Sports Biblio Digest 9.9.18: A Half-Century of American Football Culture Wars
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Sports Movies of Burt Reynolds; A Young Athlete’s Suicide; A Minor Leaguer’s Shattered Dream; Maple Baseball Bats Kick Ash; An Alt-History of Baseball; The Tale of Tiger Mike; Billie Jean King Photo Exhibit; Jemele Hill; Dan Jenkins at 88
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Another season of pro football is here, which means another round of pieces speculating about whether “there’s something in the air” about the fate of the NFL.
Whether it’s concussions, or unlikeable owners, continued servile media fawning over Colin Kaepernick and even the political act of prayer in football, this narrative has become as boring as it is predictable.
This week’s bombshell Nike campaign features Kaepernick as the new poster boy for a very hollow idea of sacrifice. The artifice of a media-manufactured sensibility has seemingly overtaken the spectacle on the field, something I never thought possible.
Radical Chic is back, especially in the social media-heavy worlds in which Nike’s young target audiences inhabit, and which they take to be real. Those under 40 are part of a generation that’s been sold the idea that “everything is political” from the crib, so the Kaepernick audacity isn’t a triggering event.
Some talented young wordsmiths are escalating their loathing of the NFL, “retrograde and proudly plutocratic for as long as it has existed.”
For crabby Baby Boomers like me, this genuflecting hipsterism is running rampant in too many precincts of sports media, as lazy as it is ahistorical.
It’s fashionable for some in sports media today not to write for readers and fans, but rather to insult and lecture them for liking such things as gridiron football to the degree that we have seen over the last 50 years or so.
As Jesse Berrett writes in “Pigskin Nation: How the NFL Remade American Politics,” published this spring by the University of Illinois Press, NFL impresarios and politicians alike tapped into American cultural traditionalists during the heat of the anti-Vietnam protests of the late 1960s, and as the country was literally on the verge of cracking up.
For anyone too young or not alive to remember―I was a grade-schooler near Atlanta 50 years ago, trying to comprehend the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy―those times easily spank today’s turmoil.
It’s not even close, and as Berrett reminds us, there was was a bipartisan play for the endorsements of top NFL players by presidential candidates.
Richard Nixon’s appeal to the “Silent Majority,” the precursors to today’s disaffected Trump voters (and initially courted by George Wallace), formed the backbone of this new football constituency. He invited Gale Sayers to the White House, and frequently appeared on the sidelines with George Allen’s Redskins.
Yet RFK had his own football contingent (Rosie Grier was in the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Sirhan Sirhan opened fire). Ray Schoenke, an offensive lineman for the Redskins and Cowboys, headed up Athletes for McGovern. Chiefs running back Ed Podolak campaigned tirelessly for the doomed 1972 Democratic nominee.
Berrett writes that “End Zone,” Don DeLillo’s 1972 football novel, was a send-up of overheated arguments about the sport at the time, “parodying liberal and conservative perspectives yet endorsing the fundamental truth that football means . . . something.”
The 1960 film “The Violent World of Sam Huff” is one of many cultural products Berrett examines in a fairly even-handed treatment of pro football at the dawn of what would become its defining decade.
In Berrett’s telling, that identity was solidified by the 1963 NFL Films production ”They Call It Pro Football,” narrated by John Facenda and which Berrett describes as a “mass-media genius” in which “pain was made aesthetic, visually appealing―and irrelevant."
It’s this sensibility that has bothered cultural critics of football ever since, and which also in part stirred player protests that foreshadowed more recent controversies: “Middle Americans loved football. So did Southerners. So did Richard Nixon.”
While “the NFL promoted itself as the most visibly patriotic institution in the country,” sending players on USO-sponsored tours of Vietnam, a new generation of writers, including Hunter S. Thompson, was already making the connection between football and the violence in Indochina.
So were some players. Foremost among them was St. Louis Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War and who delved often in counterculture politics.
In 1970, after his retirement, he published “Out of Their League,“ a cri de coeur influenced by his own forays into academic Marxism that was beginning to infect American higher education.
