American History Through Sport American
December 21, 2016 | Author: Kevin Ruiz Cortes | Category: N/A
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Using the Super Bowl as a barometer of America’s sports obsession is almost too easy. The last three championship...
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Copyright © 2013. Praeger. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
American History through American Sports From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Volume 1 Creating Sports Culture: Beginnings
Danielle Sarver Coombs and Bob Batchelor
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England
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Copyright 2013 by Danielle S. Coombs and Bob Batchelor All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American history through American sports : from colonial lacrosse to extreme sports / Danielle S. Coombs and Bob Batchelor, [editors] 3 v. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-37988-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-37989-5 (ebook) 1. Sports—United States—History. 2. United States—History. I. Coombs, Danielle S. II. Batchelor, Bob. GV583.A59 2013 796.0973—dc23 2012034803 ISBN: 978-0-313-37988-8 EISBN: 978-0-313-37989-5 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Contents Volume 1 Creating Sports Culture: Beginnings
Acknowledgments vii Introduction: American History through American Sports xi Part 1 Critical Issues 1. America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times Russ Crawford 2. Holy Cow! How the Advent of Early Sports Broadcasting Dramatically Changed How Professional Sports Teams in the United States Are Marketed Ric Jensen
3
19
3. Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons Ray Gamache
39
4. Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry Brad Schultz
55
5. Cables, Speakers, and Screens: The Development of Technology in Sports Broadcasting Axel Kupfer
73
Part 2 The Big Four 6. The Greatest Running Back in Football History Kaitlin Krister
89
7. Baseball: The Nation’s First National Pastime Adam G. Capitanio
99
8. Jackie Robinson: The Patron Saint of American Sports Leslie Heaphy
115
9. The Yankee Dynasty Donna Waller Harper
123
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vi | Contents
10. The Babe: Reconsidering America’s First Sports Legend Gina Anne Conley
133
11. A Concise History of Early Baseball Scott Reinardy
145
12. Cobb’s Ghost: An Argument for Baseball’s Greatest Hitter Lori Amber Roessner
165
13. Organized Chaos: The Early History of Professional Basketball 185 Jim Fisher 14. Soccer on the Pond: Hockey’s Role in Young America Melanie Formentin
197
Part 3 Outside the Lines 15. Soccer’s Own Goal: Immigration, Economics, and the Decline of American Soccer in the Early 1930s Glen M. E. Duerr
217
16. Fight Night: Boxing’s Popularity in the Early Twentieth Century Joe Marren
229
17. Reintroducing the Olympics: Making Track and Field Relevant 243 Benjamin Dettmar 18. The Tobacco Spittin’, Moonshine Runnin’ History of Early NASCAR William Matthew McCarter
261
19. Gentlemen, Start Your Engines: Early American Automobile Racing Norma Jones
273
20. Mountain Bike: Californians Reinvent Bicycling Frédéric Savre
281
About the Editors 297 About the Contributors 299 Index 307
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Acknowledgments
hen Bob first approached me about working on these books with him, I almost burst out of my skin with excitement. There is little I love more in this world than thinking and writing about sports, so the opportunity to engage with something of this scope and quality has been amazing. Bob, thank-you so much for bringing me on board—it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you, and I look forward to many future collaborations. I’d also like to thank our wonderful group of contributors, representing some of the most interesting minds working in this area today. Every time I opened up a new entry, I did so with a smile, knowing I was sure to encounter something fantastic. We’re lucky to have had all of you on board. Thank-you for your thoughtful contributions—you made our job easy. This is my first experience working with a publisher from this perspective, and I only have praise for the ABC-CLIO/Praeger editors involved with this project. Dan Harmon was with us through the initial stages, and his humor, intellect, and vision made him a joy to work with on these volumes. James Sherman came on board in the middle of the process, and I can’t say strongly enough how much we appreciated his patience and good humor! Many, many, many thanks go to the people who kept me sane during this process, especially my parents, Bill and Pat Sarver. If I were to try to give a fitting tribute to every person who helped me, the acknowledgments would be a volume unto themselves, so I’m just going to cop out with a list: Mary, Jason, Mackenzie, and Julia Massarelli; John, Kyle, Ella Bella, and “Lil’ Johnny” Sarver (hi future Sarver!); Tracey and Gordon Gibb; Heather, Chris, Nicky, and Xander Seifert; Peter Fontana; Norman Mallard; Christine Alexander; Mary Josephine Alexander; and the rest of my crazy, loud, hilarious family. Love you all.
W
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viii | Acknowledgments
I’m incredibly lucky to have a job I love with people I admire, so thank- you to the faculty and staff in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and College of Communication and Information for all that you do. I’d particularly like to thank Dean Stan Wearden and Director Jeff Fruit for their support during this process (and during my time at Kent State in general). I’d also like to thank all of my colleagues and friends, particularly Audrey Lingenfelter, Amy Wilkens, Darlene Contrucci, Ellen Losh, Sharon Marquis, and Beth Bush. You keep things running around here, ladies, and we couldn’t do our work without you. I also have been quite fortunate to be able to work with the best graduate assistants around, Alexandra Dellas and Norma Jones, as well as Gina Conley. Thanks for making the effort to decipher my late night e-mails and figure out what I am really looking for. Finally, an extra loud shout-out goes to Mark Goodman and Marianne Warzinski. Thanks for making me laugh every single day. Most important, I would like to thank my wonderful husband, Lindsey, and our two beautiful daughters, Alexandra and Genevieve. Both of my daughters spent their “babyhoods” with me working on this project (and Gennie was born in the midst of it!), so in some ways this is a lasting tribute to them. You make every day worthwhile. Danielle Sarver Coombs Kent, Ohio
Creating a three- volume anthology like American History through American Sports might seem like a solitary task. Actually, this collection would not exist without a stellar team behind it. Thanks first to my coeditor, Danielle S. Coombs, for her vision in bringing this collection to life. In our short time together at Kent State University, Danielle and I have become great friends and colleagues. This is the first of many such collaborations. Next, I would like to thank and congratulate the contributors, a group of scholars, professional writers, enthusiasts, and graduate students, whose analysis and insight illuminated the idea of sports and its influence on American history and popular culture in new and engaging ways. I am really pleased that Danielle and I were able to pull together such a phenomenal team, not only from several nations, but also including some of the finest scholars working today. In addition, young scholars and graduate
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Acknowledgments | ix
students from some of America’s finest schools, including Kent State University, Michigan State University, Penn State University, and the University of South Florida, brought energy and enthusiasm to the project. I hope this brief note will accentuate how much I truly appreciate their work. American History through American Sports would not have seen the light of day without the steady, enthusiastic support of our editors at ABC- CLIO. Initially, my good friend Dan Harmon shepherded the collection. Thanks to Dan for his professionalism and friendship. James Sherman took over as the project took flight, and we certainly appreciate his steady guidance and stewardship. Thanks too to ABC-CLIO leadership for the company’s unwavering commitment to popular culture studies. In a world of shrinking publishing opportunities, ABC-CLIO provides a high-quality publishing platform for scholars in many disciplines. Other friends offered support and help along the way, including Chris Burtch, Larry Leslie, Kelli Burns, Thomas Heinrich, and Tom and Kristine Brown. I have been lucky to have many fantastic mentors, whom I would like to thank, including Lawrence S. Kaplan, James A. Kehl, Sydney Snyder, Richard Immerman, Peter Magnani, Anne Beirne, and Phillip Sipiora. A special thanks to Ray B. Browne (1922–2009). He served as a wonderful spiritual guide for all popular culture enthusiasts and continues to be an inspiration for me. In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues at Kent State University for their support and encouragement, particularly Stan Wearden, Dean of the College of Communication and Information, and Jeff Fruit, Director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Their vision and leadership have been inspirational. The friendship of colleagues Bill Sledzik, Tim Smith, and Gene Sasso helped as well. Financial support from JMC also enabled me to have an outstanding graduate research assistant and editor on the project: Gina Anne Conley. Gina’s diligence and hard work improved the collection immeasurably. Thanks too go out to Alex Dellas and Norma Jones, graduate students extraordinaire at Kent State, for their hard work. On a personal note, nothing I do is possible without the support of my family. Thanks to my parents, Jon and Linda Bowen, for all their support. Kathy and Kassie brought immeasurable joy into my life on a moment-by- moment basis. I cherish every instant we spend together—thank-you. Bob Batchelor Munroe Falls, Ohio
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Introduction: American History through American Sports
U
sing the Super Bowl as a barometer of America’s sports obsession is almost too easy. The last three championship games, culminating in 2012’s Super Bowl XLVI, rank as the most watched television shows in history, displacing long-time leader M*A*S*H. The New York Giants 21–17 victory over the New England Patriots reached 111.3 million viewers. NBC, the game’s home network, claimed that a total of 177 million viewers watched at least six minutes of the game, which accounts for roughly 56 percent of the entire population.1 Given figures like these, it is difficult to argue that sports are anything but the backbone or driving narrative of modern America. Though some sports observers, historians, and commentators argue over which sport dominates the national obsession (with football usually at the top), we assert that the real American pastime has moved beyond the popularity of a single sport to watching sports as a whole. This new interpretation, which interweaves many connected aspects of contemporary popular culture, is driven by technology and innovation, from one’s ability to watch sporting events on cell phones and tablet computers to the high-tech wizardry that makes it possible to watch a game on a 70-inch, high definition TV or even in 3-D. Again, professional football serves as an exemplar when examining America’s sports viewing fanaticism. Although the NFL season technically runs from late summer through February’s Super Bowl championship, the sport generates news all year, picked up by various local, regional, and national cable stations, such as ESPN, Fox regional channels, and the NFL Network. During the 2011 season, several socioeconomic and cultural factors contributed to high viewership. The difficult economy, for instance, made watching football at home a cheap alternative to going out. In addition, the electronics industry’s holiday season price-cutting on big screen
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xii | Introduction: American History through American Sports
televisions and other gadgetry gave people viewing opportunities via high definition broadcasts. Astoundingly, 23 of the top 25 telecasts in 2011 were NFL games. According to the Associated Press, “a total of 37 games drew at least 20 million viewers each.” Imagine if each person donated $1 to charity for each game watched; some $740 million would have flowed into charitable coffers during football season alone.2 When one takes into account the number of games viewed on cell phones, laptops, and other stand-alone devices, this number soars. Another figure that escalates nearly beyond comprehension is the amount of money gamblers wage on the Super Bowl. A Wall Street Journal report estimated that about $90 million would be wagered legally through Las Vegas sports books in 2012. However, this number could be doubled, tripled, or more if one accounts for the range of bets that actually take place, from offshore, Web-based betting firms to small office pools and individual bets (nearly all technically illegal).3 Moreover, to really boggle the mind, consider that gambling on the penultimate NFL matchup is a drop in the bucket (perhaps not even 10 percent) in comparison to the total money bet legally and illegally in the United States. In 2009 the Economist estimated that legal bets on all sports in Las Vegas reached about $2.6 billion. Based on these figures, the amount of money exchanging hands in America and globally via gambling is staggering.4 If the American sports gambling scene were considered a corporation, it would rank as one of the larger in the world. Using the Super Bowl and professional football as a guide is just one way to demonstrate the ubiquity of sports in the contemporary world. When we take the subject of professional football and broaden it across all the sports that occupy the American mind today, we see the totality in virtually every area of a person’s life. Not only does sports take center stage in people’s viewing world, but it influences what they do with their leisure time (actually playing themselves or other means of interacting), how they spend money, what products they purchase and why, and how they create a personal worldview. For most Americans, the sports fixation begins almost at birth (infant clothes adorned with team logos), runs through K–12 education (school activities centered on sporting events and athletic participation), is cemented in college (fanaticism and loyalty to the alma mater), and then is extended in adulthood (leisure time focused on sports and games). Taken as a whole, the narrative strains that coalesce to create the United States are all replicated or solidified in the sports world: heroism, good versus EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Introduction: American History through American Sports | xiii
evil, pride, community, and patriotism. In other words, the notion of sports as a way of life dominates America’s cultural landscape, just as it has been vital to the nation’s history. The need for a single collection that examines, analyzes, and assesses sports from a historical and cultural perspective drives the work contained in American History through American Sports: From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports. This three-volume anthology is unique. It focuses on how the “Big Four” American sports (baseball, football, basketball, and hockey) and sports outside the mainstream have transformed and influenced society at large and vice versa, because there is constant reaction and interaction among sports, history, and culture. This collection demonstrates how sports, history, and popular culture are fundamentally interwoven and in turn reflect larger societal transformations taking place throughout history. The reader will soon discover that the essays in this collection are not boring, straightforward accounts of a topic or theme. Such sports history, sport-specific volumes, and biographies and autobiographies are readily available, virtually flooding the marketplace as each individual season begins. Instead, as editors we tasked the contributors to take a stand on the issues raised in their entries, infusing their thoughtfully researched work with crisp arguments and sophisticated, insightful analysis. As a result, readers may not agree with all that they encounter in American History through American Sports, but they will uncover new ways of looking at sports, history, and culture. American Sports, American Dreams Athletic success is an essential facet of the American dream. The central notion—that achieving greatness in sports through determination will lead to a better life—is played out on courts, fields, parks, and courses nationwide. This scenario occupies the minds of countless young athletes. It is little wonder that one of the first statements heard from many of those who achieve stardom is that they plan to buy a home for a family member, usually their mothers, who sacrificed some parts of their own lives for the stars’ success. The notion that victory leads to a trip to Disney, new cars, a house for mom, or some other material gain is so pervasive in sports culture that it is essentially a cliché. However, the principle of the American dream necessitates a payoff on a grand scale that justifies the years, decades, and lifetime dedicated to achievement and athletic prowess. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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xiv | Introduction: American History through American Sports
For some athletes, the hard work begins in dark, musky weight rooms, while for others it is logging mile after mile, running on back roads and through neighborhoods through oppressive heat, driving snow, or rain, just getting in a little better shape than one’s competitors, fixating on that one extra step or bit of power that leads to victory. Regardless of the sport, the guiding principle is that determination and perseverance enable the athlete to maximize his or her natural talents, leading to athletic achievement. In the United States, we shower those who embody these traits with trophies, medals, scholarships, and riches. They are held up as exemplars in their communities and, if they are talented enough, go on to represent themselves and their sports on larger stages. There is a certain “Americanness” to the way people promote and support young athletes on their way to college scholarships and beyond, wrapping them in the community flag, exuding civic and local pride in the exploits of young people. Driving through just about any community in America, one finds road signs, placards, and in some cases, even statues honoring high school championship teams, Olympic medal winners, and other team and individual winners. The sports-related American dream is intricately linked to both nostalgia and the centrality of celebrity culture in contemporary society. Across mass communications, programming, texts, and images draw audiences to sports via emphasis on past glory and exceptional individuals. Critics might view nostalgia’s lure or the fascination with celebrity as a kind of broad self-persuasion or even delusion, but a more positive outlook is that people use the past to make sense of their own lives and events. According to scholar Christine Sprengler, “[Nostalgia] tells us something about our own historical consciousness, about the myths we construct and circulate and about our desire to make history meaningful on a personal and collective level.”5 In sports, the use of nostalgia to link culture and history creates a grander narrative. The challenge, however, is in understanding that nostalgia can drift into camp or romanticism and, perhaps more important, be employed to create stories that accentuate ideas on the fringes or unacceptable to mainstream society. Analyzing sports, history, and culture, one quickly recognizes that the sports world emphasizes and reinforces grand narratives that not only help define societal norms, but also enable individuals to interpret their interior and exterior worlds. Scholar Andrew C. Miller, for example, investigates the connections among film, masculinity, and the American dream, explaining, “[T]he sports film genre coalesces around underdog-to-champion,
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Introduction: American History through American Sports | xv
hard-work-leads-to-victory narratives that shape sporting cinema and help to forge a masculine ideal closely intertwined with an ‘Athletic American Dream’.” 6 In this instance, one clearly identifies how the tropes Americans employ in understanding themselves and society are built or mirrored in sports popular culture. On an even deeper level, people use these narratives and similar ones to create, envision, and attempt to operationalize their goals and aspirations. The enduring popularity of sports films and continued use of sports themes in novels, television shows, and other media demonstrate how deeply ingrained these grand narratives are within American popular culture. Technology and Culture Technology and culture beat on, hand in hand, across history. Like so many aspects of American life, technology has played a critical role in sports, for both participants and fans. Many of the improvements made to equipment, apparel, and other components have transformed the games themselves. The influence of Tiger Woods aside, innovations in both golf clubs and golf balls have changed the way players approach the sport. The added length derived from changes to equipment enables players to hit the ball farther than in past eras. In addition, many golfers have responded to the technological improvements by enacting rigorous fitness programs designed to enhance their ability to hit the ball far. As a result, younger and more athletic individuals are pursuing golf careers, which then changes the kinds of fans who watch the sport. In turn, advertisers and sponsors pump money into golf based on its appeal to a younger demographic. Top this off by countless mass communications channels created to provide golf coverage and garner advertising dollars, and one sees the tight connection among technology, the capitalistic sports industry, and fandom. With all the positive influences, however, emerge new challenges. Of the many consequences resulting from increased coverage of sports on the Web, cable television, and other media, one of the most difficult to alleviate is the unyielding pressure placed on young athletes to market themselves and their skills. The common refrain is that today’s young athletes throughout the K–12 system are over-coached, play too many games despite health risks, and are forced to “specialize” in one sport early so that they do not “fall behind” others who also specialize.
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xvi | Introduction: American History through American Sports
Entire industries have emerged that exist basically to place the spotlight on youngsters, such as summer baseball and basketball camps, where college coaches can attend, but technically not recruit, as if the players do not recognize these coach/celebrities. In some cases, the potential payoff for young stars and those around them leads to shady business practices among unethical sports agents; college coaches; sneaker and athletic apparel executives; and the parents, guardians, and coaches who allow this behavior to take place. Demonstrating how the most vulnerable are targeted, much of the criticism of young athletic leagues—barely sanctioned by any governing body of note—is justified when inner-city, African American youths are made promises by unscrupulous adults, often without regard to an athlete’s future development outside sports. The lure of money, scholarships, and giant shoe contracts is tantalizing for youngsters being touted as the next Jordan/Kobe/LeBron and their families. The challenge is accentuated when the vision of future success and payoff is tied to the language and symbols of the American dream. Although it seems hard to imagine a scenario in which technology plays a greater role in athletic success than contemporary America, scholars Timothy Marjoribanks and Karen Farquharson imagine a time when technology plays an even greater role, literally inside the human body. The challenge is not just designer drugs or steroids creating bigger, stronger bodies; the future may lead to other innovations that seem to belong in a science fiction film. Marjoribanks and Farquharson explain, “Such technologies may contribute not only to physical performance, but to the thinking and decision-making capacity of athletes.”7 If the challenges the sports world has faced regarding steroids, human growth hormones, and other performance-enhancing drugs is any indication of how governing organizations will handle future cyborg athletes, then the potential implications are far-reaching and fundamental. The sports world will not be able to rely on the personal ethics of individual performers, particularly considering the way athletes have turned to drugs to gain an edge. Crafting a People Although we use the term “sports” loosely today to describe just about any kind of leisure activity or organized game, that notion did not really exist prior to the late 1800s. From precolonial times to the late nineteenth
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Introduction: American History through American Sports | xvii
century, sports slowly grew in importance, but did not yet take hold of the national consciousness as it would in the twentieth century. If the early settlers in North America had looked carefully, they could have caught a glimpsed of the sporting future by examining the Native Americans, who developed sporting events with intricate and ornate rules, customs, and rituals. Historian Elliott J. Gorn explains that Native Americans “often played stickball and other games within a context of sacred dancing, chanting, and drumming, shamanism, dietary restrictions, body painting, pipe smoking, and other ritual practices, all part of a distinct religious worldview.”8 The colonists, however, did not take up Native American sports, choosing—when they did play—to engage in games from their homeland or adapting them to their new environment. From today’s vantage point, the corollary experiences and importance the Native Americans placed on their games seem similar to the modern pomp and circumstance surrounding sports. Even the religious aspect is carried over and considered a central tenet of many sporting events, from the blessing that is broadcast at the beginning of every NASCAR event to the prayer circles players form after professional football games. Across centuries, then, sports can be viewed as a means for establishing culture, whether in local communities or larger scale efforts at nation building. As sports took a dominant role in American culture, its tenets melded with the ideals at the heart of a capitalistic, democratic society. “Not surprisingly,” says Richard O. Davies, “within a society in which competition provided the essential framework for an aggressive capitalist economy, winning in sports usually took precedence over merely competing and learning to be ‘good losers’.” 9 Certainly capitalism is at the heart of American history and culture, which is then replicated in the sports world. Much of the language of sports is tied to capitalism and economics, from the salaries of players and revenues of owners to discussions of player “value” for an organization. Many professional athletes earn extraordinary salaries and benefits from their abilities, but in the broader capitalist scheme, they are reduced to mere commodities, just like the majority of fans who watch them. The kinship, then, that people feel for their sports heroes is based to some degree on the recognition that we are all servants to the system, or in sports/ popular culture lingo, “the man.” Sports history is also filled with triumphs and tragedies that shine a spotlight on America’s challenges regarding gender, race, disability, and sexuality. The essays in American History through American Sports not
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xviii | Introduction: American History through American Sports
only illuminate specific sports and key individuals that contributed to the establishment of sports in the nation, but also analyze the ways sport has defined and continues to redefine American culture. American History through American Sports Insider’s Guide American History through American Sports examines the development of popular sports and sports figures in America, from its earliest origins to the digital age. The essays investigate the development of sports over time, focusing on the core issues in the evolution of sports, as well as the way culture and sports have come together to change public tastes. This collection blends historical and popular culture perspectives in its analysis of the development of sports and sports figures throughout American history. The set is divided into three volumes, organized chronologically: •• Volume 1 focuses on the early development of sports culture. •• Volume 2 surveys sports in the television age as it became part of mainstream culture. •• Volume 3 examines sports in the digital age. Each volume begins with a general discussion of the role of sports in American culture. These “big picture” essays address the foundational/ critical questions related to the history of sports. Next the volumes look at the “Big Four” sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Then each volume concludes with a look at sports outside these mainstays, from soccer and boxing to NASCAR and extreme sports. The wide-ranging essays cover topics of interest for sports fans who enjoy the NFL and MLB, as well as those who like tennis and watching the Olympics. In addition, many essays feature research on and analysis of specific sports icons and favorite heroes. The provocative questions asked include the following: •• Why did it take so long for soccer to take hold in the United States? •• Who is the NFL’s all-time greatest running back? •• Why are Americans fascinated with mixed martial arts, extreme sports, and NASCAR? •• Why are race, gender, sexuality, and other societal challenges magnified in the sports world?
