Sports Biblio Digest 5.20.18: Sports Gambling’s Anxious American History
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: Tom Wolfe’s Sports Stories; Michigan State; Neil Leifer; Robert Lipsyte’s ‘SportsWorld’ Reissued; Teen Athletes and Coaches; Sports Catch-Phrase Bingo; Metta World Peace; Remembering Ray Wilson, Chuck Knox, Mike Slive and Bret Bearup
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 125, published May 20, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
EDITOR’S NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week but it will return on June 3.
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I have no idea what’s ultimately going to happen now that sports gambling in the United States has essentially been legalized, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this week.
To be clear, all the court did was declare unconstitutional a federal ban on states getting into sports gambling, but the fascinating history of American anxiety on the subject is certainly worth revisiting.
Especially since so many other countries, including Great Britain and in Europe, sports gambling has been no big deal for a long time.
At SB Nation, Richard Johnson expertly recounts how sports gambling became illegal in the first place.
So many scandals have taken place since then, and many of the usual suspects were out in force after this week’s ruling: idealistic ex-athletes, and crabby sportswriters, the latter making at least this important point:
“ . . . shameless greed continues to remove the sport from our sports.”
Believe it or not, some are still shocked, absolutely shocked, to find gambling going on, and what about potential new addicts to deal with? And that dastardly welfare state!
I’m not trying to be flip or sarcastic here. I don’t gamble at all, outside of a friendly Final Four pool or long-in-the-past fantasy leagues. I've played a few cheap hands of poker in Vegas and laid out a fiver or two at Kentucky horse tracks, but that's about it.
What Congress, and already many states, appear to be primed to do, is something quite a few steps above an office bracket-busting contest, or my lame Keno results. It’s far too soon how this is all going to play out, but a good number of sportswriters who admit they don’t gamble either seem to have a lot of sweeping solutions already.
Including tax them, and tax them to the gills.
The man who invented the point spread had much to do with this sports gambling renaissance, and it didn’t take long for point-shaving scandals to ensue, especially among unpaid college athletes.
That’s still a concern, especially in wake of the recent ruling. And will more bad gamblers be made? Sports media could see a real boon, but will the additional content, as suggested above, “remove the sport from our sports?"
Dan Wetzel makes about as much sense as anyone about all this:
“What no longer will carry merit is the tired and untrue arguments by the NCAA and the professional sports leagues that propped up PASPA for all these years. The FBI has long said that the best tool it has in fighting point shaving or game fixing is legalized wagering because it can see suspicious activity in real time.
“Instead, anti-gambling forces argued against this and rather lined the pockets of organized crime, which for decades has used wagering money to fund far worse endeavors such as drug and human trafficking.
“Sports, and the business of sports, will never be the same.”
Traveling to Britain, Chuck Culpepper of The Washington Post offered what he thinks could be a sneak preview of what’s to come in America, and he’s not exactly enamored:
“I entered a William Hill, saw some roulette machines and found a rack of soccer sheets, voluminous and intimidating, pages and pages with wee print on the FA Cup final of May 19 (Manchester United vs. Chelsea), the European Champions League final of May 26 (Liverpool vs. Real Madrid), the World Cup coming in June, and who would score goals, and how many, and when. An entire page concerned halftimes. One could bet on such minutiae as whether a match would have a red card.
“What a wretched way to watch a beautiful sport.”
Tom Wolfe on Sports
Two sports stories stand out from the prolific pen of Tom Wolfe, who died this week at the age of 88. While his sports portfolio is small, his early-to-mid-1960s profiles of Cassius Clay and Junior Johnson loom large in cementing Wolfe’s gargantuan legacy.
In “The Marvelous Mouth of Cassius Clay,” published in Esquire in October 1963, we see the brilliance of Wolfe’s obsessive reporting, which informed his sense of projecting his subject into the future:
“Already Cassius’ plans go far beyond fighting. I never could get him to discuss the possibility that Sonny Liston might very well beat him. But Cassius makes it clear, one way or another, that he has thought of that possibility and knows that, in any case, the fight game is like a road show with two, maybe three more bookings. After the climactic fight, or fights, What? as they say in the political monthlies. A few charades at the Garden with such celebrities as Zora Folley and Wayne Bethea? Boxing is a dying show. They had to rush Cassius Clay along like a Department of Agriculture experimental-station suckling to revive the business this time. Ring Magazine, always known as the boxing bible, is half devoted to wrestling now. Which only goes to document Cassius Clay’s Gorgeous George insight. Wrestling is not dying, because it is inspired hooey.”
