Interest, Fans, and Sports

In recent days, football has been very much in the news, the product of some pretty upset fans.  Not upset with the game, but with the temporary officials. And, perhaps much more significantly, it's been in the news a lot recently because of a growing body of evidence that football is causing a lot of early traumatically induced dementia amongst its players.  I actually started this entry off awhile back after reading an article about that in The New Republic, and today, when I'm finally publishing this rather longish entry, there's a news story that's broken in which player Jim McMahon has indicated that, if he could go back, he'd play baseball instead.  He's now suffering from the early stages of dementia himself.

 Schoolyard football, 1940s

I guess that makes this as good to time as any to delve into the professional sports, or sports in general.  Indeed, we're nearly on the 120th anniversary of what's become the American Sport, professional football.  It was on this day November 12, 1892 that professional football made its debut.  Or, rather more accurately, the first professional football player made his debut.  That player was William "Pudge" Heffelfinger, who was paid $500 to play as a lineman for Pittsburgh's Allegheny Athletic Club.  Heffelfinger had been offered half that to play in a prior game, but declined so as to not jeopardize his amateur status.  But apparently the former Yale football player felt that the $500 amount was ample compensation. And, while diminutive by today's standards, $500.00 in 1892 was indeed a substantial amount to be paid for a single game, when the value of that $500.00 at that time is considered.  He must have been pretty good at the primitive game.

William "Pudge" Heffelfinger, while a student at Yale.

To know a thing like that, you'd probably assume that I must be a die hard football fan, or perhaps a die hard sports fan, but I am not.  I only know who Heffelfinger is because he was mentioned in the truly freighting article on head injuries associated with football (really scary) in the most recent issue of The New Republic, although it appears that Heffelfinger, who played in the non helmet era, when head injuries may actually have been considerably less frequent, lived until age 86.  Anyhow, sports are one of the very few areas where my father's interests diverge from my own.  My father loved football.  Indeed, he loved all sports.  I can recall him watching the Wild World Of Sports very routinely, and there were very few major sports that he would not follow, to some degree, if they were on television.  And, moreover, he knew something, often a great deal, about each one.  He was, for instance, the first person I ever recall talking knowledgeably about stock car racing, long before NASCAR achieved its current level of fame.  At the same time, however, he knew a lot about golf, even though he didn't play it.  And he knew a great deal about football, which he had played at the high school level in the 1940s.  Indeed, I know he played for the local NCHS, and I believe he played for the high school in Scottsbluff before that.

I, on the other hand, just can't seem to muster up enough interest to follow too many sports, or even follow any steadily.  I'm not sure why, but I simply lost interest in a lot of them in my early teens.  Some I never had any interest in.  I have nothing against them, I just don't seem to be able to follow them. For example, I've never been able to follow any kind of automobile racing at all.  It's not that I won't, I simply can't.  I used to like watching football when I was very young, but about the time I hit junior high school my interest was waning and indeed it simply passed away.  I did watch a few football games while in high school, and even photographed the 1980 Oil Bowl for the high school paper, but that 1980 game was the second to last one I ever personally attended.  Indeed, I think I went to the high school games more because there were high school girls there, rather than being interested in the sport itself, save for the game I photographed, which I was watching for that reason.  The last one I ever watched was a Guernsey High School game I watched while in the National Guard.  At that occasion I happened to just be at Camp Guernsey when the game was going on. The football field at that time adjoined the camp, and I didn't have anything to do, so I went and watched it.  It would stun real football fans to know that even though I lived in Laramie Wyoming for six years, I never once saw a football game while there.  I was, moreover, a student at the University of Wyoming at the time.

Indeed my record on football is so poor that I went from that last Guernsey game all the way up until I was married before watching a full game on television again.  In our household my wife is a real football fan.  She'll watch the games, and every year the Super Bowl is a minor party at our house.  So, I'll watch that game now.

My track record is no better for most other major sports either, although I really do like baseball quite a bit.  I don't watch a lot of it, but I like it, and will follow it in some years.  That's about the only major professional sports I follow at all, and I don't follow any of the university teams in any sport.

