Everything They Had (6 page)

Some six years ago when I was at a dinner party in New York at the home of Roger Altman, a friend who is now Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, a dinner filled with top political people and media stars, wealthy and accomplished men and women, I let the others have their ego time, one after another one-upping each other on what they had done lately and which important person they had just interviewed. I waited patiently all evening, like a great poker player holding the perfect hole card, and then late at night I played my card, saying (quite casually, of course) that the next day I was flying to Islamorada, Fla., in the Keys, to interview Ted Williams. All conversation stopped, and I owned that dinner party and it struck me that at the moment if I had wanted to auction off a job as my assistant—not unlike Tom Sawyer, that is, someone to carry my notebooks and tape recorders while I spent the day with Ted Ballgame—I could easily have gone to five figures.

As I write this I have just finished up
October 1964
, the fourth of my sports books, and the bookend to
Summer of
'
49
; it is the story of the 1964 season and the seven-game Cardinals-Yankees World Series that year, and the end of the Yankee dynasty. I had a wonderful time doing it.

I spent two days in Omaha with Bob Gibson and found him (as I suspected I would) utterly admirable, a man whose intellectual, physical, and spiritual abilities seem to be in almost perfect proportion, and the component parts not merely for a dominating athlete, but an imposing person. Bill White, then in his final days as National League President, was filled with laughter and a sense of amusement about life's contradictions, and he had an inner richness all his own. Tim McCarver was a writer's perfect interview, combining an exceptional love of language with an equally remarkable love of the game. Dick Groat talked the way he played, ever the strategist, each play from that season still fresh in his mind as it was 30 years ago, each one a situation, calling for its own strategy. Lou Brock was the ultimate student of the pitchers and base stealing; what came through was his hard work and discipline as well as his passion and hunger to excel.

Among the Yankees, Al Downing was a wonderful interview, analytical, candid, thoughtful. Steve Hamilton, now the athletic director at Morehead State, was bemused, and self-deprecating (albeit appalled when my car, which had been parked outside his office, was towed away and I was stuck with a $40 ticket—“We don't usually treat our visitors quite this way,” he said). Mel Stottlemyre, 30 years in baseball, then pitching coach of the Mets, a sad team it seemed to me, filled with largely overpaid and quite (at least to me as the two of us were talking and the Mets players turned up their boom boxes to make the interview more difficult) surly players, became once again the cool fearless rookie who had saved the Yankees when he came up in August of 1964 and went 9–3. Pete Ramos, who was coaching at Miami-Dade Community College (Wolson campus), was delighted to summon me before his players as living proof that in that season when he had come to the Yankees late in the pennant race (too late to pitch in the World Series) and had made 13 appearances, he had an earned-run average of 1.25 and had not, despite all the pressure on him in big game after big game, walked a single batter. And Bobby Richardson, despite the considerable gulf between his personal politics and mine, treated me with great grace and generosity, had me in his home and took me with his extended family to lunch and recalled the season with singular irony.

That I eventually gravitated to writing books on sports is not so surprising. I had always been a serious sports fan, and as a college student I had covered sports for the
Boston Globe
to help pay for my tuition, and as a young reporter in the South during the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the mid- and late Fifties, I had been fascinated by the coming of the first generation of black athletes in big-time American sports and my instinctive sense that a revolution was taking place in America, and that it was taking place most notably and quite possibly first in the world of sports.

So it was that I gradually and tentatively ventured out 15 years ago to do my first sports book. I did it almost because I needed to: In 1979 I had finished a long book on the media which had taken six years; it, together with a book on the origins of the war of Vietnam,
The Best and the Brightest
, meant that I had spent 11 years on two books, and I was tired both physically and mentally, and I badly needed a break. I was a serious professional basketball fan, had become a friend of coach Jack Ramsay, had loved his 1977 championship Portland team, and by chance had been in Portland on a book tour the day Bill Walton announced that he wanted to be traded. Instantly I envisioned a book on a season in professional basketball, and in particular how the coming of ever-larger salaries (in those more innocent days, $300,000 for a star player was still considered an outlandish salary) and the increasingly litigious nature of the society had begun to change sports. I thought it could be a good book, and could be a welcome change of pace after almost 25 years of covering politics. So I went out and did it (
The Breaks of the Game
) and had a glorious, if exhausting, time.

I liked the world of sports and I liked many of the people I met and I came to cherish the friendships I made in the doing, and the passion, intelligence and, on occasion, inner purity of the different athletes I met, basketball players, baseball players and rowers, many of whom who still remain in my life. (Just last year Bill Walton decided to expand my cultural horizons and took me and my family to a Grateful Dead concert at the Meadowlands, thereby gaining me a new level of esteem in the eyes of my then 12-year-old-daughter.)

I like wearing the two hats. The first hat is ostensibly the more serious one, and my larger books on politics tend to take some five or six years; the other hat as a sportswriter I wear more lightly, I think. The books are shorter and I do them more quickly. I've come to see these books as a form of relaxation. College professors get sabbaticals, self-employed writers do not, so I see them as a form of partial sabbatical. They are work but they are pleasure: It is a world that is, for me at least, as witness my meeting with Carville, generally more pleasant and less adversarial than that of politics.

