SPORT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34107, 20 March 1976, Page 9

SPORT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY

Nice Guys Finish Last. By Paul Gardner. Allen Lane. 286 pp. N.Z. price $8 95. (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley) Paul Gardner, a British pharmacist by training, but an American sports writer by inclination, has investigated the notion that sport, and attitudes to sport, are the key to the character of a people. His engaging survey of American sport — the title does not come from a sex manual — is certainly revealing of American social attitudes — of attitudes to success and failure, to the competitive society (and the incipient revolt against the competitive society), to racism, and to the ways of big bush ess. including in this context, the universities.

But the book is neither a dull, sociological treatise, a shallow survey of American sport nor, an indiscriminate criticism of American life and values. It is rather a quizzical investigation of the major commercialised professional sports, baseball, gridiron football and basketball, which in turn appalls, amuses, informs and provides telling insights into American social history.

For. as sports moved from the cow paddocks of the century ago to the 50.00 C-seat rain and wind free astrodomes of today, their character has changed utterly. They have become entertainments on a lavish scale. Big business has moved in; and big business buys and sells sport and sportsmen with the same relish and cold efficiency as any other commodity. It has created its own closed shops of major and minor leagues, made its own rules to prevent players from taking a large slice of the cake and appointed its own commissioners to police them.

Yet sport is more than a mere commodity. If the first loyalty of those

who control it is to profits rather than to the abstract ideals of a sense of public sevice and the good of the game, sport is the inevitable loser. The pressure to win becomes overwhelming and the enjoyment disappears. This malady, Gardner says, has hit both baseball and football; and the extraordinary financial manoeuvres attending the introduction of soccer as a major spectator sport in the sixties actually prevented soccer from becoming established.

Americans, it was said after the failure of the experiment, were not ready for soccer. Rather it was that soccer was not ready' for American business methods in sport. C. 8.5., for instance, paid 5500,000 for the television rights when league soccer was played in 1967, but it was faced with fitting 20 commercials into a 90-minute game, whose much-advertised attraction was its non-stop character. So it was that referees were equipped with an electronic device to warn them when a commercial was due. Their duty' then was to stop the game on some pretext to allow it to be fitted in.

But American sport survived far worse irregularities. Gambling has caused numerous scandals. The Chicago White Sox, later known as the Black Sox, once threw a world series, the holy of holy of baseball, for a gambler’s bribe; and the lengths to which some universities have gone to attract athletes and footballers on “scholarships” is astounding.

American sport has been enmeshed for many years in problems which have surfaced elsewhere only recently. Racism was rife until the fifties and Paul Robeson, for instance, suffered insult and injury, indignity' and humiliation, as an outstanding Rutgers footballer. “Ole Man River” was. for him, a wondrous escape. But today black

players dominate.' Though they represent only about 20 per cent of the population, blacks make up 25 per cent of baseball players, 32 per cent of footballers and 55 per cent of basketball players. Politics, Gardner finds, has become another curse. Sport has been profoundly affected by political and social attitudes and by the growing materialism of America. There was a time when the Puritan ethic restricted sport to the gentlemanly art of cricket, but it virtually came to an end at Ffoboken in 1859 when England trounced a New England side, even t’ ough 22 Americans batted in each innings. Baseball, popular in the Civil War, flourished in the small town era and as transport became swifter the national leagues became established, making baseball, or at least watching baseball, the national pastime. But with the spread of technology, the growth of violence and the Cold War, football, which had somethig of the spirit, morality and objectives of national leaders, surpassed baseball. Sucessive Presidents did much to identify it with politics, equating it with patriotism, manliness and the American way, culminating in the Nixon-Agnew attitude that critics of football were “kooks, crumbums, commies and hairy, loud-mouthed beatniks.”

The astounding growth of basketball in recent years is seen by Gardner as an expression of the counter-culture. It is a freer, fast-moving game with room for virtuosity, style and lightheartedness, as the Harlem Globetrotters have demonstrated. It cared nought about long hair, beards or even beads and, as the only major American sport that does provide international competition, seemed to fit neatly into the internationalism of the youth culture.

If in his dissection of the body of sport Gardner exposes some bazarre and malignant growths, he happily retains much of the excitement, drama and atmosphere of sporting occasions. There are absorbing accounts of the immortals and of the origins of the games they played. Oddly enough, only one of thfem, basketball, has a true American heritage. Gridiron simply grew from soccer and rugby. And though one Abner Doubleday is credited with developing the national pastime of baseball in 1839 — and there is an appropriate hall of fame to prove it — there are certain English sceptics. They can point to its similarity to rounders, a game, they add crushingly, for girls. And readers of .lane Austen can point to a young lady in “Northanger Abbey” who preferred baseball and horses to books. Miss Austen wrote that book in 1798.