This is not to say, however, that I somehow disapprove of them (although the article on football mentioned above causes me to have real concern about it as a sport).  Not following them is not the same as disapproving of them, and I've often wished I did follow them, although I've now given up trying to.  I've liked it a great deal when my own kids played sports and watched them.  On other sports, I've tried to read the sports page so that I can pick up a knowledge of them, and hopefully be able to talk about them intelligently, but it's such a lost cause that I'm never able to do that for more than a few days.  Indeed, when both my wife and I are at the breakfast table, with the local newspaper out, she'll often just state "give me the sports page" knowing that I'm not going to read it.  If there's important news on something else on that page, I miss it.  Just today I was at a firm lunch when the topic turned to the Denver Broncos and as usual I was clueless.  One of our lawyers has a near relative on that team, and I can't even recall who he is, even though he's a starter.  And this is the second time we've had an employee with a near relative on a professional football team whom everyone else recognizes, and I'm out to sea on.

As odd of character trait as it is, however, I will watch some sports if I happen to see them, and really like those off sports.  When a student at the University of Wyoming I'd watch the ruby games if they happened to be going on while I was around, and I really liked rugby.  I used to watch Australian Rules Football if it was televised, even though I have no idea what the "rules" in Australian Rules Football are.  I really like equine sports and, when they are televised, I'll watch them. Steeple Racing is a great sport.  Polo is a super sport in my view.  What all this says about me, I have no idea.

Anyhow, mostly looking at the really popular sports from the outside, looking in, has made me notice a bit how what is popular as a sport varies by location, setting and time, even while knowing that I'm somehow missing out on the enjoyment of them today.  That's a bit worth exploring in the context of what's noted here.  Professional sports as part of the national background, and even amateur sports, have really changed enormously over the decades.

This entry stared off noticing football, but the truth of the matter is that football is a sport that did not have a great following until after World War Two.  There was a following, to be sure, but mostly of college teams.  Professional football existed after some point in the 20th Century, and beyond the bonus for a game level noted above, but it wasn't a very big deal. There's reason that that baseball figures were used for ad hoc identity tests by American solders during World War Two and football knowledge was not.  Not everyone could be expected to have it.  Football only achieved its current status in the 1950s, and only after it started to be televised.  Television made professional football what it is. Before that, it was a college sport, much like rugby is today, or to a degree like what US soccer now is.  It also had a huge high school following.  This all actually makes sense, as football is a theoretically 1.25 hour long game.  Just perfect for what was a game mostly played by students who were real students.  That also made it the perfect television game, however, as it could easily fit into a convenient and predictable television time slot, even with commercials.  That probably also made it about 2 hours long, over the original 1.25 hours.  None the less, as odd as it may seem now, it was a select group who followed any kind of professional football before World War Two.  Lots of folks followed college football, but it was actually a game more likely to be played by real students, as opposed to the "student athletes" we have today.  A scandal like the current Penn State football scandal would be almost unimaginable in that prior era, as having a full time football coach, or at least a big program like so many schools have today, would have been unthinkable.

Baseball, then, was a very early, widely followed, sport in the United States.  Indeed the first efforts to organize professional baseball date back to 1870.  Two US teams actually were part of that very early organization.  National League baseball dates back to 1876.  The American League to 1901.

The 1896 Baltimore Orioles.

It's more than a little difficult to imagine how professional sports were followed before the advent of the radio, but they were.  Commercial radio got its start in the United States in 1920, and there were really no easily accessible radio stations of any kind in the US prior to 1916.  That baseball (and as we'll see boxing) had such a major following therefore, and so early, is really fairly amazing. But it did. Baseball had a major American following by the early 20th Century and gave Americans their first annual major sporting spectacle, the World Series in 1903 when the Boston Americans took on the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Boston prevailed after taking five games in a contest designed to be a best of nine series.  The amazing thing is, however, that in an era in which the fastest transportation was the train, a series of this type had been created.

 Jim Thorpe, the legendary athlete who excelled at nearly every sport, including football and baseball, as a baseball player for the New York Giants.

