sponsors such as Volvo, Cannondale, and Reebok. Not long after Giove’s sponsorship agreements were made public, Subaru began a marketing campaign directed toward the gay and lesbian community that prominently featured openly gay tennis stars Martina Navratilova and Amelie Mauresmo. Ned Overend is considered the grandfather of professional mountain biking and the first to make a professional career of the sport. Overend was the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) World Mountain Bike Champion in 1991 and after his retirement in 1996 Overend became a coach for Team Specialized and transitioned to race triathlons and extreme adventure races where he has also proven to be a top competitor. Despite the proliferation of doping scandals and accusations in professional road biking and the contradictory nature of the antiestablishment ethos spouted by both mountain and BMX bikers while simultaneously competing in the corporately sponsored ESPN X Games and starring in Mountain Dew advertisements, cycling in the United States is experiencing a tremendous increase in popularity both as a participant and spectator sport. Bicycling magazine is consistently listed within the top ten magazines for U.S. circulation in the Wall Street Journal and bike sales have increased dramatically in the past five years. The potential reasons for the increase in cycling’s popularity could be attributed to America’s fitness obsession,

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to Lance Armstrong’s celebrity status, to the X Games’ “cool” factor, and myriad other reasons. Regardless, a once uniquely European sport is taking hold in the United States and cult heroes such as Greg LeMond, Missy Giove, and Ned Overend are getting their due celebrity while cycling and other companies are beginning to experience the economic benefits of a sport with increasing social and cultural capital.

Xtreme Sports Prior to the inaugural staging of the Xtreme Games, sports like snowboarding, skateboarding, bungee jumping, and the like were considered “alternative” sports. They achieved this classification not only because they were not traditional teambased sports such as football, basketball, and baseball, but also because they were athlete-centered activities in which participation was based on the pure love of the sport. Individuals cited the rush of adrenaline that came along with the performance and camaraderie that was forged out of eschewing traditional sports in favor of newer renegade forms of bodily activity as their main reasons for engaging in these activities. The lure of snowboarding was, in part, its decidedly antiestablishment ethos. The Xtreme Games (later renamed the X Games) were one of the first steps in the transition of these so-called alternative sports from subcultural underground to mainstream commodity, replete with television contracts and seven-figure endorsement deals. The Extreme Games were held for the first time in 1995 and took place in Newport and Middleton, Rhode Island, and Mount Snow, Vermont. Competitions were held in nine sporting categories including aggressive in-line skating, bicycle stunt riding, bungee jumping, extreme adventure racing, skateboarding, skysurfing, snowboarding, sport climbing, street luge racing, and wakeboarding. The Extreme Games were judged to be a tremendous success by their parent company, ESPN, as 198,000 spectators attended the first event and major companies provided financial backing (including Advil, Mountain Dew, Taco Bell, Chevy Trucks, AT&T, Nike and Miller Lite Ice). In an effort to promote branding opportunities and better market the Games to an international broadcast audience, in 1996 the Extreme Games were officially renamed the X Games. In 1997 the X Games proved so successful in terms of popularity, network contracts, and branded commodity sales that ESPN created the Winter X Games, featuring events such as free skiing, snowmobile, snocross, skiboarding, ice climbing, snow mountain bike racing, and shovel racing. The inaugural Winter Games were televised to 198 countries and territories in twenty-one different languages. This was the first year that ABC Sports broadcast an X Games event and as they grew in popularity, more corporations recognized the marketing and branding opportunity of the games. Toyota was the major corporate sponsor for the Asian X Games Qualifier and the Asian X Tour and as such, every time the event was advertised viewers saw it as The Asian X Games Qualifier Presented by Toyota. In 2002 ESPN successfully executed the inaugural X Games Global Championship. The first-of-its-kind team event featured six world regions competing against each other in summer and winter action sports at two simultaneous venues: San Antonio, Texas, and Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia. Combining both venues, Team USA registered a cumulative total of 196 points, edging out Team Europe, which finished second with 167 points. In total 69,260 spectators came to

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cheer on their favorite teams at X Games Global Championship and the event continues to grow in popularity.

Automobile Racing Since the advent of the automobile, individuals have desired to race. Automobile racing occurs on dirt roads, oval tracks, road courses, straight-line courses, superspeedways, and anywhere one might conceive of driving a vehicle. In the United States, drivers engage in contests that include drag racing, sports car racing, rallying, off-road racing, dirt-track racing, midget-car racing, and the like. Although Formula One (F1) racing is immensely popular in most parts of the world, in the United States it is the series for Indianapolis (Indy) cars and stock cars that receive the most attention.

Stock-Car Racing Stock-car racing in the United States is nearly synonymous with NASCAR— the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. NASCAR, with its historic and mythological roots in moonshining (the running of homemade, illegal alcohol) of the rural South, was formalized and standardized by William “Big Bill” France in the late 1940s. The popularity of the sport exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, primarily due to television’s broadcasting of the Winston Cup, the sport’s premiere competition series. Before that time, many races were only seen on tape delay. Now events are televised live and appear on CBS, Fox, TNT, NBC, and ESPN stations. Such broadcasting has taken NASCAR from its regional roots and turned it into a sport of national—even global—popularity. Without question, NASCAR is the fastest-growing spectator sport in America and it currently ranks number 1 in terms of the number of fans who attend its events. Between 1990 and 2002, those in attendance of NASCAR races rose an incredible 91 percent. In comparison, attendance figures for the NBA have increased by only 20.7 percent during that same time period. By 2005 NASCAR races constituted seventeen of the twenty biggest spectator events in sports in the country, where an average of 125,000 fans attend each race, paying an average ticket price of $88. It ranks second in terms of televised sports viewership, placing it just behind the number of people who tune into watch the National Football League. NASCAR consists of three major national series (NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series, NASCAR Busch Series and the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series) as well as eight regional series and one local grassroots series. NASCAR Sanctions 1500 races at over 100 tracks in thirty-five U.S. states, Canada, and Mexico. Of the more than thirty races that constitute the Winston Cup, the Dayton 500 (called the “Great American Race”) is the most prestigious. Held in Daytona Beach, Florida, the Daytona 500 kick starts the annual series in February. Throughout the season, which ends in November, drivers earn points for where they finish each race and the number of laps they were in the lead for each race, accumulating their total score throughout the season to determine the final winner. A number of drivers have achieved both significant acclaim in the sport and celebrity status with the public, and Jeff Gordon, NASCAR’s 1993 Rookie of the Year certainly ranks among them. In 1995 Gordon became the youngest driver to

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win the Winston Cup championship and between that year and 1998, he dominated the sport, winning forty races (including an astounding streak of thirteen in a row in 1998). Another racer who claimed both success in racing and popularity with the fans was Dale Earnhardt. Nicknamed “The Intimidator,” Earnhardt won his first Winston Cup championship in 1980 and repeated his dominance of the series six more times by 1994. His six titles tied Richard Petty’s record. In one of NASCAR’s biggest tragedies, Earnhardt hit the wall at a speed of about 180 miles per hour on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. The death of Earnhardt and the frequency with which drivers crash makes technology and safety a central concern for racing teams. The term “stock” in stock-car racing refers to the idea that, in theory, the automobiles are production-based (or “stock”) models that anyone can walk into a dealership and purchase. But while the machines may look similar to those on the showroom floor, in reality, they are hand built, using the highest performance parts available and state-of-the-art technology and engineering. In addition, NASCAR officials keep close control of the technological improvements racing teams make to their cars, which helps keep races competitive. The organizational structure of NASCAR has been called a “benevolent dictatorship” because the control of the sport is consolidated in the hands of the France family. NASCAR sets “inspection fees” for the cars, drivers only receive a small share of the revenue produced by the sport, and NASCAR controls the International Speedway Corporation, a company that has a stake in over one-half of the twenty-three tracks on which races are held, which considerable contributes to the organization’s income as well as presents something of a conflict of interest. The organization does not provide a pension for the drivers who risk their lives for the sport and there are no players’ unions. It is the individual racing teams, with the backing of corporate sponsors, who provide health insurance and retirement accounts to their members. It is the ubiquity of corporate sponsorship that contributes to the uniqueness of NASCAR within the world of sports, for it provides the necessary money to finance each team. Racing events and speedways are frequently named for their corporate sponsors. Moreover, the entire racing team, including the driver, owner, pit crew, and car, are branded with the sponsor’s name and/or logo, ranging from Tide laundry detergent, to STP fuel and oil additives, to Coca-Cola, to Tyson Foods, to Miller Brewing Company, to Gillette razors. In effect, the racing teams become moving billboards for the array of products associated with NASCAR, though it is an exceedingly and complex and dialectical relationship between the teams, their sponsors, and the fans that make the sport run. To be successful, a racing team needs money. Corporations want their brands associated with successful racing teams. The association of a particular brand with a popular driver has the ability to draw in an increased number of customers, which in turn increases the profits of the corporation. This, by extension, allows the corporation to increase the amount of sponsorship for its racing team. In this cycle, drivers are celebrity endorsers and fans are the consumers of products ranging from NASCAR, to media, to material products. In addition, fans become participants in the sport when their dollars are used to buy products from corporations who fund their favorite driving teams. Research has demonstrated that NASCAR fans are overwhelmingly brand loyal, meaning that they purposefully and consistently

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choose NASCAR sponsors’ products over other brands not associated with the sport. One product that has had an interesting relationship with NASCAR is tobacco. Since 1971, tobacco ads have been banned on U.S. television and radio, yet automobile racing has been able to skirt the issue through sponsorship deals. Winston cigarettes, a product of the R. J. Reynolds corporation, could no longer air commercials during racing coverage, but the sport became riddled with the name “Winston.” Individual races included the Winston 500, the Winston Western 500, and the Winston All-Star Race. There was also the Winston Million, a prize awarded to the driver who won the sport’s four Grand Slam events in a single year, though the company is not permitted to distinguish the particular product it produces. R. J. Reynolds and Skoal are among the other tobacco-related companies associated with the sport. The drivers that populate stock-car racing constitute a relatively homogenous population and competitors tend to be both white and male. There have been efforts to address the raced and gendered issues of the sport. A few women, including Shawna Robinson and Louise Smith have enjoyed moderate success and NASCAR’s official Web site (nascar.com) now includes a list of “Women of NASCAR.”

Indy Car Racing Indy cars are also referred to as open-wheel racers, because no fenders cover their wheels. The drivers sit in an uncovered cockpit, the engines of the cars are located in the rear, and they are designed to sit low to the ground. The year 1993 saw the retirement of one of the sport’s greatest drivers, A. J. Foyt, who had competed since 1957. Another racing great, Rick Mears, retired during this time as well. Family legacies like the Unsers and the Andrettis have also achieved great success in Indy Car racing. Once the premier form of racing in the United States, Indy Car racing has been eclipsed by the success and popularity of NASCAR in the past few decades. Contributing to Indy racing’s downslide was the controversial split between the Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) and the Indy Racing League (IRL). Since 1978, the CART organization governed the sport but in 1995 Tony George, owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, formed a rival IRL. George mandated that twenty-five of the thirty-three spots in the Indy 500 would be filled by drivers on the IRL circuit. This meant that only eight spots would be available for drivers in the CART series and led to deep feelings of animosity between the competing leagues, doing great damage to the sport as a whole. The Indianapolis 500, held every year on Memorial Day weekend, has been called the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing.” More than 500,000 fans fill the stands to watch drivers complete their 200 laps around a two-and-a-half-mile track at speeds that reach over 200 miles per hour. While the race traditionally begins with the announcement, “Gentleman, start your engines,” a number of women have revved up at the start of the event. Sarah Fisher raced in 2001, preceded by Janet Guthrie in the 1970s. In 1992 Lyn St. James became the first woman to be named the Indianapolis 500 “Rookie of the Year” and subsequently racked up seven Indy 500 starts in nine years. St. James’s sixth place qualifying position for the Indy 500

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in 1994 was the highest for a woman until the appearance of Danica Patrick in 2005, who finished fourth.

Electronic Sports As technology, computers, and the Internet developed during this time period, so too did “simulated sport,” a term that refers to animated participatory sports experiences, video games, sporting technologies, online fantasy leagues, and online gambling. This industry grew tremendously in the late 1990s, in tandem with the rise of the personal computer and high-speed Internet connections. With the introduction of Sony Playstation in 1994 and Microsoft XBOX in 2001, equipment has increased at a rapid pace. Today, competitors can square off against opponents across the globe through online gaming and leagues (such as the Cyberathlete Professional League) and tournaments (like the World Cyber Games), often with monetary rewards, which accommodate the millions who engage in these virtual contests. The year 2000 witnessed the advent of the World Cyber Games and in 2003 the first Electronic Sports World Cup was organized to accommodate nearly 400 competitors. The Major League Gaming (MLG) became the first North American professional video game league in 2002. With Nintendo’s release of Wii in 2005 and continual advancements in virtual reality technology, it is difficult to predict what the future holds for simulated sports and cyberathletes. Electronic sports or “eSports” include the simulation of nearly every athletic competition imaginable and leagues such as MLB, NBA, NHL, and NBA sponsor games related to their respective organizations. Perhaps no other sports-related video game has achieved greater popularity than the multiple incarnations of Madden Football. Redesigned in 1988 by EA (Electronic Arts) Sports and named for former NFL coach and sports commentator John Madden, the series is among the best-selling video games in history, spurring the proliferation of a specified genre. Like Madden Football, many games allow users to take on the virtual identities of their favorite players. For instance, one might become Tiger Woods for a simulated PGA event, quarterback the Indianapolis Colts in the role of Peyton Manning, or assume the role of real fighters like Muhammad Ali in games like Knockout Kings. Voice commentaries, often provided by real-life media personalities, realistic graphics, and sounds, often give the sense that game is actually unfolding on a television screen. In other games, one might choose to play the role of coach or manager, rather than athlete, and attempt to strategize and coordinate an entire sporting system. In addition to gaming, the Internet has revolutionized American sports other ways. Today, it takes only a click of the mouse or the touch of a screen to learn about players, sports teams, scores, and events from anywhere an individual can conceive. The online sports gambling industry is a economic juggernaut, allowing people to place bets at any time of the day as they refresh their Web browsers and check the score of multiple and simultaneous sporting events. The Internet revolution has also produced “fantasy sports” leagues, such as football, baseball, and basketball, and has become a popular pastime for many Americans, where participants are “owners” and compete against “owners” of other teams. Sophisticated, hierarchical organizational systems govern the leagues, the winners of which are determined by complicated scoring systems based on real-life performances of athletes and teams. This virtual phenomenon, and many others,

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has changed how many people consume sports, encouraging greater personal investment in the performance of teams and athletes for multiple reasons.