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Introduction: American History through American Sports | xix
Notes 1. Scott Collins, “Super Bowl’s on a New Ratings High, Again,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/07/entertain ment/la-et-super-bowl-ratings-20120207 (accessed February 7, 2012). 2. Associated Press, “‘Absolutely No. 1’: No Matter What, NFL’s Midas Touch Delivers Rising TV Ratings, Revenues,” Washington Post, February 3, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/absolutely-no-1-no-matter -w hat-n fls-m idas-t ouch-d elivers-r ising-t v-r atings-r evenues/2012/02/03/ gIQA6yhZnQ_story.html (accessed February 3, 2012). 3. Matthew Futterman, “Enjoy the Game, Don’t Lose the Bet,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702037 18504577181182734516976.html (accessed January 29, 2012). 4. “The Agony of Influence,” Economist, September 25, 2010, 71–72. 5. Christine Sprengler, “Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics,” in Contemporary American Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 3. 6. Andrew C. Miller, “The American Dream Goes to College: The Cinematic Student Athletes of College Football,” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 6 (2010): 1222–1223. 7. Timothy Marjoribanks and Karen Farquharson, Sport and Society in the Global Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 217. 8. Elliott J. Gorn, “Sports through the Nineteenth Century,” in The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives, ed. S.W. Pope (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 34. 9. Richard O. Davies, Sports in American Life: A History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 411.
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Part 1 Critical Issues
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1
America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times Russ Crawford
I see Opechancanough your plot to murder me, but I feare it not. As yet your men and mine have done no harme, but by our direction. Take therefore your Armes, you see mine, my body shall bee as naked as yours: the Isle in your river is a fit place, if you be contented: and the conquerour (of us two) shall be Lord and Master over all our men. If you have not enough, take time to fetch more, and bring what number you will; so every one bring a basket of corne, against all which I will stake the value in copper, you see I have but fifteene, and our game shall be, the Conquerour take all.1
T
hus mixed martial arts came to America. The proposed death match wager between John Smith, representing the London Company, and Opechancanough of the Powhattan Confederation, in 1607 was the first mention of what would become an American sport culture that blended the sporting traditions of the native peoples of the Americas, European immigrants, and eventually forced immigrants from Africa. Even before the arrival of Europeans, native tribes had a vibrant sporting culture of their own. The new Americans would bring their own sporting traditions, which differed significantly by immigrant group and region. Unlike today, what sports one partook in often depended on one’s social class or religious affiliation. Title IX was far in the future, so females were primarily relegated to the role of spectator. Despite those differences, the first debates, in what would become the United States of America, over the role of sport in the life of society would take place during this colonial period, and the precursors of many of the sports that we enjoy watching or participating in began to take shape. The foundations of our modern sporting culture, save for commercialization, were laid during the nearly two centuries that our nation existed as a colonial possession of the British Empire. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via 3 UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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4 | Critical Issues
First Sports: Native American Games Though the rules differed in many respects, Native Americans played various sports that have been melted into the American sporting repertoire. In the same volume in which Captain Smith recounted his wager with Opechancanough, he also described events before a proposed attack on the European settlers, saying that “The Indians with all the merry sports they could devise, spent the time till night.”2 Other Europeans were more specific in their descriptions of the games they observed natives playing. Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf watched the Iroquois play a game similar to modern lacrosse and is credited with giving the sport its name, observing that the stick with a basket at the end that the players used resembled the crozier (crosse in French) that bishops carried.3 When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, they saw the locals playing a game called Pasuckuakohowog, which involved contending teams kicking a ball at a goal, much like soccer. As more Europeans arrived, they began to take note of the games native to their new land, and in many cases they expropriated those sports for their own uses. From Canada to the Carolinas, diverse tribes played some form of what Brébeuf dubbed lacrosse. The Iroquois called the game baggataway, while the Cherokee, who played with a stick in each hand,4 called it the “little brother to war,” because of the rough and tumble nature of the play and its utility in inculcating the teamwork and aggression necessary for war. There were various versions of the game, and in some cases the game did resemble a war in the vast number of participants, which could involve entire villages, with teams numbering in the hundreds. Goals were sometimes miles apart and the contests often lasted for days at a time. In some cases women were allowed to play, and at other times and places they had a separate version of the game.5 In the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans, the principal character Hawkeye, played by Daniel Day Lewis, was depicted playing the game with his native friends in an impromptu match, demonstrating how the two races could find harmony through sport.6 In actuality, the game served, at least in one famous case, as an effective stratagem for resisting European encroachment. During Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763 a group of Ojibwa warriors began a game outside the walls of Fort Michilimackinac and sent the ball flying over the stockade’s wall. When the British allowed the natives inside the fort to retrieve the ball, they captured the gate and admitted their fellows, resulting in the slaughter of most of the garrison.
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 5
As with lacrosse, the native precursor to soccer, called Pasuckuakohowog, which translates into “They gather to play ball with the foot,” also resembled and likely served as preparation for war. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of participants battled for days, attempting to get the ball through goals set a mile apart. The warlike nature of the game was also demonstrated by the rough play that accompanied it. According to descriptions of the game, players used face paint and other means of disguise to conceal their identities and so avoid retaliation for particularly hard tackles. Native tribes also competed against their neighbors and members of other tribes in foot races, archery contests, and other competitive sports. They engaged in pastimes such as hunting or fishing primarily for sustenance, but also for enjoyment. Contact with European settlers would later alter the way that native tribes played, introducing European and later American sports that would become popular with all Americans. Native games such as lacrosse would also modify the way that immigrants participated in sports, and both groups would add their contributions to what later became the sporting culture of the new nation. Old World Baggage: The European Sporting Tradition Although certain Dutch sports contributed to the sporting culture of what would become the United States, most of the culture that eventual Americans brought with them originated in England. Four distinct British populations—the Puritans of Massachusetts, Cavaliers of Virginia, Quakers of Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish of the backcountry frontier—made up the bulk of British immigration during the colonial period.7 Each of these groups brought sporting traditions with them, along with their material belongings. They were somewhat united in that they were to one degree or another steeped in British culture, with its pervasive sporting traditions, but class and religious distinctions produced unique sporting cultures that existed side by side, sometimes overlapping, but most often producing quite different attitudes toward the proper role of sport in society. To a certain extent, the debates that preoccupied colonial Americans still resonate today. Whether sports have or should have value beyond the playing field, whether they are frivolous distractions from the serious work of building a nation, and whether they are injurious to the social fabric are all issues that have been argued over since the colonies gained a foothold on the new continent. Assuredly American culture in the twentieth century
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6 | Critical Issues
has embraced sport as a central feature of our society. That does not, however, indicate that critics of sport have been defeated, merely that their voices have become somewhat muted. Golf or Hockey? Dutch Sports in America Holland controlled the area around modern New York from 1614 to 1674, with the center of New Netherlands located in New Amsterdam, which became New York City when the British took control in 1674. During their 60 years of control, the Dutch settlers introduced “kolven,” a popular sport from Holland, into the colony. The game consisted of players using a curved stick to hit an object across a frozen lake or pond, either trying to get as close to a point as possible in one stroke or to a more distant point in as few strokes as possible.8 The emphasis on stroke scoring lends itself to arguments for kolven being an ancestor of golf, and its location on frozen ponds to hockey, but conclusive evidence tying it to one or the other does not exist, especially since kolven could also be played in the streets. The street version of the game was something of a nuisance when players got out of control and their enthusiasm resulted in property damage. A 1659 Dutch law in Fort Orange (Albany) forbade the playing of the game on the streets and assessed fines for those who broke the law.9 Lawful Recreation: New England The Puritans of New England and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were the products of the British sporting culture, but as in their efforts to purify the Anglican religion, they took a divergent path in their enjoyment of sport. The Puritans, more than 20,000 of whom immigrated during the 1630s to the British colonies, were escaping persecution under Charles I. They sought to create a “City on a Hill” in the New World that would serve as an inspiration for reforming the old.10 As part of that project, the Puritans under the initial leadership of John Winthrop sought to reform many of the practices that they had left behind, including sport. They were by no means opposed to all sport, but believed that sports should be bent to further more serious goals, rather than being merely a source of amusement. The Puritans tied games explicitly to their efforts to defend the colony from either the natives or predatory Europeans. Colonial laws required that local militias engage in games that would improve their physical fitness, and by 1639 militia companies were sponsoring athletic
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 7
contests and engaging in physical training on their muster days. Harvard University likewise required students to practice “lawful” recreations and set aside a special period during the day for games.11 The Puritan tolerance toward lawful recreation did not extend to many sports such as horse racing, blood sports such as boxing, and other rougher diversions that might encourage gambling. They also jealously guarded the sanctity of the Sabbath. Thomas Shepard, a famous Puritan clergyman, spoke in a famous sermon of Satan, “with a ball at his foot, ready to kick and carry God’s precious Sabbaths out of the world.”12 They also sought to ensure that sport was a serious undertaking and that enjoyment of games would not threaten the public peace. In 1657 Boston forbade foot and ball games after “several persons . . . received hurt by boys and young men playing at football in the streets.”13 Those games remained popular, however, and the precursors of the modern games of football, soccer, and baseball grew out of the Puritan sporting tradition. Re-creating Britain: Southern Sport Virginia, the first successful British colony in America, drew most of its population from those British subjects distressed by the outcome of the English Civil War (1642–1651). During that period, between 40,000 and 50,000 English immigrants, largely distressed cavaliers or supporters of the losing royalist side, arrived in Virginia. Many of these immigrants were children of the English nobility, and they brought along their attitudes toward sports and class.14 Among the British immigrant groups, those who came to the southern colonies matched most closely the folkways of the sporting culture that existed in the mother country. The Anglican religion of most of the southerners in the main migration offered a less critical view of sport than did the New England Puritans or the Quakers from the middle colonies. The southern colonies also had the most pronounced class system of any of the British transplants, not only because of slavery, which was more common in the South, but also because the majority of the colonists in the main wave came from the upper class. Therefore, the southern sporting culture held different opportunities for different classes. For the upper class, public sport primarily meant horse racing, known as the sport of kings, and the gambling that accompanied it. Not only did participating in horse racing provide excitement, but it also allowed the gentry to provide indications that they belonged to that social class. All
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8 | Critical Issues
classes could watch and gamble on the race, but only the select few could participate as owners of horses or patrons of the sport. This participation provided markers that were clear to all that the people engaged in the sport were different and were socially superior for that difference. As wealth flowed into the southern colonies, horse racing became more elaborate, with specially constructed tracks and concern over the bloodlines of the horses. Organizations such as jockey clubs also provided exclusive memberships and chances to exercise power over the sport.15 Separation of the classes was so significant a part of racing that in 1674 a Virginia county court fined one James Bullocke, who was a tailor and therefore not a gentleman, 200 pounds of tobacco for running his horse against one of his betters.16 In addition to horse racing, the southern gentry engaged in other sports considered to be more genteel than those of the other classes. One popular sport imported from Britain was the fox hunt, but when American gray foxes proved to be difficult to run to ground, the southerners were forced to import English red foxes. The gentry also played cards, typically with wagers on the outcome, and at least attempted to reserve game such as deer for their exclusive pleasure. Another symbol of class status was playing billiards, a popular game among the gentry. Because billiard tables were expensive, only the wealthy could afford them, as well as the leisure to participate in such time-consuming games. The upper crust also often dabbled in rougher sports, but only as spectators, often forcing their slaves to serve as gladiators (more about that later in the section on slave sport). The lower classes in the South enjoyed sports that were rougher in nature and particularly enjoyed blood sports of various kinds. The bull and bear baiting popular in England were transported to the new world, as were sports such as “gander pulling,” in which a goose was hung head down by a leg, and riders would race past at full speed, attempting to tear off the greased head of the goose with their hands. Cock fighting, or pitting specially bred and trained roosters against one another in a fight to the death, was also popular in the inns or taverns where the less socially fortunate gathered. Gambling on card and dice games, as well as less formal horse racing, also served as diversions, as did bare knuckle fights. Although participation in these diversions was relegated to the lower classes, spectators often included mixed-class crowds.17 Other sports included contests of functional skills such as shooting or feats demonstrating superior strength. Colonists tested their abilities in shooting matches, ran foot races against one another, and performed feats of strength. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 9
Though the colonial gentry in the South attempted to re-create the sporting culture, informed by social class, that they had left behind in England, the sports they enjoyed, such as fox hunting, and other rougher blood sports failed to survive into the modern era. The class distinctions built into many of these sports were an early casualty of the American Revolution (1776–1783), which set off a wave of popular sentiment against class distinctions. In a nation fired by Jefferson’s statement from the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” where every white man stood for his right to be addressed as Mister, there was little room for lines of separation based on class. These lines certainly continued to exist, but the sports supported by the colonial gentry, save for horse racing, faded into the background and became the province of the country club rather the sports that appealed to the masses. Forced Participation/Opportunities for Free Play: Slave Sport Between 1619 and 1808, more than 500,000 slaves were imported into what would become the United States. Like European immigrants, the men and women forcibly transported from Africa brought along their own sporting traditions. However, unlike their free counterparts, they had little opportunity to practice their imported sports because of the heavy labor demands on their time and the often insufficient nutrition to provide energy even during their occasional free time. The slaves also had to contend with living under the supervision of their masters or hired overseers, which allowed precious little freedom for sport. Despite these difficulties, many slaves did take part in a variety of sports, largely playing the same games as the white population. They often spent Sundays or holidays such as Christmas, which were free from labor for many slaves, taking part in sporting events and activities. Among these were such favorites as pitching quoits (throwing a metal ring around a vertical stick), foot races, wrestling, jumping, and playing various ball and bat games that were among the colonial precursors to baseball. Prominently, slaves engaged in sports in support of their masters’ efforts or for their owners’ amusement. Many slaves served as jockeys for their masters’ horses in the racing that was so central to colonial sport. The skills developed by the slaves who cared for their masters’ horses allowed them to learn the trick of calming and connecting with the animals and often translated into their employment as riders. Demonstrating a skill such as this could afford a slave a special status on the plantation and access to travel opportunities that were not available to all slaves. Their EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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10 | Critical Issues
participation in racing also provided excitement and adulation that were absent from the drudgery and abuse that constituted the typical work environment for slaves.18 In addition to racing horses, slave crews or individuals often were trained to race boats, with races often pitting slaves from one plantation against those from others.19 Slaves often accompanied their masters as handlers for fighting animals, including roosters and dogs, and these sporting opportunities offered some respite from the burden of their condition. Africans also were often pitted against slaves from other plantations in prizefights, either as bare knuckle fighters or as wrestlers. Matches could be informally contested between slaves from the same plantation, and more formal bouts could be held featuring slaves from neighboring locales, or in public for amusement and wagering. As with horse racing, gambling on the outcome provided additional diversion. Income from slave matches often exceeded winnings from horse races, and superior fighters could earn fortunes for their masters, although in many cases the wager included transfer of ownership of the losing slave to the winner’s master.20 Tom Molineaux, one of the most famous slave fighters, was reputed to have won his freedom as a fighter and later traveled to England to pursue the career that he had learned as a slave.21 A difficulty in recapturing the sporting traditions of slaves is that very little has been written about any sports that persisted after the Middle Passage. This was exacerbated by the reticence of slaves and even their descendants to speak with outsiders about what they did in their free time, if it was hidden from the eyes of the slave masters. One such example is the martial art form engolo, known as “knocking and kicking” in the British American colonies. In Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Arts in the Atlantic World, T. J. Desch Obi traced the origins of the martial art from Angola to South Carolina, but though he was of Nigerian origin, he initially encountered difficulty finding anyone willing to speak to him about this sporting tradition, which has persisted to the present in the former colonies.22 Whether testifying to the difficulty in finding sources for the sporting traditions of slaves or to a reluctance to research a topic that might argue that slavery was anything less than an evil institution that ground down its victims, sport and slave life is an area that seems ripe for further research, particularly during the colonial period. In addition, the role of sport in slave life in the North, where fewer slaves typically meant greater inter action between the races, is also open for exploration.
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 11
Needful Recreation: Quaker Sport Like the Puritans of New England, the Quakers, who made up much of the population of Pennsylvania and surrounding colonies, saw little value in sports for their own sake. William Penn, the man who gained the royal charter and founded the colony as a refuge from religious persecution in England, argued that “the best recreation is to do good.”23 Unlike the southern colonies, those dominated by the Quakers discouraged gambling on sporting events, let alone card or dice games, which were prohibited by law, as were blood sports such as animal baiting.24 The Quaker colonies of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the western part of New Jersey, according to historian David H. Fischer, had the strictest laws prohibiting sports, giving courts unlimited authority to censor any sport “which excites the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion.”25 For the Quakers, play had to serve a higher purpose, such as preparing young Quakers for the rigors of life. Their schools were the first in the colonies to require physical exercise, and George Fox, one of the founders of the religion, bequeathed the city of Philadelphia sixteen acres “for a playground for the children of the town to play on.”26 Various strenuous exercises such as swimming, running, and ice skating met with the approval of the Quaker leaders, as these pursuits built strong bodies and were regarded as methods for sharpening the mind as well.27 Fishing and hunting were acceptable, particularly if they were for subsistence, to rid the area of vermin, or to earn money. In keeping with the egalitarian ethos of the Quakers, Penn and his agents encouraged settlers to hunt in the woods owned by the proprietor, in defiance of the tradition restricting the sport to the king and nobility in the mother country. In addition to serving recreational needs, settlers were also encouraged to hunt and fish as a commercial activity, combining pleasure with profit.28 Try as the Quakers might to keep them out, however, the sporting ways of other peoples made their way into Quaker locales, and underground animal baiting matches popped up from time to time, despite the efforts of officials such as Philadelphia mayor Squire Wharton, who took the active step of infiltrating a bull baiting, where he freed the animal and threatened to arrest any man who interfered.29 As time passed and immigrants from other areas and religions began to settle in Philadelphia, the strict prohibitions on sports began to lose their force. The increasing presence of British imperial officials also hindered the ability of the Quakers to sideline competitive sports.
