1954/1955
MILAN HIGH SCHOOL LETTER JACKET AND OSCAR ROBERTSON’S CRISPUS ATTUCKS JERSEY
S
ometimes life imitates art, sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes the two are so close together as to make no difference. That is the case with the stories of Milan and Crispus Attucks high schools. In 1954 Milan (enrollment 161) became the smallest school ever to win the Indiana state basketball championship. The following year Crispus Attucks became the first all-black team to win. The two schools weave together the two strands of Indiana’s hoops culture: one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly black.
Milan’s victory made the team of crew-cut farm boys local heroes, and they became national legends in 1986, thanks to the movie Hoosiers, which was based on the Milan miracle. The Milan Indians were no fluke, however. They had reached the state tourney’s Final Four in 1953 and had gone 19–2 during the regular season. Milan, about 50 miles west of Cincinnati, was home to 1,100 people at the time; the school also served nearby communities like Pierceville (population 45), birthplace of the star guard, Bobby Plump. When a new coach, 24-year-old Marvin Wood, came to town in 1952, bringing both modern tactics and a serious case of the fundamentals, he clicked with a critical mass of boys who had been playing together for years.1
The game was different in 1954, in ways that made it possible for teams that looked overmatched to compete. Most important, there was no shot clock. If Milan got ahead, Wood called for the “cat and mouse”—that is, the stall. In one game in the 1953 tournament, Plump held the ball for eight interminable minutes.2
The cat and mouse played a major role in the 1954 championship game against much bigger, much taller Muncie Central, which had won the title in 1951 and 1952. This was not a great game, on the merits; both teams shot poorly, and at critical times, the play was sloppy. As the fourth quarter opened, the score was 26–26. With six-plus minutes left and Muncie leading 28–26, Wood called for the cat and mouse. If the Indians were fouled, they could sink free throws. Otherwise, the idea was to keep the game close and take their chances at the end. So Plump stood near center court, cradling the ball and occasionally looking over at Wood for guidance. For more than three minutes, nothing happened. It is not the most thrilling hoops sequence ever filmed, but it is oddly compelling.3
With three minutes left, the action resumed. Plump missed a shot from the top of the key; Muncie rebounded, but turned the ball over. Milan scored to tie, 28–28, with a little more than two minutes left. Plump drew a foul and sank two free throws. Milan up two. Muncie took the ball in, and on yet another careless pass, Milan took it back.
No cat and mouse here. Milan’s Ray Craft found himself in position inside, went for it—a basket would give them a decisive four-point lead—and watched his shot curl out. Muncie tied it up with a backdoor layup. Forty-five seconds left. Plumb got the inbound pass, dribbled in place—the lack of defensive pressure is astonishing—then made his move with six seconds to go. Dribbling with his right hand, Plumb drove, faked left, stepped right, and drained a 14-footer as time expired. Final score: 32–30 for Milan. A legend was born. A few weeks later, the players were rewarded with letter jackets; this one belonged to Gene White, the 5-foot-11 center.
A 32–30 victory betokens something less than a masterpiece, but there was a lot more to Milan’s play than strategic standing around. The team could certainly score, putting up 60 against Terre Haute in the semis and 39 in the first half against Crispus Attucks High School in the quarterfinals.
Crispus Attucks was founded in 1927 to segregate black Indianapolis students; they were not allowed to attend any other public high school. Then, because Crispus Attucks by definition was for blacks only, state basketball authorities barred it from entering the state tournament on the grounds that it was not open to all.4 That catch-22 was dissolved in 1942, but a number of Indianapolis schools continued to refuse to play the Tigers. Ray Crowe, who became coach in 1950, used to tell his players that they were playing five against seven—the team could expect no close calls from the all-white referee crews.5
Talent has a way of asserting itself, however, and the Tiger teams of the 1950s were stuffed with talent, including two future Harlem Globetrotters. The biggest star of all was Oscar Robertson, who was a sophomore when Milan beat the Tigers in 1954. The next year, Crispus Attucks was ready to break through. After losing just one game during the regular season, it beat Gary Roosevelt 97–74, becoming the first all African American team to win the championship. Robertson wore this jersey in the final, in which Crispus Attucks set a record that still stands for most points scored—a style of play a world away from Milan’s hold-and-hope strategy.6
In 1956 Crispus Attucks did itself one better, going undefeated and repeating as state champions.