SUMMARY As U.S. history continues to unfurl and spread into the twenty-first century it is almost impossible to predict the directions that sport might take. Certainly, advancements in training and nutrition will build better athletes. Records will be shattered and reset, only to be shattered and reset again. New sports will develop and, if history is any indication of the changes that will take place in the future, today’s “minor” or “alternative” sports will become more mainstream. In this respect, the twenty-first century is not unlike the times that preceded it. But the future holds a vast galaxy of possibilities that one cannot predict by studying the past. As computer technology advances, the ways in which Americans play, participate in, and consume sports will certainly change. The proliferation of sport-specific television channels, radio stations, and particularly Internet sites will contribute to additional changes in the coming years. The speed at which communication and the sharing of information runs is simply mind-boggling. Technology might also influence the nature and structure of sports. Recently, the country has seen the introduction of instant replay in sports like football and perhaps the ubiquity of cameras in present-day society will be put to sporting use to reduce the likelihood of errors in officiating, cheating by coaches, and players’ dirty tactics. It also seems as if the real physicality required for sporting participation could be replaced with increasingly virtual experiences, allowing individuals to experience a host of sporting activities within the confines of a single room. As such, it may be possible to one day replace humans—officials, coaches, even athletes—with computer technologies. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but these possibilities are not so far-fetched. Technological advancements, scientific understandings, and medical knowledge are likely to lead to further developments in performance-enhancing substances. How might sporting organizations stay ahead of the curve? The U.S. government has begun to intervene, holding a series of congressional hearings over the use of steroids in sport. Many have begun to consider the issue of “cyborgization” or the presence of drug use, training techniques, nutritional supplements, the development and use of prosthetics, and body and genetic modification in sports. In effect, athletes become “cyborgs”—amalgamations of natural and artificial elements—and blur the boundaries between what is human and what is technology in complex ways. And what will the intensification of globalization mean for sports? Will national borders become obsolete or will sport be used to reify those boundaries as economic, population, transportation, and communication flows make them more flexible and permeable? Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, various groups have struggled to achieve equality in and through sport. At the same time, however, inequalities persist. Positional stacking—the relegation of athletes of color to peripheral positions in team sports—continues. Despite the overrepresentation of African American athletes in basketball, football, and track and field, they remain underrepresented in key functionary positions like coaching, owners, athletic directors, and general managers. But race is more than a black-white issue, and we must

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take into account the changes in U.S. population, most recently calculated at 305,000,000 people. As the country continues to grow, the United States will become an increasingly multiracial society and, considering the dialectical relationship between sport and society, athletics will change as well. The division between rich and poor seems ever widening, thus affecting the access to and success in sport. Women and girls have made considerable inroads into mainstream athletics, consistently chipping away at the myth of female frailty yet their opportunities to compete and to hold positions of power still lag behind those of men and boys. It remains to be seen what effects science and technology will have on the perseverance of inequalities based on race, social class, and gender. What is certain, though, is that sports will continue to grow, to capture our imaginations, to provide us with outlets for joy and frustration, and to hold a prominent place in both the history and the future of the United States.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES Print Sources Abdel-Shehid, Gamal. 2000. Muhammad Ali: America’s b-side. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 26:317–25 Ardell, J. H. 2005. Breaking into baseball: Women and the national pastime. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Armstrong, L. 2000. It’s not about the bike: My journey back to life. New York: Berkeley Press. Booth, D., and H. Thorpe. 2007. Berkshire encyclopedia of extreme sports. Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing. Carpenter, L.J., and V.R. Acosta. 2005. Title IX. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Coakley, J. 2005. Sports in contemporary society: An anthology. 7th ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Coakley, J., and E. Dunning, eds. 2000. Handbook of sports studies. London: Sage. DePauw, K. P., and S. J. Gavron. 2005. Disability sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Eitzen, D. S., ed. 2005. Sport in contemporary society: An anthology. 7th ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Fainaru-Wada, M., and L. Williams. 2006. Game of shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the steroids scandal that rocked professional sports. New York: Gotham. Griffin P. 1998. Strong women, deep closets: Lesbians and homophobia in sports. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Lafeber, W. 1999. Michael Jordan and the new global capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton. Longman, J. 2000. The girls of summer: The U.S. women’s soccer team and how it changed the world. New York: Perennial. Markovits, A. S., and S. L. Hellerman. 2001. Offside: Soccer and American exceptionalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Messner, M. 2002. Taking the field: Women, men, and sports. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nylund, D. 2003. Taking a slice at sexism: The controversy over the exclusionary membership practices at Augusta National Golf Club. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27:195–202. Sage, G. H. 1998. Power and ideology in American sport: A critical perspective. 2nd ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Schaffer, K., and S. Smith, eds. 2000. Olympics at the millennium: Power, politics, and the games. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Shaughnessy, Dan. 2005. Reversing the Curse: Inside the 2004 Boston Red Sox. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Summitt, P. 1999. Raise the roof: The inspiring inside story of the Tennessee Lady Vols’ groundbreaking season in women’s college basketball. New York: Broadway Books.

Web Sites Top North American athletes of the century. 1999. ESPN Web site. http://espn.go.com/ sportscentury/athletes.html. U.S. Paralympics. U.S. Olympic Committee Web site. http://www.usoc.org/paralympics/. Women’s Sports Foundation. http://www.womenssportsfoundation.org.

Films Hoop dreams. 1994. Dir. Steve James. Fine Line Features. Murderball. 2005. Dir. Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro. Paramount Pictures. Nine Innings from Ground Zero. 2004. HBO Home Video. Shadow Boxers. 1999. Dir. Katya Bankowsky. Image Entertainment. The Year of the Yao. 2004. Dir. Adam Del Deo and James D. Stern. Endgame Entertainment.

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RESOURCE GUIDE Print Sources Abrams, Roger I. 2005. The first World Series and baseball fanatics of 1903. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Alexander, Charles. 2002. Breaking the slump: Baseball in the Depression era. New York: Columbia University Press. Anderson, David. 2000. More than Merkle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Baker, William J. 1986. Jesse Owens: An American life. New York: Free Press. ———. 1988. Sports in the western world. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barnett. C. Robert. 2004. St. Louis 1904. In Encyclopedia of the modern Olympic movement, ed. John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Berlage, Gia Ingham. 1994. Women in baseball: The forgotten history. Westport, CT: Praeger. Betts, John Richard. 1974. America’s sporting heritage: 1850–1950. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Bjarkman, Peter C. 2000. The biographical history of basketball. Chicago: Masters Press. Bullock, Steven R. 2004. Playing for their nation: Baseball and the American military during World War II. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cahn, Susan K. 1994. Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport. New York: Free Press, 1994. Carroll, John M. 1992. Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in racial advancement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1999. Red Grange and the rise of modern football. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cayleff, Susan. 1995. Babe: The life and legend of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chapman, David L. 2006. Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the beginnings of bodybuilding. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Cohen, Stan. 1985. A pictorial history of downhill skiing. Missoula, MT: Pictorial Histories Publishing. Creamer, Robert. 1974. Babe: The legend comes to life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Crepeau, Richard C. 1980. Baseball: America’s diamond mind: 1919–1941. Orlando: University Presses of Florida. Davies, Richard O. 1994. America’s obsession: Sports and society since 1945. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College. ———. 2007. Sports in American life: A History. New York: Blackwell. Deford, Frank. 1975. Big Bill Tilden: The triumphs and the tragedy. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Dickey, Glenn. 1982. The history of professional basketball since 1896. New York: Stein and Day. Dyreson, Mark. 1998. Making the American team: Sport, culture, and the Olympic experience. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2003. Icons of liberty or objects of desire? American women Olympians and the politics of consumption. Journal of Contemporary History 38 (July): 435–60. ———. 2008. Mapping an empire of baseball: American visions of national pastimes and global influence, 1919–1941. In Baseball in America, ed. Donald Kyle, Robert R. Fairbanks, and Benjamin G. Rader, 143–88. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Englemann, Larry. 1988. The goddess and the American girl. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, Stephen R. 1994. Big leagues: Professional baseball, football, and basketball in national memory. New York: William Morrow. Fry, John, ed. 1972. America’s ski book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Gallico, Paul. 1938. A farewell to sport. New York: Knopf. Gorn, Elliott J. 1986. The manly art: Bare-knuckle prize fighting in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gorn, Elliott J., and Warren Goldstein. 2004. A brief history of American sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Guttmann, Allen. 1984. The Games must go on: Avery Brundage and the Olympic movement. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Women’s sports: A history. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Games and empires: Modern sports and cultural imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. The Olympics: A history of the modern Games. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2004. Sports: The first five millennia. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Heaphy, Leslie A. 2003. The Negro Leagues: 1869–1960. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Henry, Bill. 1976. An approved history of the Olympic Games. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Herlihy, David V. 2004. Bicycle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hietala, Thomas R. 2002. The fight of the century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. Hillebrand, Laura. 2001. Seabiscuit: An American legend. New York: Random House. Hubbard, Kevin, and Stan Fischler. 1997. Hockey America. Indianapolis: Masters Press. Ikard, Robert W. 2005. Just for fun: The story of AAU Women’s Basketball. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Isaacs, Neil D. 1984. A history of college basketball. New York: Harper and Row. Isenberg, Michael T. 1994. John L. Sullivan and his America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Keys, Barbara J. 2006. Globalizing sport: National rivalry and international community in the 1930s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kirsch, George B., Othello Harris, and Claire E. Nolte. 2000. Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Koppett, Leonard. 1969. Flood backed by players, plans suit to challenge baseball reserve clause. New York Times, December 30, 42. ———. 2003. Koppett’s concise history of Major League Baseball. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lanctot, Neil. 2004. Negro League baseball: The rise and ruin of a black institution. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lester, Robin. 1995. Stagg’s university: The rise, decline, and fall of big-time football at Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Levine, Peter. 1992. Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Lomax, Michael. 2004. Black entrepreneurship in the national pastime: The rise of semiprofessional baseball in black Chicago, 1890–1915. In Sport and the color line: Black athletes and race relations in twentieth-century America, ed. Patrick B. Miller and David K. Wiggins, 25–43. New York: Routledge. Lowenfish, Lee. 2007. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s ferocious gentleman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Margolick, David. 2005. Beyond glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a world on the brink. New York: Knopf. McCallum, John D., and Charles H. Pearson. 1973. College football U.S.A., 1869–1973. New York: Hall of Fame Publishing. McGurn, James. 1987. On your bicycle: An illustrated history of cycling. New York: Facts on File. Margolick, David. 2005. Beyond glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a world on the brink. New York: Knopf. Mead, Chris. 1985. Champion—Joe Louis: Black hero in white America. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Menke, Frank G. 1969. The encyclopedia of sports. 4th ed. South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes and Co. Mrozek, Donald J. 1983. Sport and American mentality, 1880–1910. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Nelson, Murry. 1999. The originals: The New York Celtics invent modern basketball. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press. ———. 2005. Bill Russell, a biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ———. 2005. Insular America: The NBA began in Akron? The Midwest Conference in the 1930s. International Journal of the History of Sport 22 (November): 990–1010. Oriard, Michael. 1993. Reading football: How the popular press created an American spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2001. King football: Sport and spectacle in the golden age of radio and newsreels, movies and magazines, the weekly and the daily press. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Peterson, Robert W. 1970. Only the ball was white. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 1990. Cages to jump shots: Pro basketball’s early years. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. Pigskin: The early years of pro football. New York Oxford University Press. Quirk, James P., and Rodney D. Fort. 1992. Pay dirt: The business of professional team sports. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rader, Benjamin G. 1983. American sports: From the age of folk games to the age of spectators. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ———. 2002. Baseball: A history of America’s game. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ribowsky, Mark. 1995. A complete history of the Negro Leagues, 1884–1955. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub. Group. Riess, Steven A. 1991. City games: The evolution of American urban society and the rise of sports. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1995. Sport in industrial America, 1850–1920. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson. ———. ed. 1998. Sports and the American Jew. Syracuse: NY: Syracuse University Press. Ritchie, Andrew. 1996. Major Taylor: The extraordinary career of a champion bicycle racer. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Roberts, James B., and Alexander G. Skutt. 2006. The Boxing Register: International Boxing Hall of Fame official record book. New York: McBooks Press.

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Roberts, Randy. 1983. Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the era of white hopes. New York: Free Press. Roberts, Randy, and James Olson. 1989. Winning is the only thing: Sports in America since 1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ruck, Rob. 1987. Sandlot seasons: Sport in black Pittsburgh. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sammons, Jeffrey T. 1988. Beyond the ring: The role of boxing in American society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Smith, Robert A. 1972. A social history of the bicycle: Its early life and times in America. New York: American Heritage Press. Smith, Ronald. 1981. Harvard and Columbia and a reconsideration of the 1905–06 football crisis. Journal of Sport History 8 (Winter): 5–19. ———. 1988. Sports and freedom: The rise of big-time college athletics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Play-by-play: Radio, television, and big-time college sport. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sperber, Murray. 1993. Shake down the thunder: The creation of Notre Dame football. New York: Henry Holt and Co. ———. 1998. Onward to victory: The crises that shaped college sports. New York: Henry Holt. Tygiel, Jules. 1983. Baseball’s great experiment: Jackie Robinson and his legacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Voigt, David Q. 1983. From gentleman’s sport to the commissioner system. Vol. 2 of American baseball. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Watterson, John Sayle. 2002. College football: History, spectacle, controversy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wiggins, David K., and Patrick B. Miller, eds. 2001. The unlevel playing field: A documentary history of the African-American experience in sport. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wong, John. 1998. FDR and the New Deal on sport and recreation. Sport History Review 29 (November): 173–91.