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12 | Critical Issues
Rough and Tumble: Scots-Irish Sport in the Backcountry The fourth major immigrant group that made up the 13 British colonies came to the New World from the borderlands between Scotland and England. Many ancestors of these immigrants had already migrated from Britain to Ireland, and they kept moving to gain economic advantage. These settlers brought with them a warrior culture, developed in the constant warfare that existed in the borderlands. This hyper-masculine culture, which placed a premium on physical toughness and indifference to pain, colored their sporting ways. As they arrived in the colonies during the peak period of 1765–1775, these new Americans, with their disdain for authority and willingness to fight, made their way into the previously unsettled areas in the western parts of the colonies, as far as possible from the established power centers. One favorite informal sport was rough and tumble fighting, which had no rules, other than victory. In this likely predecessor to mixed martial arts, fighters were able to bite, kick, scratch, and gouge out eyes in the pursuit of advantage. Not surprisingly, these impromptu matches typically began with drinking and one man boasting of his fighting skills until another man challenged the first to back up his words with actions. Charles Woodmason, an itinerant Anglican minister who traveled through the Virginia backcountry, wrote that “I would advise you when You do fight Not to act like Tygers and Bears as these Virginians do—Biting one anothers Lips and Noses off, and gowging one another—that is, thrusting out one anothers Eyes, and kicking one another on the Cods, to the Great Damage of many a Poor Woman.”30 Another witness, Thomas Anburey, described “a fellow, reckoned a great adept in gouging, who constantly kept the nails of both his thumbs and second fingers very long and pointed; nay to prevent their breaking or splitting . . . he hardened them every evening in a candle.”31 These sorts of blood sports gave backcountry denizens a chance to prove their manliness by disfiguring their fellow colonists and were regularly legislated against, but without much affect, since one of the primary reasons for moving to the fringes of settlement was to escape the long arm of British authority. Like the southerners, the Scots-Irish of the backcountry also enjoyed sporting events that lent themselves to gambling, and many of these events, also in common with other colonies, often took place around taverns or inns that served alcohol. Whether through sponsorship of a local softball team or as the locale for fans to gather, the bar scene was, and continues to be to the present day, a center of sporting life. These locations were also EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 13
places where all classes and races could gather together to participate in or watch the action and wager on it.32 After the American Revolution, class distinctions began to fade, at least in public social matters, but race resisted change. Though both black and white, slave and free mixed socially at sporting events, when the new day dawned, the tremendous gulf that existed between the races reasserted itself. Cheerleaders in the Making: Women and Sport With the exception of genteel games such as cards, or lawn games, colonial women were relegated to the role of spectators in colonial sports. The ability of females to take part in sports often depended on the colony where a woman lived. Females could and did take part in the useful sports of the northern colonies, but could only watch, if that was allowed, the sports of the southern and backcountry colonies. Imperial Sports: The British Attempt to Assert Control In the period between the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 and the start of hostilities in the American Revolution in 1775, the British Empire sought to extend greater control over its American colonies. That control had been sporadic in the century and a half since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Part of that effort involved attempting to export sporting traditions to the colonies. The increased imperial military presence played a role, especially in bringing upper class sports such as cricket to the New World. Like the colonists, the British realized the value of using sport to keep their soldiers, and in cricket’s case, sailors, active and in shape. The first mention of cricket in the colonies is found in the “Secret Diaries” of William Byrd of Westover. An entry from 1709 reads: “I rose at 6 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew. At about 10 o’clock Dr. Blair, and Major and Captain Harrison came to see us. After I gave them a glass of sack we played cricket. I ate boiled beef for my dinner. Then we played at shooting with arrows and went to cricket again till dark.”33 The British import fared well into the antebellum era, but eventually lost out to the American adaptation of British games such as rounders, which became the American national pastime. With British attempts to exert control over their increasingly recalcitrant colonies failing, open violence broke out at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775. The American ambivalence toward sport persisted even before the Revolution. In 1774, the Second Continental Congress EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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14 | Critical Issues
resolved that the individual colonies “discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibition of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and amusements.” However, George Washington, the commander of the Continental Army, ordered his officers to encourage “games of exercise for amusement.”34 These games included versions of cricket, which Washington himself played in 1779,35 bowling, a form of football, and others.36 From the first days of British colonization in North America, sport has occupied a great deal of attention. From Puritans and Quakers attempting to restrain unfettered enjoyment, to southerners and backcountry denizens seeking that pleasure, to slaves seeking some release from the drudgery and horror of their lives, to native tribes seeking the spiritual in the physical, sport helped shape the early history of the nation that would one day have entire television networks devoted to sport. We still debate the issues that raged among colonists over what role sports should have in our lives. In the lawful and needful recreations of the Puritans and the Quakers, we can see the origins of the fitness culture that consumes hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In the public spectacles of horse racing and other sports engaged in by southerners and New Yorkers, we can see the origins of the massive $1 billion sports industry that keeps us entertained and sometimes outraged. We have restrained the crueler sports, at least involving animals, but the spectacle remains. notes 1. Captain John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & the Summer Isles, Together with The true travels, adventures, and observations, and a sea grammar—Volume I, Chapter IX, “How wee escaped a surprising at Pamaunukee,” http://memory.loc.gov/cgi- bin/query/r?ammem/lhbcb:@ field(DOCID+@lit(lhbcb0262adiv20) (accessed May 27, 2010). 2. Ibid. 3. “Brébeuf Among the Huron,” http://ring-of-light.axspace.com/brebeuf.htm (accessed May 27, 2011). 4. Tom Rock, “More Than a Game,” Lacrosse Magazine, http://web.archive.org/ web/20070822224214/http://www.redhawkslax.com/news.lacrossemag.html (accessed on May 27, 2011). 5. Thomas Vennum Jr., “History,” uslacrosse.org, http://uslacrosse.org/museum/ history.phtml (accessed May 27, 2011); “Sports History: Lacrosse,” Hickock Sports.com, http://www.hickoksports.com/history/lacrosse.shtml (accessed May 27, 2011). EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 15
6. The Last of the Mohicans, directed by Michael Mann (Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1992). 7. David H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 8. “Ice Hockey,” The Ice Skate Museum, http://www.iceskatesmuseum.com/ e-disc-hockey.htm (accessed May 27, 2011). 9. George White, “History of Golf—Part Five: America and Golf,” thegolf channel.com, http://www.thegolfchannel.com/30310/6936/ (accessed May 27, 2011). 10. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity, 1630,” http://religiousfree dom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html (accessed on June 10, 2011). 11. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 147. 12. Ibid., 148. 13. Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), 8. 14. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 226. 15. Rader, American Sports, 11. 16. Benjamin G. Rader, American Ways: A Brief History of American Cultures (New York: Harcourt College Publishers, 2001), 36. 17. Richard O. Davies, Sports in American Life: A History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2007), 17. 18. Lisa K. Winkler, “The Kentucky Derby’s Forgotten Jockeys,” Smithsonian .com, April 24, 2009, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/ The-Kentucky-Derbys-Forgotten-Jockeys.html (accessed May 28, 2011). 19. David K. Wiggins, “Good Times on the Old Plantation: Popular Recreations of the Black Slave in Antebellum South, 1810–1860,” Journal of Sport History 4 (1977): 274. 20. Ibid., 273. 21. Gerald Gems, Linda Borish, and Gertrude Pfister, Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 2008), 92–93. 22. T. J. Desch Obi, Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Arts in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 2. 23. Rader, American Sports, 9. 24. Davies, Sports in American Life, 12. 25. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 552. 26. Ibid., 554. 27. Davies, Sports in American Life, 12. 28. Nancy Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo- America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 85. 29. John Fanning Watson, “Annals of Philadelphia, 1830,” http://files.usgw archives.org/pa/philadelphia/areahistory/watson0110.txt (accessed June 10, 2011). EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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16 | Critical Issues
30. Elliot J. Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 18. 31. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 737–738. 32. Struna, People of Prowess, 151. 33. Dreamcricket USA, “History of American Cricket Part I—The 1700’s,” http:// www.dreamcricket.com/dreamcricket/news.hspl?nid=7157&ntid=4 (accessed June 10, 2011). 34. Rader, American Sports, 16. 35. Dreamcricket USA, “History of American Cricket,” http://www.dreamcricket .com/dreamcricket/news.hspl?nid=7157&ntid=4 (accessed June 10, 2011). 36. Rader, American Sports, 16.
Bibliography Davies, Richard O. Sports in American Life: A History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Fischer, David H. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gems, Gerald, Linda Borish, and Gertrude Pfister. Sports in American History: From Colonization to Globalization. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 2008. Gorn, Elliot J. “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry.” American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 18–43. “Ice Hockey.” The Ice Skate Museum. http://www.iceskatesmuseum.com/e-disc -hockey.htm (accessed May 27, 2011). The Last of the Mohicans. Michael Mann, director. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1992. Obi, T. J. Desch. Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Arts in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Rader, Benjamin G. American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004. Rader, Benjamin G. American Ways: A Brief History of American Cultures. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Rock, Tom. “More Than a Game.” Lacrosse Magazine. http://web.archive.org/ web/20070822224214/http://www.redhawkslax.com/news.lacrossemag.html (accessed May 27, 2011). Struna, Nancy. People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo- America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Vennum, Thomas, Jr. “History.” US Lacrosse. http://uslacrosse.org/museum/ history.phtml (accessed May 27, 2011).
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America Plays: Sports in Colonial Times | 17
White, George. “History of Golf—Part Five: America and Golf.” thegolfchannel .com. http://www.thegolfchannel.com/30310/6936/ (accessed May 27, 2011). Wiggins, David K. “Good Times on the Old Plantation: Popular Recreations of the Black Slave in Antebellum South, 1810–1860.” Journal of Sport History 4 (1977): 260–284. Winkler, Lisa K. “The Kentucky Derby’s Forgotten Jockeys.” Smithsonian.com. April 24, 2009. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history- archaeology/The -Kentucky-Derbys-Forgotten-Jockeys.html (accessed May 28, 2011). Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity, 1630.” http://religiousfreedom .lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html (accessed June 10, 2011).
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2
Holy Cow! How the Advent of Early Sports Broadcasting Dramatically Changed How Professional Sports Teams in the United States Are Marketed Ric Jensen How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing Introduction In the early part of the twentieth century, sports were among the first live events that radio brought into people’s homes, and they quickly became some of the most popular programming offered by this new medium. Why did radio have such an influence among sports fans in America and throughout the world? A few reasons stand out. First, radio provided a sense of immediacy—rather than wait for a box score or game recap for a few days or even weeks, the listener could hear events as they unfolded, waiting with baited breath for the next score. Orrin Dunlap, a New York Times reporter, compared the impact of live radio broadcasts of sports play-by-play in the 1920s to the highlights shown on movie newsreels days after the contests had been wrapped up: “Seeing by radio is far more exciting than watching a belated and cut newsreel of such warfare, because here the result is in suspense; it may be revealed at any moment.”1 Second, because of the sound effects and the enthusiasm of the sportscaster’s voice and the manner in which he told the story, radio brought the emotions of the game into the listener’s living room or other private or public space. Sports fanatics (we now know them as “fans”) often became excited as they listened to the earliest radio broadcasts of live sporting events. Third, radio had such an impact because it reached so many people. For example, the 1938 heavyweight world’s championship title fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling “provided the most extensive coverage in history . . . EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via 19 UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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20 | Critical Issues
and was broadcast to every corner of the world except Asia.”2 Fourth, radio has historically been the only mass medium that provides coverage of every game of the season as well as pregame and postgame reports and shows on which fans can call in and talk about the sport. As a result, radio has historically created a special bond, a personal ongoing, open-ended communication, between teams and their fans. The fact that radio provided a way for people to listen to actual spoken accounts of sports events as they occurred cannot be overstated. This was true whether the radio broadcasts originated from the scene of the event (in which the voice of the broadcaster was augmented by the roar of the crowds) or was re-created at a distant radio studio far away from the action (in these cases, studio engineers could make the event sound like it was broadcast live). In the United States, the earliest sports radio broadcasts often did not involve live, play-by-play accounts transmitted from the arena or stadium where the event actually took place; instead, brief descriptions or summaries of the action were sent by telephone or telegraph to a radio studio, where an announcer would creatively try to interpret and describe what he though would have most likely occurred.3 Radio enabled the public to listen to the battles of their favorite team or athlete, whether at home, at work, or at the neighborhood bar. Better yet, because radio is a passive medium, it allows people to listen to broadcasts while they are fishing, cutting the grass, reading a good book, or doing something else. Even though people might not be able to go to the arenas where the games were played, radio allowed them to “go to” these spectacles merely by tuning in, turning the dial to the proper frequency, and adjusting the volume. Instead of providing a sterile account of a boring event, radio conveyed the excitement people would feel if they attended the game in person. Clavin writes that because of radio broadcasting, “No longer would sports events be staged in a vacuum. First regionally, then nationally, radio would report the results of sports events as they finished . . . to a spellbound audience.”4 Some of the sports that were first broadcast in the 1920s were boxing, baseball, football, hockey, horse racing, and tennis. Beck and Bosshart contend that it was the live transmissions of boxing on radio that made this sport and this technology so popular.5 Perhaps the epiphany that provided a glimpse into the power of radio sportscasting occurred when Jack Dempsey fought Georges Carpentier for the heavyweight championship on July 2, 1921. At that time, only a few stores sold radio receivers people could listen to at home, and a mere handful of sports events were broadcast. To promote the fight, radio pioneer David Sarnoff (who would later head RCA) had radio receivers installed in theaters and ballrooms and EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 21
charged for admission; more than 300,000 boxing fans paid the entrance fee. Proceeds from the fight were dedicated to helping France recover from the devastation it incurred in World War I. In the two weeks leading up this fight, one department store claimed that it sold $90,000 worth of radio sets, most to fans who wanted to listen to the broadcast of this fight. As was the style of the day, a sports announcer read bulletins sent by telegraph, rather than describing the action as it occurred. As many as 500,000 listeners on the East Coast tuned in to the broadcast on WJY in New York; Lever and Wheeler describe this promotion as “one of the forces behind the explosive growth of radio.”6 But in spite of the spectacular success of the broadcast of the Dempsey– Carpentier fight, the merits of sending sports events over the radio airwaves to fans were the subject of considerable debate, which took decades to resolve. On one front, there were ongoing struggles to convince the owners of sports organizations that radio broadcasts were in their best interest. For example, even legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard, who worked to broadcast the Dempsey–Carpentier fight, was initially skeptical about whether radio accounts of his fights would harm his bottom line; he banned radio broadcasts of fights at Madison Square Garden from 1924 to 1926. Even after sports organizations agreed to have their games broadcast live over the radio, the economic structure had to be resolved; at first, some organizations paid the radio stations to broadcast their games, but by the 1930s the clubs were demanding license fees from the radio broadcasters. At another level, newspaper owners tried to limit the power of radio, to keep their businesses prospering. For example, newspapers in many countries pushed through legislation that would restrict the amount of time sports could be broadcast over the radio each day. Yet another struggle took place inside homes, where families had to decide what programs they would listen to every day. A 1926 survey of listeners conducted by radio station WJZ in New York City revealed that whereas men wanted baseball games broadcast, many women preferred to listen to soap operas during that time. The choice of whether to broadcast sports or women’s programs was complicated by the fact that most sports were played during the day, which also happened to be the time that network radio stations were broadcasting some of their highest-rated programs to women. Hilmes described the dilemma facing local affiliates this way: “Should a network alienate its female listeners and sponsors by disrupting cherished serials and count on a male audience [to listen to ballgames], which is usually claimed to not exist during the daytime?”7 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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22 | Critical Issues
How Early Games Were Broadcast The first radio broadcasts of sports events were not live accounts transmitted directly from the stadium or gym where the competition took place. Rather, as discussed previously, the common practice was to telegraph updates (usually when a team scored) to an announcer at a distant site, who would create an account of what he thought may have actually happened. This required early sports play-by-play announcers to be storytellers, using the full arsenal of their creative skills to paint a picture of what the listener may have seen and heard at the site where the event actually took place. Sports broadcasters’ tools included their stored knowledge of how a pitcher threw the ball, the stance a batter would take at the plate, and even the manner in which the manager would argue with the umpire. The stories the broadcasters told were interwoven with sound effects. Tony Silvia wrote, “Early radio broadcasts were often, at-best, a re-creation of reality, not reality itself. . . . Early radio broadcasts actually were imaginative reenactments of games that had already been played moments or even hours earlier.”8 Future U.S. president Ronald Reagan got his start in radio by broadcasting football games for the University of Iowa, “by demonstrating that he could give listeners visual images that would make them think they were in the stadium.”9 He later claimed that these experiences helped him communicate with average Americans. Both Reagan and Barber “enjoyed large audiences because of the vividness of their ‘live’ play-by-play descriptions of Major League Baseball games.”10 Major League Baseball When commercial radio broadcasting first became widespread in the 1920s, baseball was the only established professional team sport in the United States. Therefore, baseball provides keen lessons about how professional sports first responded to this new medium. It appears that baseball and radio were meant for each other; radio broadcasters were able to use their imagination and storytelling skills to convince the listener sitting in his living room that he was magically transported to the stadium, viewing the game from the best seat on the first base line. The Radio Guide wrote: “Baseball broadcasts are more potent than music, more productive of speculation than foreign or political speculations, and are more widely heard than any other daytime program in the summertime; radio has really made baseball the national game.”11 In fact, Nachman describes radio’s
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 23
role in promoting the sport as “the crucial arm of sports in America [that is spreading the gospel of baseball].”12 The first radio broadcasts of Major League Baseball (MLB) games occurred at the onset of the Roaring Twenties. WWJ radio in Detroit broadcast the 1920 World Series. In August 1921 Pittsburgh’s KDKA transmitted live results of the game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies to the station, where broadcasters would fill in the details with their imagination. Later that year, WJZ in New Jersey broadcast the World Series. By the end of 1921, 28 commercial radio stations were broadcasting live accounts of baseball and other sports. The 1922 radio broadcast of the World Series was heard by five million people on three continents. In 1925 the Chicago Cubs broadcast their first home games over WMAQ. By 1935 the World Series on radio had become so popular that the Ford Motor Company paid $100,000 to sponsor the broadcasting of this event. In historical terms, it appears that owners of professional baseball clubs have consistently felt threatened that new technologies might lessen attendance and profits by giving the game to fans free of charge. Adomites describes how baseball owners initially fought against descriptions of their games in newspapers (in the 1860s), in accounts transmitted by telegraph (in the 1890s), and in movie newsreels (in the 1910s). At the onset of radio broadcasting, many MLB owners were hostile to this new technology, fearing it would reduce live attendance and their profits. In New York, a ban prohibiting live broadcasts of baseball games was in place until the 1930s. Other cities placed limits on the conditions under which games could be transmitted by radio. An interesting contrast is how radio broadcasting was viewed by the promoters of boxing as compared to MLB owners. In the case of prizefighting, radio was viewed as a medium that would hype the bouts and boost ticket sales, and promoters of the sport went out of their way to provide radio coverage.13 The reason for this is that boxing matches were irregularly scheduled, special events that would only occur at infrequent intervals. In contrast, MLB owners had to bring fans to the ballpark every day, because their teams played a schedule that stretched from April to October. The reality was that radio “drove up attendance at the [ball]parks, whetting the audience’s appetite for to see for themselves they had only imagined” by listening to the games on radio broadcasts. For example, attendance rose from less than 500,000 fans a year in 1938 to more 955,000 in 1939, the year that radio broadcasts began. In fact, Alexander describes radio as “the innovation that broadened the realm of the game more than
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24 | Critical Issues
any other” during the Great Depression.14 Silvia wrote that “Instead of radio ruining attendance, it actually drove crowds to experience first-hand what they heard from afar. . . . Hence many who had never been to a ballpark were prompted to make a trip.”15 Despite the prevailing attitude that radio could cripple the sport, the Chicago Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals recognized early on that broadcasting their games could heighten fan interest and attendance. In fact, Halberstam describes how “[t]he ownership of both clubs [the White Sox and the Cubs] welcomed radio with open arms . . . [making] Chicago the citadel of baseball on the radio.”16 The Cubs viewed broadcasting as a force that could build fan interest, increase ticket sales, and create the impression that Wrigley Field embodied “friendly confines” that fans would want to visit. Comparing how the Cubs and the cross-town Chicago White Sox utilized this new medium of radio broadcasting provides some telling insights. Cubs’ owner Philip Wrigley already knew that radio advertising enhanced the marketing of his line of chewing gum, so it was only natural that he believed radio broadcasts would build the brand of his baseball team. As a result, in 1925 Wrigley invited all the radio stations in Chicago to carry all the Cubs’ games. The success of radio broadcasting in heightening interest in the Cubs was astounding. Even though the Cubs finished in fourth place, they earned more money than any other National League club. “Instead of reducing gate receipts as feared, broadcast[s] stimulated interest, especially among women.”17 In 1925 the Cubs also earned the distinction of being the first team to broadcast its road games, when WMAQ performed this feat. In contrast, the White Sox had fewer financial resources than the Cubs and were only able to build a radio network with a limited number of stations. That legacy can still be seen today, as Chicago is most often viewed as a “Cubs’ town,” even though their on-the-field success has been much less impressive than that of the White Sox. The St. Louis Cardinals used radio to build a base of fans that spread across vast distances in the West and South where baseball teams had not been established. Until the 1950s, St. Louis was the home to two MLB clubs, the Cardinals of the National League and the Browns of the American League, who later moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles. St. Louis had been considered a “Browns’ town” until KMOX radio first broadcast the Cardinals’ appearance in the 1926 World Series. The power of those broadcasts was so pervasive and far-reaching that from that point on, St. Louis and a far-flung region of the South and West