Perhaps demonstrating to an even greater degree the early popularity of baseball, the game had become such a big deal by 1919 that gamblers famously conspired to "fix" the series for gambling purposes, giving the US its first major sporting scandal.  Still very prominent in the sporting popular imagination, The Black Sox scandal saw some members of that team, who still played a pretty good series, throw it, nearly devastating the sport as a result.  This before the advent of radio play by play, when the news of the game, for most people, would have come in the form of the newspaper.

The 1919 Chicago White Sox before the disastrous "Black Sox" scandal.

Americans weren't just avidly following baseball in the late 19th Century and early 20th, however. They were also following the other major American sport of the era. . . . boxing.

Boxing, in recent years, has darned near died as a popular professional sport.  I would never have guessed that would have occurred when I was a kid.  Boxing was really popular up through the 1970s, and it seems that many, many people, men and women, followed at least the heavy weight boxers.  Sonny Liston, Mohammed Ali, George Frazier, etc, were all major sporting figures and televised boxing was very popular.  It had its critics to be sure, but it wouldn't have seemed obvious to anyone in the 1970s when Mohammed Ali engaged in banter with Howard Cosell that the sport would collapse in on itself like it has.  Now Ali is a sad shadow of his former self, likely demonstrating the effects of repeated poundings in the ring and Cosell is gone.  Boxing does not appear on network sporting television anymore.  I don't ever pick up Sports Illustrated (which seems to me to also sort of be a sad shadow of it former self) but I haven't noticed a stop action photo of boxing, sweat flying off the face of a boxer getting struck, as was so often the case in the covers of the 60s and 70s.

If boxing was big in the 60s and 70s, it was simply enormous in the 1890 to 1950 era. 

Boxing is an ancient sport, even as a professional sport, with champions in the UK going back to the 18th Century.  It had a huge following in the Western World and in some ways may be regarded as the first international sport.  A certain gentlemanly glamor attached to it at some point fairly early on, in spite of its undeniably brutal nature, and it had its own super stars very early on.  In the late 19th Century bare knuckle boxing gave the world one of the very first such sports super starts, the legendary John L. Sullivan, who became the last boxer to be a heavyweight champion under the London Prize Rules.

Sullivan defended the world's last real bare knuckle championship in 1882.  He'd been champion since 1889.  He was, at that point, undefeated and didn't fight a defense of his title for fifteen years, when he went on to fight Gentlemen Jim Corbett under the Marquess de Queensbury Rules, thereby signalling the end of the bare knuckle era.  This was ironic, perhaps, because most of Sullivan's matches had in fact been fought under the Queensbury rules with gloves, with only three being bare knuckle.  At any rate, Sullivan lost and Corbett became the new champion.  Sullivan went into semi-retirement after that and died at age 59, the results of over eating, over drinking, and boxing.

Boxing was also the one of the first integrated professional sport, acquiring that status long before baseball or football (with football obtaining it before baseball).  It didn't integrate without controversy, but it did integrate.  Something about the one vs. one nature of it probably made that inevitable.

Boxing also gave Americans, and indeed sports fans worldwide, one of the, if not the, first international black super star, Jack Johnson.  Johnson is sometimes inaccurately remembered as the world's first black champion, which he was not.   He was the first black heavyweight champion, however, and in the sport of boxing the heavyweights have always captured the public imagination, even while boxing fans tend to often admire the welterweights, and even the featherweights and bantamweights more.  The lighter boxers "box" more.  The heavier ones pound more.  I'm not sure what that says about the public as fans, but there you have it.

 Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion of the world, 1908, and the second black boxing champion.

Johnson was also popular because he was controversial.  A larger than life figure in an era of strong segregation, he ignored it and lived not only contrary to the color line but in many ways he lived in a way that couldn't help but draw a lot of attention.  Some have claimed that his disregard for societal boundaries damaged the cause of black athletes, and perhaps by extension American blacks in general, but I very much doubt that.  Chances are better that his refusal to adhere to such things helped them in the long run, as it required people to confront prejudices through a person who wouldn't honor them and who was obviously the best at his sport.  Which is not to say that his personal life was universally honorable, which would not be true.  Johnson was champion from 1908 through 1915.  He lost the title to Kansas cowboy Jess Willard in the 26th round of an intended 45 round fight in Havana.  He actually continued to fight up until age 60, but engaged in at least one war bond promotion fight in 1945, at age 68.  He died in a car wreck in 1946.