Films Baseball: Fourth inning, a national heirloom. 1994. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS Video. Baseball: Fifth inning, shadow ball. 1994. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS Video. Baseball: Inning six, the national pastime, 1940–1950. 1994. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS Video. The Great Depression: “To be somebody.” 1993. Dir. Stephen Stept, Joe Morton, Steve Thayer. PBS Video. The Jackie Robinson Story. 1950. Dir. Alfred E. Green. Legend Films. Joe Louis: America’s hero … betrayed. 2008. HBO Films. Knute Rockne and his Fighting Irish. 1993. Dir. Lawrence R Hott. WGBH. A league of their own. 1992. Dir. Penny Marshall. Columbia Pictures. People’s century: 1930, sporting fever. 1998. Dir. David Espar. PBS Video. Rites of autumn: Seasons of change. 2001. Dir. Don Sperling. Lions Gate Home Entertainment. Seabiscuit. 2003. Dir. Stephen Ives. Warner Home Video. 75 seasons: The story of the National Football League. 1994. NFL Films. Time Capsule: The Los Angeles Olympic Games of 1932. 1984. Dir. Bud Greenspan. Family Home Entertainment.

Web Sources Arnold Palmer … a biography. Sandhills Online. http://www.sandhills.org/plantation/golf/ palmer.htm. Baseball Almanac. http://www.baseball-almanac.com.

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Baseball Hall of Fame. http://web.baseballhalloffame.org. Basketball Hall of Fame. http://www.hoophall.com. Carter, Bob. Wilkinson created Sooner dynasty. ESPN Classic Web site. http://espn.go.com/ classic/biography/s/Wilkinson_Bud.html. History. National Invitation Tournament Web site. http://www.nit.org/history/nit-postseasonresults-1950s.html. Hockey Hall of Fame Web site. http://www.hhof.com. International Olympic Committee (IOC) Web site. http://www.olympic.org/uk. LA84 Foundation. http://www.la84foundation.org. Ladies Professional Golfers Association Web site. http://www.lpga.com. Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Web site. http://www.hoophall.com. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum Web site. http://www.baseballhall.org. National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame Web site. http://www.college footballhall.org. National Football League Web site. http://www.NFL.com/history. Pro Football Hall of Fame Web site. http://www.profootballhof.com. Sports Century. ESPN Web site. http://espn.go.com/sportscentury. Sugar Ray Robinson. The Official Site of Sugar Ray Robinson. http://www.cmgww.com/ sports/robinson/bioography.html.

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INDEX Aaron, Henry (“Hank”), 316, 323, 399, 485 Abbott, Jim, 447 Abbott, Margaret Ives, 109 Adams, Babe, 122 Addie, Pauline Betz, 186 African Americans, 47–48, 81, 281–83, 353–55; baseball, 122–25, 159–60, 198–99, 234–37, 315–17; basketball, 205, 239, 291, 292; bowling, 268; boxing, 145, 220, 256–59, 342–43; college basketball, 327, 365; college football, 247, 296–97, 333, 371–72, 411; cycling, 104, 147; figure skating, 464; football, 90, 172–73; golf, 347, 385, 526–27; horse racing, 104–5; Olympics, 252–55; professional basketball, 329–30, 451; professional football, 247, 300, 336–37, 368–69, 408; tennis, 304, 387. See also color line; discrimination; racial segregation Agassi, Andre, 469, 515, 530, 531 Aiken, Jim, 300 Aikman, Troy, 501 Ainge, Danny, 449 airplane racing, 266–68 Akers, Michelle, 512 Albright, Tenley, 340 Albritton, David, 256 Alcindor, Lew, 363, 366 alcohol, 50, 58, 80, 194; auto racing, 267, 535; boxing, 96; sponsorship, 233 Alcott, Amy, 427 Alexander, Grover Cleveland (“Pete”), 202 Ali, Laila, 524 Ali, Muhammad, 377, 380–84, 423–26, 466, 515

All-American Football Conference (AAFC), 297, 311, 334 All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), 274, 282–83 Allan, Sir H. Montague, 136 Allen, Forrest (“Phog”), 125, 207, 241 Allison, Bobby, 432 Allison, Jim, 188 Almeida, Rafael, 158 alternative sports, 473, 474, 519, 534. See also extreme sports Alworth, Lance, 367 Alzado, Lyle, 458 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), 67; basketball, 86, 166, 237, 240–42; boxing, 142, 258; Olympics, 138, 140, 187; women, 263, 292, 390 Amateur Hockey League, 91–92 amateurism, 60, 64, 66, 67, 157, 179, 259; college football, 293; golf, 224; Olympics, 374, 419, 462–63; tennis, 386 Ameche, Alan, 338 American Amateur Hockey League (AAHL), 134 American Association, 51, 53, 54, 78 American Baseball Guild, 286 American Basketball Association (ABA), 331, 353, 361–62, 401–4 American Basketball League (ABL), 169, 204, 494–95 American Bowling Congress, 268 American Classic Series, 103–6 American Football Conference (AFC), 409 American Football League (AFL), 366 American Football League Players Association, 369

550

INDEX

American League, 80–81, 114, 115, 166, 355 American Olympic Committee (AOC), 92, 140, 242 American Professional Football Association (APFA), 213 American Softball Association, 263 American Tennis Association (ATA), 304, 347 American Women’s Baseball Federation (AWBF), 488 Anani, Sumya, 524 Anderson, Ada, 67 Anderson, Forrest (“Fordy”), 325 Angott, Sammy, 303 Anson, Adrian (“Cap”), 48, 52 antebellum sports, 14–25 Antley, Chris, 525, 526 Aparicio, Luis, 317, 324 Arcaro, Eddie, 306, 348 architecture. See stadiums Arizin, Paul, 332 Arledge, Roone, 407, 419, 433 Armaindo, Louise, 70 Armstrong, Henry (“Homicide Hank”), 257 Armstrong, Lance, 531 Artest, Ron, 495 Ashburn, Richie, 320 Ashe, Arthur, 387, 430, 439 Ashford, Evelyn, 516 Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), 390, 405, 420–23, 472 Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), 387, 430 Astley, Sir John, 67 Astor, John Jacob, 108 Atkinson, Juliette, 110 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), 327 Attell, Abe, 143, 178 Auerbach, Red, 492 Auriemma, Geno, 497 Austin, Tracy, 469 auto racing, 188–89, 306; 1930s, 266–68; 1950s, 349; 1970s, 432; 1990 to the present, 535–38 Avila, Roberto (“Bobby”), 317 Babcock, Harry, 188 Baer, Buddy, 302 Baer, Max, 257 Baeza, Braulio, 389 Bailey, Jerry, 526 Baker, Buddy, 432

Baker, Hobart (“Hobey”), 135 Baker, Mary (“Bonne”), 283 Baker, Newton, 161, 279 Bakken, Jill, 519 Baldwin, Sandra, 515 Balfour, Murray, 388 Banks, Alline, 293 Banks, Ernie, 316, 324 Barber, Miller, 468 Barber, Red, 286 Bardeen, George, 123 Barkley, Charles, 439, 449, 492, 519 Barksdale, Don, 329 Barnett, Gary, 504 Baroudi, Sam, 303 Barry, Justin (“Sam”), 206 Barry, Pete, 204 Barry, Rick, 361, 362 Bartlett, Dewey, 421 baseball, 49, 117, 159, 162, 202, 246; 1861–1889, 45–54; 1890–1899, 78–81; 1900–1909, 114–25; 1910s, 157–66; 1920s, 197–202; 1930s, 232–37; 1940s, 278–88; 1950s, 315–25; 1960s, 354–60; 1970s, 397–400; 1980s, 441–47; 1990 to the present, 481–91; drugs, 490–91; earthquake, 446; economics, 199–200, 442–43, 482–83; ethnicity, 158–60, 198–99; fans, 443–44; growth, 481–82; image, 79–80; legal issues, 199–200, 482–83; media, 200–201, 318–20, 443–44; Olympics, 235, 236, 518; perfect game, 323; race, 122–25; records, 483–86; remembrances, 483–86; scandals, 444–47. See also Negro American League; Negro National League; rules: baseball Baseball Hall of Fame, 233 Basilio, Carmen, 343 basketball, 82–86, 168, 205; 1900–1909, 125–26; 1910s, 166–68; 1920s, 203–7; 1930s, 237–42; 1940s, 288–93; 1950s, 325–32; 1960s, 360–66; 1970s, 401–6; 1972 Olympics, 417; 1980s, 447–53; 1990 to the present, 491–99; amateur, 166–67; ethnicity, 204–5; globalization, 82–84; Lakers-Celtics domination, 448–49; NBA, 447–50; Olympics, 241, 341, 365, 376, 518–19; transportation, 206. See also college basketball; professional basketball; rules: basketball Basketball Association of America (BAA), 291

INDEX

Bathgate, Andy, 339 Baugh, Samuel (“Slingin’ Sammy”), 247, 298 Baum, Harry, 169 Bausch, James, 259 Bayard, Louis, Jr., 109 Baylor, Elgin, 327, 330, 362 Beach, William, 64 Beamon, Bob, 378 Beard, Ralph, 289 Beasley, DaMarcus, 513 Bechler, Steve, 490 Beckenbauer, Franz, 470 Becker, William, 104 Beckman, Johnny, 203 Bedwell, H. Guy, 184 Bee, Clair, 240, 288, 325 Beecher, Catharine, 26, 28 Bejines, Kiko, 467 Beliveau, Jean, 388 Bell, Bert, 298 Bell, James (“Cool Papa”), 235, 281 Bell, Tommy, 303 Bellamy, Walt, 341 Belmont, August, Jr., 107 Belmont, August, Sr., 106 Bennett, Brooke, 518 Bennett, James Gordon, Jr., 66, 68 Benoit, Joan, 463 Berenson, Senda, 83, 85, 206 Berg, Moe, 236 Berg, Patty, 344, 345 Berra, Yogi, 320, 321, 323 Bertelli, Angelo, 294 Bertuzzi, Todd, 509 Bevens, Bill, 287 Bezdek, Hugo, 133 Bias, Len, 439, 459 Bible, Dana X., 244 bicycling craze, 102 Biddle, Anthony J. Drexel, 144 Bidwell, Bill, 456 Bierbauer, Louis, 78 Big Ten, 125, 128, 289, 297, 327, 332 Bikila, Abebe, 341 billiards, 10–12 Bing, Dave, 362 Bird, Larry, 403–5, 447–48, 450, 452, 519 Bird, Sue, 497 Bittner, Jaynne, 283 Bjurstedt, Molla, 185 Black Sox scandal, 164, 165, 199, 200, 281

Black, Hughie, 167 Black, Joe, 316 Black, Julian, 301 Blaik, Earl, 294 Blair, Bonnie, 520, 463 Blanchard, Felix Anthony (“Doc”), 295 Blanda, George, 367 Bleibtrey, Etheda, 215 Blood, Johnny, 215 Boitano, Brian, 463 Bolletieri, Nick, 529 Bonavena, Oscar, 384 Bonds, Barry, 323, 399, 485, 490, 517 Bonner, Jack, 144 Borden, Amanda, 518 Borders, Ila, 488, 489 Boros, Julius, 385 Boston, Ralph, 374 Bosworth, Brian, 460 bowl games, 134, 332–33 bowling, 268–69 Bowman, John, 244 box score, 35, 45, 47, 399, 485 boxing, 95–99; 1861–1889, 58–61; 1900–1909, 142–47; 1910s, 175–78; 1920s, 218–23; 1930s, 256–59; 1940s, 301–3; 1950s, 341–43; 1960s, 380–84; 1970s, 423–26; 1980s, 466–67; 1990 to the present, 522–25; ethnicity, 218–20, 342–43; gambling, 342–43; geography, 220–21; legal issues, 222–23, 342–43; media, 221–22, 342; race, 175–77; sexism, 218–20. See also rules: boxing; weight classifications boycotts, 369, 373–77, 417, 430 Bradbury, Steven, 520 Braddock, James, 257, 258, 301 Bradley, Pat, 428, 467, 527 Bradshaw, Terry, 409 Branca, Ralph, 321 Brashear, Donald, 509 Breadon, Sam, 280, 284 Bridwell, Al, 121 Bright, Johnny, 297 Britton, Jack, 178 broadcasting, 233, 245, 269, 334. See also media broadcasting revenues, 367, 409, 459; baseball, 398; college football, 411; NBA, 449; professional football, 453–54, 502 Brodie, John, 371 Brosnan, Jim, 357

551

552

INDEX

Broughton, Jack, 23 Brown, Jim, 336, 339, 371, 427 Brown, Kevin, 482 Brown, Paul, 276, 294, 299, 300, 336 Brown, Pete, 385 Brown, Roosevelt, 336 Brown, Walter, 63, 292 Brundage, Avery, 253, 374, 377, 416, 419 Brush, Ben, 105 Brush, John T., 116 Bryant, Kobe, 492, 495 Bryant, Paul (“Bear”), 334 Bucyk, Johnny, 339 Budge, Don, 265 Bueno, Maria, 388 Bullock, Matthew, 133 Burdette, Lou, 323 Burk, Martha, 528 Burke, Thomas, 94 Burns, Tommy, 145, 176, 221 Busch, Gussie, 285 Bush, Gerard, 325 Bush, Reggie, 508 Butler, Frank, 70 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 129 Buxton, Angela, 348 Byers, Walter, 410 Cade, Robert, 373 Calac, Pete, 214 Callaghan, Helen, 283 Called Shot, 230 Caminiti, Ken, 490 Camp, Walter Chauncey, 55–57, 88, 129, 132, 169 Campanella, Roy, 275, 284, 287–88, 316, 321–22 Campanis, Al, 445 Campbell, Clarence, 415 Campbell, Earl, 411 Campbell, Oliver, 109 Cann, Howard, 326 Canseco, Jose, 446, 491 Caponi, Donna, 427 Cappelletti, Gino, 371 Capriati, Jennifer, 516, 530 Carbo, Frankie, 303, 381 Carideo, Frank, 211, 246 Carlos, John, 377, 378 Carlson, Cliff, 207 Carlton, Steve, 360, 399