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 25
became Cardinals’ fans. In addition to getting more people hooked on baseball, the radio broadcasts were wildly successful at building the Budweiser beer brand. (Budweiser owner August A. Busch purchased the team in 1953.) By the 1950s the Cardinals’ radio broadcasts were carried by 124 stations in 14 states. The Cincinnati Reds provide another example of how emphasizing the development of a radio network enhanced the baseball club. In 1933 the Reds sold a controlling interest in the club to Powel Crosley, who owned radio stations in the region. This match, described by Adomites as “made in economic heaven,” enabled the Reds to get free promotions and publicity, while it also sparked a rise in radio ratings.18 In marked contrast, some clubs chose not to embrace radio and suffered as a result. Bellamy and Walker describe the Pittsburgh Pirates as an example of a franchise that utilized the “penned-in” model.19 In this model, owners of a franchise may feel the team is located in a small market that can’t economically sustain the team; thus they view radio with disdain because it might reduce the number of paying customers. By 1930 cities with two MLB teams (Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago) had entered a pact in which each club would not broadcast one of its road games if the other team in town was playing at home. This resulted in thousands of people in rural America being able to regularly listen to baseball broadcasts featuring many different clubs, while urban residents in MLB cities were hard pressed to find any game carried over the radio airwaves. New York City is perhaps the most high-profile battleground providing a stark contrast in how baseball teams approached the merits of radio broadcasts. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the New York Yankees and the New York Giants viewed radio as a serious threat and barred live radio broadcasts of home games from their stadiums. In 1932 the owners of all the teams in New York agreed to a five-year ban that prohibited all radio broadcasts from their parks; only the All-Star Game and the World Series were broadcast in New York. Ed Barrow (the general manager of the Yankees) and Horace Stoneham (the owner of the Giants) “feared” and “were aghast” that radio broadcasts might hurt attendance.20 That prohibition remained in place until Larry McPhail bought the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938. By 1939 every Dodgers’ home and away game was broadcast on radio, while the Giants and Yankees only broadcast home games. Legendary radio broadcaster Mel Allen explained the situation: “What you had was baseball taking off on radio all around the country while here in New York—the communications capital of the world—you couldn’t hear a game.”21
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26 | Critical Issues
Boxing Big name boxing prizefights were marketed as rare, one-of-a-kind spectacles. Hyped by advertisers and sponsors, championship bouts in the early twentieth century often attracted huge audiences. Radio proved to be a perfect medium to bring the excitement of a prizefight intimately to where people were listening, in part because the radio broadcasters often sat ringside and not in a far-off press box. Douglas writes, “One is especially struck, when listening to . . . past boxing matches . . . by the power of sounds to transport one into the hubbub of the arena. . . . At boxing matches you heard the ref yelling in the ring, the crowd milling around and then yelling and cheering, the bell between rounds, and all of these sounds pulled you in.”22 In fact, some historians claim that the first live broadcast of a sports event was the airing of a boxing match in Pittsburgh by pioneering radio station KDKA on April 4, 1921. The world heavyweight title fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier on July 2, 1921, was a landmark event because it demonstrated the power of radio to cover sports events. The broadcast of the fight was developed by David Sarnoff and the Radio Corporation of America; the fight was transmitted over New York station WJY; and it was aired over loudspeakers at street corners, saloons, and other public sites throughout the New York City area. In 1923 live updates about the world heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tom Gibbons were broadcast from the tiny, remote village of Shelby, Montana, throughout the United States and Canada by radio station WOR of New York. Sportscaster A. Frazier provided “detailed stories” as soon as reports were sent from the fight scene to the station. The radio broadcast of the 1923 title fight between Louis Firpo and Jess Willard attracted two million listeners. The 1927 boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey attracted an audience of 40 million listeners. By 1927 more than 40 million Americans listened to the radio broadcast of the Dempsey–Sharkey boxing match. In 1938 it was estimated that nearly 6 out of every 10 Americans with a radio set in their homes tuned in to the radio broadcast of the Joe Louis–Max Schmeling heavyweight boxing championship match. College Football and Other College Sports At the college level, it was football (not baseball) that pioneered live radio broadcasts. In 1912 an experimental radio station at the University EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 27
of Minnesota successfully provided telegraphed updates about some of its football games to a few listeners. It was not until 1921 that the first commercially sponsored radio broadcast of a football game aired, when KDKA transmitted the game between the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University. Beginning in the 1920s, college football games were routinely broadcast over radio stations and networks, including the Army–Navy rivalry and games featuring such powers as Notre Dame and Ohio State. In 1920 WTAW in Bryan, Texas, provided the first full play-by-play of a college football game, between Texas A&M College and the University of Texas. The 1922 football game between two national powers—the University of Chicago and Princeton—was the first game to show how radio broadcasts could attract a large national audience. This game was broadcast by New York’s WEAF, and fans with radios along the East Coast could tune into it; meanwhile, a throng of thousands of fans gathered near WEAF to hear the game broadcast over loudspeakers. Smith writes, “The Princeton-Chicago broadcast was the first of a number of intercollegiate games that were used to promote college football and bring financial rewards to radio stations and networks. [It demonstrated that] football could be employed to sell not only all kinds of advertising but radio equipment as well.”23 In 1925 one of the first live broadcasts of a college football game occurred when the University of Pennsylvania played Cornell University. In New York City WHN began carrying Columbia University football games in 1926. Initially most colleges did not expect they could earn a lot of money from broadcasting live sports events. Instead, most athletic contests were “sustaining” broadcasts, in which the radio station aired the games at no charge, but gained no income from paid advertising for these games. In fact, Notre Dame used this sustaining model well into the 1940s. In contrast, there were only a few “sponsored” programs for which businesses put up money and sold advertisements. Most often, colleges did not ask for cash compensation from the radio stations to broadcast these events, because they believed that simply airing the games on radio would promote both the university and its athletic events. All that changed during the 1930s as more college presidents began to see radio broadcasting as a significant revenue source. In 1924 WGN of Chicago began broadcasting college football games from the Big Ten Conference. The popularity of radio broadcasts of college football games continued to grow throughout the 1930s; in New York City listeners could often hear as many as 10 games broadcast at the same time on a Saturday afternoon. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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28 | Critical Issues
The way in which universities and colleges debated the merits of broadcasting sports over the radio airwaves varied significantly. In 1931 the Stanford Athletic Department complained that the combined effects of radio broadcasts and the Great Depression were “threatening football receipts” and lowering attendance.24 In fact, several major college sports conferences, including the East Intercollegiate Association (which included Army, Navy, and Syracuse), the Pacific Coast Conference, and the Southern Conference, all voted to ban radio broadcasts for the 1932 season. There were two major concerns about how radio broadcasts might threaten attendance. First, it was feared that on cold or snowy days many fans might prefer to listen to games on radio in the comfort of their homes than shiver for hours sitting in frozen bleachers. Second, broadcasting the games featuring the nation’s best teams into towns where smaller colleges were playing lower-caliber opponents made it harder for small colleges to persuade fans to pay to attend their games. L. C. Boles of Wooster College said, “It seems to be that the smaller colleges are in the same position as the independent groceries [who have to compete] with the big chains.”25 But by the 1930s the attitude that radio broadcasts should be not be supported by advertising had changed, and more and more colleges warmed up to the idea that broadcasting their games on radio could help the university raise needed funds. In 1932 the University of Iowa broadcast football games sponsored by Maytag Washing Machines with future president Ronald Reagan doing the play-by-play. That same year, the Pacific Coast Conference became the first collegiate league to develop a radio broadcasting package. They entered into an agreement with NBC, the Hearst Broadcasting Service, and the Columbia Broadcasting System to air games of member schools within specific geographic markets. As a bonus, the radio networks agreed to develop and air special programs to excite listeners about the sport. By the mid-1930s a new trend had emerged in which individual universities (not leagues) were negotiating deals to earn revenues by having their games commercially broadcast. In 1934 the University of Michigan and Yale each brought in the most money by selling the rights to its radio broadcasts for $20,000; other schools brought in lesser amounts. The only two universities that opposed selling radio rights for profit were Harvard and Princeton. President Harold Dodds of Princeton University said, “I view the sale of radio broadcasts as further surrender to the commercial atmosphere which already surrounds college intercollegiate athletics.”26 However, even Harvard succumbed to the lure of bringing in funds through radio rights and in 1937 sold the rights to its radio broadcasts for $35,000. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 29
In addition to broadcasting regular season college football games, radio played a key role in stimulating interest in postseason bowl games. In 1925 the Rose Bowl game was the first bowl game to be broadcast over commercial radio and the first college football game to be broadcast nationally. By broadcasting these games, the persuasive power of radio, which made listeners feel as though they were present at an exciting event, helped transform college football bowl games into events more and more fans felt compelled to listen to. The rise of the Orange Bowl football game attests to the power of radio to turn a run-of-the-mill college football game into a national spectacle. In the 1930s this game was often played before as few as 3,000 fans, but after it was hyped over the radio airwaves by sportscaster Ted Husing, this contest rapidly evolved into a prominent New Year’s Day tradition that was broadcast nationally. To a lesser extent, basketball and other college sports were also broadcast over radio. Broadcasts of college basketball games in the New York City area originated in the 1940s. The National Hockey League The National Hockey League (NHL) provides a unique perspective on the onset of sports radio broadcasting, because it involves the United States and Canada. On March 24, 1923, CFCA (a radio station operated by the newspaper Toronto Star) began broadcasting hockey games on an experimental basis; one of the first contests was a match between two minor league teams. The games were broadcast by Foster Hewitt, who would keep on calling hockey games for the next 57 years. By 1926 the Toronto Maple Leafs became the first NHL franchise to regularly broadcast their games over radio. In 1931, the year the team opened the Maple Leaf Gardens, owner Conn Smythe developed a plan to broadcast all Leafs’ home games for out-of-town fans; games that were sold out would also be broadcast in Toronto. These broadcasts were sponsored by General Motors of Canada, and broadcasts attracted more than one million listeners throughout Canada and the United States. By 1934 the Montreal Canadiens’ matches were broadcast over radio in French and English throughout Quebec, while the rest of Canada heard Maple Leafs matches. As many as 75 percent of all Canadians were listening on radio to the 1934 Stanley Cup playoffs. It has been estimated that by the end of the 1930s more than two million listeners tuned in to NHL radio broadcasts.27 The effect of the NHL broadcasts in Canada was deeply felt. Clement wrote, “In Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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30 | Critical Issues
coverage of NHL hockey from the 1930s through the early 1950s had an even more profound effect, raising hockey to the level of a national passion and Saturday night ritual and carving out a central place in Canadian popular memory for the NHL.”28 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, other NHL clubs, including the Boston Bruins, the New York Americans, and the Chicago Blackhawks, began using radio broadcasts to stimulate interest in the sport. The Americans began broadcasting home games in 1926, while the New York Rangers began to regularly broadcast their games in 1943. Nationwide radio broadcasts resulted in “rabid popularity” of the NHL throughout Canada and made the game more popular in the United States. These radio broadcasts soon proved their worth on several levels. They educated hundreds of thousands of listeners across Canada and North America about hockey and the NHL and played a role in legitimatizing the NHL in the minds of amateur hockey players, the general public, and fans. Despite the enthusiasm for the prospects of radio broadcasting to promote the NHL, there was also significant opposition. Smythe said, “There were some (Toronto Maple) Leaf directors who thought we shouldn’t broadcast games because it would hurt ticket sales. I knew we should broadcast. People who were interested enough to listen to our games on the radio were going to buy tickets sometime.”29 Tex Rickard, who owned the New York Americans, agreed that radio broadcasts were a good thing because they “created an intense desire to see a game of hockey played” among rabid listeners who tuned in to these contests.30 The National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and Other Sports Because the other major team sports in the United States, the National Football League (NFL) and the National Basketball Association (NBA), had not been established at the onset of commercial radio broadcasts in the early 1920s, this chapter does not devote a lot of space to discussing them. The National Football League’s Green Bay Packers were one of the league’s first teams to begin broadcasting their games, in the 1930s. In the mid-1930s the Mutual Radio Network began broadcasting the NFL championship game over WOR in New York.31 In 1934 the Detroit Lions Thanksgiving game against the Chicago Bears was broadcast by NBC over a network of 94 stations; the Lions may have been one of the first NFL clubs to utilize radio because their owner, Dick Richards, operated radio stations in Michigan and California. The first nationwide radio EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 31
broadcast of an NFL game occurred in 1940, when the championship game between Chicago and Washington was aired. MacCambridge described how radio could whet the appetite of potential NFL fans, making them want to learn more about the league and its teams. The New York Giants began broadcasting their games in 1943. When the NBA was formed in 1947, each franchise was allowed to develop its own arrangements for radio broadcasts of its games. Radio coverage was envisioned as a way to help each franchise make some money by selling broadcast rights and to draw more fans to pay to watch the games in person: “The lure of radio was so great that most of the teams gladly paid for the privilege of being broadcast and then tried to recoup their cash outlay by selling game-time advertising.”32 Several NBA teams used radio promotions and game broadcasts as a way to promote interest in the league. The NBA provides a unique view into the debates about whether or not broadcasting would harm sports franchises because this league was formed in 1947, when the power of radio broadcasting was being realized and the potential of television was first being imagined. Ned Irish, one of the founders of the New York Knickerbockers, advocated the idea that radio broadcasts might help the clubs by providing cash from selling the broadcast rights and might create buzz that would spur interest in the new league. While Irish encouraged league-wide TV broadcasts, Al Sutphin, who owned the rights to the Cleveland franchise, disagreed strongly. He feared that broadcasting games on TV would reduce attendance, describing it as “something that only keeps fans away from games.”33 Radio was also used to broadcast other sports as early as the 1920s. In 1924 WGN of Chicago broadcast the Indianapolis 500 for the first time (the first airing of a car race on American radio); in 1925 WFBM (a radio station developed by the Indianapolis News) and WGN (created by the Chicago Tribune) both provided reports from the racetrack. The 1928 Indianapolis 500 is important because “[p]ublic awareness of the race—beyond merely realizing that it existed—was enhanced to an even greater extent . . . by the fact that the National Broadcasting Company devoted a full hour of air time to covering the finish by radio.”34 In 1923 the Kentucky Derby was broadcast on radio for the first time by Louisville radio station KHAS, and an estimated six million listeners tuned in. In the late 1920s some prominent golf matches were broadcast live on radio, but they weren’t especially popular, because “[r]adio didn’t lend itself [to] the play-by-play of golf contests as it did baseball, boxing and college football.”35 The first national radio broadcast of a golf tournament occurred in 1936, when CBS broadcast The Masters from Augusta, EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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32 | Critical Issues
Georgia.36 Clifford Roberts, one of the founders of the Masters tournament, “felt the radio program was important because it enabled distant fans to follow the tournament and because it helped stir up interest among potential ticket buyers.”37 How Sports Organizations Dealt with the “Threat” of Radio Broadcasts A common theme that runs through how many sports organizations dealt with radio seems apparent. When it became obvious that commercial radio would likely turn into a significant economic and social force in the early 1920s, the leaders of several sports institutions didn’t know what to make of it and how to deal with it. Perhaps this stemmed from the precedent of how American sports teams had wrestled with other new technologies when they first emerged, including updated accounts in newspapers and transmissions sent over the telegraph. The main source of friction seemed to be the economic bottom line; the owners of sports teams and the leaders of sports leagues wanted to make sure that the rise of radio did not occur at their expense. Major League Baseball club owners provide one of the best examples of ownership that most feared the effects of radio broadcasts. New York sportswriter Ford Frick (who would later become the commissioner of MLB) described the ongoing debates about whether radio broadcasts should be allowed, which stretched over the 1920s and 1930s. Frick said, “The baseball meetings of these days frequently developed into real donnybrooks with the battle lines clearly drawn between the advocates of radio and the old-time conservatives who saw red whenever the new medium was mentioned.”38 Silvia suggests that Dodgers’ owner Larry McPhail and broadcaster Red Barber played a major role in convincing other team owners that radio was a friend and not a foe, which was a revolutionary change of attitude. In several instances, those same people who initially opposed broadcasts changed their minds once they comprehended how this new technology could grow their sport. For example, Tex Rickard was a New York City boxing promoter who played a key role in the 1921 broadcast of the Dempsey–Carpentier fight who later led many of the marketing efforts of Madison Square Garden. “Rickard had banned radio from his arena [Madison Square Garden] in November 1924, fearing it would reduce attendance at prizefights . . . but early in 1926 he changed his mind after hearing from shut-ins and disabled veterans who couldn’t make it to the EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 33
Garden.”39 Rickard created WMSG in 1926 and planned to air all the sports events taking place at Madison Square Garden that time and circumstances would allow. Beck and Bosshart describe how broadcasting the 1935 heavyweight championship between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling made money for the fighters, the promoters, and the radio stations: “The radio stations reporting the . . . fight . . . had to pay $27,500 for license fees, still everybody made a profit. Despite the live reporting on the radio, 88,000 spectators went to the fight and paid entrance fees, so radio proved to be no threat to sports arenas’ attendance.”40 In the end, it should be noted that the relationship between sports and radio has benefited sports teams, radio stations, sponsors, and fans. For example, Valiant suggests that sports broadcasts played a critical role in building up the enthusiasm and listener support needed to create chains of network radio stations. In other words, sports were so important and sought after that they created a demand for radio networks that would carry these games to large audiences. Robert McChesney wrote, “Sport and the Mass Media enjoy a very symbiotic relationship in American society. . . . The staggering popularity of sport is due, to small extent, to the enormous amount of attention provided to it by the mass media. On the other hand, the media are able to generate enormous sales in both circulation and advertising based on their extensive treatment of sport.”41 We need to be reminded that the lessons learned in examining how sports organizations dealt with radio are still relevant today. In 2009 some sports organizations were still fighting to restrict reports and the media from live blogging or tweeting during their games. We have all experienced NFL games being blacked out locally from local television stations. It’s all too common to have out-of-market games be unavailable on satellite or cable television unless one pays a premium fee. The point is that we know technology is going to continue to evolve. It’s likely that as new media technologies become available, some sports owners and leaders are going to continue to resist these new forms of mass media, still fearing that people will stop coming to watch their teams play if live information is transmitted by these devices. I hope that when this happens we can suggest that these owners look back and reexamine the lessons learned from looking at how sports organizations dealt with radio. Perhaps they might realize that new technologies may well make their teams more popular if they embrace new forms of media, and that they will likely only suffer if they fear these innovations and don’t employ them. Perhaps the moral to this story is best summed up by Paul Admoites: “As early as the 1860s, it was already clear that baseball sold EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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34 | Critical Issues
newspapers and newspapers sold baseball. The point is [that] advanced communications create fans everywhere, even thousands of miles away from the parks.”42 Notes 1. Ray Gamache, A History of Sports Highlights: Replayed Plays from Edison to ESPN (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 87. 2. Robert Brown, Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 3. 3. Jim Cox, American Radio Networks: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 8. 4. Thomas Clavin, Sir Walter: Walter Hagen and the Invention of Professional Golf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 131. 5. Daniel Beck and Louis Bosshart, “Sports and Radio,” Communication Research Trends 22, no. 4 (2003): 9. 6. Janet Lever and Stanton Wheeler, “Mass Media and the Experience of Sport,” Communication Research 20, no. 1 (1993): 128. 7. Michele Hilmes, Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States (Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2007), 103. 8. Tony Silvia, “The Art and Artifice of Early Radio Baseball Re-creations,” Nine 15, no. 2 (2007): 87. 9. John Jones and Robert Rowland, “The Weekly Radio Addresses of President Ronald Reagan,” Journal of Radio Studies 7, no. 2 (2000): 260. 10. Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 197. 11. John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 627. 12. Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 427. 13. Bill Jaker, Frank Sulek, and Peter Kanze, The Airwaves of New York: Illustrated Histories of 156 AM Stations in the Metropolitan Area, 1921–1966 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 129. 14. Charles Alexander, Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 203. 15. Silvia, “Art and Artifice of Early Radio Baseball Re-creations,” 114. 16. David Halberstam, Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History (Chicago: Masters Press, 1999), 223. 17. Lever and Wheeler, “Mass Media and the Experience of Sport,” 125. 18. Paul Adomites, “Baseball on the Air,” in Total Baseball, eds. John Thorn and Peter Palmer (New York: Warner Books, 1992), 254. 19. Robert V. Bellamy and James R. Walker, “Baseball and Television Origins: The Case of the Cubs,” Nine 10, no. 1 (2001): 35. 20. Red Barber, The Broadcasters (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 128. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 35
21. Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 209. 22. Ibid., 204. 23. Ronald A. Smith, Play-by-Play: Radio, Television and Big Time College Sport (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 17. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. Ibid., 30. 26. Ibid., 33. 27. Arthur Pincus and David Rosner, The Official Illustrated NHL History: The Story of the Coolest Game on Earth (Chicago: Triumph Books, 1999), 41. 28. Wallace Clement, Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: McGill University Press, 1997), 367. 29. Quoted in Halberstam, Sports on New York Radio, 66. 30. Ibid., 68. 31. Ibid., 92. 32. Charles Rosen, The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009), 165. 33. Ibid., 32. 34. Donald Davidson and Rick Shaffer, The Official History of the Indianapolis 500 (London: Autocourse Press, 2006), 65. 35. Clavin, Sir Walter, 131. 36. David Owen, The Making of The Masters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 183. 37. Quoted in ibid. 38. Quoted in Halberstam, Sports on New York Radio, 224. 39. Quoted in Jaker, Sulek, and Kanze, Airwaves of New York, 129. 40. Beck and Bosshart, “Sports and Radio,” 10. 41. Robert McChesney, “Media-Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States,” in Media, Sports, and Society, ed. Lawrence Wenner (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989), 48. 42. Adomites, “Baseball on the Air,” 654.