Johnson is remarkable in numerous ways.  Once again, from our prospective here, he's remarkable in that he was a sports super hero, or super villan, prior to the radio age.  People weren't following his fights on the radio or television, they were reading about him in the newspaper, and yet he was widely known, widely followed, and widely vilified.  His personal life was followed, which is truly remarkable for a character so early in the modern sports era (which this really was).

And, perhaps, something about both of these widely followed, pre-broadcast sports, may say something about the pace of life.  Baseball, in the early era, was played all in the day. The phrase "day game" would have made no sense at all. They were all day games.  And boxing matches and baseball games were nearly unrestricted in terms of allotted time of play. Baseball still is, which is one of the reasons it has trouble as a televised sport.  Boxing no longer is.  The thought of a 45 round bout, like the 1915 title fight, or the even earlier no limit fights, would be unthinkable now. Of course, they'd be unthinkable not just because they'd be incapable of being broadcasted, but in the case of boxing, because a bout of that length would be unthinkably brutal.

Boxing, as noted, broke the color barrier before any other major professional sport, and that continued on into modern times.  If Johnson was a bit of a villain in the public imagination, Joe Lewis, the champion of the 1930s and 1940s, was an unqualified hero.  Some claim that Lewis repaired the damage that Johnson had done, but again, I don't think so.  I think Johnson paved the way for Lewis, but Lewis, in his own right advanced the cause of black athletes.

That cause was soon to be advanced, of course, not only by Lewis, but by the great amateur track and field athlete Jessie Owens.  We're not really looking at amateur sports here, but because this topic naturally leads to Owens, some mention of him should be made.  What's interesting here, with an athlete like Owens, is that at least by the 1930s people were following not only professional sports, but some amateur ones as well.  Owens may be the single greatest track and field athlete of all time, and he famously made a great showing in the 1936 Munich Olympics.  Coming before the era when amateur sports translated into wealth, however, he lived a fairly quiet life after the Olympics, working at fairly routine jobs in later years.  Chances are overwhelming that if he'd been born now, he would have been a wealthy man.  But, in his own era, he was mostly a man famous for his Olympic victories.  Indeed, sports greatness in general did not really equate to wealth in this time, even for professional athletes. That's a feature of the much more recent era.

It wouldn't be fair to say that boxing and baseball were the only professional sports, or sports in general, with wide followings in the early 20th Century.  Horse racing, at least compared to now, was a surprisingly widely followed sport, and the first half of the 20th Century gave us two of the most widely known race horses of all time, Seabiscuit and Phar Lap.  Both of those horse are part of remarkably similar Great Depression rags to riches stories, but the interesting thing about horse racing of that era is that it was very widespread and widely followed. Today it tends to be only really followed, by average sports fans, if a really dramatic Triple Crown event is in the offering.  

The legendary Australian race horse Phar Lap in 1930. Photo by Charles Danile Pratt

Interestingly, horse racing was also integrated early on in the sense that the human part of the racing team, the jockey, were sometimes black. African Americans had a major presence in the post Civil War history of the sport which is largely forgotten today, but which probably makes sense if we consider that the African American population was overwhelmingly rural and southern prior to the Great Depression.  Oliver Lewis, a trainer and a jockey, trained the winning horse in the very first Kentucky Derby, and black jockeys figured prominently at the Derby for years.  Isaac Murphy is still remembered as one of the greatest jockeys of all time.  Murphy was the first jockey to win three Kentucky Derbys and won a record 44% of all races he rode, a record that nobody has yet approached. 

It wasn't just conventional horses races that were followed in this early time frame.  Before World War Two there were a surprising number of long distance horse races in the United States. Several of these, for example, were held in Wyoming involving very long rides.  At least a couple of such races occurred with the starting point being Gillette Wyoming, and the finishing point being Denver Colorado.  At least one similar race went from Rock Springs Wyoming to Denver Colorado.  Endurance races still occur, but not really of a similar nature to these.

