Sports Biblio Digest, 6.28.20: Gerald Early on Race, Sports and Culture
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Baseball’s Stumbling Return; 100 Days Without Sports; The Corruption of Sports; Nooses, Stars and Bars and NASCAR; Liverpool’s Drought Ends; Joe Paterno; Bob Uecker; Tom Seaver and Pat Jordan; Arthur Ashe Biopic; Lou Gehrig's Lost Memoir; Remembering Stephen Fay
********
Well before he earned popular culture acclaim for his appearances in Ken Burns documentary films, Gerald Early has been a prolific scholar at the nexus of sports, race and culture that’s aflame today.
A longtime professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Early has written books on boxing, baseball, jazz, Motown and Sammy Davis, Jr., and edited volumes of essays on Muhammad Ali, writers on sports and the collected writings of the black poet Countee Cullen.
He is the editor of another anthology published this spring, “The Cambridge Companion to Boxing,” with a cover photo of Jack Johnson, the early 20th century black American boxing champion who has captured Early’s imagination for decades.
In an April interview with St. Louis Public Radio, Early said his life’s work of wanting “to understand the United States” and “how the world works” necessarily requires exploring “to some degree, the African-American’s place in the world.”
Given the dynamic, fluid events of the last month, Early’s scholarship of previous black life in America helps illuminate the continuity of a history that may seem cut off from current events.
Present generations in many ways are showing their disconnect from the past—as evidenced by attempts to remove the Lincoln Emancipation memorial in Washington, a startling example of the failure to properly teach history in our education system.
But for any reader wishing to dive into some of this rich history of black Americans, sports figures and otherwise, Early’s work is a valuable guide.
His 1994 essay collection, “The Culture of Bruising: Essays On Prizefighting, Literature and Modern American Culture,” won a National Book Critics Circle Award and is a good starting point. Following up his previous book, “Tuxedo Junction,” he jumps right into an examination of black boxers and intellectualism, unimpressed with most black writers’ stab at the subject (He finds Norman Mailer wanting too.).
Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison make some headway in this regard, but it’s the former champion Floyd Patterson, “one of the most thoughtful men ever to enter the boxing ring,” who intrigues Early.
Patterson's personal feuds with Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali fuel much of his fire as the 1960s roar along, and as America is forced to confront dramatic and jarring racial and social change.
However, like Ellison’s boxing character in “Invisible Man,” Early writes:
“Patterson becomes lost in a maze of symbols, consumed and obsessed by the category he occupied: the acclaimed black prizefighter as accomplished black American.”
And a bit later:
“We must be clear here in understanding that Patterson was disliked by black intellectuals in the sixties.”
Patterson ultimately was no match for Liston in the ring, and a 1960 Olympic boxing champion named Cassius Clay morphed into the charismatic, colossus figure of Muhammad Ali, feeding into the cultural narrative of a roiling decade.
Patterson embodied bourgeois values that were going out of style on the progressive left amid a time of cultural, Civil Rights and anti-war protests.
“Patterson wanted mere acceptance; Ali wanted transcendent worship,” Early writes. “Patterson wanted admiration; Ali authority.”
Early could be said to possess something of Patterson’s temperament and sentiments. Elsewhere in “The Culture of Bruising,” he admits to being turned off by Black History Month, which he called “literally a sickening experience for me."
More specifically, Early was chastened by the rise of what he calls “Afrocentrism” in universities, followed by multiculturalism (and now intersectionality).
Such a limiting creed, he argues, “denies any idea of human transcendence not rooted in race.” This runs completely counter to today’s “anti-racist” activism grounded in sharp racial and group identities that punctuate a Black Lives Matter movement that has galvanized many whites into action.
Two later essays about Malcolm X in “The Culture of Bruising” drive home Early’s discomfort with a more strident form of black identity.
He admits that Malcolm X remains a compelling figure with post-Civil Rights era blacks because he popularized the notions of black activism, black determination and black identity.
Malcolm X's autobiography, Early admits, is “a considerable literary accomplishment” and he acknowledged that “it is the black middle class from which some of the most vehement endorsements of Afrocentrism emanate.”
This is more than dispiriting to Early, the father of two daughters in that generational milieu caught up with the Malcolm X mythology:
“The fact that Malcolm represented something purely black, and argued throughout his public life, for a purely black political movement remains one of the strongest aspects of his appeal.”
Ultimately, however, Early cannot reconcile Malcolm X’s advocacy of violence any more than he can accept Afrocentrism, which he calls “a fundamentalist religious sentiment” and “a philistine form of theatrical engagement, of mask-wearing and of self-conscious gestures.”