Graham Greene, the great British novelist, would alternate his serious novels with detective novels, which he came to call his “entertainments,” and in some way these sports books are my entertainments, fun to do, a pleasant world and a good deal more relaxed venue, and yet a venue from which I can learn a great deal about the changing mores of the rest of the society. (I should admit that in baseball I have the luxury of interviewing athletes who played 30 or 40 years ago rather than those who play today, something I am not sure I would enjoy nearly as much.) If I did these books at first because they were fun and in some ways less demanding, then I have been surprised by their increasing commercial success—and the expanded constituency they have brought me, that is, readers who have come to my other books because they first read one of my sports books.

In addition, sports has been an excellent window through which to monitor changes in the rest of the society as we become more and more of an entertainment society. I do not know of any other venue that showcases the changes in American life and its values and the coming of the norms of entertainment more dramatically than sports. We can learn as much about race from sports as almost any subject and we can learn what the coming of big money does to players and to lines of authority more from sports than anything else. When I wrote
Summer
I did it because I wanted a book on the last moment of the old era in baseball, when the game was played on grass, in the daytime, when the teams traveled by train, and when the games were broadcast by radio, when owners held dictatorial power, and when above all else, both teams, the Yankees and the Red Sox, were still lily white.

October 1964
catches baseball midway through the dramatic changes that have taken place since World War II: By 1964 baseball is a television sport, expansions have come, because of television ever bigger money is moving into the game (the Astrodome is just being completed at $30 million) and although the new money has not yet reached the players it is already affecting the nature of the game and its ownership.

Above all, by 1964, baseball reflected a larger slice of America: In the critical last game of the 1949 pennant race, four of the starting nine players on the Yankees—Raschi, Rizzuto, DiMaggio and Berra—were of Italian-American descent, whereas in the critical seventh game of the 1964 World Series, four of the nine Cardinals—Gibson, Brock, White and Flood—were black. The Yankees, of course, could have extended their dynasty, they could have signed Ernie Banks and other great black stars, but George Weiss, their general manager, did not think blacks were as talented or as mentally tough as whites and he gave for far too long orders to his best scouts not to sign them. All of that came to a head by 1964 as Mantle and Ford and others wore out; the Cardinals that fall, it seemed to me (and I was a Yankees fan), represented not just a larger slice of America, but a more just America. That, I suppose, was the answer I had been looking for when I started the book.

America entered the new century on the very threshold of becoming a great power. Barely more than a century old, it was already moving at an astonishing rate from agrarian to industrial society, and from rural to urban society. With a population of roughly 70 million, the nation was becoming urbanized at an accelerating rate; indeed tensions between the new immigrants who lived in the cities and were often Catholic, and people who were nativists, that is the older stock Americans who lived in more rural areas, would dominate the country's politics for the first third of a century.

More than a third of the population made their living from farming. The pace of life was slow; for every 1,000 Americans, there were only 18 telephones, most of these in businesses. No one spoke of disposable income or the entertainment share of the take-home dollar—take-home dollars were too scarce. Sports, both amateur and professional, had a limited importance; ordinary people lacked the time to play them, and more important, the time and money to watch them.

But the country would become the most dynamic society in the world. In a century of stunning advances in technology, no country was so systematically on the cutting edge like America, not only in inventing new and critical scientific breakthroughs, but in bringing them to market as devices to be enjoyed by simple working citizens. If there was one great American revolution, created by hundreds of smaller inventions, it was a revolution which created the good life for ordinary working men and women. It was a revolution which in sum made the worst kind of physical labor less harsh, paid workers a fairer share for their labor, gave them a decent wage, and allowed them not only great personal dignity and economic independence with an increased amount of disposable income, but more leisure time. How America spent both that leisure time and disposable income—the rise of an entertainment society and its effect upon the world of sports—would be one of the most dramatic by-products of what was often called the American Century.

By the end of the century, it had become America the affluent, a place where ordinary families owned two and sometimes three cars, one and sometimes two houses, took long, expensive vacations, and spent a vast amount of the GNP on the search for pleasure. In the process—in part because of its wealth, in part because of the direction the new technology took it—America had morphed itself from a grim, often joyless, rather Calvinist society to a modern mass-production industrial society. By the Sixties, it changed again, into a communications society, to finally, by the end of the century, an entertainment society in which images replaced print as a principal means of communication.

In all of this change sports—amateur and particularly professional—would be among the main beneficiaries. By 1998, America's most famous athlete, Michael Jordan, a young black man from North Carolina, made some $78 million a year in salary and endorsements, and certain professional sports franchises, like the New York Yankees and the Dallas Cowboys, were said to be worth close to a billion dollars.

Rarely had the beginning of a century in one nation seemed so distant from the end of the same century. In January 1900 the country was barely a generation removed from a bitter and exceedingly violent civil war, yet from that war were the beginnings of American power, dynamism and industrialism first fashioned.

But that was yet to come. If the Civil War had been fought to end slavery, then there was in the Reconstruction era, as the true political price of reunion emerged, a resurgence of racism, slavery replaced by legal racism, and fierce continued suppression of the children of slaves. If, in Lincoln's phrase, a house divided against itself cannot stand, then America as the century began was neither a house divided nor a house unified. In the new century, one of the great struggles played out would be that of black Americans struggling for full citizenship. And no arena would showcase this battle in a series of stunning and often bitterly divisive increments, or reflect the true talents of black America more clearly, than the world of sports.

The century would begin with what was virtually a national attempt to limit the possibilities of a great black fighter, Jack Johnson, because he was considered uppity and was far too often seen with white women. Special laws were passed as a means of entrapping Johnson and ending his right to be seen as the heavyweight champion of the world. It was just the beginning. The struggle of blacks in the century ahead would be an ongoing source of national tension and debate.