In “The Last American Hero,” published in the same magazine less than two years later and also in Wolfe’s first book collection, we can see in the lead paragraph the effusive, liberating style of the juiced-up, heavily descriptive use of language he practically turned into his own lexicon:
“Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields.”
Alex Belth has rounded up so much more to savor from Wolfe at The Stacks Reader, including “The Art of Fiction,” an interview with George Plimpton at The Paris Review.
Wolfe’s oeuvre, style, dress and habits all have been fleshed out substantially as remembrances flowed this week. He was the master of the long sentence, driven by an obsession over status.
The foremost exemplar of New Journalism, which came into vogue in the 1960s, was unwavering in his embrace of it many decades later.
In 2012, The Economist pointed to his 1998 novel, “A Man in Full” (whose lead character is an aging Southern college football star) as an example of the “saturation reporting” Wolfe employed in an 11-year book project, and that he learned studying Max Weber and other sociologists as a Yale student:
“He examines myriad subcultures, from banking to basketball, and uncovers versions of charismatics, gatekeepers, grunts, hierophants, shitheads, sacred texts, totems, taboos, campfires, hierarchies, protocols, omertàs and unspoken rules. The journalist’s notebook becomes ‘a beggar’s cup,’ modern artists in Manhattan do an ‘apache dance’ and ideas develop ‘liver spots.’“
That’s the essence of Wolfe, far beyond his flash, with his prose or the white suits, that tends to get lost.
Perhaps the most fitting honor he got came in 1981, before his literary fame, when he was named a Library Lion by the New York Public Library, which also houses his papers, and which he used as an office of sorts for decades.
A Few Good Reads
Piper Weiss was 13 years old when her private tennis coach committed suicide after attempting to kidnap another student. Her new memoir, “You All Grow Up and Leave Me,” unlayers the story of a child predator with bizarre sexual fetishes. She also unfurls the complicated relationship between elite youth athletes and their coaches that is rarely understood by others;
Michigan State University has reached a whopping $500 million settlement with more than 300 sexual assault victims of now-imprisoned doctor Larry Nassar, including some prominent members of the U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team. That news comes with an even more troubling caveat, beyond what’s happened already: A condition of the settlement asks that survivors not advocate for legislation in the Michigan state house that would remove government immunity in cases involving childhood sexual abuse. The biggest scandal in the history of American higher education appears to be far from being fully resolved;
Baseball writer Rob Neyer has an interesting new role, apparently on the side: commissioner of the West Coast League, which includes his Oregon hometown Portland Pickles. His forthcoming book, “Power Ball,” takes a look at the game through the lens of one game played last season between the A’s and current World Series champion Astros;
From FiveThirtyEight, how shoddy statistics found a home in sports performance research, and in particular something called magnitude-based inference, or MBI;
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, everybody’s playing sports catch-phrase bingo these days, defined by a diligent teacher of English and journalism as SONCs, or sports-originating news catchphrases;
The Athletic has launched a soccer vertical, with the World Cup less than a month away, and has hired away as editor George Quraishi, who created the glossy, lavishly illustrated American soccer magazine Howler. It continues under new ownership, and in its short five-year life has even gotten a plug from Print, the notable graphic design magazine.
Sports Book News
On June 1 Rutgers University is reissuing Robert Lipsyte’s 1975 “SportsWorld,” which in many ways kicked off the sports-and-politics penchant we’re seeing now in the media, and certainly influenced many of the present-day practitioners of the genre.
An introductory blurb to the new edition makes it clear why an updated version is coming out now:
“We see how SportsWorld sensibilities help elect our politicians, judge our children, fight our wars, and oppress our minorities. And now featuring a new introduction by the author, SportsWorld is a book that will provide the foundation for understanding today’s world of sports and the time of Trump.”