Vince Lombardi was among Meggyesy’s loudest critics, as was rugged Baltimore Colts linebacker Mike Curtis, whose memoir defending football from “malcontents,” according to one reviewer, make him sound like Archie Bunker.
The cultural-tug-of-war portrayed by Berrett is between renegade athletes and their more conservative overlords. It’s a contest that remains framed the same way today, and denies the consideration of the fans who have made the NFL such a behemoth spectator sport, and its best players millionaires.
This week Berrett wrote that Meggyesy paid a real price for his heresy from the football orthodoxy. He might have enjoyed some recognition and props from today’s “woke” element in sports media and among activist athletes, but he was never enriched by it.
The battles back then were real and contentious and nearly brought this country to its knees. I didn’t think much of Meggyesy’s critique of America, but it was pretty ballsy for him to lay it out in the face of a hot war and a generally hostile press.
In many ways, I don’t think the United States has healed from that time. At times, including today, the wounds have reopened so much that I fear that we may never break out of our tribal silos.
We are all getting played, including Kaepernick. The issues upon which he has based his protest are real, although I have long felt he is a miscast figure in a misguided protest, long before Trump weighed in.
Kaepernick's cause has now been purloined by Nike, a current mass-media genius, which offers the illusion of the rewards of sacrifice without requiring aspirants to do anything more than purchase overpriced sneakers.
RIP, Paul “Wrecking” Crewe
Days after his death at 82, Burt Reynolds is being honored this weekend by the Florida State football team, which will be wearing a “BAN ONE” decal on their helmets.
That was from one of his iconic films, “Smokey and the Bandit,” which helped elevate Reynolds to national fame. Reynolds played for the Seminoles, long before they became a national powerhouse, and was a teammate of ESPN college football analyst Lee Corso.
In a sense, “Buddy” Reynolds, as he was known during his college playing days in the 1950s, formed the template that he would eventually take to the screen, one that dovetailed naturally into a variety of feature roles. As Corso said this week, “in 99 percent of the movies, he played himself.”
They included starring roles in two football-themed films: As the All-Pro running back Billy Clyde Puckett in “Semi-Tough,” and as Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a former pro football player, in “The Longest Yard.”
John Schulian panned “Semi-Tough,” calling it the ruination of “our best football novel” (see item below on Dan Jenkins).
Released in 1974, “The Longest Yard” showcased Reynolds’ sex appeal and swagger, qualities he exuded no matter the role. As Crewe, an ex-NFL player booted from the league for point-shaving, then sentenced to jail for stealing his girlfriend’s car, the rapscallion role was set up perfectly for him.
(The film, which was partially shot at the maximum security Georgia State Penitentiary, included real prisoners as extras, and starred actual NFL luminaries, including Ray Nitschke, Gene Washington and Joe Kapp.)
In prison, he’s the embattled leader of the “Mean Machine,” a team of convicts prepping to face a team of prison guards. During the game, his mistakes dig the inmates into a big hole, and without spoiling the end, Crewe more than redeems himself.
Reynolds was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for that role, which was covered by Adam Sandler (yes, that Adam Sandler) in 2005. Reynolds said he never saw the remake, in which he played the role of Coach Nate Scarborough.
That probably says more about a lack of imagination in Hollywood today than anything else. Reynolds was hardly the first former athlete to become a movie star (see: Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Duke Kahanamoku, Esther Williams, Jim Brown, Bubba Smith, O.J. Simpson, Fred Williamson, etc.).
But it is easy to see, for better or for worse, that because of Reynolds, “the jock became the Hollywood prototype,” albeit of a very different vintage:
“Reynolds had a quality—an ease on camera, a comfort saying ridiculous things, and a physical ability to credibly fight bad guys and win a prison football game. It made him sui generis, and then inspired generations of male actors who wanted to top-line films."
