Sports Biblio Digest 6.17.18: Revisiting James Michener’s ‘Sports in America’
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: Soccer and Art; Brandi Chastain; The Twilight of Air Jordans; How Football Codes Began; ‘Bull Durham’ at 30; Baseball’s Magna Carta; Bob Ryan; A Twitterless Sportswriter; George Carlin; Remembering ‘Pie’ McKenzie and Anne Donovan
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This is Digest issue No. 128, published June 17, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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More than 40 years after its publication, James Michener’s “Sports in America” did well to foreshadow the contemporary sports landscape at a time when the country’s sports scene was in great flux.
In the year 1976, professional sports were grappling with free agency, television airtime expanded and contracts were becoming more lucrative, women in sports were beginning to make major strides and the social developments of the previous decade were seeping into the sports culture.
Of the prolific author’s more than 40 books, this was Michener’s only volume devoted to solely to sports, and his erudition and curiosity served him well. Michener marshalled a vast range of topics and materials, read deeply and absorbed an essential understanding of what makes sports tick for many fans, regardless of nationality. It's a timeless insight:
“Sports . . . should transcend any meannesses in our society and offer a more responsible ideal.”
That may seem like a quaint notion today, and certainly sports are no better or no worse than any other component of society when it comes to meanness and idealism.
We do tend to put them on the pedestal of the latter to counter the constant threat of the former, given how easy it is to disrupt our undiluted enjoyment of games.
Michener leads off within the context of 1960s social critics who applied a similarly dark vision to what was happening in the world of sports. While not always in agreement with authors like Paul Hoch, Harry Edwards, Dave Meggysey, Gary Shaw and others like them, Michener argues that we “cannot ignore the basic questions that they raise.”
An admitted admirer of “public sporting spectacles” is open-minded enough to consider the strong Marxist, racial and leftist viewpoints of writers and activists who’ve profoundly informed a current generation of successors.
That’s because, Michener writes:
“The days of bland acceptance of sports are past. The entire program in this country will have to be subjected to most careful scrutiny and the most biting criticism.”
Michener is a much more generous observer than those critics, past or present, could ever imagine being. He writes about the necessity of physical education and exercise programs fostering better health. His idealism also remains infectious throughout a lengthy, serious examination of all aspects of an increasingly complicated world of sports:
“As a nation, we run the risk of forgetting the salutary effect of play . . . I prize the sheer non-sense of play above almost anything else in sports, for it keeps one young in spirit; it should remind us of our animal inheritance, and it loosens us up.”
I can’t imagine today’s socially-conscious “woke” sports commentators allowing themselves to publicly admit to any such modest joy. Michener was relaxed about a more professionalized tier for college athletics and exulted in football bowl games as reflecting the “grandiose non-sense of American life.”
Michener also thought soccer had brighter prospects in America than existed at the time, although he might be chagrined to know that it has come about largely because of “the sanction of television.” A longtime resident of Austin, Texas, he embraced the emergence of women's sports, and was often seen courtside at University of Texas Lady Longhorns basketball games.
But Michener wasn’t afraid to call out what he didn't like as America celebrated during its bicentennial period, deploring when sports were used “as a handmaiden to politics, militarism and flamboyant patriotism.”
The excess then, as now, is on the American gridiron, and Michener also was dubious about the increasingly excessive costs and uses of publicly-financed sports facilities.
In order to expand Mile High Stadium in Denver, opera, symphony and other fine arts patrons were taxed 40 cents per ticket. It was part of a larger levy lumping in all forms of entertainment in this tax effort, which Michener found “abominable.” But he didn’t stop there:
“In ancient Rome, stadiums were financed by imposing a tax on brothels, proving that the citizens of Rome had a clearer sense of values than those of Denver.”
Michener would likely be apoplectic over the notoriety of public financing that has grown since his death in 1997.
He also was skeptical of the effects of television on sports, and almost certainly would take a dim view of today’s world of 24/7 programming, social media, fantasy leagues and e-sports that have made fans more passive than ever:
“The danger of television is not only that it diminishes intellect, but that its invitation to isolation threatens psychological stability.”
Michener is adept at chronicling the history of sports media before the start of that “juvenile electronic age” by delving into the world of the sportswriter, whose “greatest advantage” is “his freedom.”
He didn’t look at the sports pages of newspapers as many have, as the “toy department,” but as the most liberated place for good prose in a daily publication. John Kiernan and Red Smith were his favorites, and he found Jim Murray funny but also occasionally irritating. Golf writer Herbert Warren Wind was, Michener wrote, “one of today’s most graceful masters of the English language.”
There’s also a good critique of his favorite sports books, both non-fiction and novelistic, a good cross-section of mid-20th century superlatives whose works have more than stood the test of time: Jim Bouton, Roger Angell, Jim Brosnan and Leonard Koppett.
Michener was cool to Vince Lombardi, fond of walking and getting out in nature while gently admonishing those who were against competition.
That may seem a bit contradictory, but in this sprawling, readable and constantly surprising book, Michener has laid a foundation for a worthy update to his panoramic effort.