Lipsyte penned a new introduction in February 2017, just weeks after Trump took office:
“I fear that unless Trump is carried out of the arena and his team comes apart against #TheResistace, athlete activism will be subverted and co-opted as it was fifty years ago. But SportsWorld, that sweaty Oz where so many of our values and definitions are born, will endure.”
While Lipsyte certainly has many admirers in the media, sports and otherwise, and he’s a talented writer and sharp observer, he’s always struck me as exceptionally insufferable. Especially the sentences and hashtag above.
Not a sportswriter by temperament, nor much of a fan of sports growing up, Lipsyte published “SportsWorld” between his stints at The New York Times, and as big money and saturation television coverage of sports was coming into vogue. He says his current favorite sportswriter is Dave Zirin, “the most relentlessly political sportswriter I have ever run up against,” of The Nation.
He meant that as a compliment, but that’s exactly what I think has gone wrong with so much sportswriting today. Nothing in life: sports, culture, history and even politics, should be seen primarily through the lens of politics. It's a twisted, inside-out reversal of the commonplace sensibility that politics should be seen through everything else. Lipsyte had a major hand in trying to override what most people who have an abiding love for sports understand about them, flaws and all.
Lipsyte picked the right time to take a deep, hard look at the greed, power and evaporating soul of sports, and made some worthy and trenchant observations. That kind of examination has always been needed, especially today. But his inability, or unwillingness, to try to understand a fan’s passion and obsession for sports is a major drawback for me.
Lipsyte has never been able to get past the spectacle of sports, the greedy entertainment hustle it has become, to appreciate what many find endearing about sports in spite of all that.
He's never been able to regard them, in a most elemental sense, as an expression of the human condition, and I think that's tragic. Sadly, he has many more adherents in The Lodge today, thanks to his continuing influence and Zirin's political pied pipering.
Published earlier this week by Triumph Books: “No Malice,” a memoir by Metta World Peace, formerly known as Ron Artest, and known even more infamously for his participation in the 2004 “Malice at the Palace” brawl involving the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers. It’s his second book following “Metta’s Bedtime Stories” for children in 2013.
Now Hear This
Here’s a real treat I found digging out links for the Lipsyte segment above: an audio recording he had with Studs Terkel upon the initial release of “SportsWorld” on Chicago public radio station WFMT;
Also not given frequently to the airwaves is renown sports photographer Neil Leifer, interviewed here by noted music photojournalist Jared Polin, aka The Fro, and of course they delve into Leifer’s famous shots of Muhammad Ali and plenty more;
Wish I had endless time for podcasts of all kinds. Here’s a 16-minute “minicast” with Tim Wendell about his 2010 book “High Heat” at the Baseball PhD podcast, which has plenty of longform recordings, including a recent look at baseball and comedians. Here are the guys behind the podcast, and why they do what they do the way they do it;
More on the sports gambling decision at the Today Explained podcast.
Passings
Chuck Knox, 86, guided the Los Angeles Rams and Seattle Seahawks to playoff berths in a 22-year NFL head coaching career that included three coach of the year awards and “Knoxisms” that illustrated his no-nonsense approach to the game, and to life. Known as “ground Chuck” for his dutiful devotion to the running game, Knox, who had been suffering from dementia, is still revered in the Pacific Northwest, giving the Seahawks their first dose of respectability;
Ray Wilson, 83, was a defender and oldest starter on England’s 1966 World Cup championship team, regarded as an unsung player who also starred at Huddersfield Town and was part of Everton’s FA Cup winning team, also in 1966. Wilson, who died in a care home after battling Alzheimer's Disease, was honored at Wembley Stadium on Friday;
Mike Slive, 77, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in recent years, did more than remake the Southeastern Conference into more than just a college football powerhouse. He helped reshape the entire landscape of collegiate athletics, and was well-respected and deeply admired, even by jaded sportswriters;
Bret Bearup, 56, never turned out to be the can’t-miss basketball star he was projected to be at the University of Kentucky, but his post-playing life was a rich and endearing chronicle, never far away from the game he loved and the many people, in and out of basketball, who knew him warmly and simply as “Bear.” The cause of death hasn't been disclosed.