Bibliography Adomites, Paul. (1992). Baseball on the air. In Total Baseball, John Thorn and Peter Palmer, eds. New York: Warner Books, 654–656. Alexander, Charles. (2002). Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era. New York: Columbia University Press. Barber, Red. (1970). The Broadcasters. New York: Da Capo Press. Beck, Daniel, and Louis Bosshart. (2003). Sports and radio. Communication Research Trends 22 (4): 9–10. Bellamy, Robert V., and James R. Walker. (2001). Baseball and television origins: The case of the Cubs. Nine 10 (1): 32–45. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Browden, Pamela, and Tom Philbin. (2007). Two Minutes to Glory: The Official History of the Kentucky Derby. New York: HarperCollins. Brown, Robert. (1998). Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Carroll, John, and John Martin Carroll. (2007). Red Grange and the Rise of American Football. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Clavin, Thomas. (2005). Sir Walter: Walter Hagen and the Invention of Professional Golf. New York: Simon & Schuster. Clement, Wallace. (1997). Understanding Canada: Building on the New Canadian Political Economy. Toronto: McGill University Press. Cox, Jim. (2009). American Radio Networks: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Covil, Eric. (n.d.). Radio and its impact on the sports world. AmericanSportscasters Online. Retrieved at http://americansportscastersonline.com/radio. Craig, Douglas B. (2000). Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Davidson, Donald, and Rick Shaffer. (2006). The Official History of the Indianapolis 500. London: Autocourse Press. Douglas, Susan. (1999). Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dunning, John. (1998). On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press. Gamache, Ray. (2010). A History of Sports Highlights: Replayed Plays from Edison to ESPN. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Halberstam, David. (1999). Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History. Chicago: Masters Press. Hilmes, Michele. (2007). Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States. Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth. Hilmes, Michele. (1997). Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hodges, Russ, and Al Hirschberg. (1963). My Giants. New York: Doubleday. Jaker, Bill, Frank Sulek, and Peter Kanze. (1998). The Airwaves of New York: Illustrated Histories of 156 AM Stations in the Metropolitan Area, 1921–1966. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Jones, John, and Robert Rowland. (2000). The weekly radio addresses of President Ronald Reagan. Journal of Radio Studies 7 (2): 257–281. Lever, Janet, and Stanton Wheeler. (1993). Mass media and the experience of sport. Communication Research 20 (1): 125–143. Lorenz, Stacy. (2000). A lively interest on the prairies: Western Canada, the mass media, and a world of sport (1870–1939). Journal of Sport History 26 (1): 195–227. MacCambridge, Michael. (2005). America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. New York: Anchor Books. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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How Early Sports Broadcasting Changed Professional Sports Teams Marketing | 37
McChesney, Robert. (1989). Media-made sport: A history of sports coverage in the United States. In Media, Sports, and Society, Lawrence Wenner, ed. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 48–71. McDonough, Peter King, Paul Zimmerman, Vic Carucci, Greg Garber, Kevin Lamb, Joe Gergen, Harold Rosenthal, C. Nevius, Ed Bouchette, Ted Brock, Tom Barnidge, and Phil Barber. (1994). 75 Seasons: The Complete Story of the National Football League (1920–1995). Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing. Nachman, Gerald. (1998). Raised on Radio. Berkeley: University of California Press. Newton, Anna, and Jean H. Ardell. (2007). Taking the measure of baseball broadcasters. Nine 15 (2): 79–86. Owen, David. (2003) The Making of The Masters. New York: Simon & Schuster. Peterson, Robert. (1997). Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football. New York: Oxford University Press. Pincus, Arthur, and David Rosner. (1999). The Official Illustrated NHL History: The Story of the Coolest Game on Earth. Chicago: Triumph Books. Rosen, Charles. (2009). The First Tip-Off: The Incredible Story of the Birth of the NBA. New York: McGraw-Hill. Ross, James. (2008). Hockey capital: Commerce, culture, and the National Hockey League, 1917–1967. Doctoral Dissertation. London, ONT: University of Western Ontario. Schumacher, Michael. (2007). Mr. Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers, and the Birth of the NBA. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Sherony, Keith, and Glenn Knowles. (2009). A tale of two teams: A comparison of the Cubs and White Sox in Chicago. Nine 18 (1): 107–124. Silvia, Tony. (2007a). Baseball Over the Air: The National Pastime on the Radio and in the Imagination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Silvia, Tony. (2007b). The art and artifice of early radio baseball re-creations. Nine 15 (2): 87-–94. Smith, Curt. (1992). Voices of the Game. New York: Simon & Schuster. Smith, Ronald A. (2001). Play-by-Play: Radio, Television and Big Time College Sport. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sterling, Christian, and John Kittross. (2002). Stay Tuned: A Concise History of American Broadcasting. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Valiant, Derek. 2002. Rural radio listening and talking back during the progressive era in Wisconsin, 1920–32. In The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, Michelle Hilmes and James Loviglio, eds. New York: Routledge. Wenner, Lawrence, ed. (1989). Media, Sports, and Society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
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3
Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons Ray Gamache
Introduction On May 27, 1823, some 60,000 spectators gathered to watch a showdown between two thoroughbreds—one from the North and the other from the South—with an astronomical $20,000 purse in the offing. The great event between nine-year-old American Eclipse and four-year-old Sir Henry not only enticed race fans from all over the young nation, but served as a model for future sport spectacles. Few fans could have imagined that they were partaking in an event that “was the combination of energies that would later serve as the foundation of the modern sports experience: the power of regional pride, the thrill of shared passions, the ability to see a contest as an allegory. And the intense desire to win.”1 Even those not present to watch the three heats—including Sir Henry’s owner, Colonel William R. Johnson, who had become ill the night before from eating bad lobster—would have been hard pressed to tell from the newspaper coverage that anything monumental had transpired. The New York Evening Post printed the results in that day’s edition and a “truncated description”2 in a second edition of that day’s paper. However, as John Eisenberg argues in The Great Match Race, what transpired when American Eclipse won the second and third four-mile heats on America’s first railed, dirt track over Sir Henry was more than the winning of a large sum of money for his owner, Cornelius W. Van Ranst, more than the North claiming victory over the South, and even more than the greatest horse race ever run in the still fledgling country. What ensued was a sport spectacle the likes of which would not be seen again for years to come, an archetype of sport as the conveyor of a nation’s hopes and aspirations, social values, and status relationships. Replete with compelling story lines related to the jockeys, the owners, and the horses
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40 | Critical Issues
themselves, the match race between American Eclipse and Sir Henry satisfied the requisites of good drama—to move the events from the random and meaningless to actions that connected people with ideas, emotions, and meanings that they could recognize and respond to.3 It would be years before a communications network could disseminate and frame sporting events for popular consumption in a timely fashion. The American Eclipse–Sir Henry match race anticipated later spectacles. However, for much of the nineteenth century, sport was anything but spectacle. The concept of sport as spectacle must include a number of aspects: institutionalized public performances of physical exertion and skill, rules or guidelines, management and supervision, competition, incentives, being ritualized and non-mundane, taking place before an assembled audience, and having the suspense of undetermined outcomes.4 Sport spectacles are manifestations of a social relation between people and events, in that sports and athletes embody a nation’s identities and aspirations. As cultural performances, sport spectacles are distinct systems of meaning through which cultural norms are formulated, communicated, and reformulated.5 The great match race of 1823 was an anomaly because it lacked the requisite technology to communicate its importance and reformulate its meaning on a national and international scale. In this chapter I argue that the modern sport spectacle crystallized from a convergence of factors, including the industrialized processing of goods and services, the evolution of a consumer society, and the development of an information network of mass media, specifically the development of film (e.g., sport film actualities and newsreel highlights), all of which promoted sport as a modern entertainment business and a prominent social practice. From Spectacular Sport to Sporting Spectacles The relationship between sport and its dissemination and reformulation through mass media emerged as a continuation and transformation of magic lantern traditions that had originated in the seventeenth century and gradually took shape along with the invention, development, and deployment of nineteenth-century communication technologies such as the telegraph, telephone, and motion picture camera. Models for early moving pictures can be traced back to wall paintings and illustrated books, both of which employed a series of images to tell a story. The dissemination of sports via electronic media was arguably also an extension of a visual entertainment tradition (e.g., circus, burlesque, variety theater, etc.) that “emphasized display and spectacle rather than story-telling.”6 The conjunction of these EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 41
developments would ultimately produce the first mediated sport spectacle, the Corbett–Fitzsimmons heavyweight championship fight in 1897. Attempts to capture and project motion were conducted in the laboratories of Muybridge, Edison, and Marey in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In February 1888, Eadweard Muybridge met Thomas A. Edison in the latter’s West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory to discuss combining Edison’s phonograph with his zoopraxiscope to project a series of painted images onto a screen, a process that Edison ultimately deemed impractical and inconvenient. However, when Edison met Étienne-Jules Marey at the 1889 Paris Exposition he formulated the ideas for a machine that “passed a tape-like band of film past a camera lens, halting and then exposing a single frame of film for a brief fraction of a second, after which the strip was again moved forward, until the next frame of film was halted in front of the lens and likewise halted.”7 After several experiments with cylinders, Edison and his camera specialist, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, enlisted William Heise for the project, largely because Heise had expertise in moving tape-like strips of paper through a machine. In the spring of 1891 their experimentation produced a horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and kinetoscope viewer, which used three-quarter-inch- wide film. Of the seven films known to have been made with this camera, the last captured two men boxing. The progression from the kinetoscope peep show to motion picture camera projection owed as much to conditions related to audience comfort as to technological innovation. Woodville Latham testified that almost as soon as the Edison Kinetoscope Company began showing fight films in the enlarged kinetoscopes at their parlor on Nassau Street in Manhattan, his sons Otway and Gray Latham heard viewers express a desire to see the films projected on a screen.8 Such a projection enabled several possibilities. For one, the audience saw a larger, if not life-sized, representation of the subject matter, more clearly and more conveniently. Second, rather than experiencing the film individually, viewers seeing a film projected upon a screen shared the experience with others. Third, projection offered the possibility of exhibiting an entire sporting event instead of a staged exhibition, necessitated by the kinetoscope’s limited capacity. Projection also benefited the exhibitor in that parlors needed only one projector, reducing the wear and tear on both film and projector. Showing a film to many viewers at one time reduced costs and increased revenues, expanding the exhibitor’s range for distribution because more parlors across a wider territory could be opened with far fewer projectors. Moreover, film ultimately succeeded in displacing the theater as a popular medium of EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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42 | Critical Issues
naturalistic theatrical fare, exploiting the theater’s established economic base while adding to the public’s desire for sporting images, which lithography and photography had engendered. Not surprisingly, then, by 1897 almost 15 percent of all commercial films had a sporting title.9 The Corbett–Fitzsimmons Fight Film When Bob Fitzsimmons knocked out Jim Corbett in Carson City, Nevada, on March 17, 1897, winning the heavyweight championship of the world, three hand-cranked cameras loaded with thousands of feet of film were situated at ringside in a specially designed wooden house to capture the entire spectacle. The fight was financed and promoted by Dan Stuart, a Dallas entrepreneur and sporting man, and filming of the event was produced by the Enoch Rector–Samuel Tilden Jr. partnership, which had successfully staged a boxing exhibition called “Corbett and Courtney before the Kinetograph” for the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company, but was now operating under the aegis of the newly formed Veriscope Company. By the time an agreement for the fight, including film rights, was signed, the commercial potential for fight films had increased dramatically as a result of the development in projection by the Eidoloscope, Phantoscope, and Vitascope cameras. Boxing became the first sport to realize considerable profits from motion-picture reproductions, complementing the profits reaped from the purse, paid admissions, betting, and theatrical exploitation of prizefighters’ celebrity status. While the 11,000 feet of film stock with a wide-screen format shot by Rector’s specially built cameras on March 17, 1897, was being developed for exhibition, a variety of religious and reform groups lobbied Congress to enact legislation that would ban not only prizefighting but also images and reports of fights. Fearing that such a broadly written bill would result in censorship of newspapers and magazines, Congress took no action on the proposed legislation. Even though a number of state legislatures also considered banning fight films, few enacted laws prohibiting their exhibition. Several factors contributed to the defeat of such legislation, including boxing’s popularity, the absence of any clear conception of what constituted cinema, and the Veriscope Company’s effective publicity and promotional campaign.10 Exhibition of the film Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was noteworthy on several counts. Before the film was made available to the public, Stuart screened the film for the New York press, generating considerable publicity about the film’s content rather than the technology. Each of the fighters EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 43
made claims about what the camera showed. In this regard, the company’s name, Veriscope, literally meaning truth-viewer, proved useful in benefiting from the controversies stemming from the fight’s outcome. A New York World article noted that the camera proved to be “a triumph of science over the poor, imperfect instrument, the human eye, and proves the veriscope camera is far superior.”11 The possibility that the camera could prove whether or not Fitzsimmons had been down for a ten-count in the sixth round and whether or not Corbett had been fouled in the decisive fourteenth round added to the film’s attraction. This illustrates one of the main tenets of the spectacle, as delineated by Guy DeBord: “Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch.”12 Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight debuted on May 22, 1897, at the Academy of Music in New York City. The two-hour film was soon offered as a stand- alone feature in many theaters in major urban centers. As a representation of an actual event, the film was both legally and socially acceptable viewing material for an audience that cut across cultural and economic lines. In Chicago, where the film enjoyed an initial run of nine weeks, admission ranged from 25 cents for a gallery seat to $1.00 for the orchestra.13 The theater seat served as a replacement for the ringside seat, creating an alternate way of consuming this sport. Over time, the film was exhibited in various other places of amusement—fairgrounds, resorts, amusement parks, storefronts, and midways—almost anywhere a screen could be hung and electricity provided. Despite newspaper reports that detailed the flickering and vibrations that proved trying to the eyes, prompting efforts to improve both prints of the film and the projecting machines, the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight film remained a premiere attraction thanks to effective publicity and distribution, topicality, and mode of exhibition. One of the noteworthy aspects of the film’s exhibition was its use of an expert who stood onstage and provided running commentary. These experts varied from location to location, and undoubtedly their commentary also varied in content and quality. Nonetheless, their descriptions of the fight’s key moments, especially its controversies, fueled the audience’s experience and drew considerable reactions, as evidenced in various newspaper reports. First, the narrator connected the fight film exhibition to the tradition of the illustrated lecture and thereby helped to assuage the concerns of those for whom boxing was anathema by suggesting the more refined mode of presentation used in illustrated lectures on the lyceum circuit.14 Also, the spoken commentary rendered musical accompaniment EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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44 | Critical Issues
unnecessary and doubtless inspired spectator yelling, cheering, and generally playing the counterpart of the actual ringside spectators. In the use of an expert to provide commentary, sports announcing was born. Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight grossed approximately $750,000, with profits exceeding $120,000 after the fighters received their percentages, making it the first motion picture blockbuster. More important, the fight film proved that a mass audience would pay to see a representation of an actual event and that a privileged commentator could be used to guide viewers to the correct interpretation and feeling state, a function performed by today’s expert analysts, who communicate insider information through intonation, interpretation, and assertion. Backlash and Bans During what became known as the Nickelodeon era (1905–1915), the motion picture industry changed from a loosely structured entertainment syndicate to a big business model based on mass production by a limited number of vertically integrated companies. These studios ultimately changed both their product, concentrating on feature-length fictional films, rather than sport actualities, and viewing spaces, replacing storefront nickelodeons and peep show parlors with ornate theaters that showed only entertainment films. By 1911 the film industry had entered into the second phase of news film development with the release of the first American- produced weekly newsreel by the French-owned Pathé Weekly. Thanks to their regular release, the newsreels became a vehicle for news transmission that audiences, already in the millions, came to expect. As already established by newspapers, news sustains itself through form and habit.15 Sporting events became a mainstay of the newsreels precisely because they were scheduled throughout the calendar year. In the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, sports also experienced considerable growth as a source of popular entertainment. This growth was fueled in part by the continued proliferation of sporting magazines, the development and expansion of sports sections in newspapers, and the distribution of newsreel sports segments. The symbiotic relationship between these industries generated tremendous enthusiasm by producing a constant flow of publicity through co-promotional activities. This joint venture to film and exhibit sporting actualities had to contend with reformists, who continued to rail against the barbarity of prizefighting, still struggling to shed its reputation as a brutal, savage blood sport with no socially redeeming value. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 45
Ultimately, the spark needed to incite the move toward censorship and the banning of fight films was provided when Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion by defeating Tommy Burns in 1908 and then summarily disposed of one Great White Hope after another until he defeated former champion Jim Jeffries on July 4, 1910. As long as there had been a white heavyweight champion and the racial hierarchy was maintained, the exhibition of fight films was tolerated, even celebrated, especially when the feature showcased popular champions like Corbett and Jeffries. Because John L. Sullivan and his successors had maintained the color line, no black heavyweight was afforded the opportunity to upset hegemonic white masculinity. Although the sporting elite did not allow a black heavyweight champion, film played an important role in creating a space where black athletes demonstrated their talents. The camera captured these performances without cultural preconceptions. Johnson, however, not only upended the hierarchy, but his dominating ring presence and his flouting of social conventions, carrying on relationships with white prostitutes and marrying two white women (Etta Duryea in 1909 and Lucille Cameron in 1912), led to his being cast as a threatening menace to the established order. Promoter George Lewis “Tex” Rickard lured Jeffries out of retirement, thanks in part to the largest purse for a championship fight, $101,000, with the fighters splitting two-thirds of the movie rights and each receiving a signing bonus of $10,000. The fight, originally scheduled for July 4, 1910, in San Francisco, was moved to Reno, Nevada, when in mid- June California governor James N. Gillett withdrew his support, bowing to pressure from civic and church leaders. According to a New York Times article on December 5, 1909, details of the “moving picture clause” occupied a considerable portion of the negotiations, and the clause was finally “stricken out of the articles and incorporated into a separate agreement.”16 That separate agreement included the formation of a stock company, the J. & J. Co., to handle the fight’s pictures. The MPPC ultimately bought up both boxers’ shares of the net film profits, paying Johnson $50,000 for his third and Jeffries $66,000, as well as buying Rickard’s share for $33,000. The Times article reported that profits would exceed $300,000. Production values of the film Johnson-Jeffries Fight were not particularly noteworthy, because despite a veritable cadre of cameras outfitted with special lenses being used by member companies Vitagraph, Essanay, and Selig, the film utilized most of the conventions of earlier fight films. Cameras were stationed on a platform 30 feet west of the wing and shot the action from that distance. One difference from earlier fight productions EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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46 | Critical Issues
was the allocation of a panning camera to follow Jeffries, “framing the white boxer as protagonist and privileging white spectatorship.”17 Jeffries, however, was unable to match the ring skills of the younger, more agile Johnson, who not only controlled the action, as he had in other fights, but was also seen talking to his opponent, as well as to Corbett and Sullivan, both of whom served as handlers in the Jeffries corner. Another significant aspect that the cameras captured was that during the climactic sequence in the fifteenth round after Jeffries had been knocked down three times, Jeffries’s handlers entered the ring (Corbett included), preempting the final knockout ten-count. This caused referee Tex Rickard to declare Johnson the winner and new champion rather than allowing Jeffries to be knocked out as he surely would have been. The first attempt to ban fight films, as well as telegraphed descriptions of fights, had been introduced in the U.S. Congress as early as May 1910. Although that effort failed, another bill was introduced by Representative Thetus Sims (D-Tenn.) early in 1912. Southern Democrats pushed through the legislation, which was modeled on existing federal control of obscene publications (e.g., birth control, abortion literature). With the Sims Act of 1912, passed on July 31, 1912, Congress used its constitutional power to regulate commerce by forbidding interstate transport of fight films. Because motion pictures were considered commerce, they came under the purview of the federal government. Federal intervention served a dual purpose of raising concerns about the moral effect of boxing and the impact of Johnson’s ascendancy to heavyweight champion. That the Sims Act was motivated by racial ideology was evidenced by the demagoguery deployed in the debate. On July 19, two weeks after the fight, Representative Seaborn A. Roddenbery (D-Ga.) delivered a speech in which he called Johnson “an African biped beast” and that failure to take action against that “black-skinned, thick-lipped, bull-necked, brutal-hearted African”18 would lead to another civil war. With its racial overtones, the Sims Act was another manifestation of the racial divide that had been established with the barring of blacks from professional baseball by the end of the 1888 season. A Golden Age of Spectacles In the decades between the two world wars, newsreels, radio, and newspaper sports sections helped to establish athletes as the heroes and heroines of a burgeoning consumer culture. World War I had made the American public “picture-minded,” because photographs from the front “told much EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 47
more than the censors would permit to go over the cables.”19 The deadly accuracy and vivid realism of the newsreels garnered the confidence of the audience in a way that was far more dynamic than print could achieve. Athletes became recognizable commodities within a national sporting identity, an identity based on a strict separation between whites and nonwhites that reinforced the unequal distribution of power. While newsreel sports segments reinforced existing attitudes about culture, class, gender, and race, they rarely attempted to change those attitudes.20 Sports highlights featuring the sports stars of the 1920s—Dempsey, Ruth, Grange, Tilden, Jones, Ederle, and Man o’ War—became a staple of the newsreels, because sporting contests were regularly scheduled events that offered easy-to-digest entertainment featuring sports stars who had become increasingly important after World War I. While sports reporters like Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Westbrook Pegler, and Paul Gallico were instrumental in elevating the status of sports stars in the 1920s, the newsreels intensified the public’s desire for those stars by bringing them from the printed page to a larger-than-life stature that only the movie screen could display. As Paul Gallico notes, the times were right “with money to burn and money to squander, plus the worst of all war hangovers, the lust and craving for stimulation and excitement to replace and resolve the terrible nervous pitch at which people had lived from 1914 to 1919.”21 Some 130,000 people paid almost $2 million to watch Gene Tunney defeat champion Jack Dempsey in 1926, and a year later 145,000 people paid more than $2.5 million to see the rematch. A day after playing his final football game for the University of Illinois, Red Grange signed a contract with the Chicago Bears and earned more than $40,000 in only three games, then signed a $300,000 movie contract with Arrow Picture Corporation.22 In addition, by 1920 the public’s interest in film entertainment was firmly established, evidenced by the fact that in the United States the number of cinemas grew from 9,000 in 1908 to 20,000 1920.23 This growth would not have been possible without a very large number of people having acquired the habit of attending the cinema. Film’s ability to affect an audience en masse had both positive and negative implications for the development of the newsreels as journalism. On the one hand, newsreels exerted considerable influence in assimilating a large immigrant population to cultural norms; on the other hand, newsreels were confined by the limitations of the motion picture camera being employed, within the context of a news organization trying to capture its news on the fly, often rendering that coverage superficial and entertaining. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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48 | Critical Issues
Despite these limitations, watching newsreel coverage of sports joined attending sporting events, as well as reading about athletic contests in the print press and listening to games on the radio, in creating a common popular culture centered around sports.24 One component of that popular culture was being in the public eye, which now meant being seen. As Benjamin Rader notes, “While few Americans were able to see Grange perform in the flesh, millions saw him in the newsreel of thousands of theaters. The image of Grange, speeded up by the flickering screen, was almost eerie, as it darted, slashed, cut away from the would-be tacklers and crossed the goal line one, two, three or even five times within a few seconds.”25 Having raised his home run record to 59 in 1921, Babe Ruth and his larger-than- life persona were lionized by the newsreels to the extent that “Ruthian” became synonymous with individual success, heroism, and style.26 Having a vested interest in promoting and presenting sports in a positive light, newsreel coverage of sports, like that of newspapers, was built around ballyhoo, hero worship, and an idealized notion of the importance of sports. Myth-making in the service of maintaining an audience meant that newsreel editors manufactured empathy between fans and their heroes. The newsreels created a world inhabited by heroes who reassured everyday Americans that extraordinary accomplishments of magnetic personalities provided meaning for a nation of faceless masses.27 In this way, the newsreels were instrumental not only in extending the popularity of sports stars as cultural celebrities, but also in creating and diffusing overarching narratives that established sports as an important national cultural tradition. The entire information network and consumer society all found profit in exploiting the public’s desire for sporting spectacles and its willingness to uncritically accept the great athletes as heroes.28 The Myth Makers Finally, it is important to consider the role played by newsreel producers and sports journalists in fostering an appreciation for sport spectacles and the heroes on whom the bright light of fame shone. Within the visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s, the need to generate increasingly affective representations spurred technological innovations. With the introduction of sound in 1927, drama could be heightened by splicing in crowds cheering, bands playing, and the thud of the ball being struck—often recorded separately. As Mike Huggins notes, “The visual pleasures of the sporting spectacle were enhanced by slow motion photography and occasional repetition of interesting shots. . . . Newsreel-recorded games became in part EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 49
calculated media events, manufactured on the cutting-room floor.”29 In short, sport’s appeal was, and continues to be, its excitement, and how producers generate that excitement in production codes and practices helps us to unpack both the emotional and narrative qualities of a sporting spectacle. Newsreels maintained the positioning of sports as a specialized field within journalism while attempting to legitimate their own status as sports journalists. Like their counterparts in the press boxes, newsreel cameramen and editors developed their own particular codes and practices that distinguished them from other journalists. As such, they can be seen as members of an “interpretive community”30 who not only shaped their professional identity, but also defined appropriate practices. Meaning derived from knowledge about these shared practices helped members of the newsreel community to validate themselves, especially in comparison to the status that sportswriters had achieved by the 1920s. Arguably, that decade served as an important time in establishing newsreel sports segments as a specialized unit within the larger community of sports journalists. The means that they used to create that distinctiveness was sports highlights, which offered a completely new way of appreciating sports and sports stars. Not surprisingly, even the venerated Grantland Rice, the decade’s leading sportswriter, adopted the medium, supervising the production of Sportlight Films, which offered monthly, 10-minute newsreels featuring athletes.31 Newsreel sports highlights were effectively employed to capture the exploits of star athletes, fixing them as recognizable markers of excellence and lending them an aura of universality that became imprinted upon a collective memory. If the 1920s producers of newsreel sports content provided a sense of identity and community in their coverage of sports, they also established a hierarchy of power. Within this frame of reference, the press box and the sports pages were the privileged domain of white male sportswriters, whose primary role was to foster an appreciation for the stars by building “a sport fandom of dubious value.”32 Newsreel editors followed this practice. Raymond Fielding argues that the primary goal of the newsreels was to present attractions that featured celebrities in an uncontroversial formula to appease theater owners. Sports events were almost always filmed jointly by no fewer than two or three of the competing companies, so that the footage almost always emphasized the spectacle. Fielding posits, “Newsreel editors and managers defended their selection of content on the basis of popular interest and entertainment value. It was argued that military subjects . . . furnished the same sort of exciting movement and pictorial display as that other popular category, sports.”33 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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50 | Critical Issues
Holding on to this quasi-journalistic distinctiveness was one way that newsreel sports editors maintained their identity, which arguably facilitated looking back at the past with a nostalgic glow, as Rice did in his 1954 autobiography: “Looking back and reflecting on that golden, crazy age—from 1919 to 1930—I’m convinced, more than ever, that no decade in history has produced the like of Ruth, Dempsey, Jones, Hitchcock, Man O’ War, Weissmuller and Bill Tilden.”34 Rice’s emphasis on particular star athletes is enveloped in an aura of universality that affixes itself to collective memory, fashioning the athletes into generalizable markers of excellence. Conclusion: Triumph of the Spectacle Occupying a central position in popular culture, newsreel presentations of sports and athletes operate within a frame permeated with symbolism and metaphor. Newsreel highlights continued the trend established in the print media of mythologizing sports heroes for the general public. Through their highly edited, action-oriented format, newsreel highlights shaped audience responses in a way that was more interesting, engaging, personal, and powerful than the stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines. With their ability to generate more interest in idolization of the athletes, newsreel highlights depicted sports celebrities as larger-than- life figures performing in the service of their nation. As Douglas Kellner notes, “Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the world of the media spectacle. . . . To become a celebrity requires recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be it sports, entertainment, business or politics.”35 Newsreels used formulaic highlights to transform narratives about sporting events into palatable segments with easily identifiable heroes and villains, framing their presentations within a discourse that furthered a popular national culture. By focusing on the transcendent nature of competition and elevating sports stars to the status of national heroes, newsreels helped to maintain the status quo while sidestepping any journalistic responsibilities in covering issues related to gender, race, and ethnicity. In doing so, the newsreels perpetuated sport’s place in reproducing social inequality. Depictions of women and minorities were largely patriarchal. Only the most attractive female athletes were considered for inclusion; black athletes had to be nonthreatening. These athletes were expected to manifest and uphold the dominant culture’s values and morals at all times. If they attempted to challenge those roles, they were marginalized EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 51
or rendered invisible. Not surprisingly, newsreels maintained the idea that politics should be kept out of sports. Newsreel highlights celebrated and entertained, never digging very deeply beneath the surface, generating interest with an emphasis on affect. By anchoring the audience’s response in recognizable stars, experiences, and pleasures, newsreel sports highlights maintained an entertainment ethos in which stars were presented as cultural icons, guiding the audience to the correct feeling state. By adding meaning, an appealing sport celebrity encouraged fans to generalize their appreciation from the athlete to an endorsed product or brand. Sports stars appeared in the newsreels because they evoked an emotional response from their audiences and because the newsreels and sports organizations benefited from these peoples’ visibility. In eliciting crowd responses, the newsreel had a power “which it did not bequeath to its successor, television.”36 Notes 1. John Eisenberg, The Great Match Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), xi. 2. Ibid., 173. 3. John Bloom, There You Have It (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 3. 4. Donald G. Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 11. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde,” Wide Angle 8:3–4 (Fall 1986): 64. 7. Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 69. 8. See footnote 3 in Gordon Hendricks, The Kinetoscope: America’s First Commercially Successful Motion Picture Exhibitor (New York: Theodore Gaus’s Sons, 1966), 99. 9. Mike Huggins, “The Sporting Gaze: Towards a Visual Turn in Sports History—Documenting Art and Sport,” Journal of Sport History 35:2 (Summer 2008): 318. 10. See Daniel G. Streible, A History of the Prizefight Film, 1894–1915 (PhD diss., University of Texas 1994), 94–98. 11. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner’s, 1990), 198. 12. Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle (Paris: n.p., 1967), no. 18. Translated by Ken Knabb. 13. Quoted in Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 198. 14. Streible, A History of the Prizefight Film, 122. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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52 | Critical Issues
15. Luke McKernan, “Witnessing the Past,” in Researcher’s Guide to British Newsreels, Volume 3, ed. J. Ballentyne (London: BUFVC, 1993). 16. “Rickard Explains ‘Secret’ Session,” New York Times, December 5, 1909, S1. 17. Streible, A History of the Prizefight Film, 351. 18. Congressional Record, July 19, 1912, 9305. 19. Silas Bent, Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 164. 20. See Ray Gamache, A History of Sports Highlights: Replayed Plays from Edison to ESPN (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2010), 67–81. 21. Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1938), 97. 22. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper, 1957), 209. 23. Nicholas Pronay, “The Newsreel: The Illusion of Actuality,” in The Historian and Film, ed. P. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 98. 24. See Mark Dyreson, “Aggressive America: Media Nationalism and the ‘War’ over Olympic Pictures in Sports ‘Golden Age,’ ” International Journal of the History of Sport 22:6 (November 2005): 974. 25. Benjamin G. Rader, “Compensatory Sport Heroes: Ruth, Grange and Dempsey,” Journal of Popular Culture 16:4 (Spring 1983): 15. 26. Quoted in David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson, “Introduction: Sport Celebrities, Public Culture, and Private Experience,” in Sports Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrities, ed. David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson (London: Routledge, 2001), 6. 27. Mark Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 16. 28. Allen, Only Yesterday, 207. 29. Mike Huggins, “Projecting the Visual: British Newsreels, Soccer and Popular Culture 1918–1939,” International Journal of the History of Sport 24:1 (January 2007): 87. 30. Barbie Zelizer, “Journalists as Interpretive Communities,” in Social Meanings of News, ed. Daniel Berkowitz (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), 406. 31. Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes, 7. 32. Bent, Ballyhoo, 32. 33. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911–1967, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2006), 168. 34. Grantland Rice, The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life in Sport (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1954), 137. 35. Douglas Kellner, “Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle,” in The Spectacle of the Real, ed. Geoff Kind (Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2005), 27. 36. Pronay, “The Newsreel,” 99.