It would be pleasant to report that all of Indianapolis embraced the Tigers, the first team from the city to win the tourney. The team did make the traditional parade, riding a fire truck from Butler Fieldhouse to Monument Circle downtown. But unlike the teams in every other year, the Tigers were not allowed to get off and take pictures. Instead, the truck made a circle and headed to the black side of town.7 The players suspected, bitterly and probably correctly, that the authorities feared they would make trouble.8
There can never be another Milan miracle. Hundreds of small schools disappeared through consolidation, and in 1997 Indiana eliminated its single-class state tournament. Now schools of similar size play only against each other. But Hoosiers keeps the story alive—and also pays quiet homage to the history of Indiana hoops. In the climactic scene, the hero from Hickory High takes his final shot from the exact same place on the floor that Plump did.9 And in another art-imitates-life moment, the coach of the other team is played by Ray Crowe—Crispus Attucks’s longtime coach.10
1955
PAINTING OF STILLMAN’S GYM
D
irty, smelly, clouded in a fog of tobacco, filled with characters straight out of Damon Runyon, and run by a crusty lifer with a foul mouth: that is the stereotype of the midcentury boxing gym.
It is also a precise description of Stillman’s, the “University of Eighth Avenue,” as boxing writer A. J. Liebling called it.1 The second-floor gym was a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, Ring magazine, and the Neutral Corner, the saloon of choice.2
As the capital of American boxing for three decades, Stillman’s was as famous as its fighters. Outsiders paid 50 cents for the privilege of watching the workouts and of getting abused by proprietor Lou Stillman. Everyone paid, even Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, who were known to go to the gym for a break between sets. Marlon Brando took in the place to prepare for his role as a washed-up pug in On the Waterfront.3 The gym itself had a major role in Somebody Up There Likes Me, the 1956 film starring Paul Newman as fighter Rocky Graziano.
There were rules, of course. “No rubbish or spitting on the floor, under penalty of law,” read one sign,4 above the gobs of spittle and litter. For Stillman, the grime was a matter of principle: “I keep the place like this for the fighters’ own sake. If I cleaned it up, they’d catch a cold from the cleanliness.” Featherweight champ Johnny Dundee noted of fresh air, “Why, that stuff is likely to kill us.”5
Naturally, Stillman was not Stillman’s real name. Born Lou Ingber, he was a beat cop before he went to work for an eccentric philanthropist, Alpheus Geer, who ran something called the Marshall Stillman movement, designed to reform burglars through boxing.6 Ingber became so identified with the establishment that he changed his name; everyone called him “Stillman” anyway. The do-gooders abandoned the program when their equipment was stolen. Stillman decided to keep it going as a business, eventually moving it from uptown Harlem to midtown Manhattan.
His trusty sidekick was Whitey Bimstein, the inspiration for the trainer in the Rocky movies. Bimstein figured he trained more than 7,500 boxers;7 he was also one of the great cutmen. When Graziano got nailed above the eye during a middleweight championship fight, Bimstein lanced the hematoma with a silver dollar in less than a minute. Graziano won three rounds later.8
Georges Carpentier (see the 1921 entry) trained at Stillman’s when he was in the United States. Primo Carnera, Joe Louis, and Gene Tunney dropped in on occasion.9 Jack Dempsey, Lou Ambers, James J. Braddock, Billy Conn, Kid Gavilan, Billy Graham, Willie Pep, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jersey Joe Walcott—champions all—were regulars. Tough but democratic, Stillman described his management philosophy this way: “Big or small, champ or bum, I treated ’em all the same way—bad. If you treat them like humans, they’ll eat you alive.”10
At its peak, some 375 boxers paid a monthly fee to Stillman’s, and the place was so crowded fighters could get hurt shadow-boxing. But time and television took a toll. Instead of going to the Friday night fights, fans stayed home and watched them. That meant fewer fights, and thus fewer fighters, and thus fewer people training. “The racket’s dead,” Stillman said in February 1959,11 estimating that only 75 fighters were enrolled in his school of hard knocks. The gym closed a few weeks later.
This painting is by John Cullen Murphy, the author’s father. Murphy’s early career was in sports illustration; he then began drawing Big Ben Bolt, a comic strip featuring a college-educated boxer that ran from 1950 to 1978. In the image above, painted around 1955, Murphy captures the dingy camaraderie of the place. There is, however, a glaring flaw. Light didn’t flow into Stillman’s with such golden brilliance. The windows were never cleaned.
1956
YOGI BERRA’S CATCHER’S MITT
Y
ogi Berra participated in 19 World Series as a player, manager, and coach. He was a 15-time all-star and a three-time most valuable player (1951, 1954, 1955).1 The number Berra liked most, however, was 10. That’s how many World Series–winning teams he played on—more than anyone else in baseball history.2
If there was an award for most likable athlete, Berra might have won that, too. And he certainly would have won the prize for being the most quotable. Among the jewels in the Yogi lexicon are the following:
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
“It’s deja vu all over again.”