For that matter, local sports of certain types were very common prior to World War Two.  Polo, for example, was a huge deal in the United States Army.  I'd guess that most Army officers do not know this today, unless they are in the cavalry or artillery branch and attune to the mounted history of those branches, but it was simply enormous prior to World War Two.  Cavalry and artillery officers were avid participants in the sport, having picked it up from the British.  Not only did they participate, but they were encouraged to do so by the military.  This was also true of the National Guard, the only reserve of the Army up until after World War Two.  Cavalry and artillery National Guard units featured teams, some of which even played indoors. The ability for average men to be able to play the sport, otherwise an expensive endeavor, provided a major recruiting incentive for the Army and National Guard at the time.

Indeed, horses in general, and horse sports, were such a feature of Army life prior to World War Two that they provided an incentive or disincentive for some people to join, or to join various branches.  Men who hated horses, and of course there are people who do hate and fear them, shied away from military careers.  Presumably somebody who was allergic to them would have to.  Men who loved horses joined and sought assignment to the cavalry or artillery.  One famous World War Two general, with a career stretching back to prior to World War One, Terry Allen, retired immediately after World War Two, in spite of a brilliant wartime career, simply because he did not want to be an Army without horses.  His wife would claim that Gen. Allen loved horses, the Army, and her, in that order.

Rounding this out, I suppose, I should note a sport that features horses and cows, but was very regional in the period we're looking at, that being rodeo sports.  "Rodeo" itself, of course, is  not a sport, as it's a collection of sports that all are grouped into that event for presentation.  Rodeos got their start as sporting events in the late 19th Century and were big deals in the Western United States and Canada by the 1890s.  Now they've spread across the country, but well into the 20th Century they were really pretty much a Western deal, but a pretty steady feature of Western life.  The Professional Rodeo Cowboy's Association dates back to 1936, so at least by that time there were men who were making a career of it.  That a person could make a career out of being a rodeo cowboy in 1936 is notable in and of itself, as that was in the depths of the Great Depression.

Roughstock, Cheyenne Frontier Days, 1910.

I suppose, after all of that, the logical question would be, well. . . what's the point?  I don't know that I particularly have one, other than to look how the public fascination with certain sports has evolved over the years. We can easily track professional sports in the United States back well over 150 years, which is something that's amazing in and of itself, and perhaps says that the fascination with sports isn't anything new at all. ESPN may be relatively new, but what it taps into isn't.  People were avidly following certain professional sports in an era prior to automobiles, television or radio, meaning that people were following some sporting events by newspaper pretty avidly.  The sports page, apparently, isn't anything new at all.  And play that was at least somewhat cross country came in pretty early as well, as baseball teams were obviously riding the rails pretty early, and boxers going to some exotic venues. The types of sports that people routinely followed, however, have changed.  In the early 20th Century, people were following some sports  that took a very long time to reach a conclusion.  Baseball may be the classic example,  being a daytime game, with most games played during the weekday.   It takes hours to play, but that didn't stop it from being watched or followed.  Now, people follow sports that lend them selves to a compact televised segment, to some extent.  Or at least they seem to watch sports that take less time to watch and which are easy to televise.

It also seems to me to be the case that in some ways, perhaps very minor ways, people have less of a connection with the sports they follow now as opposed they did previously, although such an analysis can definitely be taken too far.  Be that as it may, professional athletes always stood apart as great athletes, but  it was somehow easier to imagine yourself as a Babe Ruth, or even a Ty Cobb, than it is to imagine yourself as a Peyton Manning. Perhaps that's in part because the professional athletes of former eras were not so separated from average people in terms of incomes, but perhaps it is also because they really were more average.  Or at least most of them were.  Most of us cannot imagine being a Jessie Owens or Jim Thorpe.  And in that earlier era a sport based on playing for hours on a grassy field, or racing a horse, was closer to what many people worked on or experienced everyday.  While professional sports have always been spectator in nature, I suspect that the spectators were a little closer to the participants at one time.