Carnera, Primo, 257 Carpentier, Georges, 220 Carr, Arthur D., 133 Carrasquel, Alfonso (“Chico”), 317 Carroll, Pete, 508 Carter, Don, 348 Carter, Jimmy, 417, 419 Cartwright, Alexander, 33, 34, 45 Cash, Swin, 497 Casper, Billy, 346, 385 The Catch, 455 Catching, Tamika, 497 Cauthen, Steve, 432 century runs, 71 Cerdan, Marcel, 303 Chadwick, Henry, 35, 45, 47 Chamberlain, Wilt, 327, 330, 363, 403 Chance, Frank, 118, 122 Chandler, Albert B. (“Happy”), 281 Chang, Michael, 469 Chapion, Aaron, 46 Chapman, Ben, 287 Chapman, Ray, 201 Charles, Bob, 468 Charles, Ezzard, 303, 343 Charleson, Oscar, 199 Chase, Hal, 162 Chase, Sue, 524 Chastain, Brandi, 512 Chavez, Julio Cesar, 522 cheering, 133, 294 Chesbro, Jack, 117 Chicago White Sox scandal, 163–66 Chow, Amy, 518 Choynski, Joe, 97 Christianity, 27, 44, 83–84, 87, 144 Chuvalo, George, 384 Cicotte, Eddie, 163, 164 Cincinnati Red Stockings, 46 Clark, Dwight, 455 Clark, Ellery, 94 Clarke, Bobby, 414 Clay, Cassius. See Ali, Muhammad Clemens, Roger, 486, 491 Clemente, Roberto, 317, 356, 400 Clifton, Nate (“Sweetwater”), 329 coaches, 243; college basketball, 405; football, 128, 334, 411, 507–8 Coachman, Alice, 260 Cobb, Ty, 119, 122, 125, 157–58, 165, 202 Cochran, Jacqueline, 268 Coleman, Georgia, 264

INDEX

college basketball: 1910s, 166–67; 1920s, 206–7; 1930s, 240–42; 1940s, 288–91; 1950s, 325–28; 1960s, 365–66; 1970s, 404–6; 1980s, 452–53; 1990 to the present, 496–99; ethnicity, 327–28; media, 326–27. See also basketball; rules: basketball college football, 237; 1910s, 169–72; 1920s, 207–13; 1930s, 242–47; 1940s, 293–301; 1950s, 332–34; 1960s, 371–72; 1970s, 410–11; 1980s, 459–60; 1990 to the present, 504–8; bowl games, 332–33; early history of, 86–90; ethics, 211–13; ethnicity, 333–34; geography, 170–72, 210; legal issues, 211–13; media, 210–11, 333; national champion, 505–7. See also football; rules: football College Football Association (CFA), 411 college sports, 472–73 Collett, Glenna, 181 Collins, Doug, 417 Collins, Eddie, 163 Collins, Jimmy, 116 colonial sports, 1–14 color line, 214, 285; baseball, 51, 81, 122–23, 235, 281, 285; boxing, 24, 96, 256–59; college basketball, 405; golf, 346, 528; horse racing, 105; professional football, 247, 300. See also discrimination; racial segregation Comiskey, Charles, 163 commercialization, 19, 305; baseball, 233, 482; boxing, 96; college basketball, 296, 497; college football, 54–55, 88, 131; cycling, 100; horse racing, 62; Olympics, 416, 418; professional football, 248; Super Bowl, 502; surfing, 149; tennis, 386 Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (CIAW), 390 Conn, Billy, 302 Connerly, Charlie, 338 Connolly, James B., 93, 94 Connolly, Maureen, 347 Connors, Jimmy, 430, 468 Conte, Victor, 517 Continental League, 354 Cooper, Charles (“Tarzan”), 205, 240 Cooper, Chuck, 329 Cooper, Henry, 384 Cooper, Irving Ben, 357 Cooperstown, New York, 34, 48, 233 Corbett, James J. (“Gentleman Jim”), 60, 97

Cosell, Howard, 407, 466 Coubertin, Baron Pierre de, 92, 95 Coughlin, Father Charles, 234 Coulon, Johnny, 178 Cournoyer, Yvan, 388 Courson, Steve, 458 Court, Margaret, 388, 429, 430 Courtney, Charles, 64 Cousy, Bob, 331, 332, 361 Creighton, James, 45 Cribb, Tom, 23 Crocker, Ian, 518 Croker, Richard, 107 Cronkite, Walter, 245 Croteau, Julie, 488 Csonka, Larry, 409 Cullman, Joe, 429 Cunningham, Billy, 362 Curtis, Thomas, 94 cycling, 99–103, 147–48, 268–69, 531–34 Dale, Harold, 303 Dambrot, Irwin, 326 Daniel, Beth, 527 Daniels, Clem, 371 Daniels, Isabelle, 375 Danzig, Alison, 201 Dark, Alvin, 355 Dashiell, Paul, 129 Davenport, Lindsay, 516, 530 Davenport, Willie, 378 Davidson, Gary, 401, 409, 412 Davila, Alberto, 467 Davis, Al, 370, 457 Davis, Dwight F., 110, 150 Davis, Ernie, 372 Davis, Glenn, 295 Dawes, Dominique, 518 Dawson, Len, 367 Day, Laraine, 287 Day, Pat, 526 De La Hoya, Oscar, 522 de Quesada, Alejandro, 373 de Varona, Donna, 375 Dean, Everett, 206 Dean, Jerome (“Dizzy”), 234 Dee, James R., 135 Deerfoot, 66 DeFrantz, Anita, 515 Dehnert, Henry (“Dutch”), 167, 203, 204 Delahoussoye, Ed, 470 Delvecchio, Alex, 339

553

554

INDEX

Dempsey, Jack (“the Nonpareil”), 97, 222, 223, 257, 291 Dempsey, William Harrison (“Jack”), 177 Denning, Blaine, 329 Derringer, Paul, 278 Desormeaux, Kent, 526 Devers, Gail, 516 Devery, William S., 115 Dewey, Godfrey, 250 DeZonie, Hank, 329 Didrikson Zaharias, Mildred (“Babe”), 252, 260–66, 275, 345 Diem, Carl, 253 DiMaggio, Joe, 234, 278, 320 Dinneen, “Big Bill,” 115, 116 Dipley, Walter, 144 disabilities, 280, 396, 447, 521, 529 Dischinger, Terry, 341 discrimination, 275, 353–55, 379, 395, 433; baseball, 355; basketball, 239, 451; boxing, 342–43; football, 296, 369; golf, 529; horse racing, 103; tennis, 348. See also African Americans; color line; ethnicity; racial segregation; women Divac, Vlade, 494 diving, 215, 254, 259, 263–64, 375, 379, 518 Dixon, David, 457 Dixon, George (“Little Chocolate”), 98, 143 Doby, Larry, 275 Dolan, Tom, 518 Donaldson, John, 160 Dong-Sung, Kim, 520 Donovan, Landon, 513 Doolittle, James, 267 doping. See drugs Dorais, Gus, 171, 208 Dorsett, Tony, 411 Doubleday, Abner, 32, 50 Dougherty, “Patsy,” 115 Douglas, James (“Buster”), 466, 522 Douglas, Robert (“Bob”), 204 Douglas, William O., 402 Dowd Report, 446 Dowd, John M., 445 Downes, Isaac, 20 downhill skiing, 520 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 175 Dragila, Stacy, 516 Dressen, Charlie, 321 Drew, Howard P., 175, 185, 187 Drew, John, 452

Drexler, Clyde, 493, 519 Dreyfuss, Barney, 116 drug testing, 439, 458, 462; baseball, 444–45; Olympics, 419–20; professional football, 501 drugs, 439, 517; baseball, 444–45, 485, 490–91; boxing, 525; cycling, 532–33; horse racing, 526; Olympics, 419–20, 465; steroids, 458–59; track and field, 516 Duenkel, Virginia, 374 Dukes, Walter, 327, 329 Dundee, Johnny, 178 Dunn, William, Jr., 108 Dunway, Glen, 306 Durocher, Leo, 286, 321 Duval, David, 527 Eagleson, Alan, 413 Eakins, Thomas, 63 Earhart, Amelia, 268 early American history, 1–40 Earnhardt, Dale, 473, 536 earthquake, 119, 446, 480 Easter, Luke, 316 Eastern Conference, 339 Eastern League, 125, 198, 204 Eckersley, Dennis, 446 Eckersley, Walter, 211 economic issues, 243; baseball, 1890s, 78, 80; baseball, 1910s, 158; baseball, 1920s, 199–200; baseball, 1930s, 232–33, 235; baseball, 1950s, 318; baseball, 1980s, 442–43; baseball, present day, 482–83; basketball, 237–38; boxing, 223; football, 209, 296, 454–57; golf, 265; hockey, 248; horse racing, 22, 181–83, 266; NBA, 328, 449–50; Olympics, 250–52. See also broadcasting revenues; gambling; salaries Ederle, Gertrude, 218 Edwards, Harry, 377, 445 Edwards, Leroy, 291 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 315, 344 Elder, Lee, 426 electronic sports, 538–39 Eliot, Charles, 88, 125, 129 Elliott, “Bump,” 334 Elway, John, 500 Embry, Wayne, 330 Emerson, Roy, 386 Emslie, Bob, 121 endorsements, 526; African Americans, 408; Andre Agassi, 469; basketball, 439, 450,

INDEX

451, 453; cycling, 531, 534; Babe Didrikson, 305; golf, 180; Michael Jordan, 493, 495; Don King, 424; Joe Namath, 370; NASCAR, 536; Olympics, 419, 462, 516; tennis, 428, 530; women, 305, 422, 496; Tiger Woods, 526 Ennis, Del, 320 Erne, Frank, 143 Erving, Julius (“Dr. J.”), 402, 450 Erwin, J. O., 126 ESPN, 433, 440, 441, 495–96, 502; college basketball, 453, 459; Extreme Games, 534; hockey, 461, 509; NASCAR, 535; NBA, 449; professional football, 457 ethnicity, 142; baseball, 51, 158–60, 198–99, 234, 315–17, 355; basketball, 204–5, 329–30; boxing, 218–20, 303, 342–44; college basketball, 327–28; college football, 133, 246, 333–34; professional football, 214, 336–37 Etten, Nick, 281 Evans, Charles, Jr. (“Chick”), 179 Evans, Lee, 378 Evashevski, Forest, 334 Evers, Johnny, 121 Evert, Chris, 429, 431, 468 Ewbank, Weeb, 338 Ewing, Patrick, 492 Ewry, Ray, 95, 517 extreme sports, 534–35 Eyser, George, 138 Faggs, Mae, 375 Fainaru-Wade, Mark, 517 Fairhall, Neroli, 463 fantasy sports leagues, 538 Farrand, Max, 131 Faruot, Don, 294 Fears, Tom, 337 Federal League, 53 Federer, Roger, 531 Felix, Ray, 329 Feller, Bob, 286 Felsch, Oscar (“Happy”), 164 Ferguson, John, 388 Ferguson, Kathleen, 374 Ferrell, Barbara, 378 Ferrell, Frank J., 115 Fielder, Cecil, 482 Fight of the Century, 146 figure skating, 262, 340–41, 464, 520–21 Filchock, Frankie, 300

Finley, Charlie, 398 Fish, Jennifer, 376 Fisher, Carl Graham, 188 Fisher, Sarah, 537 fishing, 10–12, 13–14 Fitzsimmons, Robert (“Ruby”), 97, 99, 144, 145 Flack, Edwin, 94 Fleming, Peggy, 376 Flock, Bob, 306 Flood, Curt, 357, 397 Flowers, Vonetta, 519 Floyd, Raymond, 385 Flutie, Doug, 458, 460 Folley, Zora, 384 Fonda, Jane, 439 football: 1861–1889, 54–58; 1900–1909, 126–33; 1910s, 168–73; 1920s, 207–15; 1930s, 242–48; 1940s, 293–301; 1950s, 332–39; 1960s, 366–72; 1970s, 406–11; 1980s, 453–60; gender, 503–4; geographical history, 89–90; growth, 242–48; Native Americans, 3–4; professionalization, 172–73; spectacle, 503–4; violence, 55, 58, 86, 88–89, 126, 168. See also college football; professional football; rules: football Ford, Alexander Hume, 149 Ford, Doug, 346 Ford, Len, 336 Ford, Whitney, 320 Foreman, George, 379, 423, 424 Fosbury, Richard, 188, 378 Fosdick, Raymond, 155 Foss, Frank, 188 Foss, Joe, 366, 369 Foster, Andrew (“Rube”), 48, 123, 159, 199, 281 Foudy, Julie, 512 Fowler, April, 524 Fox, Nelson, 324 Fox, Richard Kyle, 45, 59, 60, 98 Foyt, A. J., 432, 537 France, William (“Big Bill”), 267, 306, 535 Francis, D. R., 137 Franklin, Ron, 432 Frazee, Harry, 200 Frazier, Joe, 376, 384, 423, 425 Frazier-Lyde, Jackie, 524 free agency, 357, 362, 398, 442; NBA, 450; professional football, 407, 454 Free, Harry James, 373