By the year 2026, when “Sports in America” turns 50, what would such an update read like? We should hope it would encompass Michener’s time-honored techniques of stepping back into the past, and deeply into nature and the real, physical world, to help inform us of the proper approach:
“It is such experiences—the sea, the woods, the excitement of watching an honest game, the dance of life—that has kept me interested in sports. I want this country to protect, and augment, and make available such experiences to others. For it is this enlarging of the human adventure that sports are all about.”
Soccer and Art
Sebastian Smee, art critic for The Washington Post, goes a bit overboard, but in a good way, about “The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art,” which is on exhibit at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami through Sept. 2. He took a visit not long after his beloved AS Roma upset Barcelona to reach the semifinals of the UEFA Champions League, and was euphoric:
“It was as if Anita Ekberg had reentered the waters of the Trevi Fountain—as if beauty itself had triumphed over the bitter treachery of history.”
Smee was just getting warmed up, as it turns out:
“Beauty arises from order — from a feeling, however illusory or short-lived, that you and the world are in perfect alignment. It happens in soccer, and in other sports, all the time. Every goal is fundamentally beautiful: The thing that is supposed to happen finally happens.
“Beauty is nice. But in a great work of art, there has to be something else, something more. 'Chaos in a work of art,' wrote the German Romanticist poet Novalis, ‘should always shimmer through the veil of order.’ ”
The proprietors of a new soccer and art magazine may take exception to some of that hyperbolic prose. London-based OOF magazine just dropped its second issue right before the World Cup. While seeking out some proper overlap between the two dimensions, it also boasts a fierce attitude against conflating them, as this Tweetstorm demonstrates:
“You can do an artistic reading of football, look for its beauty and its aesthetic, but it exists, entirely, as a thing in itself.
“What we do as look at how artists use football to express something about society, how they use football as a metaphor for poverty, violence, bigotry, community, etc etc etc.
“To treat football as art is to demean its incredible purpose, to treat art as something intention-less that can just be plopped on other things is to demean ITS incredible purpose.”
This is the Shortlist piece by former England international Gary Lineker that triggered all that above, invoking obvious references to Maradona and Messi, as well as Michel Platini.
More about OOF here and here, and a podcast primer with editor Eddy Henkel. At The Art Newspaper, he picks out some of his favorite soccer art by contemporary artists.
The Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame is redoing a plaque of former U.S. women’s soccer star Brandi Chastain for her induction because the likeness looks nothing like her. The San Jose Mercury News conducted a poll about the closest resemblance and readers provided an array of similarities, including Gary Busey, John Elway, Mickey Rooney and Jimmy Carter.
A Few Good Reads
The movie “Bull Durham” was released 30 years ago this week, and here’s Alan Siegel’s appreciation at The Ringer;
A new documentary about perhaps the most famous sports shoe ever has made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. “Unbanned: The Legend of AJ1,” is the story of how the Air Jordan came to be. Once associated with deadly street violence, Melvin Backman writes at The New Yorker that the shoe “has achieved the ubiquity it once rebelled against, and the shoes are slowly losing their cultural sway;’
“The Laws of Base Ball,” some of the actual founding documents of the game’s rules, will be on display later this month at the Library of Congress as part of its Baseball Americana exhibit timed for the All-Star Game at nearby Nationals Park;
In honor of Father’s Day, Kelly Carlin recalls her dad, George Carlin, and his memorable comedy comparing baseball and football. A new commemorative box set of his work has been released this week by PBS.
Sports Media News
Bob Ryan writes about his 50 years at The Boston Globe;
Longtime Dallas Cowboys beat writer Charean Williams is the winner of the Pro Football Writers Association’s Dick McCann Award and will be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in August, the first female writer so honored. That story posted by her former employer, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, neglected to mention that they laid off “Mother Football” last year after 18 years;
Andrea Kremer, now with the NFL Network, is also being recognized in Canton as the 2018 recipient of the Rozelle Radio-Television Award winner;
Former Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Stephen Brunt explains his Twitter-free existence, which sounds to anyone in the media professions like a luxury. For all of the good things about social media, I’m increasingly tempted to pull the plug because what’s distasteful and upsetting are (to me, anyway) drowning out just about everything else.
Sports Book News
Coming this fall: “How Football Began” (Routledge), by British sports historian Tony Collins, who’s the author of a global history of rugby and other books on rugby and British sports history;
Just as American football season begins in September, Jeff Pearlman’s long-awaited history of the U.S. Football League, “Football for a Buck,” is being published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and it figures to have plenty on Donald Trump’s ill-fated ownership of the New Jersey Generals;
Also this fall, “Basketball: A Love Story,” (Crown Archetype) by Jackie MacMullan and Rafe Bartholomew, a history of the sport based on interviews with many luminaries that the publisher claims may be “quite possibly the most ambitious basketball book ever written.”
Coming next week: Summer Books Preview
Passings
Johnny McKenzie, 80, was a gruff and tough hockey player known as “Pie” for the Boston Bruins in the 1970s, and had the battle scars and penalty minutes to prove it. Off the ice he had his demons that in later years he tried to grapple with, with varying degrees of resolution;
Anne Donovan, 56, was a college basketball All-American, an Olympic gold medalist as a player and a coach and the first female coach to win a WNBA championship. At 6-foot-8, she helped revolutionize women’s post play in the 1980s, playing at Old Dominion with fellow Basketball Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman. The cause of death has been announced as heart failure.