Sports Biblio Digest 6.3.18: A Pardon for Jack Johnson
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: The Great American Novel; Kobe Bryant, Author; Rick Telander, Artist; A College Softball Scandal; Football Recruiting in Mississippi; A Private History of ‘A League of Their Own;’ Stan Fischler; Remembering Billy Cannon and Charlotte Fox
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This is Digest issue No. 126, published June 3, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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President Donald Trump’s pardon of boxing legend Jack Johnson could hardly be viewed as a highly notable event in a White House that on a daily basis boils over with unprecedented chaos.
But with Sylvester Stallone and Lennox Lewis at his side in an Oval Office ceremony, Trump issued only the third posthumous pardon in U.S. history.
It’s an action that many have believed was long overdue. Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, was convicted under the Mann Act of taking an underage woman across state lines.
That the female was white was the unshakeable piece of history that has added to America’s racial struggles in the 105 years since Johnson’s conviction.
Johnson died in a car crash in 1946 at the age of 68, and for decades advocates and family members have worked for a pardon. Some thought it might come during the Presidency of Barack Obama, but it did not.
The reaction to Trump’s pardon wasn’t just muted, but even uncharitable. To say that he’s not popular in the African-American community is putting it mildly. At The Undefeated, Jesse Washington’s odd commentary laid this on the current president:
“Trump just freed the memory of one black man who died 72 years ago. How many living black men are now headed to the place where Jack Johnson never should have been?”
This is an issue that has plagued America for decades, and presidents and lawmakers of both parties, at every level of politics. I somehow doubt this sentiment would have been echoed had Obama “righted this wrong,” as Trump put it.
No, Trump’s actions may not ever be enough, nor might any president’s, because the racial stains of our history will never go away. Criminal justice reform often has backfired against minorities and the poor, especially the more recent war on drugs.
Before the pardon, and as Trump was weighing the suggestion by his celebrity friend Stallone (who’s at work on a Jack Johnson biopic), Allen Berra talked to Gerald Early, a boxing historian and professor, who pointed to other wrongs that need to be righted, including Chuck Berry.
Yet Berra, like so many in the media piqued by Trump (I’m not a fan either), lashed out at his administration’s tough-on-crime policies and other political matters he thinks will won’t help the plight of blacks.
Nor could he help but to conclude that this might just be the perfect president to issue such a pardon. Johnson, unlike future black sports activists Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, didn’t do much to uplift his own race. His personal behavior was selfish and he felt no obligation to his fellow African-Americans.
(Did Berra read Dave Zirin’s screed in April that he thought Johnson and Trump would have despised one another, and that the boxer’s family should refuse a pardon?)
“Johnson lived a philosophy as free from identity politics as a Fox News commentator,” Berra wrote, setting up his backhanded punchline:
“Maybe, in Johnson, Donald Trump sees a kindred spirit.”
A valuable lesson in American racial and well as sports history could have been delivered. No matter what you may think of the current president (and I don't think much), this was an occasion for a more constructive dialogue, one that I think was squandered by those who say they have wanted to have a decision like this to foster such a conversation.
RIP, Word Smith
Philip Roth’s only sports novel was barely mentioned in the tributes following the author’s death last week at the age of 85. “The Great American Novel” was not meant to be taken as seriously as his acclaimed “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and the excellent trilogy of “American Pastoral,” “I Married A Communist” and “The Human Stain.”
But Roth’s wicked satire of baseball (and flowery sportswriting) in American culture was, at least for me, more than a great entertainment. In a conversation last year with Steven Goldleaf on Bill James’ website, official baseball historian John Thorn panned it, saying “it was the worst thing he ever wrote,” but didn’t really explain why.
What I liked about “The Great American Novel” is that unlike, say, some of those involved in the cultural production of baseball, on a certain level it didn’t take itself too seriously.
Yet I also read it as a deft puncture of a past time, that as the narrator, retired sportswriter “Word” Smith, reminds us in the prologue, has an origin story in the Cooperstown Myth:
“When both the rulers and the subjects of the Holy Baseball Empire can sanctify a blatant falsehood with something so supposedly hallowed as a ‘Hall of Fame,’ there is no reason to be astonished (I try to tell myself) at the colossal crime against the truth that has been perpetrated by America’s powers-that-be since 1946.”
That sets up Smitty’s tale of the Patriot League, with its ex-cons, amputees and a vast array of rogue and improbable characters, a saga kept from the good people of the American Republic by the lords of baseball. The years were the war years, and the expunging took place in the 1950s, the time of McCarthy, and Roth provides a cameo appearance for the House Un-American Activities Committee:
“I am speaking of a rewriting of our history as heinous as any ordered by a tyrant dictator abroad. Not thousand-year-old history either, but something that only came to an end twenty-odd years ago. Yes, I am speaking of the annihilation of the Patriot League. Not merely wiped out of business, but willfully erased from the national memory.”