555

556

INDEX

Freeman, Ron, 378 Freeth, George, 149 Frick, Ford, 287, 358 Friedman, Benny, 211 Friedman, Marty, 169 Fullerton, Hugh, 164 Fullmer, Gene, 343, 380 Furey, James, 167, 203 Furyk, Jim, 527 Gabriel, Roman, 371 Gallico, Paul, 201, 211, 222, 262, 264 gambling, 277, 326; baseball, 50, 120, 162, 164, 445; basketball, 325–26, 498–99; boxing, 58–59, 96, 223, 341–43, 380; college football, 211, 296, 505; cycling, 101; early American history, 3, 6–8, 14–16, 19–20, 25; horse racing, 62, 103, 106–7, 181–83, 224, 266, 526; professional football, 172, 300, 371; track and field, 67 Game of the Century, 366 Gandil, Arnold (“Chick”), 163, 164 Gans, Joe, 143 Gardella, Danny, 286 Garland, William May, 251 Garnett, Kevin, 493, 495, 498 Garrett, Mike, 372 Garrett, Robert, 94 Garrett, William, 289 Garrison, Zina, 469 Garvey, Ed, 407 Gates, William (“Pop”), 240 Gatorade, 373 Gault, Prentice, 335 Gehrig, Lou, 201, 484 Geoffrion, Bernie (“Boom Boom”), 339, 388 George, Tony, 537 George, Walter, 68, 186 Gervin, George, 402 Gestring, Marjorie, 254, 264 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 445, 446, 447 Giambi, Jason, 490, 517 Gibbons, Tommy, 221 Gibson, Althea, 304, 347, 529 Gibson, Bob, 356, 358, 359 Gibson, John L. (“Jack”), 135 Gibson, Josh, 235, 281 Gibson, Kirk, 443 Gifford, Frank, 338 Gilchrist, Cookie, 371 Gillett, J. N., 146

Gilliam, Jim, 316 Gilmore, James A., 158 Ginobili, Manu, 495 Giove, Missy, 533, 534 Gipp, George, 209 Glauer, George, 20 Godfrey, George, 96 Gogarty, Deirdre, 524 Gola, Tom, 332 Goldberg, Arthur, 357 Goldberg, Rube, 146 Goldstein, Ruby, 380 golf: 1890s, 107–9; 1910s, 178–81; 1920s, 223–24; 1930s, 264–66; 1940s, 304–5; 1950s, 343–47; 1960s, 384–86; 1970s, 426–28; 1980s, 467–68; 1990 to the present, 526–28; amateurism, 179–80. See also women: golf Gonzales, Richard Alonzo (“Pancho”), 304 Goolagong, Evonne, 429 Gordon, Edward, 253 Gordon, Jeff, 535 Goss, Joe, 59, 60 Gottlieb, Eddie, 167 Gould, Jay, 149 Gouverneur, Samuel L., 20 Graham, Otto, 299, 335, 337 Graham, Sylvester, 26 Grandchamp, Gail, 524 Grange, Harold (“Red”), 196, 211, 212, 214 Gray, Pete, 273, 280 Graziano, Rocky, 303 Great Foot Race, 20 Great Races, 20–25 Great White Hope, 177 Greb, Harry, 220, 223 Green, Elijah (“Pumpsie”), 316, 353 Green, Si, 330 Green, Sihugo, 327 Greenberg, Hank, 234, 278, 279, 281, 357 Greene, Charlie, 378 Greenlee, Gus, 234 Greer, Hal, 330 Gregory, Dick, 376 Gretzky, Wayne, 413, 461, 510 Grier, Roosevelt, 336 Griffey, Ken, Jr., 447 Griffey, Ken, Sr., 447 Griffin, Montel, 522 Griffith, Clark, 119 Griffith, Emile, 380 Groat, Dick, 325

INDEX

Grove, Robert (“Lefty”), 202, 234 Groza, Alex, 289 Groza, Lou (“the Toe”), 299, 335 Gulick, Luther, 82, 137, 138, 139 Gutenko, John, 177 Guthrie, Janet, 537 Guyon, Joe, 214 Gwilliam, Shad, 120 gymnastics, 67, 138, 463, 514, 518; early American history, 16, 27, 44 Hagan, Cliff, 332 Hagen, Walter, 157, 179, 223, 224 Hagge, Marlene, 386 Hagler, Marvin (“Marvelous”), 466 Hahn, Archie, 138 Halas, George, 297, 298, 337, 500 Hale, William H., 130 Hall, Ervin, 378 Halmay, Zoltan, 138 Halstead, Alfred, 87 Hamill, James, 63 Hamilton, Steve, 463 Hamilton, Tyler, 532 Hamilton, William (“Billy”), 79 Hamm, Mia, 512 Hamner, Granny, 320 Hanlan, Ned, 64 Hans, Rollen, 329 Hansen, Fred, 374 Hapes, Merle, 300 Hard, Darlene, 388 Harding, Tonya, 521 Harlem Globetrotters, 240 Harlow, Robert (“Bob”), 157, 180 Harmon, Tom, 294 harness racing, 30–32, 61–62 Harper, Jesse, 171 Harper, Ron, 493 Harper, William Rainey, 125, 127 Harris, Franco, 409 Harrison, Les, 331 Harroun, Ray, 188 Hart, Eddie, 417 Hart, Leon, 295, 296 Hart, Marvin, 145 Hartack, Bill, 348, 389 Harvey, Doug, 388 Haskins, Clem, 498 Haslett, Jim, 458 Haughton, Percy, 170 Havemeyer, Theodore A., 108

Havlicek, John, 361, 362 Hawk, Frank, 474 Hawkins, Connie, 402 Hay, Bill, 388 Hayes, Abner, 371 Hayes, Bob, 374 Hayes, Elvin, 356, 362, 363 Hayes, John J., 141 Hayes, Woody, 334 Haynes, Marques, 292 Haynie, Sandra, 386 Haywood, Spencer, 401, 402, 450, 451 Hearnes, Thomas, 466 Heenah, John, 59 Heilman, Harry, 202 Heine, Sonja, 262 Heinsohn, Tom, 332 Heisman, John, 171 Heiss, Carol, 341 Heldman, Gladys, 429 Henderson, Edwin, 204 Henderson, Paul, 415 Henderson, Ricky, 446 Henrich, Tommy, 278 Hernandez, Keith, 444 Herreshoff, Nathaniel, 111 Hicks, Thomas, 138 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 27, 28, 35 Hill, A. G., 215 Hill, Pete, 124 Hincapie, George, 532 Hines, Jimmy, 378 Hirsch, Elroy (“Crazy Legs”), 337 Hnida, Katie, 504 hockey, 215, 248–49; 1900–1909, 134–36; 1950s, 339; 1960s, 388; 1970s, 411–15; 1980s, 460–61; 1990 to the present, 508–11; Olympics, 519–20 Hodges, Gil, 323 Hofheinz, Judge Roy, 356 Hogan, Ben, 344, 346, 385 Hogan, Frank, 289 Hogan, Hulk, 471 Hogan, James, 57 Hogan, Patti, 429 Holdsclaw, Chamique, 497 Holland, Bill, 306 Hollins, Marion, 181 Holm, Eleanor, 252, 264 Holman, Nat, 203, 206, 240, 325, 326 Holmes, Larry, 426, 466 Holum, Dianne, 376

557

558

INDEX

Holyfield, Evander, 522, 523, 524 Hoover, J. Edgar, 276 Hopkins, Bernard, 522 Horine, George, 187 Hornsby, Rogers (“Rajah”), 165, 202 Hornung, Paul, 371 horse racing, 31; 1861–1889, 61–63; 1890s, 103–7; 1910s, 181–83; 1920s, 224–25; 1930s, 266–68; 1940s, 305–6; 1950s, 348; 1960s, 388–89; 1970s, 432; 1980s, 470; 1990 to the present, 525–26; early history, 10–12; economics, 181–83; gambling, 62, 103, 106–7, 224, 266, 526 Horton, Tim, 339 Houseman, Lou, 144 Houston Astrodome, 356 Howard, Elston, 316, 320 Howe, Gordie, 339, 412, 510 Hruska, Roman, 421 Hubbard, Cal, 215 Hubbell, Carl, 234 Hudson, Martha, 375 Huff, Sam, 338 Hughes, Charles Evans, 182 Hughes, Sarah, 521 Hulbert, William, 48, 49, 50 Hull, Bobby, 339, 388, 412, 413 Hunt, Lamar, 366 Hunter, Bill, 412 Hunter, James (“Catfish”), 398 hunting, 12, 13–14, 64–65 Huntington, Henry, 149 Hurd, Dorothy Campbell, 181 Husman, Tony, 306 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 245 Hyer, Tom, 17, 24 Hyman, Misty, 518 Iba, Hank, 241, 289, 290–91 Independent Women’s Football League (IWFL), 503 Indy Car racing, 537–38 Inkster, Juli, 527 Inter Collegiate Athletic Association (ICAA), 130, 131, 132 Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America (IC4A), 66 Intercollegiate Hockey League, 91, 134, 135 Intercollegiate Rowing Association, 64 International Amateur Athletic Federation, 185 International Bowling Association, 268 International Boxing Club (IBC), 342

International Hockey League (IHL), 92, 136 International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF), 428 International League of Independent Professional Ball Players, 124 International Olympic Committee (IOC), 137, 236, 416, 515 International Tennis Federation (ITF), 184 Interstate League, 204 Irish, Ned, 274, 288, 292, 329 Irsay, Robert, 410 Irvin, Monte, 316 Iverson, Allen, 495 Jabbar, Kareem Abdul, 363, 403, 448, 449 Jackson, Joseph Jefferson (“Shoeless Joe”), 157, 164, 165, 200 Jackson, Peter (“Black Prince”), 96, 97 Jackson, Phil, 492, 493 Jackson, Tony, 327 Jackson, Vincent (“Bo”), 447 Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman, 90 Jacobs, Helen, 265 Jaeger, Andrea, 469 James, Larry, 378 James, LeBron, 495 Jeanette, Joe, 176 Jeannette, Buddy, 291 Jeffries, James J. (“Jim”), 142, 145, 146, 175, 176 Jenkins, Clarence (“Fat”), 205 Jenkins, David, 341 Jenkins, Hayes, 340 Jennings, Hugh, 119, 121 Jensen, Jackie, 324 Jethroe, Sam, 283 Jewett, George, 90 Jewish athletes, 67, 167, 205; baseball, 80, 234, 322, 359; basketball, 167–69, 205, 239; boxing, 97, 142–43, 178, 219; football, 246; Olympics, 188, 254, 415–16; tennis, 348; track and field, 187 Johannson, Ingemar, 343 Johnson, Bancroft (“Ban”), 81, 114, 115, 117–19, 164 Johnson, Ben, 465 Johnson, Cornelius, 254, 256, 260 Johnson, Earvin (“Magic”), 403–5, 439, 447–50, 478, 494, 519 Johnson, Grant (“Home Run”), 124 Johnson, Jack, 142, 144–47, 175–76, 220–21, 257

INDEX

Johnson, Michael, 516 Johnson, Rafer, 341 Johnson, Randy, 486 Johnson, Walter (“Big Train”), 202, 304 Johnson, William (“Hootie”), 528 Johnson, William R., 21 Johnston, Bill (“Little Bill”), 225 Johnston, William M., 185 Jones, Barbara, 375 Jones, Bobby (“the Emperor”), 266, 305 Jones, Charley, 46 Jones, Howard, 209 Jones, Jerry, 501 Jones, John Paul, 186 Jones, K. C., 327, 330, 361, 449 Jones, Marion, 516, 517 Jones, Perry, 304 Jones, R. William, 417 Jones, Robert Tyre (“Bobby”), 223, 224 Jones, Roy, Jr., 522 Jones, Sam, 361, 362 Jones-Smoke, Marcia, 376 Jordan, David Starr, 131 Jordan, Don, 380 Jordan, Michael, 439, 449–53, 491–94, 519 Joyner, Al, 464 Joyner, Florence Griffith (“FloJo”), 464–65 Joyner-Kersee, Jackie, 464, 465, 516 Kahanamoku, Duke Paoa, 149, 215, 216 Kalsu, Bob, 371, 479 Karras, Alex, 371 Kaufman, Al, 145 Keck, Howard, 349 Kefauver, Estes, 341 Keinath, Charles, 125 Kellmeyer, Fern, 422 Kellogg, John Harvey, 77 Kelly, Billy, 184 Kelly, Jim, 458 Kelly, Michael Joseph (“King”), 51, 52 Kemp, Jack, 367 Keon, Dave, 388 Kep, Jan, 459 Kerner, Ben, 328, 330 Kerr, Steve, 493 Kerrigan, Nancy, 521 Kersee, Bob, 464 Ketchel, Stanley, 144, 145 Kharlamov, Valery, 415 Kiick, Jim, 409 Kilbane, Johnny, 178

Killion, Joseph, 60 Kilmer, Willis Sharpe, 183 Kilrain, Jake, 60, 96, 97 Kim, Duk Koo, 466 King, Betsy, 428, 467, 527 King, Billie Jean, 386, 428, 429, 430 King, Don, 423, 424, 425, 426, 525 Kite, Tom, 467 Kiviat, Abel, 186 Klein, Chuck, 202 Kling, Johnny, 119 Knickerbocker rules, 33–34 Knight, Bob, 329 Knight, Bobby, 405, 499 Koufax, Sandy, 358, 359 Kraenzlein, Alvin, 95 Kramer, Jack, 304, 305 Krayzelburg, Lenny, 518 Krone, Julie, 526 Krzyzewski, Mike (“Coach K.”), 497 Kuhn, Bowie, 357, 398, 442 Kukoc, Toni, 494 Kurland, Bob, 289, 290–91 Kwan, Michelle, 520 La Chapelle, Madame Exilde, 67 Labine, Clem, 321 Lacy, Sam, 235, 283 Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), 305, 345, 427 Laettner, Christian, 519 LaGuardia, Fiorello, 279 Lakers-Celtics domination, 448–49 Lamonica, Daryle, 370 LaMotta, Jake, 303, 343 Landis, Floyd, 532, 533 Landis, Kenesaw Mountain, 164–65, 198–200, 233–35, 263, 273 Landry, Tom, 501 Lane, Dick (“Night Train”), 336 Lane, Floyd, 326 Langford, Sam, 220 Lanier, Bob, 449 Lanier, Hal, 286 Lapchick, Joe, 203, 204 Lapinski, Tara, 521 Lardner, Ring, 201, 211, 222 Larned, William A., 184 Larsen, Don, 322, 323 Larson, Clinton, 188 Lasorda, Tommy, 482 Lavagetto, Cookie, 287