A Few Good Reads
Dan Jenkins, now 88, has another essay collection that’s just been published, “Sports Makes You Type Faster,” and he consented to a rare interview to discuss his career, what’s changed about his profession and why he doesn’t want to fully retire:
“I haven’t done anything other than type and know people. I spent a lifetime, six or seven decades, not only typing for a living but cultivating sources. You only know what people tell you. I tried never to burn a bridge, or write an expose. That was not a part of my era. I used to laugh at guys in the business who ran around trying to find some third-string halfback who smoked a joint so they could win a Pulitzer.
“You don’t win Pulitzers for those stories, you just break up homes. If I wrote about everything I knew about athletes I hung out with drinkin,' I would have made a lot of enemies.”
(From 2014: A Bryan Curtis profile of Jenkins at Grantland, which includes the origins of “Semi-Tough,” and how it “was a new kind of sports book.” )
Ivan Maisel of ESPN.com, who lost a son to suicide, writes about Tyler Hilinski, a Washington State quarterback who took his own life, and how his grieving family is trying to carry on without him and honor his memory;
Brian Mazone worked for years to reach the major leagues, but a rainout denied what turned out to be his only shot at getting in The Show;
Tom Nichols has spent 31 years calling minor league games on the radio, and recently got a chance to call three innings of a Reds game, his first in the bigs;
As Billie Jean King turns 75, the New York Historical Society is opening a photography exhibit in her honor;
Andrew Bernstein, the longtime official photographer for the Los Angeles Lakers, Clippers and Kings, was honored this week by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame with the Curt Gowdy Media Award;
At LSU, Tiger Mike is the revered live mascot of a storied football program; the post kicks off an SB Nation series on college football mascots, thus far including those at South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee;
During the off-season, the Indianapolis Colts finished a project to digitize as many season media guides as it can in franchise history, including going back to Baltimore in the 1940s. The homepage takes a while to navigate and the PDFs for each media guide also are slow to load, but they’re a terrific glimpse into seeing how NFL teams responded to the growth of the game and the media attention that came with it;
Curt Smith, author of books about the radio and television evolutions of baseball, has a new book out about the history of American presidents and the game;
From a new book about Oklahoma City and its pursuit of big-time sports with an NBA franchise comes the story of Tim McVeigh, and his painful obsession with his hometown Buffalo Bills;
A review of Jeff Pearlman’s new book about the USFL by Chris Dufresne of TMG College Sports, who covered the Los Angeles Express, a team that “was a perfect training ground for a young writer” and a beat that led to meeting his eventual wife. Here’s an excerpt from “Football for a Buck;”
The new head of the Society for American Baseball Research is Scott Bush, a VP at the Goldklang Group, a minor league ownership consortium. He succeeds Marc Appleman, who transformed SABR into an entity holding industry-wide events, including an analytics conference during spring training, as well as its summer convention for members;
For decades, ash bats ruled in the major leagues, but now the big-bashers and almost everyone else uses maple bats. How that transformation came to be.
Now Hear This
On the Baseball by the Book podcast, the latest guest is Josh Ostergaard, author of the 2014 book “The Devil’s Snake Curve,” which he describes as an alt-history of the game. Significant sections are devoted to Billy Sunday, the major-leaguer-turned-evangelist, and Moe Berg, the major-leaguer-turned spy; the book got an NYT plug;
Skip Desjardins, author of a book about America and the baseball pennant race during the final weeks of World War I, talks about “September 1918” on the New Books in Sports podcast.
Sports Media News
Deadspin goes long on the content mill FanSided, where young (even teenage) writers and site managers are paid next to nothing in the latest attempt to chase after the race-to-the-bottom clickbait in hopes of becoming the next Bleacher Report (now owned by Turner) or SB Nation (operated by Vox Media);
Not a surprise that Jemele Hill has left ESPN, where she had been writing for the race-and-sports vertical The Undefeated. However, other departures there are leading to speculation that site may not have much of a future, a la Grantland, as the Worldwide Leader’s new leadership veers away from edgy cultural, personality and non-sports programming that has drawn heat from traditional viewers. ESPN also parted ways earlier this year with FiveThirtyEight.com, which is now part of fellow Disney entity ABC News.
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This is Digest issue No. 136, published Sept. 9, 2018.
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