Roth’s irreverent playfulness (“The Babe Ruth of the Big House”) leaps off nearly every page. So, so much of it is way over the top, including Smitty’s fishing trip with Ernest Hemingway off the Florida Keys, also in the prologue.
For Roth, he may have found doing such a book a welcome departure from the serious fiction steeped in postwar America’s cultural turbulence that many came to expect of him. Yet the book was published in 1973, as America’s Watergate crisis grew and the Vietnam War was coming to a grim close.
The themes, veiled behind Smitty's florid prose and madcap storytelling, were no less weighty. It certainly didn't contain the overt mean-spiritedness of Roth's other satire of the time, the anti-Nixonian "Our Gang."
Smitty's last-dash letter to Chairman Mao from the Valhalla Home for the Aged, seeking publication of his Patriot League chronicle, was a fitting, uproarious finale to such an enjoyable absurdity.
The exploits of Gil Gamesh and others on the homeless Rupert Mundys team have proven highly allegorical for many phases of a post-World War II era that is coming to a culmination, and that is now without one of its sharpest, wittiest and most vital literary observers.
A Few Good Reads
Tom Junod’s love for college softball led him toward a totally unexpected assignment: a grotesque scandal at Auburn, one of the nation’s top programs, that led to the resignation of the father-son coaching tandem and the school’s athletics director;
Many of the women who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II and the years after never went public about their sexuality, but some of the remaining survivors are starting to open up, including some who found romance on those diamonds that has lasted for decades;
From Outside, a seamstress who conquered bike racing in the 1890s;
From SB Nation, a deep look into how the NCAA investigated football recruiting allegations at Ole Miss that was little more than a Pyrrhic victory for those defending the crumbling edifice of amateurism in college sports;
Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter and author Rick Telander is exhibiting drawings and paintings at a local gallery this, giving Chicago Mag a good excuse to drop this Q & A about how he got into a visual kind of doodling;
The Michigan Opera Theater’s presentation of “The Summer King,” about the Negro Leagues legend Josh Gibson, is part of a series of arts-related events in Detroit over the last two months that culminates in Detroit next weekend with Negro Leagues weekend at Comerica Park. “Take Me Out to the Opera” also includes an exhibit of Negro Leagues History at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History;
From Only a Game, there was hockey in Las Vegas long before the Knights, and there are still those who fondly recall the Gamblers, who played at a rink at the Sahara Hotel and Casino in the late 1960s;
After several decades as a hockey writer and broadcaster, Stan Fischler 86, retired before the Stanley Cup playoffs, and is moving to Israel to be closer to his son and grandchildren. The author of dozens of hockey books (and a few about his hometown of New York City), “The Hockey Maven” tells Tablet magazine that he’ll continue publishing his weekly hockey newsletter from abroad;
It’s been 32 years since Len Bias died of a drug overdose, days after being drafted by the Boston Celtics. His mother admits to the Boston Globe that “It’s not anything that you’ve forgotten about. It’s something that you have learned to live with. You embrace the realities of life and move forward.”
Sports Book News
From SABR, and St. Johann Press, a new book about the Fall Classic during the first two decades of the 20th century: “The World Series in the Deadball Era” is a collection of stories and photographs from the writers and photographers of the day, edited by Steve Steinberg of SABR’s Deadball Research Committee, which has published two other books about that period;
Sports radio talk show host Clay Travis, who routinely attacks those in sports media (especially on ESPN) who inject their liberal political views into sports coverage, is publishing a book along those lines in September. “Republicans Buy Sneakers Too,” from HarperCollins, is a long-ago reference from Michael Jordan about his reluctance to get involved in politics, and it's getting a lot of critical scrutiny now in our ever-woke social times;
To be published in October by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, “The Mamba Mentality: How I Play,” by Kobe Bryant, the NBA great’s first book since his 2016 retirement, and with a foreword by Phil Jackson;
Published last week, as mentioned in the last newsletter, is an updated version of Robert Lipsyte’s 1975 book “SportsWorld,” by Rutgers University Press.
Passings
Billy Cannon, 80, was the only Heisman Trophy winner to play at LSU, and the first Tiger to have his jersey retired. He played in the American Football League for 11 years before becoming a dentist and a real estate investor. The latter ended up badly for him, as he became involved in a counterfeiting scheme that resulted in prison time. Cannon’s sentence led to a long delay for his induction into the College Football Hall of Fame, but he owned up to his misdeeds in his 2015 memoir “A Long, Long Run.” He later moved his dental practice to and oversaw the medical practice at the notorious Angola Penitentiary and was buried in a coffin made by prisoners there, with materials purchased at their own expense;
Charlotte Fox, 61, survived the disastrous Mount Everest expedition in 1996 that inspired Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air.” She had a distinguished career in climbing but also endured other tragedies, including the death of a boyfriend in an Everest avalanche in 1993, and the death of her husband in a paragliding accident in 2004. She was found dead in her home in Telluride, Colo., apparently from a fall down a staircase. Foul play is not suspected.