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Sport as Spectacle: Early Athletes as Popular Cultural Icons | 53
Bibliography Allen, Frederick L. Only Yesterday. New York: Harper, 1957. Andrews, David L., and Steven J. Jackson. “Introduction: Sport Celebrities, Public Culture, and Private Experience.” In David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson, eds. Sports Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrities. London: Routledge, 2001, 1–16. Bent, Silas. Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Bloom, John. There You Have It. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Congressional Record, July 19, 1912. DeBord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: n.p., 1967. Translated by Ken Knabb. Dyreson, Mark. “Aggressive America: Media Nationalism and the ‘War’ over Olympic Pictures in Sports ‘Golden Age.’ ” International Journal of the History of Sport 22, 6 (November 2005): 974–989. Eisenberg, John. The Great Match Race. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911–1967. 2nd ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2006. Gallico, Paul. Farewell to Sport. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1938. Gamache, Ray. A History of Sports Highlights: Replayed Plays from Edison to ESPN. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2010. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” Wide Angle 8, 3–4 (Fall 1986): 63–70. Hendricks, Gordon. The Kinetoscope: America’s First Commercially Successful Motion Picture Exhibitor. New York: Theodore Gaus’s Sons, 1966. Huggins, Michael. “Projecting the Visual: British Newsreels, Soccer and Popular Culture 1918–1939.” International Journal of the History of Sport 24, 1 (January 2007): 80–102. Huggins, Michael. “The Sporting Gaze: Towards a Visual Turn in Sports History—Documenting Art and Sport.” Journal of Sport History 35, 2 (Summer 2008): 311–329. Inabinett, Mark. Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Kellner, Douglas. “Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle.” In Geoff Kind, ed. The Spectacle of the Real. Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2005, 23–36. Kyle, Donald G. Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. McKernan, Luke. “Witnessing the Past.” In J. Ballentyne, ed. Researcher’s Guide to British Newsreels. Volume 3. London: BUFVC, 1993.
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54 | Critical Issues
Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. New York: Scribner’s, 1990. Pronay, Nicholas. “The Newsreel: The Illusion of Actuality.” In P. Smith, ed. The Historian and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, 95–120. Rader, Benjamin G. “Compensatory Sport Heroes: Ruth, Grange and Dempsey.” Journal of Popular Culture 16, 4 (Spring 1983): 11–22. Rice, Grantland. The Tumult and the Shouting: My Life in Sport. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1954. “Rickard Explains ‘Secret’ Session.” New York Times, December 5, 1909. Streible, Daniel G. A History of the Prizefight Film, 1894–1915. PhD diss., University of Texas, 1994. Zelizer, Barbie. “Journalists as Interpretive Communities.” In Daniel Berkowitz, ed. Social Meanings of News. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997, 286–299.
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4
Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry Brad Schultz
The [players union] and the League broke into open warfare. The League appealed to the courts. Litigation followed, but the League contracts were held inequitable.1
T
hat statement could easily have been made in 2011 when the National Football League (NFL) and its players’ union engaged in a lockout that threatened to cancel the entire NFL season. It could also have come from almost any modern professional sports leagues, most of which have suffered through a series of recent work stoppages. Major league baseball players went on strike five times between 1972 and 1981, with the 1981 strike lasting 713 games and costing $146 million in player salaries, ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and concession revenues.2 A lockout by baseball owners midway through the 1994 season forced cancellation of the World Series for the first time since 1904. A lockout canceled the entire 2004– 2005 National Hockey League (NHL) season, and the National Basketball Association (NBA) lost 32 games due to a lockout in 1998–1999 and 16 games in 2011. NFL players went on strike in 1982 and again in 1987, when union leader Gene Upshaw declared, “No games will be played until management abandons its unlawful course. We are prepared to withhold our services, however long it takes.”3 That strike was settled after NFL owners used replacement players for three regular season games. But the modern sports fan might be surprised to learn that the quote comes from Connie Mack, the legendary baseball player and manager, who was commenting on the 1889 dispute between the National League and the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. Even at that time, professionalism had begun to turn sports in America from pastoral play into big business.
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The Seeds of Growth Much has been written and discussed about the development of sports in the United States, particularly in regard to the issue of when sports actually began. As far back as 1733, newspaper accounts of a boxing match in England appeared in the Boston Gazette.4 The emergence of the Penny Press and the growth of mass audiences in the 1830s created more interest and coverage of sports, as did the development of the telegraph in the 1840s. Sowell argues that it was the telegraph that led to national sports coverage, creating an interest in sports very similar to how newspapers used the Internet more than a hundred years later.5 In 1894 Thomas Edison staged, filmed, and distributed a boxing match between Michael Leonard and Jack Cushing. For 60 cents audiences could watch the six-round bout in a peep show kinetoscope, and it “created a sensation.”6 By the time of Edison’s film, professional baseball had existed for more than a generation. The National League started play in 1876, and indeed it was professional in the sense that owners scheduled games, sold tickets, and paid players, but it was also chaotic and decidedly small scale. The entry fee to join the league was only $10, and by 1882 six of the eight charter teams had folded.7 When the National Football League formally organized as the American Professional Football Association in 1920, the team entrance fee was a mere $100. “There wasn’t one hundred dollars in the room,” said George Halas of the meeting of 12 owners in a Canton, Ohio, car dealership, “but still each of us put up one hundred dollars for the privilege of losing money.”8 Sports during that period could be characterized by what Melville refers to as expression.9 Expression, as contrasted with achievement, is defined by fragmentation, an emphasis on participation, and a decidedly regional focus. And though both outlooks demand winning, expression “only recognizes winning for something, while [achievement] demands winning as something.”10 In the late 1800s expression was rooted in the Victorian ideals of sportsmanship, fair play, and the genteel competition of the upper classes. “You cannot afford to bid for the patronage of the degraded,” said National League founder William Hulbert in 1881. “The sole purpose of the League, outside the business aspect, is to make it worthy of the patronage, support and respect of the best class of people.”11 It was also during this time that Baron de Coubertin helped create the modern Olympic Games, partly in hopes of inspiring the concept of amateurism.12
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 57
Such beliefs were most clearly represented by fictional football player Frank Merriwell in a series of stories and books written by Burt Standish beginning in 1896. Merriwell played football at Yale with style, supreme ability, and above all, character. He was the idealized amateur: someone who played not for money or personal gain, but for the glory of school and team. Merriwell was “not dull or charismatic, but doggedly moral.”13 By contrast, professional athletes were often viewed as ungentlemanly, dishonorable, or “lowbrow.”14 Professional players were routinely denied hotel accommodations, and even when accepted they were often told, “We can’t let baseball players mingle with the other guests.”15 According to baseball historian Donald Honig, “The public’s dubious regard of professional baseball players—‘You’re all right, but please don’t try to join the family’—continued for the better part of the century’s first two decades.”16 Factors of Change Several factors played a role in the transformation of American sport from expression to achievement, or what McChesney also referred to as the “nationalization” of sport.17 Between 1880 and 1900 the urban population in the United States grew from 14 to 30 million.18 A large part of that growth was immigration, as 14 million new citizens entered the country between 1899 and 1914.19 In addition, these new Americans would enjoy more free time than their predecessors. From 1901 to 1921 the average workweek shortened by 10 hours (58.4 hours to 48.4 hours), and more leisure time meant more revenue opportunities for professional clubs.20 For professionalism to become successful also required a winnowing of competition. As professional sports began to develop, there were few barriers to entry (including plentiful land and low player salaries), and thus “new leagues sprang up nearly every year.”21 But the war between the National League and the Baseball Brotherhood in 1890 cost owners about $4 million and threatened to throw both leagues into bankruptcy.22 Another challenge by the Federal League in 1914–1915 caused estimated losses of $10 million for the American and National Leagues.23 The NFL’s biggest threat arose in 1960, when the American Football League began play. For six years the rival leagues bid against one another for player talent, at a cost of millions of dollars, before a merger was finally worked out in 1966. “We could have done our business for another 30 years,” said Art Modell, who owned the Cleveland Browns at the time, “but we sought [a merger]
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58 | Critical Issues
to prolong the success of pro football before things got out of hand and we couldn’t control them.”24 Other factors contributing to growth included improvements in transportation, social mobility, communication, and especially technology. According to Seymour: The very concept of establishing professional baseball leagues among distant cities and playing a regular schedule of games would have been at best a dream were it not for the railroad networks of the nineteenth century and the airplane of the twentieth. A mere mention of the telegraph, electric light, airplane, automobile, and television is a reminder of the profound impact of technology on the business of selling baseball games.25 Media technology brought together these audiences, first through newspapers and telegraph wires, then through radio and television waves, and connected the growing mass audiences that made sports profitable. In 1922 radio helped the World Series reach an estimated audience of one million listeners, which did not include crowds of fans who gathered around loudspeakers in New York and New Jersey.26 The 1923 boxing match between Jess Willard and Louis Firpo attracted a broadcast audience of two million,27 while another heavyweight title fight, between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in 1927, generated thousands of dollars’ worth of sales for radio receivers.28 By 1927 NBC had developed a national network to the point that it could broadcast the Rose Bowl between Stanford and Alabama, a game that marked the first live, coast-to-coast broadcast of a sporting event on radio. NBC was able to create national radio networks (two of them, in fact) in part because of sports. “We have to have baseball in order to sell enough sets to go on to other programming,” said RCA found David Sarnoff.29 Thus the development of the sporting media played an essential role in the growth of professional sports. Media content devoted exclusively to sports began to appear as early as the 1820s, when sports magazines were created. Many of them quickly failed, but John Stuart Skinner’s American Turf Magazine and Sporting Magazine (1829) and William T. Porter’s Sprit of the Times (1821) became both popular and influential.30 The Sporting News, which is still published today, began on March 17, 1886, at a cost of five cents per issue or $2.50 for the entire year.31 Extensive newspaper coverage of sports began in the late 1800s, due in large part to the newspaper wars taking place in New York. Under the leadership of Joseph EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 59
Pulitzer, the New York World became one of the first newspapers to create a distinct sports department. To keep up, the New York Times began running sports photographs in a special Sunday picture section, and in 1895 the New York Journal became the first newspaper in the United States to print a section entirely devoted to sports.32 While the media dramatically increased in scope and reach, they also changed to keep up with a shifting culture. As America transitioned from the conservative values of the Victorian era to the more liberal attitudes of the 1920s, the tone and style of sports coverage changed dramatically. It was the “Jazz Age,” a time when the disillusioned soldiers of World War I returned home and reveled in adventurous excess. According to Asinof, “They protested the old Victorian morality of their upbringing. American life began to seem like a three-ring circus of sport, crime and sex. Everything was changing and changing fast.”33 Baseball provincialism had long dictated that no games be played on Sunday, but as one indication of changing cultural attitudes, many teams began overturning such blue laws. “The only objectors are the narrow-headed kill-joys who can’t understand why anyone should be happy or free,” wrote the Sporting News in 1918.34 On May 4, 1919, the first Sunday baseball was allowed in New York; the largest regular season crowd ever at the Polo Grounds (35,000) saw the Giants lose to the Phillies.35 Playing on Sundays would prove to be essential for the growth of professional sports, especially for the emerging National Football League, which realized it could not compete with the popular college games on Saturdays. Whereas professionalism in the Victorian era had been disdained as too unrefined and individualistic, it was accepted for the same reasons in the Jazz Age. The sporting media played an important part in celebrating the achievements of the professional athlete, and their florid praise made icons of both athlete and writer. Grantland Rice wrote of football star Red Grange, he “moves as Nurmi runs and Dempsey moves. There is only the effortless, ghostlike weave and glide upon effortless legs . . . so perfect in the coordination of brain and sinew.”36 Rice also commented, “When a sportswriter stops making heroes out of athletes, it’s time to get out of the business.”37 No athlete was more celebrated than the Yankees’ Babe Ruth, who in 1919 began to capture the public’s imagination by shattering baseball home run records and by 1920 was being called “the greatest attraction in the history of the game.”38 He was not just the Babe, he was the “Sultan of Swat,” the “Colossus of Clout,” and the “Bambino.” Ruth appeared in newspapers, magazines, movies, and radio serials, and his playful EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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60 | Critical Issues
excesses—eating too much, wrecking cars, staying out all night, and especially hitting long home runs—endeared him to millions of fans. Harry Hooper, who played with Ruth during his early years with the Red Sox, said: I saw it happen, from beginning to end, this nineteen-year-old kid, crude, poorly educated . . . transformed into the idol of American youth and a symbol of baseball the world over. A man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that perhaps has never been equaled. I saw a man transformed from a human being into something pretty close to a god.39 The public adulation of Ruth, and by extension other professional athletes such as Dempsey and Grange, had a profound economic impact. Fans flocked to see Ruth wherever he played, making the Yankees the richest and most successful team in baseball. The first year Ruth played in New York, 1919, the Yankees drew 1.3 million fans, setting a single-season record for any team and nearly doubling their own attendance record.40 Ruth himself became rich from his salary and many endorsements, with estimated lifetime earnings of more than $2 million (around $32 million today). In the depression years of 1930 and 1931, his base salary of $80,000 was more than that of President Herbert Hoover. “What’s Hoover got to do with it?” said Ruth. “Besides, I had a better year than he did.”41 When Grange turned professional with the Chicago Bears in 1925, he and the team embarked on a 17-game, cross-country barnstorming tour that reportedly netted Grange $200,000. Grange’s popularity was such that his appearances were credited with saving several shaky pro franchises, including the Giants, who drew a crowd of 73,000 when Grange played in New York.42 All of these forces combined to create in American professional sports what Frey and Eitzen call the corporate/commodity model.43 The model suggests that as economics become more important, a transition takes place from game to sport (or as Melville would argue, from expression to achievement). Part of the difference is that although play is considered somewhat unorganized and transitory, in sport “attracting spectators and media sponsorships becomes more important than the playing process because sport is now driven by profit and the market.”44 Culture, technology, and especially the media, with their emphasis on advertising and commercial sponsorship, were instrumental in this process. By 1924 the Victorian ideals of amateurism had been almost completely abandoned, leading the EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 61
Sporting News to admit “that professional baseball is a business as well as a sport.”45 As Edison’s film showed, the rights to distribute and sell sports programming had monetary value. Just in St. Louis, films of the 1908 World Series packed two movie houses twice a day for a week.46 In 1913 Western Union paid each Major League Baseball (MLB) team $17,000 per year over five years for the telegraph rights to the games. The movie industry purchased the rights to film and show the highlights of the 1910 World Series for $500, a figure that team owners managed to increase to $3,500 for the following season.47 Baseball owners were a little slower to accept radio, fearing that giving away the product for free would hurt game attendance, and as late as the 1930s, all three New York baseball teams had a ban on live radio broadcasts. The ban was broken in 1938 when Larry MacPhail took over the Brooklyn Dodgers and immediately signed a deal with 50,000- watt station WOR. In one year sponsors paid more than $100,000 in advertising, and while the Dodgers struggled on the field, their attendance actually increased. In 1939 a third-place Dodgers team drew 955,000 fans, which was 250,000 more than the Giants and 100,000 more than a Yankees team that finished in first place. Before MacPhail left the Dodgers in 1942, he sold the team’s annual radio rights for $150,000—a figure that sounds paltry, but would be worth $1.9 million in today’s dollars.48 Soon other owners also realized that live radio broadcasts did not hurt attendance, but actually created more interest in the team and encouraged more people to come to the park. After one season of broadcasting games on WMAQ, the Chicago Cubs had the highest financial receipts of any club in the National League, and Cubs’ owner William Wrigley was so enamored of radio that at one point he had the games broadcast on five different stations. “The more outlets the better,” he reportedly said. “We’ll tie up the entire city.”49 Back in Brooklyn, Dodgers’ announcer Red Barber would often exhort listeners to come to the games. “Barber would be talking on the radio, ‘Hey, we’re close to a million’,” remembered Dodgers’ fan Bill Reddy, “and everybody in Brooklyn was running out to go again to make sure they made it.”50 A League of Their Own No professional sports organization has benefited more from the media than the National Football League. In 1962 the NFL sold the rights to televise its games to CBS for $4.65 million. The league’s current contract is worth $17.6 billion, paid over eight years by CBS, FOX, NBC, and EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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62 | Critical Issues
ESPN. Television rights fees for the NFL have increased 10,000 percent since 1970 and have helped make the league the most valuable and profitable team sport in the world. In 2010 the average net worth for each team was more than a billion dollars, and even the least valuable team— Jacksonville—was worth $725 million.51 The growth of cable television in the 1970s opened up new avenues for revenue, specifically through pay- per-view channels. Providers found that customers would pay extra fees, usually between $30 and $50, for special events such as championship boxing fights. The boxing match between Oscar de la Hoya and Floyd Mayweather in 2007 recorded 2.15 million pay-per-view purchases and earned $120 million, making it the richest bout in history. In 2010 a series of 16 pay-per-view matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championship resulted in 9,145,000 buys and generated $411 million in gross revenue.52 Pay-per-view has also become popular with consumers who cannot see certain games or teams in their local area. Most major sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL, offer out-of-market programming for an additional fee, and in 2010 the NFL had about 1.6 million subscribers to its Sunday Ticket programming, which allowed consumers to watch up to 14 games per weekend. The NFL charged $250 for the package and in 2010 earned $600–$750 million in gross revenues through its distribution on DIRECTV satellite.53 In a similar way, sports leagues are using satellite radio to reach consumers. SiriusXM Satellite Radio currently has an 11-year deal worth $650 million to carry Major League Baseball games. Sports content has become so valuable and is in such demand that many teams are forming their own media distribution outlets as a means of creating additional revenue. The New York Yankees (YES Network) and New York Mets (Sports Channel New York) distribute their channels over cable and satellite, while Major League Baseball launched its own network in 2009. In 2003 the NFL Network debuted; it creates revenue on top of the lucrative deal the league has with the broadcast networks. As revenue increased through attendance and media rights fees, and sports transitioned into big business, the issue became one of who would reap the benefits. Professional team owners kept most of the money because they controlled all the costs, including ticket prices, concession sales, and especially player salaries. Salaries in all professional sports historically had been kept low because of rules designed to prevent players from selling their services on the open market and keep them bound to one team in perpetuity. In baseball the rule was known as the reserve clause, and the low salaries paid to players was considered a key factor in why eight players on the Chicago White Sox allegedly fixed the 1919 World EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 63
Series.54 According to Surdam, “If you were a player, you were undoubtedly exploited in the sense of having your pay determined by a rigged market. Most economists believe that a crucial attraction of the reserve clause to owners was its diminution of a player’s bargaining power.”55 The reserve clause survived several legal challenges, including a 1922 decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court said that antitrust laws did not apply to baseball because it was an “amusement” that did not constitute interstate commerce.56 As professional sports became ever more profitable, it became increasingly difficult to argue that the games were simply “amusements,” and baseball player Curt Flood legally challenged the reserve clause in 1970 when he was traded against his wishes. Although Flood lost his case before the Supreme Court, fighting the reserve clause became an important issue for the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), and in 1975 arbitrator Peter Seitz effectively struck down the reserve clause when he ruled that baseball players Dave McNally and Andy Messerschmidt could become free agents and sign with any team. Other professional leagues soon adopted similar procedures that allowed for some degree of free agency. The result was a staggering increase in player salaries, as team owners now had to bid against each other for player talent. That players wanted more money was nothing new to professional sports. In 1922 the New York Times noted, “Yearly the demands of the players have been going upward, until now they are asking for salaries that none thought to ask for only a few years ago.”57 But when the players finally achieved some economic leverage over owners, the average annual salary for a Major League Baseball player, which had been $1,200 in 1914,58 $4,800 in 1920,59 and $29,000 in 1970, increased to $2.36 million in 2005.60 Athletes in other sports experienced similar gains. In 2010 golfer Tiger Woods was the highest paid athlete in the world, with winnings and endorsement deals worth more than $90 million. The highest paid team athlete was basketball player LeBron James of the Miami Heat, who had earnings estimated at $45.7 million.61 The rise of the MLBPA and other professional sports unions was another sign of the transition from play to sport and from expression to achievement. The first professional baseball union appeared in 1885, but the owners’ total control of the game allowed them to crush any serious attempt at collective action. The Baseball Brotherhood referenced earlier by Connie Mack was “destroyed by Organized Baseball in the one-year trade war that followed.”62 A National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) was formed in 1956, but was largely ignored and ineffectual EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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64 | Critical Issues