559

560

INDEX

Layden, Elmer, 298 Layne, Bobby, 337 League of American Wheelman (LAW), 70, 100, 103, 104 Leahy, Frank, 294, 295, 334 Lear, Hal, 327 Leary, J. Scott, 138 legal issues: baseball, 158, 199–200, 482–83; boxing, 25, 97–98, 220–23, 342; college football, 211–13, 243; horse racing, 182 Leinart, Matt, 508 Leipheimer, Levi, 532 Leland, Frank, 123 Lemieux, Mario, 510 LeMond, Greg, 531, 534 Lenglen, Suzanne, 225 Lennon, John, 407 Lentauw, 138 Leonard, Benny, 178, 218, 223 Leonard, Buck, 235, 281 Leonard, Sugar Ray, 343, 466 Leslie, Lisa, 496 Levy, Fred, Jr., 298 Lewis, Carl, 464, 465, 516, 517 Lewis, Diocletian, 27, 28 Lewis, Lennox, 523, 524 Lewis, Ted (“Kid”), 178 Lewis, William Henry, 90 Lieberman, Nancy, 406 Lilly, Christopher, 24 Lilly, Kristine, 512 Linder, Joe, 136 Ling, Per Henrik, 28 Lipton, Sir Thomas, 111 Liston, Sonny, 382, 383 Little League, 236–37, 276, 422 Lloyd, Earl, 329 Lloyd, John, 468 Lloyd, John Henry, 124, 199 Lobo, Rebecca, 496 Loftus, Johnny, 184 Lombardi, Vince, 211, 339, 371 London, Brian, 384 London, Jack, 146 Long Count, The, 219 Long, Dallas, 374 Longden, Johnny, 389 Longley, Luc, 493 Lopez, Nancy, 427, 428, 467 Los Angeles Organizing Committee (LAOC), 251 Louganis, Greg, 478

Loughran, Tommy, 223 Louis, Joe, 257–58, 269, 274, 301–3, 343 Lowe, Paul, 368 Lubin, Frank, 242 Lubinas, Pranas, 242 Lucas, Charles, 138 Lucas, Jerry, 362, 365 Lucas, John, 452 Luisetti, Hank, 240 Lujack, Johnny, 294, 295, 296 Lukas, D. Wayne, 526 Lutz, Bob, 387 Lynd, Helen, 237–38 Lynd, Robert, 237–38 Lyon, David Willard, 84 Macci, Rick, 529 MacCracken, Henry, 129 Macdonald, Charles B., 109 Mack, Connie, 157 Mackey, Biz, 199 Mackey, John, 408 MacPhail, Larry, 232, 233 MacPhail, Lee, 280, 281, 283, 287 Madden, John E., 184 Maddux, Greg, 486 Madison, Helene, 252, 264 Maglie, Sal, 323 Mahovlich, Frank, 388 Mahre, Phil, 463 Mahre, Steve, 463 Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL), 471 Major League Baseball (MLB), 278–81, 397, 481. See also baseball Mallard, John, 20 Mallory, Molla Bjurstedt, 186, 225 Malloy, Dallas, 524 Malone, Karl, 519 Malone, Moses, 450 Mancini, Ray, 466 Mann, Carol, 386 Manning-Jackson, Madeline, 378 Mantle, Mickey, 316, 320–23, 358 Maravich, (“Pistol”) Pete, 363 Marble, Alice, 265 Marciano, Rocky, 303, 343, 382 Marichal, Juan, 356, 358, 359 Maris, Roger, 325, 357, 358, 484, 485 Marquis of Queensbury, 59–60, 96, 175, 177, 218 Marsans, Armando, 158 Marshall, George Preston, 247, 297, 299, 337

INDEX

Marshall, Mary, 67 Martin, Casey, 529 Martin, Christy, 524 Martin, Ed, 497 Martin, Fred, 286 Martin, Johnny (“Pepper”), 234 Martinez, Pedro, 486 Masters, Catherine, 503 Mathews, Ed, 323 Mathews, Margaret, 375 Mathewson, Christy, 118, 164 Mathias, Bob, 277, 340 Matson, James, 378 Matson, Ollie, 336 Mauresmo, Amelie, 533 Mays, Carl, 201 Mays, Willie, 316, 321–22, 355, 356 Mayweather, Floyd, Jr., 522 Mazeroski, Bill, 325 McBride, Brian, 513 McBride, Ken, 329 McBride, Kevin, 524 McCartney, Bill, 460 McCombs, Melvin, 260 McCormick, Moose, 121 McCoy, Kid, 144 McCoy, Thomas, 24 McDermott, Bobby, 291 McDermott, John J., 179 McDermott, Richard, 374, 376 McEnroe, John, 430, 468 McGee, William J., 139 McGrady, Tracy, 495 McGraw, John, 79, 115–17, 202 McGuire, Edith, 374, 375 McGwire, Mark, 446, 483–85, 490–91 McHale, Kevin, 403, 404, 448 McIntosh, Hugh (“Huge Deal”), 145 McLain, Denny, 360 McLoughlin, Maurice E., 184, 185 McMahon, Jess, 159 McMahon, Vince, 471, 503, 504 McMullin, Fred, 164 McNally, Dave, 398 McNamee, Graham, 195, 219, 221 McNeil, Lori, 469 McSorley, Marty, 509 McTigue, Mike, 223 Meanwell, Walter (“Doc”), 206 Mears, Rick, 537 media, 87, 269, 433, 440, 441; baseball, 200–201, 233, 318–20, 443–44;

basketball, 203, 205; boxing, 146, 221–22, 342; college basketball, 326–27; college football, 210–11, 242, 333, 459–60; horse racing, 266; Olympics, 215, 252, 340; professional football, 247, 334, 337. See also broadcasting; broadcasting revenues; ESPN; newspapers; radio; television Medwick, Joe (“Ducky”), 234 Meggyesy, Dave, 411 Mendez, Jose, 160 Meredith, Don, 407 Meredith, James (“Ted”), 186 Merkle, Fred, 121, 122 Messersmith, Andy, 398 Messier, Mark, 510 Metcalfe, Ralph, 253, 256, 259 Meyer, Debbie, 380 Meyer, Louis, 267 Meyer, Ray, 331 Meyerhoff, Arthur, 282 Meyers, Mary, 376 Michael, “Midget,” 100 Mickelson, Phil, 527 Middlecoff, Cary, 346 Mikan, George, 288–92, 330, 331, 361 Mikita, Stan, 388 Milbret, Tiffany, 512 Miller, Cheryl, 452, 453, 515 Miller, Marvin, 357, 397 Miller, Shannon, 518 Mills, Billy, 374 Ming, Yao, 495 Minor, Davage, 329 minorities. See African Americans; disabilities; ethnicity; Jewish athletes; race; women Minoso, Saturnino (“Minnie”), 317 Mitchell, Charlie, 60 Mitchell, Dale, 323 Mitchell, George, 485 Mitchell, Sam, 91 Mize, Johnny, 320 Mobutu, Joseph Desire, 424 Moceanu, Dominique, 518 Mochrie, Dottie, 527 Moffitt, Billie Jean, 387 Molineaux, Tom, 23 money. See economic issues; gambling; salaries Montana, Joe, 455, 500 Moore, Archie, 343

561

562

INDEX

Moore, Harold, 129 Moore, Jackie, 329 Moore, Lenny, 336, 338 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 139 Morgan, William G., 86, 87 Morrall, Earl, 370 Morrison, Tommy, 478 Morrissey, John, 46, 62 Morrow, Bobby, 341 Moses, Edwin, 462 Motley, Marion, 275, 299, 300, 336 Mozee, Phoebe Ann, 70 Muchnick, H. Y., 283 Muesel, Bob, 201 Mulford, Ralph, 188 Mullen, Chris, 519 Munger, Birdie, 104 Murphy, Dennis, 401, 412 Murphy, Father Edward, 381 Murphy, Isaac, 62, 103, 105 Murphy, Mary Elizabeth (“Lizzie”), 160 Murphy, Robert, 286 muscular Christianity, 27, 44, 83, 87, 144 Musial, Stan, 286, 321 Myers, Ann, 406 Myers, Lawrence (“Lon”), 67 Myhra, Steve, 338 Myrdal, Gunnar, 283 Nadal, Rafael, 531 Nagurski, Bronko, 211, 246 Naismith, James, 82–84, 87, 125, 166, 237 Namath, Joe, 368, 370, 409 Nance, Jim, 371 NASCAR, 267, 306, 432, 535–36 National Association of Amateur Athletes of America, 67 National Association of Amateur Oarsmen, 64 National Association of Basketball Coaches, 207, 241 National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP), 47 National Basketball League (NBL), 167, 239, 291, 328 National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), 402 National Football Conference (AFC), 409 National Football League. See NFL National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), 407 National Hockey League (NHL), 215, 248, 339, 388, 411, 461

National League (NL), 49–50, 53–54, 78–79, 158, 199, 355 National Recreation Association, 263 National Ski Association of America (NSA), 148 National Trotting Association, 62 National Women’s Football Association (NWFA), 503 Native Americans, 2–5, 172 Navratilova, Martina, 430, 431, 468, 469, 533 NBA, 205, 289, 291, 328, 360–61, 401; 1950s, 330–32; 1980s, 447–50; 1990 to the present, 492–95; economics, 449–50; geography, 328–29; Lakers-Celtics domination, 448–49; scandals, 450–52 NCAA, 166, 293, 325, 410, 471–72; Title IX, 420–23; women’s sports, 472 Neer, Phil, 265 Negro American League, 234–37, 281–83, 316 Negro National League, 48, 198, 234–35, 281–83, 316 Nelson, Byron, 266, 305, 346 Nelson, Maud, 160 Nelson, Oscar (“Battling”), 143 Nevers, Ernie, 209, 211 Newby, Arthur, 188 Newcombe, Don, 275, 284, 288, 316, 321 Newcombe, John, 430 Newcome, Don, 321 Newhouser, Hal, 281 Newman, Harry, 246 newspapers, 15, 197, 200, 318; baseball, 200; basketball, 203; boxing, 146; college football, 87, 210–11, 242, 327; cycling, 100; Olympics, 94, 215, 341; professional football, 337, 369; races, 31, 267. See also media New York State League, 204, 206 Neyland, Bob (“the General”), 244 NFL, 212, 274, 297, 334, 366, 370; 1990 to the present, 499–502; ethnicity, 336–37; Greatest Game Ever Played, 338; television, 406 Nicholas, Alison, 527 Nichols, Bobby, 385 Nicklaus, Jack, 384, 426, 427 Niekro, Phil, 489 Nixon, Richard, 395, 420 Noll, Chuck, 409 Nomo, Hideo, 482

INDEX

Norman, Peter, 377 North American Soccer League (NASL), 470, 511 Norton, Ken, 326, 423, 426 Nowitzki, Dirk, 495 Nurmi, Paavo, 215, 216, 217 Nuxhall, Joe, 273 O’Brien, Jack (“Philadelphia”), 144, 145 O’Brien, Larry, 404, 449 O’Connor, Earl E., 421 O’Day, Hank, 121 O’Leary, Daniel, 67, 68 O’Malley, Walter, 284, 318 O’Meara, Mark, 527 O’Neal, Shaquille, 492 O’Ree, Willie, 339 Oakley, Annie, 65, 70 Oerter, Al, 374, 378 Ohio League, 213 Ohno, Apollo Anton, 520 Okafor, Emeka, 497 Olajuwon, Hakeem, 449, 493 Olmedo, Alex, 347 Olson, Connie Mack, 293 Olson, John B., Jr., 160 Olujawon, Hakeem, 492 Olympic Project for Human Rights, 377 Olympics, 95; 1900–1909, 136–42; 1910s, 173–75; 1920s, 215–18; 1930s, 250–56; 1950s, 339–41; 1960s, 373–80; 1970s, 415–20; 1980s, 461–65; 1990 to the present, 515–22; baseball, 236; basketball, 241; boycotts, 255; early history of, 92–95; race, 175; soccer, 249 Oosterbaan, Bennie, 211 Orr, Bobby, 388 Orser, Brian, 464 Ortiz, Manuel, 303 Osborne, Tom, 504, 507 Ouimet, Francis, 179 Outerbridge, Mary Ewing, 69 Overend, Ned, 533, 534 Owen, John, 69 Owen, Mickey, 278, 286 Owens, Jesse, 254, 255, 259 Pacific Coast Conference, 333 Paddock, Charlie, 215 Page, H. O. (“Pat”), 125, 126 Page, Joe, 287 Paige, Leroy (“Satchel”), 235, 281, 288, 316

Palermo, Frank (“Blinkie”), 381 Palmer, Arnold, 344, 346, 384, 426, 427 Palmer, Carson, 508 Papaleo, Guglielmo, 303 Papke, Billy, 144 Paralympics, 521–22 Paret, Benny (“the Kid”), 380 Parish, Robert, 403 Park, Chan Ho, 482 Parker, Tony, 495 Parrish, Robert, 448 Pascual, Jorge, 286 Pasqual, Camilo, 317 Passon, Harry, 167 Paterno, Joe, 507 Patrick, Danica, 538 Patterson, Floyd, 340, 343, 381, 383 Patterson, Worthy, 330 Peete, Calvin, 467 Pegler, Westbrook, 222 Pele, 470 Pennsylvania State League, 204, 206 Pep, Willie, 303 Perabo, Susan, 488 perfect game, 323 performance-enhancing drugs. See drugs Perry, Hal, 327 Perry, Joe, 336 Pettit, Bob, 330 Pettite, Andy, 491 Petty, Richard, 432, 536 Petway, Bruce, 125 Phal, Baye, 220 Phelps, Jaycie, 518 Phelps, Michael, 518 Phillippe, Charles (“Deacon”), 115, 116 Phillips, Lawrence, 504 Pierce, Chester, 297 Pierce, Palmer, 130 Pincay, Laffit, 470 Pippen, Scottie, 492, 493, 519 Player, Gary, 385 Players League (PL), 52, 54, 78 playground movement, 166 Plunkett, Jim, 372 point shaving, 277, 289, 325–26, 453, 498 Polamalu, Troy, 508 politics, 21, 352, 394, 439–41; horse racing, 106–7; Olympics, 251, 373, 415–16 Pollard, Fritz, 172, 214, 247, 296, 457 Pove, Victor Pellot, 317 Povich, Shirley, 211