The current protests, attacks on statues and related expressions certainly have their roots in this performative street theater. Many black (and white) athletes are increasingly vocal about using their “platforms” to protest what they see as unjust.
And if the past can typically serve as a prologue, an additional voice has stepped back into the spotlight. This week John Carlos, sent home from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics for giving a Black Power salute on the medal stand, said he wants to abolish the rule that prevents athletes from protesting at the Olympics.
“Athletes will no longer be silenced,” Carlos and other members of a U.S. Olympic athlete advisory council wrote in a letter to the International Olympic Committee. “We are now at a crossroads. The IOC cannot continue on the path of punishing or removing athletes who speak up for what they believe in, especially when those beliefs exemplify the goals of Olympism.”
A Few Good Reads
A baseball season will at least be attempted, with 60-game schedules, starting in late July, after ridiculous “negotiations” that bordered on the farcical. The biggest threat now could be possible new lockdowns with COVID-19 cases spiking up in a number of places, including Southern states where pre-season camps will resume. Players are sure to test positive, but how many that might be, and how sick enough of them may become could also foil even a shortened season that already has many fans soured on the whole proposition;
Longtime Milwaukee Brewers color commentator Bob Uecker is eager to have games to call in what’s poised to be his 50th season in the booth. Even though he’s 81 and at risk for contracting COVID-19, he said he didn’t hesitate to come back after consulting with the team and his doctors;
The New York Times compiled this interactive marking 100 days since sports competition was halted in the U.S., starting with the positive COVID-19 test for Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz;
Liverpool FC won its first English Premier League title and first top-flight crown in 30 years. The Reds thrashed Crystal Palace, then watched Chelsea hold off two-time defending champion Manchester City, one of the best teams ever to play in England. Manager Jürgen Klopp’s club has lost just once in 31 matches and holds a 23-point lead over City, and wants to have a parade once the final seven matches are played (behind closed doors) and it’s deemed safe to do so;
Some other sports fans in Britain are admitting they might not be as passionate as before the lockdowns, and others eager to get back to their pastime say it may not quite have the same feeling;
A fan growing up following York FC and Burnley FC recalls those times now in middle age, replete with family memories and the pondering the fate of lower-level clubs in a very different professional soccer environment in Britain;
NASCAR’s tortuous two weeks over race and the Confederate flag got even more bizarre after the FBI ended an investigation about a possible noose hanging from black driver Bubba Wallace’s garage at Talladega. The stock-car circuit then released a photo that looked like something other than a standard mechanic's pull rope, further botching a grand misunderstanding. While there wasn’t a hate crime, NASCAR may have caused more problems than it was trying to clear up by its handling of the matter;
A new biopic of Arthur Ashe is in production, devoted to his tennis career and civil rights work and AIDS activism off the court. Tackling the screenplay is Oscar winner Kevin Willmott, who’s collaborated with Spike Lee and the executive producers include Ashe’s widow Jeanne Moutoussamy. A previous Ashe film, HBO’s “Citizen of the World,” received some tepid reviews;
A new Netflix documentary, “Athlete A,” details the many years in which USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar abused young girls and women and the agonizing decision one of them made to blow the whistle to reporters at the Indianapolis Star. The newspaper’s stories led to a long prison sentence for Nassar and the resignations of the CEO of USA Gymnastics and the president of Michigan State University (where Nassar worked) and the closure of the Karolyi Ranch gymnastics training center in Texas;
The Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal led to the downfall of Joe Paterno at Penn State, and a statue of the Nittany Lions coaching legend was discretely removed following his death in 2012. The university won't say where the statue is being stored, as the mystery behind its continued disappearance grows.
Baseball Book News
Hot off the presses is Pat Jordan’s “Tom Seaver and Me,” a memoir of his complicated, four-decade friendship with the Hall of Fame Mets pitcher. Jordan was a Milwaukee Braves’ bonus baby who washed out (the subject of his memoir “A False Spring”) and he began this project as Seaver’s dementia was publicly disclosed. Writer Pete Croatto talks to Jordan, now 79, about the challenges of his task, including getting no response from the Seaver family.
Croatto previously profiled Jordan last October at Writer Mag; here’s Jordan talking about his baseball fall from grace at Men’s Journal; and a link to an anthology of his sportswriting, with an introduction by Alex Belth.
One of my favorite Jordan pieces was his Deadspin interview with UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, a figure who's delightfully profane and insightful. As a local sportswriter told later Jordan, “What did you expect? He's surrounded by women! He loves to talk to guys;”
When we first linked to Los Angeles sportswriter Tom Hoffarth’s annual 30 baseball book reviews in 30 days, spring training was underway. He went ahead and finished posting all the reviews, and links to all of them here (plus 14 additional “bonus” books) as baseball’s second spring training is set to begin and “to alleviate some pandemic misery.”