until the rise of sports militancy and unionism in the 1960s. In 1966 the MLBPA hired Marvin Miller, who was instrumental in helping the union negotiate a minimum salary and collective bargaining agreement in 1968. That same year, the NFLPA was officially recognized by football owners. Going Global When owners in the American and National professional baseball leagues decided to have their champions meet in a series of games after the 1903 season, they immodestly called it the World Series. This was despite the fact that the two representatives that year, Boston and Pittsburgh, both played in one geographical section of the United States that did not even extend beyond the Ohio River valley. The 1923 Canton Bulldogs promoted themselves as “world champions” after winning the American pro football title with a record of 11-0-1.63 It says something about both the nature of sports at that time and America’s ethnocentrism that leagues would play for a “so-called world championship”64 that involved only a handful of teams. The winners of America’s professional baseball and football leagues still call themselves world champions, but now the same forces that caused the shift from play to sport have made their games much more global. Baseball has a longer history of international relations, dating back to an all-star tour of Japan in 1913. Montreal became the first non-U.S. franchise in 1969 (although the team left for Washington, D.C., in 2005), and Toronto followed in 1977. Major league rosters, which until 1947 had been restricted mainly to white, American players, now have about 30 percent of their players from foreign countries. Research suggests that whereas foreign players were at first not accepted by American sports audiences, today no such prejudice exists.65 “It looks like where there used to be this discrimination against foreign players it’s basically reversed,” said researcher Jason Winfree. “It seemed like American sports are trying to get more international players and a more international audience.”66 The same research indicated that recruiting and using more international players can help team owners increase both attendance and profits. Just as the media helped sports grow in the United States, they are making big businesses even bigger by opening up foreign markets. The NBA, which counted a team in Toronto as one of its original franchises in 1946, has aggressively pursued a global strategy, playing exhibition games in Rome, London, Spain, and Turkey. The league is also playing games in China, which has become a big market, in part because of NBA players EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 65
Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian. When Yao’s Houston Rockets played Yi’s Milwaukee Bucks on November 9, 2007, more than 200 million people in China watched the game on 19 different networks, making it the most viewed NBA game in history.67 The NBA distributes its games in more than 40 languages to 215 countries, and in 2011 the league showed its annual All-Star game live and in 3D at more than 100 cinemas in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Mexico. “For the first time, international basketball fans are going to have the opportunity to see NBA All-Star like never before,” said Matt Brabants of the NBA’s International Division, “on the big screen in cinemas with a special courtside seat to all the action—in 3D.”68 The NFL is also using the media to expand its product overseas. The league began playing exhibition games in Europe in 1986 and created a developmental league based in Europe, called the World League of American Football. The league went through several incarnations before the NFL pulled the plug in 2007, and while the NFL has hopes of a permanent presence overseas, it is still reaching out to foreign audiences through high definition television, the Internet, and other media technologies. “We will continue to build our international fan base by taking advantage of technology and customized digital media that make the NFL more accessible on a global scale than ever before and through the regular-season game experience,” said Mark Waller, senior vice president of NFL International. “The time is right to re-focus the NFL’s strategy on initiatives with global impact, including worldwide media coverage of our sport and the staging of live regular-season NFL games.”69 Conclusion Professional sports in 2012 bear only passing resemblance to those of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Today’s athletes are faster and stronger, the crowds and arenas are bigger, and the money is certainly much larger. But the bloom of modern sports sprouted from the seeds that were planted more than a hundred years ago—seeds that were watered through dramatic changes in culture, technology, and the media. We know, for example, that repeated exposure to a team or athlete via the media serves as a powerful agent of socialization and creates greater fan interest and team identity.70 Newspaper reports and radio broadcasts from the early days of professional sports played an important part in this process, linking players and fans in a variety of ways. Their coverage of athletes such as Babe Ruth increased interest, attendance, and revenue. Such transformations continue today in an age when fans use the Internet, EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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66 | Critical Issues
Twitter, and Facebook to connect with their favorite athletes. In 2011 the Web site tweeting-athletes.com reported that basketball player Shaquille O’Neal had 3.64 million followers on Twitter, while cyclist Lance Armstrong had 2.77 million. Such technology is now interactive and allows fans to communicate directly with athletes. “We’re hitting [Twitter] hard,” said NBA player Chris Bosh. “You can put up what you’re doing. Or if you have a question, you’d be surprised how much people know. You can be, like, ‘I need directions to this spot. People will tell you’.”71 Greater fan interest and involvement leads to higher attendance, more media coverage, and, of course, larger amounts of money. It is a continuous and ever-expanding cycle that began not long after the birth of professional sports. Millionaire brewer Jacob Ruppert bought the New York Yankees in 1915 and helped turn the franchise into one of the most successful in professional sports history. In 1927 he remarked: The business opportunity in it became apparent and it wasn’t long until I perceived that others had discovered the same thing and I knew that baseball was on the way to becoming a big industry. And it has. I still love the game for itself, but as a business man I consider it a real industry. People speak of commercialized sports, but do so unthinkingly. Sports, baseball for one and probably as the best example, simply grew into big business because the people demanded it. We pay players high salaries. And why? Because the public demands the best and the best always costs money.72 His words are no less true today. Notes 1. Anthony J. Connor, Voices from Cooperstown (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 217. 2. Doug Pappas, “A Contentious History: Baseball’s Labor Fights,” ESPN.com, September 5, 2001, http://static.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/bp/1427632.html (accessed April 1, 2011). 3. Robert Boyle, “And Then the Clock Showed 0:00,” Sports Illustrated, September 27, 1982, 14. 4. Jon Enriquez, “Coverage of Sports,” in American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices, ed. William David Sloan and Linda Mullikin Parcell (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 202. 5. Mike Sowell, “The Birth of National Sports Coverage: An Examination of the New York Herald’s Use of the Telegraph to Report America’s First EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 67
‘Championship’ Boxing Match in 1849,” Journal of Sports Media 3, 1 (2008): 70. 6. Ray Gamache, “Genealogy of the Sportscast Highlight Form: From Peep Show to Projection to Hot Processor,” Journal of Sports Media 5, 2 (2010): 86. 7. Lee Allen, The National League Story (New York: Putnam, 1961). 8. 75 Seasons (Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1994), 25. 9. Tom Melville, Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 4. 10. Ibid. 11. Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist, National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 33. 12. Tim DeLaney and Tim Madigan, The Sociology of Sports: An Introduction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 51. 13. Christian K. Messenger, “Football as Narrative,” American Literary History 7, 4 (1995): 733. 14. Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5. 15. Connor, Voices from Cooperstown, 236. 16. Donald Honig, “From Baseball America,” in The Fireside Book of Baseball, 4th ed., ed. Charles Einstein (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 166. 17. Robert McChesney, “Media Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States,” in Media, Sports, and Society, ed. Lawrence Wenner (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), 54. 18. Richard Kraus, Recreation and Leisure in Modern Society (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1998), 197. 19. Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Free Press, 2001), 73. 20. Kraus, Recreation and Leisure in Modern Society, 211. 21. Andrew Zimbalist, “Baseball’s Economic Development,” in The Cambridge Companion to Baseball, ed. Leonard Cassuto and Stephen Partridge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 202. 22. Connor, Voices from Cooperstown, 217. 23. David Voight, American Baseball, vol. 2 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1983), 117. 24. Ken Rappoport, “The AFL-NFL Merger Was Almost Booted . . . By a Kicker,” NFL.com, August 2009, http://www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d5d81206 b90&template=without-video-with-comments&confirm=true (accessed July 19, 2010). 25. Seymour, Baseball, 41. 26. David Halberstam, Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History (Lincolnwood, IL: Masters Press, 1999). EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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27. John Owens, “Sports Coverage on Radio,” in Handbook of Sports Media, ed. Art Raney and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), 119. 28. John Rickards Betts, America’s Sporting Heritage: 1850–1950 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974), 59. 29. Brad Schultz, Sports Broadcasting (Boston: Focal Press, 2001), 3. 30. Jennings Bryant and Andrea Holt, “A Historical Overview of Sports and Media in the United States,” in Handbook of Sports Media, ed. Art Raney and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), 23. 31. “History of the Sporting News,” Sporting News, 2009, http://www.sporting news.com/archives/history/1886a.html (accessed February 22, 2010). 32. Wayne Wanta, “Sports Coverage in Print,” in Handbook of Sports Media, ed. Art Raney and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), 106. 33. Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963), 32–33. 34. Sporting News, November 14, 1918, 1. 35. New York Times, May 5, 1919, 14. 36. 75 Seasons, 35. 37. Mark Inabinett, Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), ix. 38. New York Times, May 31, 1920, 13. 39. Connor, Voices from Cooperstown, 66. 40. Bill Felber, Under Pallor, Under Shadow (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 15. 41. Seymour, Baseball, 428. 42. 75 Seasons, 20. 43. James H. Frey and Stanley Eitzen, “Sport and Society,” American Sociological Review 17 (1991): 508. 44. Ibid. 45. Sporting News, March 27, 1924, 4. 46. Seymour, Baseball, 47. 47. Michael J. Haupert, “The Economic History of Major League Baseball,” Economic History Association (2007), http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haupert .mlb (accessed March 25, 2010). 48. Peter Golenbock, Bums (New York: Pocket Books, 1984), 83. 49. Schultz, Sports Broadcasting, 3. 50. Golenbock, Bums, 562. 51. “NFL Team Valuations,” Forbes, August 25, 2010, http://www.forbes.com/ lists/2010/30/football-valuations-10_NFL-Team-Valuations_Rank.html (accessed March 22, 2011). 52. Dave Meltzer, “Another Record Year for UFC on PPV,” Yahoo!Sports, Jan uary 11, 2011, http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news?slug=dm-ppvbiz011111 (accessed March 24, 2011).
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Professional Sports: Big Money and Sports as an Industry | 69
53. Alex Sherman, “DirecTV May Lose Sales of More Than $600 Million in NFL Spat,” Bloomberg, March 15, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011 -03-15/directv-could-lose-revenue-of-more-than-600-million-if-nfl-cancels -season.html (accessed March 28, 2011). 54. Asinof, Eight Men Out, 16. 55. David G. Surdam, The Postwar Yankees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 4, 7. 56. Federal Baseball Club v. National League, 259 U.S. 200 (1922). 57. New York Times, February 20, 1922, 9. 58. Andrew Zimbalist, Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look into the Big Business of Our National Pastime (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 9. 59. Lawrence M. Kahn, “The Sports Business as a Labor Market Laboratory,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Summer 2000): 77. 60. Tyler Beach, “A Major-League Changeup: Should Pitchers Have Their Own Craft Labor Unit Representation?” Willamette Sports Law Journal (2008): 49. 61. Jonah Freedman, “The 50 Highest-Earning American Athletes,” SI.com, 2010, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/specials/fortunate50-2010/index.html (accessed March 25, 2011). 62. Seymour, Baseball, 170. 63. 75 Seasons, 29. 64. Seymour, Baseball, 276. 65. Scott Tainsky and Jason Winfree, “Discrimination and Demand: The Effect of International Players on Attendance in Major League Baseball,” Social Science Quarterly 91, 1 (2010): 1. 66. “Baseball Teams with More International Players Draw More Fans,” PhysOrg .com, February 9, 2010, http://www.physorg.com/news184955531.html (accessed March 23, 2011). 67. “Yao Ming’s Rockets Beat Yi Jianlian’s Bucks, 104-88,” Associated Press, November 7, 2007, http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?section=nba&id=31 03080 (accessed March 25, 2011). 68. “NBA to Show 3D All-Star Game in Overseas Cinemas,” TV Technology, February 11, 2011, http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/113800 (accessed March 25, 2011). 69. “NFL Europa Closes,” National Football League, August 3, 2007, http:// www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d5d801308ec&template=without-video &confirm=true (accessed March 25, 2011). 70. Daniel F. Mahoney, Makoto Nakazawa, Daniel C. Funk, Jeff James, and James M. Gladden, “Motivational Factors Influencing the Behavior of J. League Spectators,” Sport Management Review 5 (2002). 71. Dave Feschuk, “Bosh, NBA, All a-Twitter Over Latest Blogging Fad,” Toronto Star, February 17, 2009, http://www.thestar.com/Sports/NBA/article/588483 (accessed February 25, 2009). 72. New York Times, March 13, 1927, sec. 9, 3. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Bibliography 75 Seasons. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1994. Allen, Lee. The National League Story. New York: Putnam, 1961. Anisof, Eliot. Eight Men Out. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. “Baseball Teams with More International Players Draw More Fans.” PhysOrg .com, February 9, 2010. http://www.physorg.com/news184955531.html (accessed March 23, 2011). Beach, Tyler. “A Major-League Changeup: Should Pitchers Have Their Own Craft Labor Union Representation?” Willamette Sports Law Journal (2008): 49. Betts, John Rickards. America’s Sporting Heritage: 1850–1950. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974. Boyle, Robert. “And Then the Clock Showed 0:00.” Sports Illustrated, September 27, 1982, 14. Bryant, Jennings, and Holt, Andrea. “A Historical Overview of Sports and Media in the United States.” In Art Raney and Jennings Bryant, eds. Handbook of Sports Media. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Connor, Anthony. Voices from Cooperstown. New York: Collier Books, 1982. Delaney, Tim, and Madigan, Tim. The Sociology of Sports: An Introduction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Enriquez, Jon. “Coverage of Sports.” In William David Sloan and Linda Mullikin Parcell, eds. American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Felber, Bill. Under Pallor, Under Shadow. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Feschuk, Dave. “Bosh, NBA, All a-Twitter Over Latest Blogging Fad.” Toronto Star, February 17, 2009. http://www.thestar.com/Sports/NBA/article/588483 (accessed February 25, 2009). Freedman, Jonah. “The 50 Highest Earning Athletes.” SI.com, 2010. http://sports illustrated.cnn.com/specials/fortunate50-2010/index.html (accessed March 25, 2011). Frey, James H., and Eitzen, Stanley. “Sport and Society.” American Sociological Review 17 (1991): 508. Gamache, Ray. “Genealogy of the Sportscast Highlight Form: From Peep Show to Projection to Hot Processor.” Journal of Sports Media 5, 2 (2010): 86. Golenbock, Peter. Bums. New York: Pocket Books, 1984. Halberstam, David. Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History. Lincolnwood, IL: Masters Press, 1999. Haupert, Michael J. “The Economic History of Major League Baseball.” Economic History Association (2007). http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haupert .mlb (accessed March 25, 2010). Honig, Donald. “From Baseball America.” In Charles Einstein, ed., The Fireside Book of Baseball, 4th ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Inabinett, Mark. Grantland Rice and His Heroes: The Sportswriter as Mythmaker in the 1920s. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994. James, Bill. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. New York: Free Press, 2001. Kahn, Lawrence M. “The Sports Business as a Labor Market Laboratory.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Summer 2000): 77. Kraus, Richard. Recreation and Leisure in Modern Society. Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1998. Mahoney, Daniel F., Nakazawa, Makoto, Funk, Daniel C., James, Jeff, and Gladden, James M. “Motivational Factors Influencing the Behaviors of J. League Spectators.” Sports Management Review 5 (2002). McChesney, Robert. “Media Made Sport: A History of Sports Coverage in the United States.” In Lawrence Wenner, ed., Media, Sports, and Society. Newbury Park, CA: Sage: 1989. Meltzer, Dave. “Another Record Year for UFC on PPV.” Yahoo Sports, January 11, 2011. http://sports.yahoo.com/mma/news?slug=dm-ppvbiz011111 (accessed March 24, 2011). Melville, Tom. Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Messenger, Christian K. “Football as Narrative.” American Literary History 7, 4 (1995): 733. “NBA to Show 3D All-Star Game in Overseas Cinemas.” TV Technology, February 11, 2011. http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/113800 (accessed March 25, 2011). “NFL Europa Closes.” National Football League, August 3, 2007. http://www.nfl .com/news/story?id=09000d5d801308ec&template=without-video&confirm =true (accessed March 25, 2011). “NFL Team Valuations.” Forbes, August 25, 2010. http://www.forbes.com/lists/ 2010/30/football-valuations-10_NFL-Team-Valuations_Rank.html (accessed March 22, 2011). Owens, John. “Sports Coverage on Radio.” In Art Raney and Jennings Bryant, eds., Handbook of Sports Media. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. Pappas, Doug. “A Contentious History: Baseball’s Labor Fights.” ESPN.com, September 5, 2001. http://static.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/bp/1427632.html (accessed April 1, 2011). Rappoport, Ken. “The AFL-NFL Merger Was Almost Booted . . . By a Kicker.” NFL.com, August 2009. http://www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d5d81206 b90&template=without-video-with-comments&confirm=true (accessed July 19, 2010). Schultz, Brad. Sports Broadcasting. Boston: Focal Press, 2001. Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Golden Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
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Sherman, Alex. “DirecTV May Lose Sales of More Than $600 Million in NFL Spat. “ Bloomberg, March 15, 2011. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011 -03-15/directv-could-lose-revenue-of-more-than-600-million-if-nfl-cancels -season.html (accessed March 28, 2011). Sowell, Mike. “The Birth of National Sports Coverage: An Examination of the New York Herald’s Use of the Telegraph to Report America’s First ‘Championship’ Boxing Match in 1849.” Journal of Sports Media 3, 1 (2008): 70. Surdam, David G. The Postwar Yankees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Szemanski, Stefan, and Zimbalist, Andrew. National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006. Tainsky, Scott, and Winfree, Jason. “Discrimination and Demand: The Effect of International Players on Attendance in Major League Baseball.” Social Science Quarterly 91, 1 (2010): 1. Voight, David. American Baseball, vol. 2. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1983. Wanta, Wayne. “Sports Coverage in Print.” In Art Raney and Jennings Bryant, eds., Handbook of Sports Media. Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006. “Yao Ming’s Rockets Beat Yi Jianlian’s Bucks, 104-88.” Associated Press, November 7, 2007. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/wire?section=nba&id=3103080 (accessed March 25, 2011). Zimbalist, Andrew. Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look into the Big Business of Our National Pastime. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Zimbalist, Andrew. “Baseball’s Economic Development.” In Leonard Cassuto and Stephen Partridge, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Baseball. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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5
Cables, Speakers, and Screens: The Development of Technology in Sports Broadcasting Axel Kupfer
F