563

564

INDEX

Power, Vic, 317 Poynton, Dorothy, 264 Prinstein, Meyer, 94 professional basketball, 238–40; 1940s, 291–92; 1950s, 328–32; 1960s, 360–65; 1970s, 401–4; 1980s, 447–53; 1990 to the present, 492–96; economics, 449–50; ethnicity, 329–30; geography, 328–29; Lakers-Celtics domination, 448–49; NBA, 447–50; scandals, 450–52. See also basketball Professional Basketball League of America (PBLA), 292 Professional Bowlers Association, 349 professional football, 213–15, 247–48; 1940s, 297–301; 1950s, 334–39; 1960s, 366–71; 1970s, 406–10; 1980s, 453–59; 1990 to the present, 499–504; economics, 454–57; ethnicity, 214, 336–37; gender, 503–4; Greatest Game Ever Played, 338; media, 337; NFL, 499–502; spectacle, 503–4; steroids, 458–59; USFL, 457–58. See also football Professional Golfers Association (PGA), 305 Proposition 48, 472–73 protests, 374, 376. See also boycotts Pulliam, Harry C., 121, 122 Pullman, George, 44 Quann, Megan, 518 Quarry, Jerry, 384 Queen, Frank, 24 Queensbury rules, 59–60, 96, 175, 177, 218 race: baseball, 122–25, 315–17; boxing, 175, 176–77, 256–59; Negro Leagues, 234–37; Olympics, 175. See also African Americans; color line; discrimination; racial segregation racial segregation, 264, 285; baseball, 235, 355; basketball, 239, 292; bowling, 268; boxing, 256–59; college basketball, 327; college football, 247, 296–97; golf, 347; professional football, 247, 300. See also color line; discrimination radio, 197, 201, 269, 318–20; baseball, 233; boxing, 219, 221–22, 258, 342; college football, 212, 245; professional football, 337. See also broadcasting; broadcasting revenues; media Raft, George, 287 Ramsey, Frank, 361

Ranbo, John, 374 Rankin, Judy, 427 Raskind, Richard, 431 Rasmussen, Bill, 433 Rasmussen, Scott, 433 Rawls, Betsy, 344, 345, 386 Rawls, Katherine, 264 Raycroft, Joseph, 125 Reach, Al, 45 Reagan, Ronald, 407 Reed, Willis, 362 Reese, Harold (“Pee Wee”), 287, 323 Reeves, Daniel F., 298 Reid, Bill, 129 relocations: baseball, 317–18; hockey, 461; professional basketball, 360–61, 450; professional football, 368, 455 Remington, Frederic, 55 reserve clause, 53, 199, 357, 397, 454 Retton, Mary Lou, 464 Reynolds, Allie, 287 Rice, Grantland, 200, 201, 211, 222 Richard, Maurice (“the Rocket”), 339 Richards, Alma, 187 Richards, Bob, 341 Richards, Renee, 431 Richards, Vince, 216, 225 Richardson, Michael Ray, 452 Richey, Nancy, 388 Rickard, George L. (“Tex”), 143, 176, 219, 220, 223, 257 Rickey, Wesley Branch, 234, 275, 279, 284–85, 321 Ricks, James (“Pappy”), 205 Riggs, Robert Larimore (“Bobby”), 304, 428, 430 Rijker, Lucia, 524 Riley, Pat, 449 Ripken, Cal, Jr. (“Iron Man”), 483, 484 Riseberg, Swede, 164 Rizzotti, Jennifer, 497 Rizzuto, Phil, 320 Roberts, Robin, 320 Robertson, Oscar, 341, 362, 402, 403 Robeson, Paul, 214, 296 Robinson, David, 492, 519 Robinson, Eddie, 507 Robinson, Frank, 316, 400 Robinson, Jackie, 275–76, 283–86, 289, 323, 400, 478 Robinson, Melinda, 524 Robinson, Rey, 417

INDEX

Robinson, Shawna, 537 Robinson, Sugar Ray, 303, 343 Robinson, Will, 405 Rockne, Knute, 171, 196, 208–10, 244, 333 rodeos, 17–21 Rodman, Dennis, 452, 492, 493, 503 Rodney, Lester, 283 Rodriguez, Alex (“A-Rod”), 482 Rodriquez, Chi-Chi, 468 Rogers, Will, 253 Rooney, Art, 337 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 231, 250, 251, 269, 279 Roosevelt, Theodore, 133, 137, 140, 145, 147, 155, 168 Root, Charlie, 230 Root, Jack, 144, 145 Roper, Jim, 306 Rose, Mauri, 306 Rose, Pete, 444, 445, 446, 447 Rose, Ralph, 141 Roseboro, John, 358 Rosen, Al, 322 Ross, J. K. L., 184 Ross, Norman, 215 Rote, Tobin, 367 Rousseau, Bobby, 388 rowing, 63–64 Roxborough, John, 258, 301 Roy, Alvin, 458 Royal, Darrell, 334 Rozelle, Pete, 366, 371, 406, 407, 458 Rudolph, Wilma, 341, 375 rules: baseball, 33–34, 37, 45, 47, 51–52, 79, 398; basketball, 82, 85–86, 125, 203, 240; boxing, 59, 60, 96, 98, 176–78, 218; college basketball, 166, 290, 331, 404, 472; college football, 242, 410; football, 54–57, 88, 128–30, 133, 168; hockey, 508–10; horse racing, 12, 62; professional football, 172, 298, 334, 407, 501; track and field, 65, 66; volleyball, 87 Rumble in the Jungle, 424 Runyon, Damon, 201 Rupp, Adolph, 241, 325, 326, 405 Rupp, Arnold, 289 Ruppert, Jacob, 232 Rush, Cathy, 405 Russell, “Honey,” 289 Russell, Bill, 327, 330, 341, 361–63, 403, 496

Russell, Byron, 493 Ruth, George Herman (“Babe”), 196, 200–202, 230, 236, 358, 486 Rutherford, John, 432 Ryan, Paddy, 59, 60 Ryan, Tommy, 144 Ryun, Jim, 378 Sabonis, Arvydas, 494 Sain, Johnny, 287 Saitch, Eyre (“Bruiser”), 205 Saith, George, 349 salaries, 53, 282, 397; baseball, early period, 47, 50, 52, 78; baseball, early 20th century, 120, 158, 162, 196, 199–200, 233, 235; baseball, later 20th century, 398, 442, 447, 482; coaches, 209; college football, 244; golf, 305, 385–86, 427; hockey, 413, 461; NBA, 449, 493; professional football, 298, 337, 453–54; tennis, 428; women’s golf, 345, 427 Sampras, Petros (“Pete”), 530, 531 Sanchez, Alex, 491 Sanders, Satch, 361 Sandler, Sandy, 303 Sandow, Eugen, 99 Sands, Charles E., 109 Saperstein, Abe, 292 Sarazen, Gene, 223, 224, 266, 385 Saubert, Jean, 374 Sauer, Hank, 322 Sauldsberry, Woody, 330 Savage, Howard, 243 Savage Games, 139 Savoldi, Joe, 246 Sayers, Tom, 59 scandals: baseball, 162–66, 289, 444–47; basketball, 289; Black Sox, 163–66, 199–200, 281; boxing, 341, 525; college basketball, 497–98; college football, 244, 296, 459, 504–5; figure skating, 521; horse racing, 526; organized crime, 103, 222, 341, 525; professional basketball, 450–52; professional football, 172, 300, 371; track and field, 516. See also drugs; gambling; point shaving Schayes, Dolph, 330 Schmeling, Max, 223, 257–59, 269, 302 Schmidt, Boss, 119 Schmidt, Gottfried, 268 Schollander, Don, 374, 380

565

566

INDEX

Schommer, John, 126 schools and sports, 43–44, 52, 77, 89, 171, 208–9. See also Title IX Schranz, Karl, 419 Schreibner, Belle, 177 Scott, Byron, 449 Sears, Richard D., 70, 185 Seaver, Tom, 360 Sedran, Barney, 168, 169 Seitz, Peter, 398 Seixas, Vic, Jr., 347 Serrano, Laura, 524 sex appeal, 262, 263–64 sex testing, 376 Sexton, Margaret, 293 Shantz, Bobby, 322 Sharkey, Jack, 223, 257 Sharman, Bill, 332 Shaw, Gary, 411 Shaw, George, 338 Shaw, Wilbur, 306 Sheffield, Gary, 490 Shepard, Alan, 426 Sherrill, Charles, 69 Shiley, Jean, 260 Shires, Dana, 373 Shoemaker, Willie, 348, 389 shooting sports, 12–14, 64–65 Shot Heard Round the World, 321 Shotton, Burt, 287 Shula, Don, 500 Sifford, Charlie, 346 Siki, Battling, 223 Simmons, Al, 202 Simmons, Curt, 320 Simmons, Oze, 247 Simms, Willie, 105, 106 Simpson, O. J., 372 Sims, Billy, 411 simulated sport, 538 Skalbania, Nelson, 413 skating, 262, 520; 1900–1909, 137, 151; early American history, 8, 10; figure skating, 262, 340–41, 464, 519; roller skating, 70; speed skating, 250, 376 Skelly, Jack, 98 skiing, 136, 148, 250, 341, 520–21, 522 Slater, Duke, 214 Slaughter, Enos, 286, 320 slavery, 16–17, 23, 176 Sloan, Tod, 106 Sloane, William Milligan, 92

Slocum, Hilton (“Kid”), 205 Smart, Joe, 115 Smith, Andy, 209 Smith, Bruce, 294 Smith, Dean, 405 Smith, Emmitt, 501 Smith, Lillian, 65 Smith, Louise, 537 Smith, Marilynn, 386 Smith, Red, 211 Smith, Stan, 387, 430 Smith, Tommie, 377, 378 Smith, Walter (“Red”), 201 Smith, Wendell, 235, 283 Smith, Willie, 291 Snead, Sam, 266, 344, 346 Snider, Duke, 316 Snow, Neil, 134 soccer, 8, 248–49, 470–71, 511–13 Social Darwinism, 64, 89 softball, 260, 282, 345, 423, 514–15 Soo, Ahn Hyun, 520 Sosa, Sammy, 483, 484, 485, 491 Southeastern Conference (SEC), 327, 333 Southwest Conference (SWC), 333 Spahn, Warren, 287, 323 Spalding, Albert, 49–54, 70, 116, 137 Sperber, Murray, 294 Spinks, Leon, 425, 426 Spinks, Michael, 466 Spitz, Mark, 380, 415 sportainment, 492 sporting goods industry, 15, 43, 50, 114, 125, 305 Spurrier, Steve, 372 St. James, Lyn, 537 St. John, Mia, 524 stadiums, 209, 312; baseball, 355, 486–88; college football, 242 Stagg, Amos Alonzo, 57, 82, 127, 209, 244 Stallings, Gene, 372 Stallworth, John, 409 Stanky, Eddie, 287 Stannard, Henry, 20, 66 Star-Spangled Banner, 236 Starr, Bart, 371 Staubach, Roger, 372 Steinetz, Christian, 126 Stengel, Casey, 288, 320 Stephens, Helen, 254, 262 Stephens, Vern, 286 Stephenson, Dwight, 457

INDEX

Stern, David, 450, 452, 494 Stevens, Francis, 20 Stevens, Gary, 526 Stevens, John Cox, 20, 21, 22, 33, 66 Stewart, Dave, 446 Stewart, William Payne, 527 stock car racing, 306, 432, 535–37. See also NASCAR Stockton, John, 449, 519 Stokes, Maurice, 329 Stoneham, Horace, 318 Stotz, Carl, 237 Stouder, Sharon, 374 Stover, Harry, 78 Strange, Curtis, 467 Street, Picabo, 520 strikes, 397, 442, 483 Strode, Woody, 298, 336 Strug, Kerri, 518 Sturm, Felix, 522 Suggs, Louise, 344, 345, 386 Sullivan, “Big Tim,” 107 Sullivan, Ed, 201 Sullivan, Jack (“Twin”), 144 Sullivan, James (“Yankee”), 17, 24 Sullivan, James E., 95, 132, 137, 139, 140 Sullivan, John L., 45, 56–60, 96–97, 146, 219 Summitt, Pat, 496 Surfing, 149 Susman, Karen Hantze, 388 Sutherland, John (“Jock”), 244 Sutphin, Al, 292 Sutton, May, 186 Suzuki, Ichiro, 482 Swann, Lynn, 409 swimming, 259, 261, 264, 374–75, 518; 1900–1909, 149; 1920s, 215–18; 1930s, 252, 263–64; 1950s, 341; 1960s, 374–75, 380, 390; early American history, 9, 66–67 Switzer, Barry, 459, 501 Swoopes, Sheryl, 496 Szymansky, Beverly, 524 Taber, Norman, 186 Tam, Tim, 348 Tanner, Roscoe, 430 Tarkanian, Jerry, 498 Tarver, Antonio, 522 Tatum, Goose, 292 Taurasi, Diana, 497

Taylor, Fred, 365 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 170 Taylor, Jim, 371 Taylor, Marshall (“Major”), 100, 103, 104, 147 Taylor, Robert, 497 television, 269, 313, 318–19, 440; baseball, 443; boxing, 341, 342, 380, 425, 466; college basketball, 453; college football, 333; golf, 343, 384; Greatest Game Ever Played, 338; hockey, 415, 461; NASCAR, 535; NCAA, 410; NFL, 406–7; Olympics, 341, 419; professional basketball, 403–4; professional football, 334, 337; women’s basketball, 406. See also broadcasting; broadcasting revenues; ESPN; media Temple, Ed, 375 Tennant, Forest, 459 tennis: 1890s, 107–10; 1900–1909, 149–50; 1910s, 183–85; 1920s, 224–25; 1930s, 264–66; 1940s, 304; 1950s, 347–48; 1960s, 386–88; 1970s, 428–32; 1980s, 468–69; 1990 to the present, 528–31 Terrell, Ernie, 384 Terry, Bill, 278 Thaden, Louise, 268 Thomas, Charles, 284 Thomas, Debi, 464 Thomas, Isiah, 452 Thomas, John, 374 Thompson, Jenny, 518 Thompson, John, 472 Thomson, Bobby, 321 thoroughbred horse racing. See horse racing Thorpe, Jim, 43, 133, 172–73, 175, 209, 213–14 Thrilla in Manila, 425 Tilden, William (“Big Bill”), 185, 225, 265 Tillman, Pat, 479 Title IX, 410, 420–23, 441, 472, 513–15 Tittle, Y. A., 371 Tolan, Eddie, 253, 256, 259 Tomjanovich, Rudy, 493 Toney, James, 522 Toomey, Bill, 378 Torrance, Gwen, 516 Tower, John, 421 Towler, Dan, 336 Trabert, Tony, 347 track and field, 185–88; 1861–1889, 65–69; 1910s, 185–88; 1930s, 259–63; 1990 to the present, 516–17. See also Olympics