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
“You can observe a lot by watching.”3
“You got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.”4
His geniality, combined with his unique command of language, sometimes made Berra the butt of patronizing comments. That was to underestimate the man greatly. Almost every Yogism had the truth of a mystically inflected epigram. That was appropriate: Lawrence Peter Berra did not get his nickname—the best ever, hands down—from a cartoon bear. It dated, he said, from his boyhood, when he and a friend saw a film that featured a yogi; for some reason the figure evoked young Larry. From then on, to everyone but his immediate family, he was Yogi.5
In every important way, this son of Italian immigrants was not just a winner but a man of wisdom and character. As a seaman second class, he manned a machine gun on a rocket boat to Omaha Beach on D-Day, ahead of the landing forces.6 He had a happy, 64-year marriage. He was financially shrewd; indeed, he was one of the first players to hire an agent. Berra dropped out of school after the eighth grade, but in later life gave his time, money, and attention to a well-regarded learning center in New Jersey. His calm dignity made people like Yankees owner George Steinbrenner look small.
The glove pictured here is from Berra’s eighth World Series, in 1956, which the Yankees won in seven games against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Berra used this glove to catch journeyman pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game—the only one in World Series history. Larsen, who had lasted less than two innings in his first Series start, would later say he didn’t shake off Berra once during his 97-pitch masterpiece,7 a tribute to the catcher’s hard-won baseball savvy.
Berra had struggled defensively as a young player, so manager Casey Stengel asked Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey to tutor him. Berra soaked it all in, and in his prime he was regarded as one of the smartest backstops in the game.8 Ted Williams said that more than any other catcher, Berra noticed when he or other hitters shifted their feet—a subtle sign of their intentions.9 “Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball,” baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once said, “is like talking to Homer about the gods.”10
As an individual, Berra became a cherished national institution who was willing to poke gentle fun at himself. As a player, he is best understood as a key Yankee in the team’s most dominant era. From his first full season in 1947 to his last, in 1963, Yankee teams won 15 pennants.
This was not the only Yankee dynasty. Love them, or more likely, loathe them, they are by far baseball’s most successful team. The Yankees won their first pennant in 1921, after trading for a certain George Herman Ruth, and their first World Series in 1923. Since then, they have racked up 26 more. St. Louis ranks second, with 11.
The Yankee championships have occurred over several distinct dynastic eras. There was the Age of Ruth (1923–1928), when the team won its first three championships. Then there was the Age of DiMaggio (1936–1943), when they won six more, followed by the Berra-Mantle era (1947–1964). After a pause for mediocrity—call them the Horace Clarke years—there was the Age of Crazy. From 1976 to 1981, the Yankees went 2–3 in the World Series. Finally, there was the Age of Jeter (1996–2001), in which the teams managed by Joe Torre chipped in four more, plus another in 2009.
Yogi Berra was not the greatest player the Yankees ever had. But he was the greatest winner—and the most beloved. Shortly before his death in September 2015, at age 90, he summed his life up in his own inimitable way: “If I had to do it all over again, I would do it all over again.”
1958
FIRST MODERN ARTHROSCOPE
“A
rthroscopic surgery” does not describe a procedure, but rather the device that enables it: the arthroscope, whose name derives from the Greek arthron (meaning joint), and skopein (to look at). An arthroscope, then, looks at joints.
In medical terms, this is not a new instrument. A primitive kind of scope was found at Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by a volcano in AD 79. The first remotely modern arthroscope dates to the early 1800s, when a German doctor illuminated two tubes with a candle to examine the inside of the bladder. The instrument slowly grew in sophistication, though it still seems a case of the examination being worse than the illness. (One French doctor ignited a mixture of turpentine and gas to create light that would bounce off mirrors to provide a view of the bladder.)1
In 1912 a Danish physician used a scope to examine the inside of the knee joint; he also coined the term “arthroscopy,” which stuck. Arthroscopy advanced steadily from there, and after World War II a Japanese doctor, Masaki Watanabe, continued the work. He designed scope after scope, adapting electronics and optics to create the finest arthroscopes in the world. His masterpiece, completed in 1958 and known as Watanabe number 21, is considered the first modern arthroscope.2 The twenty-first-century version, shown here, does not look much different from Watanabe’s finest.
So what does all this have to do with sports? For centuries, the arthroscope had satisfied curiosity and helped in diagnosis. But with Watanabe’s version, it also became a means of treatment. He performed the first arthroscopic knee surgery on a 17-year-old who had twisted his knee playing hoops. The young man went home that day and was back on the court weeks later. American surgeons began cautiously using the procedure in the early 1970s; by the end of that decade, it was routine.3
For his work, Watanabe is routinely referred to as the “father of modern arthroscopy.”4 But he could be also be called the “father of second chances,” because that is what arthroscopic surgery, the most common orthopedic procedure in the country,5 has offered to thousands of athletes.
Its great advantage is a small one. Rather than carving up a whole joint to see the problem, in arthroscopic surgery, the doctor makes a small incision—as short as a quarter of an inch—into which the scope can be inserted to look and operate through. That means less trauma to the body and a swifter recovery.