rom its earliest stages, broadcasting has had a codependent, even symbiotic, relationship with sports as each helped promote, sell, and popularize the other. The structures and practices of sports broadcasting in the 1920s and 1930s emanated from the interrelationship of a number of cultural, economic, and technological factors. These factors were determined by the wants and needs of disparate groups, including team owners, league officials, university administrators, promoters, network and station management, on-air talent, and the listeners themselves. Though virtually every spectator sport was broadcast in some form, as the most popular sports, Major League Baseball, intercollegiate football, and boxing received the lion’s share of attention from stations. Many of the practices that were developed and refined over the initial two decades of sports broadcasting continue to guide the ways sports are covered in old and new media, including newspapers, television, and the Internet. One sporting event initially helped popularize the capabilities and promise of wireless broadcasting in its infancy at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1896 Guglielmo Marconi traveled from his native Bologna, Italy, to England in order to patent his ideas for wireless communication and obtain further support for his work.1 Using wireless telegraphy, Marconi sent an account of the 1898 Kingstown Regatta to the Dublin Daily Express. Following numerous demonstrations and increasing international attention, in 1899 Marconi traveled to the United States to further promote his work. He was offered $5,000 by James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of the New York Herald, to cover the America’s Cup yacht races using wireless. Marconi received the generous offer because, as Ronald A. Smith notes, Bennett “wanted to use the wireless to sell his New York newspaper and in the process promote sport.”2 Even at this embryonic stage EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via 73 UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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of broadcasting’s development, the symbiotic financial relationship it had with sport was evident. Wireless broadcasting was initially conceptualized as a way of sending messages from ships at sea to shore. The ability of others to listen in on unsecured, “leaky” wireless signals was transformed from a weakness into a strength as entrepreneurs realized that rather than being sent simply from station to station, messages could be wirelessly transmitted directly from a single source to anyone using a radio receiver. As early as 1912, experimental sports broadcasts featuring play-by-play were being tested at the University of Minnesota, where Professor F. W. Springer and H. M. Turner broadcast the university’s home football games on experimental station 9X1-WLB to just a handful of listeners. The sinking of the Titanic on April 5, 1912, drew the public’s attention to the fledging medium when a young David Sarnoff (who would later become president of the Radio Corporation of America [RCA]), working as a wireless Marconi operator atop the Wanamaker’s department store in New York City, picked up the signal from the sinking ship and for three days relayed the news and names of survivors to people waiting outside. The growth of sports broadcasting, however, would have to wait until after World War I, as amateur radio was halted during the war and the navy took over commercial radio stations. November 2, 1920, has been pinpointed by many radio scholars as the date when radio shifted from its experimental stage to its commercial broadcasting stage. After a testing period, on that date commercial station KDKA in Pittsburgh, owned by radio manufacturer Westinghouse, broadcast the returns of the Harding–Cox presidential election to an audience of perhaps a few hundred as the first commercially licensed radio station. However, media historian Douglas Gomery argues that July 2, 1921, when the Jack Dempsey–Georges Carpentier heavyweight prizefight was aired live on the radio from Jersey City, New Jersey, is the day that broadcasting as we know it was launched, because the fight was the “single event on a single day when hundreds of thousands of people heard radio for the first time and millions read about it.”3 Utilizing a variety of old and new media, the lead-up to the fight was relentlessly hyped and carefully orchestrated by master promoter Tex Rickard, who framed the fight as a match between the working-class American champion and the elitist French challenger. Some 70,000 patrons saw the fight at a hastily built stadium in Jersey City as a battery of motion picture cameras, including one exclusively for slow-motion coverage, captured the events. Three months before the event the idea of broadcasting the match had been presented to Rickard, who instantly embraced it. He drew on the EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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expertise of the members of the National Amateur Wireless Association (NAWA), particularly its president, Andrew J. White, who also worked as publisher of RCA’s journal Wireless Age, to coordinate the event. Using a transmitter furnished by David Sarnoff and owned by the U.S. Navy (with the assistance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt), towers at the Lackawanna Railroad station in Hoboken, and telephone lines connected directly to ringside, the fight was broadcast to an estimated 200,000 listeners. White, a former amateur boxer, was selected to announce the fight over the air. Because of AT&T’s restrictions about connecting the ringside telephone directly to the transmitter, White’s play-by-play of the match was repeated verbatim by J. O. Smith to the listening audience as Dempsey knocked out Carpentier in the fourth round. Because few homes had radio sets at that point, Rickard arranged for theaters and halls in over 70 cities to broadcast the fight through loudspeakers using an early form of networking, originating at WJY in Newark. Five hundred people listened to the returns at Colonial Hall in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, hosted an audience of 574 boxing enthusiasts. Hoping to garner positive publicity for the event, theaters and halls that broadcasted the fight for paying audiences donated the receipts to the American Committee for Devastated France and the Navy Club. Nontheatrical venues and private residences hosted events for listening to the prizefight as well. The First Ward Hose Co. of Morristown, New Jersey, had approximately 500 people packed into its two-story firehouse to listen to the fight. Hundreds of listeners wrote in to NAWA, providing a representative record of the reception of the event, to describe how and where they had tuned in and how many people were listening.4 In addition to 200,000 who heard the Dempsey–Carpentier fight live over the air, which included a significant number of female listeners, millions more read about the power of the medium the next day in the newspaper. A sporting event put radio squarely in the public’s mind and vividly demonstrated its viability as a form for disseminating information and entertainment. Sports helped transform broadcasting into a nationwide phenomenon, and radio in turn played a key role in building a national audience for sports since the medium, as Michael Oriard argues, “[b]alanced the national and the local in network broadcasts and coverage of the home team and its conference.”5 The daily press had long been the primary medium through which fans followed sports. However, it was a fundamentally local medium, with press coverage focusing on local teams and athletes. Sporting events frequently provided the impetus for stations to invest in equipment EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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76 | Critical Issues
and technology that could relay geographically distant events live to listeners. Initially telephone wires were used, as AT&T had hoped to adapt radio to its telephone system. The first long-distance broadcast of a football game occurred in October 1922 when AT&T, using its telephone lines to connect to its station WEAF in New York City, broadcast the highly anticipated game between Princeton and the University of Chicago from Stagg Field in Chicago. As intersectional matchups were becoming increasingly popular throughout college football, fans could continue following their teams through the radio in lieu of attending them at the stadium. Noncommercial stations similarly used sports to broaden their appeal. In 1921 University of Wisconsin–affiliated station WHA connected telephone cables from the broadcasting booth to a number of locations on campus, including the school’s gymnasium, to broadcast various ceremonies, events, and athletic contests. Using these lines, WHA aired live broadcasts of a number of college basketball games and even the state high-school basketball tournament, in March 1923. Though basketball was still a “minor” sport in the 1920s, WHA’s broadcasts proved popular with listeners as far as the signal reached; a reception report even came in from Garrochales, Puerto Rico, where a listener had picked up the Wisconsin–Purdue basketball game.6 Sports continued to a be a key part of the broadcasting schedule with the formation of the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Red and Blue networks in 1926 and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1927. The power of chain broadcasting had been demonstrated a few years earlier, when on October 24, 1924, 18 million listeners tuning in to 22 stations heard President Calvin Coolidge address the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Major sports events were used by the networks to help establish a national audience for the network’s programming because of the broad appeal these types of spectacular events held and their ability to serve as a platform for the biggest stars and events that local stations did not have the technological capability or financial power to air. NBC’s first coast-to- coast broadcast was the Rose Bowl featuring Stanford and Alabama from Pasadena, California, on New Year’s Day 1927. The following year’s Rose Bowl broadcast, pitting Stanford and Pittsburgh, had a radio audience of 25 million. Radio allowed people to follow the activities of star athletes and coaches on and off the field with unprecedented thoroughness during the “golden age of sports.” Gilman Ostrander argues that “the period was distinguished not so much by the skill of the athletes as by the record quality and quantity of the romanticizing of them by the American public.”7 Radio was EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Cables, Speakers, and Screens: The Development of Technology in Sports Broadcasting | 77
integral in this romanticizing, as star involvement in broadcasted sporting events and in supplemental programming such as interviews helped the public become increasingly familiar with their favorite players and coaches. Athletes from all major spectator sports, including Red Grange, Bill Tilden, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and especially Babe Ruth, were transformed into celebrities. They became household names through radio’s ability to bring information directly into listeners’ homes. The ability to listen to sporting events was frequently a key selling point used by radio manufacturers (who invested heavily in stations and networks), as the number of homes with radio sets increased exponentially after World War I. Tony Silvia writes: “Beginning in the 1920s, baseball sold radios—tens of thousands of them—and in return, radio sold the game of baseball to new legions of fans.”8 Radio set manufacturers recognized that fans would purchase sets to tune in to their favorite teams and athletes. Pioneering Westinghouse station KDKA was the first to air a Major League Baseball game when Harold Arlin announced the Pirates versus Phillies on August 5, 1921. At the end of the 1921 season, WJZ in Newark, another Westinghouse station, aired the World Series between the New York Giants and the New York Yankees, with newspaper reporter Sandy Hunt handling the play-by-play. In an arrangement similar to that for the Dempsey–Carpentier fight, Tommy Cowan repeated for radio listeners what he heard from Hunt. The first-ever World Series broadcast proved to be so popular that WJZ received 4,000 pieces of mail in response.9 From the earliest generation of announcers, Graham McNamee quickly established himself as radio’s most recognizable voice, and his free- flowing, improvisational style helped him convey an unsurpassed sense of excitement and drama to listeners of sporting events. Gerald Nachman notes McNamee’s central role in the romanticizing of athletes on the radio, noting that he “symbolized, and helped create, America’s golden age of sports in the 1920s and 1930s, when hype was the name of the game.”10 Raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and having aspirations to be an opera singer, as a young man McNamee’s mother brought him to New York City to pursue a singing career. He got his start on radio in May 1923 when, biding his time while serving jury duty, he wandered into the WEAF studios and on a lark asked for an audition. After McNamee spoke briefly into the microphone, the station manager hired him on the spot.11 His first sports assignment was the Johnny Wilson–Harry Greb middleweight championship that August. Play-by-play announcing duties had been handled almost exclusively by newspaper reporters, who were reluctant to take full EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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78 | Critical Issues
advantage of the medium’s expressive capabilities. For the 1923 World Series, working alongside famed newspaper reporter Grantland Rice, McNamee contributed what would now be considered color commentary between innings. McNamee was unexpectedly thrust into the limelight when, during the fourth inning of game three, Rice suddenly decided that radio was not for him and handed the broadcast duties entirely to McNamee. McNamee quickly became the most popular radio announcer in the country, as fan mail poured into WEAF and later NBC mostly praising him. He was behind the microphone for many radio firsts. For instance, he covered the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in New York City in 1924, the first time the proceedings had been broadcast. After the 1925 World Series, 50,000 letters came in from listeners, testifying to not only his vast importance in the growth of early radio, but also the medium’s already considerable impact on American culture.12 Throughout his career, he covered a range of athletic, musical, and news events encompassing many of radio’s most popular genres and most memorable moments from its first decades: major football and baseball games, including the World Series, Kentucky Derby, Indianapolis 500, Dempsey–Tunney rematch in 1927 (nicknamed the “Long Count Fight”), Rose Bowl, prizefights, political gatherings, operas, concerts, and major news events such as Charles Lindbergh’s return to New York after his transcontinental flight in 1927. Instead of viewing radio as a potential source of revenue, many team owners, boxing promoters, and university officials were initially content with the free publicity that came from the broadcasts of their games and events. Many sports broadcasts operated under a “sustaining model,” which simply meant that the program did not receive advertising support or sponsorship and was aired as a public service. Teams allowed their games to be broadcast by any network or station that asked. The Chicago Cubs became the first Major League team to allow all of its home games on the radio, and soon owner William Wrigley permitted any station to broadcast Cubs games for free. Local stations were quick to take advantage of Wrigley’s offer, and by 1931 seven Chicago stations, every station in the city but one, were broadcasting the Cubs’ season opener, all without commercial sponsorship. One even hired University of Illinois and Chicago Bears star halfback Red Grange to handle the announcing duties.13 No one benefited from a nonexclusive broadcasting policy as much as the University of Notre Dame and its football program. Prior to the 1928 football season, Phillips Carlin, Assistant Eastern Program Director and announcer for NBC (he called the 1926–1928 World Series and 1926 EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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Cables, Speakers, and Screens: The Development of Technology in Sports Broadcasting | 79
Harvard–Yale football game alongside Graham McNamee, and together they devised the first system of paired announcers, still prevalent today), wrote to Notre Dame head coach and athletic director Knute Rockne to ask for what Carlin referred to as “blanket permission” to air any of the university’s games. Rockne, happy with the nationwide publicity radio brought to the program as well as to his own reputation, readily agreed, writing back to Carlin simply, “I am sending you herewith our schedule for next fall and you have our permission to broadcast any of these games which you may see fit to select.”14 The extensive broadcasting of Notre Dame games was critical in the university’s efforts to develop a national fan base. During the Great Depression other universities around the country began to think of radio as a source of revenue when live attendance began to decrease. As the financial pressure on collegiate football programs continued to increase, in the mid-1930s both Yale and Michigan sold the exclusive rights to their broadcasts for $20,000. Despite the financial incentives, Notre Dame continued its nonexclusive policy through 1949, when the “Irish Football Network” was established to carry radio broadcasts, and the DuMont television network won the exclusive rights to televise the Notre Dame football games.15 Despite the potential income from broadcasting rights, the majority of owners, promoters, and officials from all three major sports were initially ambivalent about airing games over the radio, because they feared that it would negatively impact attendance. Why would someone pay for something when he could have it for free? For instance, in 1929, as the Cincinnati Reds became the first Major League team to permit all of its games, home and away, to be broadcast, the Southern League banned radio broadcasts entirely.16 Teams only began to warm toward the idea of radio broadcasts when they realized that not only did attendance generally increase after the proliferation of home radio sets, but it would be an additional source of revenue through the sale of broadcast rights. Demonstrating the value of these rights, in 1934 the Ford Motor Company paid $100,000 per year, a sum personally approved by Henry Ford, for the radio sponsorship rights for the World Series and, continuing the long-standing practice, aired the Series on both CBS and NBC.17 Major League Baseball teams, with the exception of the three teams in New York City, which signed a pact among themselves preventing their games from being heard on the radio until 1939, began to broadcast their games on the radio once they realized the myriad of ways that this relationship would benefit the game. Sports broadcasts on the radio brought the game to new audiences who were perceived to have avoided the sport otherwise. Broader discourses EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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promoted the democratizing capability of radio as a medium that, through its ability to transcend space, created what Steve Wurtzler characterizes as a “shared cultural imaginary.”18 This shared imaginary in turn was readily linked with the idea of baseball as the “national pastime,” since radio made the game (and all other sports that were broadcast) accessible and understandable to anyone with a receiver regardless of background, region, or rooting interest. Commenting on the growing number of female listeners to Chicago Cubs games, the Los Angeles Times noted, “Once upon a time they used to be classed as dumb animals when baseball was mentioned. But they have found that radio helps them to learn the science of the game and most of them now can out-talk their husbands in discussing the series.”19 However crassly, the Times article exemplified the discourse about the unifying power of the medium and its benefits for listeners. Frank Navin, president of the Detroit Tigers, extended this sentiment into the domestic sphere when he said radio “carries the interest right into the home. Where once the father was the only interested one, now the whole family knows about baseball.”20 By being brought into homes through the radio, sporting events were introduced to a whole new audience, both on the national level, as they could be heard by people across the country, and on the domestic level, as all members of the family could listen in. Team owners and officials recognized that this new popularity would lead to higher sponsorship fees and increased attendance at the events themselves. One way for radio stations to assuage fears that gate receipts would be negatively impacted was to “re-create” in the broadcast studio games that had been played earlier that day. Receiving only the most basic of information, the announcers would then narrate and turn a game into a dramatic event. Many have since come to regard this practice as an art form, as Tony Silvia argues, “recreating a baseball game for radio was an art in itself, testing the creative and imaginative powers of both broadcaster and audience.”21 Particularly prevalent in baseball, after being briefed on basic information like starting lineups and weather conditions before the game, the announcer would receive over the wire (or on the telephone from “spotters” stationed at the game) shortened codes that contained only the sparsest of information. For instance, a message would simply read “S2C,” which the announcer would then translate as “Strike two, called” and would have to add in all of the details himself, such as the type and location of the pitch. Broadcasters doing these games walked a fine line between trying to hide the fact that the games were being re-created and
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Cables, Speakers, and Screens: The Development of Technology in Sports Broadcasting | 81
simultaneously deliberately drawing attention to their status as a constructed representation. In addition to the play-by-play, sound effects were used to try to reproduce, or at least signify, the acoustic soundscape where the event was taking place. Stations built libraries of the sounds that someone sitting in a stadium could expect to hear at a ball game. The sound engineers or announcers frequently imitated the sounds of the game using props in the studio to make the sound as if it were being broadcast directly from the ballpark. This “atmospheric rendering of the game” was achieved by trying to replicate the soundscape of the ballpark specifically through manufacturing a “heightened awareness of place through the studio re-creations of crowd noise, the crack of the bat, and the calls of the umpire.”22 The prototypical effect was the hitting of a mallet or stick on a block of wood to represent the bat making contact with the ball. The announcers combined the aesthetic qualities of sound effects, music, and voice to re-create a listening experience unique to the radio that foregrounded the role of the listeners’ imagination in sports broadcasting. While doing re-creations, announcers often had to deal with the flow of information being interrupted, typically when telegraph or phone lines were disconnected. Unwilling to admit to a game stoppage because of fears that fans would tune to another station, announcers had to simply stall the action, because fans would be able to check all of the statistics in the box score the next day. Ronald Reagan, who re-created Chicago White Sox, Cubs, and University of Iowa football games on WOC in Davenport, Iowa, and WHO in Des Moines in the 1930s, recalled one such incident during a Cubs game: Dizzy Dean was on the mound and I started the ball on the way to the plate and in the wind-up and he, Curly, the fellow on the other side was shaking his head and I thought just maybe it was a miraculous play or something, but when the slip came through it said, “The Wire’s gone dead.”. . . So I thought real quick, “There’s one thing that doesn’t get in the score book,” so I had Billy [Jurges] foul one off. And I looked at Curly and Curly just went like this, so I had him foul another one. And I had him foul one back at third base and described the fight between the two kids that were trying to get the ball . . . and I set a world record for successive fouls or for someone standing there except that no one keeps records of that kind and I was beginning to sweat when Curly sat straight up and started typing, he
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was nodding his head, “Yes.” And the slip came through the window and I could hardly talk for laughing because it said, “Jurges popped out on the first ball pitch.”23 Reagan recalled that there were “at least seven or eight other fellows that were doing the same ball game,” so all he could do was slow the game down by relying on the one thing that would not show up in the box score. Despite the potential technological pitfalls, re-creating games, particularly ones played out of market, in a distant studio instead of transmitting live play-by-play from the stadium or ballpark made sense from an economic perspective for the teams, promoters, sponsors, and radio stations. Western Union charged stations thousands in fees for use of their lines in order to broadcast a sporting event live.24 However, for a flat fee of $27.50, Western Union would furnish stations with complete telegraphic descriptions of any sporting event (provided permission from the home team was granted), which were then used as the basis for the re-creations.25 Coverage of sports on the radio was not limited to games alone. One of the more unusual instances, which illustrates the variety of sports-related programming in North America, was Football Revue. Hosted by Ed Thorgerson, a newsreel editor and commentator, the show aired on KPO in Vancouver beginning in the late 1930s. Combining the imaginative potential of radio with the rapid-fire story coverage and style of newsreels, Football Revue brought listeners all of the scores and “vital information” from games around the United States. The program culminated with highlights from two games, chosen by Thorgerson after scanning thousands of feet of silent football newsreels, which were re-created with sound effects in the studio.26 Sports “round-up” shows proved to be a popular genre on the radio and served as a predecessor to television highlight shows, most notably ESPN’s SportsCenter. Jules Tygiel notes that beginning in the 1920s, along with new forms including motion pictures, newsreels, magazines, and advertising, radio represented the “new ways of knowing,” which “revolutionized people’s ability to vicariously participate in the world around them.”27 Radio as a mass medium had a transformative impact on sporting culture in this period through making sports more accessible to new audiences, changing the way athletes viewed themselves, and ultimately reshaping the ways fans experienced sports. The sports media landscape was once again transformed when on April 20, 1939, at the RCA Building (which was shaped like a radio vacuum tube) at the New York World’s Fair, David Sarnoff publicly unveiled television as a new entertainment medium for the home, EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 5/15/2015 9:16 PM via UNIVERSIDAD DEL VALLE - CALI AN: 533933 ; Batchelor, Bob, Coombs, Danielle Sarver.; American History Through American Sports : From Colonial Lacrosse to Extreme Sports Account: s6493750
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