567

568

INDEX

transistor radio, 319. See also radio transportation, 47, 195–96, 206, 221 Travers, Jerome D., 179 Tremblay, Gilles, 388 Trevino, Lee, 385 Trinidad, Felix (“Tito”), 522 Triplett, Mel, 338 Trippi, Charlie, 301 Trump, Donald, 458 Tucker, Jim, 329 Tunis, John, 231 Tunnell, Emlen, 336, 371 Tunney, Gene, 219, 223, 257 Turcotte, Ron, 432 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 130 Twyman, Jack, 330, 332 Tyson, Mike, 466, 522, 523, 524 Tyus, Wyomia, 374, 378 Ueberroth, Peter, 445 Ullman, Joe, 116 uniforms, 263; baseball, 46, 232–33; cycling, 71; football, 55, 88; women’s baseball, 160 Unitas, Johnny, 338, 371 United States Olympic Committee (USOC), 418 Unseld, Wes, 362, 363 Unser, Al, 432 Unser, Bobby, 432 U.S. Football League (USFL), 457–58 U.S. Golf Association (USGA), 109, 261, 304 U.S. Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA), 70, 184, 304, 386, 428 U.S. National Lawn Tennis Association, 109 U.S. Tennis Association (USTA), 109, 347 Van Brocklin, Norm, 337, 339 van Dyken, Amy, 518 Vanderbilt, William K., 108 Vargas, Fernando (“Ferocious”), 522 Veblen, Thorstein, 63 Veeck, Bill, 275, 287, 355 Venturi, Ken, 385 Vincent, Fay, 446 Vines, Ellsworth, Jr., 265 violence: baseball, 80; basketball, 125; boxing, 59, 96, 146, 380; cycling, 101–3; football, 55, 58, 86, 88–89, 126, 168; hockey, 135, 414, 508, 509; NBA, 495

Vitale, John, 381 Voigt, David, 165 volleyball, 86, 87 Volpe, Ray, 427 von Hillern, Bertha, 67 von Saltza, Chris, 341 Vukovich, Bill, 349 Wade, Virginia, 388, 429 Wagner, Honus, 115 Walcott, Jersey Joe, 303, 343 Walcott, Joe, 143 Waldorf, Lynn (“Pappy”), 334 Walker, Dixie, 286 Walker, Doak, 296 Walker, Herschel, 457 Walker, Mickey, 178 Walker, Moses Fleetwood, 48, 51, 198 Wallace, Edwin (“Nunc”), 98 Walsh, Bill, 455, 457 Walsh, Ed, 118 Walters, Bucky, 278 Walthour, Bobby, Sr., 147 Walthour, Isaac, 329 Waltrip, Darrell, 432, 473 Wambsganss, Bill, 201 Wanamaker, Rodman, 180 Waner, Lloyd (“Little Poison”), 202 Waner, Paul (“Big Poison”), 202 war and sports, 155–56, 479; auto racing, 306; baseball, 161–62, 236, 278–88; basketball, 288; football, 294, 298 Ward, Arch, 211, 233, 298 Ward, Charlie, 507 Ward, John Montgomery, 53 Warfield, Paul, 409 Warner, Ed, 326, 327 Warner, Glenn Scobey (“Pop”), 173, 209, 244 Washburne, Hempstead, 107 Washington, Kenny, 247, 298, 336 Waterfield, Bob, 298, 335, 337 Watson, Tom, 427 Weaver, Buck, 164, 165 Webber, Chris, 497 Weber, Dick, 348 Webster, Alex, 338 weight classifications, 98, 142, 177, 218 Weill, David, 374 Weinke, Chris, 507 Weiss, George, 288 Weissmuller, Johnny, 216, 217, 263

INDEX

Welsh, Freddie, 178 Wertz, Vic, 322 West, Jerry, 341, 362 Western Conference, 125, 130, 170 Western League, 81, 114, 128 Western Pennsylvania Hockey League, 92 Westhead, Paul, 452 Weston, Edward Payson, 65, 67 Wheeler, Benjamin Ide, 131 Wheeler, Frank, 188 Whitaker, Pernell, 522 White, Andrew, 56 White, Bill, 445 White, J. William, 132 White, Jason, 508 White, Reggie, 458 White, Robert, 180 White, Sol, 124 White, Willye, 375 Whitney, Caspar, 56, 57, 137 Whitney, William C., 107 Whitted, P. D., 256 Whitworth, Kathy, 386, 427 Wie, Michelle, 527 Wightman, George, 186 Wightman, Hazel Hotchkiss, 150, 185, 186 Wilding, Tony, 185 Wilkens, Lenny, 362 Wilkes, Jamaal, 448 Wilkinson, Charles (“Bud”), 334, 335 Wilkinson, J. L., 160 Wilkinson, Laura, 518 Willard, Jess, 176, 177, 219, 221 Williams, Archie, 254, 260 Williams, Claude (“Lefty”), 163, 164 Williams, Cleveland (“Big Cat”), 384 Williams, Doug, 408, 457 Williams, Esther, 264 Williams, Joe, 230 Williams, Joe (“the Cyclone”), 159 Williams, John (“Hot Rod”), 453 Williams, Kid, 178 Williams, Lance, 517 Williams, Lucinda, 375 Williams, Marvin, 283 Williams, Serena, 528, 529, 530 Williams, Ted, 234, 278, 286, 287, 320, 323 Williams, Venus, 516, 528, 529, 531 Willis, Bill, 275, 299, 300, 336 Wills, Harry, 220, 223 Wills, Helen, 216, 225, 264, 265 Wilson, Bob, 329

Wind, Herbert Warren, 180 Winter, Max, 410 Witty, Chris, 520 Wolgast, Ad, 143 women, 69–72, 198, 231, 260–64, 420–23, 441; baseball, 160–62, 282–83, 488–89; basketball, 83, 85, 206, 292–93, 328, 472, 496; bowling, 268; boxing, 220, 524; college basketball, 496–97; cycling, 70, 147, 533; football, 502–3; golf, 180–81, 343–45, 427–28, 527; hockey, 510; rowing, 63, 69; soccer, 511–12; tennis, 61, 150. See also Title IX Women’s International Bowling Congress, 268 Women’s International Tennis Federation (WITF), 429 Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), 496 Women’s Professional Football League (WPFL), 503 Women’s Professional Golf Association (WPGA), 345 Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), 429 Wood, Tim, 376 Wooden, John, 239, 365, 404, 405 Woodruff, John, 254, 256, 260 Woods, Earl, 527 Woods, Eldrick (“Tiger”), 526 World Boxing Association (WBA), 383, 425 World Boxing Council (WBC), 383, 425 World Football League (WFL), 409 World Hockey Association (WHA), 412 Wrenn, Robert, 109 wrestling, 471 Wright, George, 46 Wright, Harry, 46, 49 Wright, Marcus, 188 Wright, Mary Kathryn (“Mickey”), 344, 345, 386 Wright, Stan, 377 Wrigley, Phillip, 274, 282 yachting, 107–11 Yamaguchi, Kristi, 520 Yamasani, 138 Yardley, George, 332 Yastrzemski, Carl, 359 Yawkey, William H., 119 YMCA, 82–84, 86–87, 166, 238, 240 Yost, Fielding (“Hurry Up”), 134, 209 Young, Andrew, 427

569

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INDEX

Young, Buddy, 296, 336 Young, Cy, 116 Young, Frank (“Fay”), 235, 283 Young, Steve, 458, 500 Younger, Paul (“Tank”), 336 Yount, Robin, 482 YWCA, 82, 87

Zaharias, George, 261 Zale, Tony, 302, 303 Zapotek, Emil, 340 Ziegler, John, 415 Zink, John, 349 Zoeller, Frank (“Fuzzy”), 528 Zuppke, Bob, 209, 212

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

MURRY R. NELSON is Professor Emeritus of Education and American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where he taught for thirty-three years. He has held Fulbright Senior Lectureships at the University of Iceland and the Norwegian Ministry of Education, and was the 2007–8 Laszlo Orzsag Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Debrecen in Hungary. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including The Originals: The New York Celtics Invent Modern Basketball (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), Bill Russell, a Biography (Greenwood Press, 2006), Shaquille O’Neal, a Biography (Greenwood Press, 2007), and Home Town League: A History of the National Basketball League, 1935–1949 (McFarland, 2009). SARAH BAIR is assistant professor of education at Dickinson College. Her research and teaching focus on educational history and social studies education with emphasis on women educators and women’s history in curriculum. Her work has appeared in Theory and Research in Social Education, Social Studies Research and Practice, and The Social Studies. CALLIE BATTS is a PhD student in the Physical Cultural Studies program at the University of Maryland. She received a MA in international sport policy from the University of Brighton and is particularly interested in the globalization of sport, the complex relationships between sport and national identity, and the politicization of sporting bodies. RONALD BRILEY is a history teacher and assistant headmaster at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has taught for thirty years. In addition to numerous scholarly pieces and reviews on film and sport, he is the author of Class at Bat, Gender on Deck, and Race in the Hole (McFarland, 2003) and coeditor of James T. Farrell’s Dreaming Baseball (Kent State University Press, 2007) and All-Stars and Movie Stars (University Press of Kentucky, 2008). He is also an adjunct professor of history at the University of New Mexico–Valencia Campus.

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ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

CHAD CARLSON earned a BA (2003) from Hope College and an M.A. (2005) from Western Michigan University. He is currently a doctoral student in the History and Philosophy of Sport Program in the Department of Kinesiology at the Pennsylvania State University. AMIE CHAUDRY is a master’s student in kinesiology at the University of Maryland–College Park. Her area of specialization is physical cultural studies, focusing on body modification subcultures. PERRY COHEN is a PhD student in the Physical Cultural Studies Program at the University of Maryland. Her research interests involve transsexual athletes, the use of assisted reproductive technologies for lesbians, and the physical culture of warehouse labor. MARK DYRESON is an associate professor of kinesiology and an affiliate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and a former president of the North American Society for the History of Sport. He earned an PhD (1989) in history from the University of Arizona and has published extensively on the history of sport including Making the American Team: Sport, Culture and the Olympic Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998) and Crafting Patriotism for Global Dominance: America at the Olympics (London: Routledge, 2008), and the editor, with J. A. Mangan, of Sport and American Society: Insularity, Exceptionalism and “Imperialism” (London: Routledge, 2007). SARAH K. FIELDS is an assistant professor in sport humanities at the Ohio State University. She is the author of Female Gladiators: Gender, Law, and Contact Sport in America, several book chapters, and numerous articles in a wide range of journals including the Journal of Sport History, the Journal of College and University Law, and the American Journal of Sports Medicine. GERALD R. GEMS has a PhD from the University of Maryland. He is a full professor in the Health and Physical Education Department at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and a past president of the North American Society for Sport History. He is the author/editor of eight books, including The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (University of Nebraska Press, 2006) and Pride, Profit and Patriarchy: Football and the Incorporation of American Cultural Values (Scarecrow Press, 2000). JOHN GLEAVES earned a BA (2006) from Carroll College. He is currently a doctoral student in the History and Philosophy of Sport Program in the Department of Kinesiology at the Pennsylvania State University. MATTHEW LLEWELLYN earned a BS (2004) from Cardiff Institute at the University of Wales and an MA from California State University at Long Beach (2006). He won the 2007 North American Society for Sport History graduate student essay contest. He is currently a doctoral student in the History and Philosophy of Sport Program in the Department of Kinesiology at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focus on both the modern Olympic movement and British

ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

and American sport has appeared or is forthcoming in the International Journal of the History of Sport and the Journal of Sport History. JIM NENDEL is an independent researcher who has taught as an assistant professor at Eastern Washington University and Penn State University. His research focuses on Olympic sport, Hawaiian sport and culture, and American football in England. His work has appeared in the Journal of Sport History and the International Journal of the History of Sport. He also has upcoming books on Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku and on service-learning in physical education and sport. SARAH OLSON received her MA in physical cultural studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. JAIME RYAN is a doctoral student in physical cultural studies at the University of Maryland and holds a MA from the University of Connecticut in sport management and sociology of sport. Her current area of study focuses on the intersection of sport, family, and social class in the swimming community. JAIME SCHULTZ is an assistant professor of physical cultural studies at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD in cultural studies of sport from the University of Iowa and has published articles and chapters on issues of gender, race, and cultural memory in sport history. CAITLIN SHANNON is a master’s student in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland. MAUREEN SMITH is a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Sacramento. She teaches courses in sport history and sport sociology. She received her BS and MS from Ithaca College and her MA and PhD from the Ohio State University. She is the author of Wilma Rudolph: A Biography (Greenwood Publishing, 2006). NANCY L. STRUNA is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland and the author of People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America. Her current research and teaching focus on the body, dimensions of identity, and cultural production, and she is currently working on a book titled “Transforming the Ordinary. Taverns and the Construction of Citizenship in Maryland, 1750–1820.” JOHN WONG is assistant professor at Washington State University where he teaches classes in sport management. He is the author of Lords of the Rinks: The Emergence of the National Hockey League, 1875–1936 and is the editor of a forthcoming book, Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada Before the Second World War. His research interests focus on the history of the business of sport, especially hockey and sport culture in the Pacific Northwest.

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