Now Hear This
Alan Gaff, author of the newly-released “Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir,” was a recent guest on the History Author Show podcast. The autobiography was written during the Murderers’ Row season of 1927 but this is the first time it’s been published in book form. Gaff provides some background here, and the book was reviewed by, among others, the above-mentioned Tom Hoffarth, Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf, The New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.
Retro Sports Files
The late professor, author and social critic Christopher Lasch took a dim view of much of what he chronicled in American life, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Best known for his 1979 work “The Culture of Narcissism,” Lasch didn’t write much about sports. But a couple years before, he went long in The New York Review of Books (also not a sports bastion) with “The Corruption of Sports.”
The piece, which was to become a chapter in that book entitled “The Degradation of Sport,” was written as sports in the capitalist West were becoming heavily televised, big-money entities, and taking on greater state-sponsored importance behind the Iron Curtain.
Spectator sports was changing in significant ways, and as a former Marxist-turned-localist conservative populist, Lasch decried the bigger, louder bread and circus atmospherics, a more knowledgeable legion of fans who became “more sensation-minded and bloodthirsty,” and the glorification of amateur sports in colleges and the Olympics:
“The recent history of sports is the history of their steady submission to the demands of everyday reality. The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie suppressed popular sports and festivals as part of its campaign to establish the reign of sobriety. Fairs and football, bull-baiting and cock-fighting and boxing offended middle-class reformers because of their cruelty and because they blocked public thoroughfares, disrupted the daily routine of business, distracted the people from their work, encouraged habits of idleness, extravagance, and insubordination, and gave rise to licentiousness and debauchery.”
Lasch serves up a richly detailed social and cultural history of American sports, from its Victorian roots, through the reforms of Teddy Roosevelt, the cravings for gladiatorial pomp in the age of yellow journalism and contemporary left- and right-wing critiques.
His conclusions are less than edifying, while he tries to hold on to some mystifying hope that the joys of play can be redeemed from the relentless, joyless demands of the modern sports world:
“The ancient connections between games, ritual, and public festivity suggest that although games take place within arbitrary boundaries, they are nevertheless rooted in shared traditions, to which they give objective expression. Games and athletic contests offer a dramatic commentary on reality rather than an escape from it—a heightened reenactment of communal traditions, not a repudiation of them. It is only when games and sports come to be valued purely as a form of escape that they lose the capacity to provide this escape.”
There was a very good follow-up exchange in NYRB involving Lasch, historian Eric Foner and Paul Hoch, a biting left-wing critic of sports in the 60s and 70s. It’s hard to believe we once lived in a time, not that long ago, when such robust points of view were argued and counter-argued, and no one was trying to silence those with opposing views. Given how woke it’s become, I can’t imagine NYRB touching something like this today, even about sports.
Lasch died in 1994 while working on his final book, “The Revolt of the Elites,” which has some haunting foresight into our current times. As do many of his other books, which require some attention but are richly rewarding.
Passings
Stephen Fay, 81, was the former editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and an investigative newspaper and magazine journalist in London, mainly writing about cricket, finance and the arts and publishing books on those subjects. Fay was the son of a Manchester Guardian journalist and worked at the Independent and The Sunday Times, as well as Business Magazine.
He took over the reins of the venerable cricket magazine in 2000 at the age of 62 and stayed in the role for three years. His final book, “Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket,” co-written with English social historian David Kynaston, was named the winner of the Cricket Writers Club Book of the Year Award in 2018.
Celebrating Independence
I’m stepping away from the newsletter next weekend, the July 4 holiday in the United States, normally a sports-packed time here and abroad. But what a strange occasion our Independence Day figures to be, given the surreal events of the past few months.
When I return, it will be time to look at the resumption of NBA and NHL seasons, the delayed start of baseball season and the looming possibility that the NFL and college football, the two biggest-drawing sports in America, may look very different this fall, if they are played at all.
Despite the turbulence in our country, I’m somewhat hopeful we can find some common ground to start building back a sense of being that’s been absolutely battered by pandemic lockdowns, and torn apart in a torrent of tribalism amplified in the increasingly unforgiving world of social media. Sports have always been a celebratory and unifying force, and I’ll really miss baseball most of all on July 4.
Sports just aren’t the same without fans, but when (if?) the baseball season starts in late July, I'll be eager to take a few more steps back to life as we knew it, and how it needs to become once again. We desperately need to enjoy some of our rituals, sports and otherwise, and soon.
Thanks for subscribing, happy reading and be well.
* * * * * * * *
The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 208, published June 28, 2020.
PLEASE NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week. It will return on July 12.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.