A century later, sports may be America’s most successful export to the world. Michael Jordan is arguably the most famous man on the planet, and Bulls caps or Yankee pinstripes cover the heads and backs of youngsters from Seoul to Soweto. Our most visible symbol has, over the 20th century, evolved from the Stars and Stripes to Coke to the Nike Swoosh. Whatever the world thinks of us, it loves our games. Major League Baseball is increasingly dominated by Latin players, and there is a growing infusion of talent from Japan and South Korea. Basketball is popular on every continent, and in Europe they now play our football along with their own.
At home, our obsession with sports has just kept growing. Sports celebrities may have once shared the nation’s stage with Hollywood–think the Babe and Valentino, DiMaggio and Monroe, the Mick and Brando. But in recent decades, there was no contest: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Mark McGwire, not Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise or Leonardo DiCaprio, were the really big box office. Only a few rock-and-rollers can approach the magnitude of sports’ greatest heroes, but their appeal tends to be generational. Brandi’s goal (and, OK, the sports-bra thing) resonated far more than any Brandy song.
In this fragmented age, it often seems that only sports can bind together the nation–across its divides of class, race and gender–in common cause and celebration. The Super Bowl is sometimes called our biggest secular national holiday. The McGwire-Sosa homer chase and the Ripken record are national conversation. Say “Hail Mary” outside church, and Americans of a certain age reply not “full of grace” but “Flutie.” When we could be discussing the future of Social Security, we fret over the retirements of Jordan, Gretzky and Elway. The death of DiMaggio engenders more visible grief than many former presidents’; and no triumphs have been more uplifting than those of the 1980 U.S. hockey team, the ‘92 “Dream Team,” Atlanta’s “Mag 7” gymnasts and our women’s soccer and Ryder Cup squads just this year.
In the following pages, NEWSWEEK will celebrate a century of American sports–offering a glimpse at some of the great performers and personalities, moments and memories. Their stories are told, in some cases, by the athletes themselves; in others, by those who knew them.
During the first half of the century, only a tiny percentage of the fans actually saw their heroes in action. That helps explain why the greatest athletes of the time seemed bigger than life. Accounts of their feats were left to sportswriters and later to radio broadcasters. And these guys were true mythmakers. Here’s Grantland Rice’s famous 1924 christening of the Notre Dame backfield: Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.
Small wonder these characters took on iconic dimensions. Jack Dempsey was “The Manassa Mauler,” Red Grange “The Galloping Ghost,” Walter Johnson “Big Train.” A bit more gravitas here, clearly, than “The Refrigerator” or “The Big Unit.” These were great athletes and, by extension, great men. (It was only later that we learned that Ty Cobb was far more of a rotten apple than a Georgia Peach.) Baseball was truly the national pastime, ruled by Babe Ruth, a performer of such titanic proportions that he rated multiple sobriquets. No one begrudged “The Sultan of Swat” his salary, an astronomical $80,000, or his famous reply when, in 1931, a reporter asked him how he justified earning more than President Hoover. Ruth answered, “Well, I had a better year.” It didn’t matter that he was a profligate, as long as he hit the long ball. Playing on the best team in the nation’s biggest city, Ruth would be the first of many baseball heroes served by New York’s newspaper wars. The torch was passed to DiMaggio, “The Yankee Clipper,” and then to Mickey, Willie and the Duke.
But it was another postwar New York ballplayer who ushered in sports’ next era. When Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s race barrier in 1947, he accepted what was an agonizing mandate–to be not just a superstar, but also “a credit to his race.” Robinson paid a huge price personally for muffling his anger at the relentless abuse he endured, but his legacy is ensured. For many Americans, sports became the nation’s most important civil-rights arena: Althea Gibson at tennis’s U.S. Open in 1957; all-black Texas Western over Adolph Rupp’s all-white University of Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA basketball final; Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon in 1975; Debi Thomas at the 1986 U.S. figure-skating championships; Tiger Woods at the Masters in ‘97.
The impact of television was also extraordinary. Even as it multiplied the sports audience a thousandfold, TV also contained the games and made everyone seem a little bit smaller. Football was the perfect sport for television, a linear game of X’s and O’s. It was fast, brutal and, at least at the fan level, easy to decipher. A president embroiled in war, Richard Nixon, believed he could call a play–literally over the phone to coach George Allen–that could help the Washington Redskins beat the 49ers. (It was a flanker reverse–and a 13-yard loss.) It took huge personas, like Muhammad Ali or Joe Namath, to break out of the tube’s confines. Ali recognized better than anyone that his canvas extended far beyond the one in the ring. He pontificated, polemicized and poeticized, but never permitted himself to be ignored. It is a sure mark of the changing American landscape that, in three decades, Ali went from a divisive, often detested, figure to a national symbol, chosen to light the Olympic torch in Atlanta.
Sports spectacle often has hidden meanings. Take a peculiar 1973 tennis match in which one contestant entered the Astrodome on a feathered Egyptian litter, the other in a Chinese rickshaw. Staged as farce, the Billie Jean King-vs.-Bobby Riggs duel had serious repercussions. King’s decisive victory was a turning point in the acceptance of woman athletes. And, coming on the heels of Title IX, it helped lead to an era in which women named Mia and Brandi, Chamique and Cynthia, Venus and Serena are no longer sideshow acts, but center-stage performers.
Sports increasingly became a prism through which America views some of the time’s most complex issues–race, gender, drugs, unions, spousal abuse, AIDS. With athletes now portrayed in the media warts and all, many fans feel estranged from a new generation of stars bloated by ego, money and, in many cases, an excessive taste for off-field play. No league understood this better than the NBA, which viewed its game and stars as products that required careful marketing. Once viewed as unacceptable by corporate America because of its growing racial imbalance, the NBA instead became the sport of choice for American youth and the ultimate showtime for affluent, middle-aged white Americans.
Unlike so many of today’s NBA luminaries, whose razzle-dazzle is in the service of the evening’s highlight films, Michael Jordan soared, whirled, spun and ultimately scored all in the service of winning. But his basketball ballet was also the centerpiece of a corporate empire that began with a Swoosh and extended through a panoply of products and entertainments. Jordan, smart and savvy, was blessed with perfect pitch. Never has a shill been so adored. All the hype couldn’t obscure that indelible image of basketball majesty: Jordan flying through the lane, his tongue lolling to the side, before the thunderous slam-dunk climax.
Who could have conjured up Michael Jordan a century ago? A glance at the daily sports pages reveals the folly of trying to predict next week’s World Series, let alone any transformations that the next millennium may bring. Sport’s greatest joy is, after all, its unpredictability. Jack Johnson over “The Great White Hope,” 1910. Upset over Man o’ War, 1919. Jesse Owens over Adolf Hitler, 1936. Ali over Sonny Liston, 1964. The “Miracle Mets,” 1969. Namath’s Jets over the Colts, 1969. “Miracle on Ice,” 1980. Villanova over Georgetown, 1985. Mia and friends over the male sports establishment, 1999. There’s only one thing certain: play the game, and we will come.