In late 1981 downhill skier Steve Mahre underwent arthroscopic surgery on both knees; five weeks later, he became the first American man to win a World Cup race.6 Gymnast Mary Lou Retton (see the 1984 entry) was back in the gym the day after her operation.7 In both cases the surgery was relatively minor. Not so Adrian Peterson’s. The Minnesota Vikings running back ripped up his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in December 2011. After arthroscopic surgery, he was back on the field, at full speed and strength, at the beginning of the next season.
Arthroscopy can be done on any joint, including hips, wrists, and ankles.8 But along with the knee, the most famous kind has to do with the elbow—better known as Tommy John surgery. In a fairer world, it would be known as Frank Jobe surgery, for the doctor who invented it. In this procedure—officially “ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction”—an elbow ligament is replaced by a tendon from another part of the body. Tommy John was the first pitcher to try it; he pitched for another 14 years.
Like any medical procedure, there is risk involved, but arthroscopy has proved its mettle. As of 2015, more than 500 major league pitchers had undergone Tommy John surgery;9 about 80 percent made it back to the majors,10 and two-thirds pitched to the same standard as before.11
For sports fans, arthroscopic procedures have brought longer careers for great athletes, but also a sense of wistfulness. Red Grange, Billie Jean King, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, Joe Namath, Bobby Orr, Gale Sayers, Smoky Joe Wood, and many others—what more could they have achieved if arthroscopy had been available for them?
1958
ARTIFACTS FROM THE “GREATEST GAME”
T
his wasn’t the greatest game in history, not by a long shot. There was too much sloppy play and not enough of the really stirring big moments—the downfield bomb, the broken-field run—that make for a classic. The kicking was appalling.
But that is to look at a beautiful landscape and see only the litter. If a great game is one that gets people so involved that they won’t leave the couch to get another beer, the label fits. And even though this contest wasn’t the greatest game in pro football history, it is undoubtedly the most important.
The date was December 28, 1958. The place was Yankee Stadium. The occasion was the twenty-sixth National Football League championship. The teams were the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts. Fifteen Hall of Famers were involved.1 The first football championship to be televised nationwide, it was watched by 45 million people, the largest viewing audience for an American sporting event to that time. When it ended, the NFL had broken through in a way it never had before.
For three quarters and 13 minutes, the game was good, but slipshod. Both teams missed chances and gave away opportunities; there were two missed field goal attempts. The Giants fumbled four times; two of these fumbles, by the normally sure-handed halfback, Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, set up two Colts touchdowns and a 14–3 halftime lead.
In the second half, the Colts had a first and goal from the three and didn’t score. The Giants defense would not let them pass, twice stuffing fullback Alan Ameche.2 Given new heart, New York’s offense stepped up and capitalized on their limited opportunities to score two touchdowns. The Giants could have sealed the deal late in the fourth quarter with one more first down, but Gifford was stopped just short. After a punt, the Colts took possession on their own 14, with 1:56 left, down 17–14.
It was the kind of situation that Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, 25, was born for. Rejected by Notre Dame and Pitt, then cut from the Pittsburgh Steelers without throwing a pass, he knew the hard knocks of football life. He had been playing semipro ball for $6 a game when a fan tipped the Colts to give him a shot. This was his second year as a starter. Even though he hadn’t played particularly well thus far, with a fumble and an interception, Unitas had the essential quality of the true leader: he could inspire others to believe in him and in themselves. Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey would say that at moments like these, it was “like being in the huddle with God.”3
In the cool and misty early evening air, as patches of ice began to appear on the field, Unitas picked apart the Giants’ secondary, informed by the game plan featured in this photo. After a first-down pass to flanker Lenny Moore, three straight throws to wide receiver Raymond Berry, who would have 12 catches on the day, moved the Colts 62 yards. Forty years later, Giants Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff would say that “Unitas to Berry,” the phrase he heard so often that day, “still rings in my ears.”4
With seven seconds left, Steve Myhra used this shoe to kick this ball through this goal post for a 20-yard field goal to tie the score 17–17. For the first time in NFL history, a game went into overtime. The first team to score would win the game—and the title, and the $4,718.77 winners’ share.5
The Giants won the toss to get the first possession and could do nothing with it. Unitas, playing with complete cool, could. He directed a 13-play, 80-yard drive of such precision and unpredictability that the Giants defense was befuddled. “When you thought he’d call a running play, he’d pass,” Huff would recall, “and when you were sure he was going to pass, he’d call a run.”6 The famous image of the final play tells the story. It shows Ameche running in the game-winning touchdown from the one-yard line. The hole he is running through is, quite literally, big enough for a truck to go through.7 The Giants had been expecting a pass.8
Even at the time, people realized that this game had meant something special. Commissioner Bert Bell was overcome: “This is the greatest day in the history of professional football!”9 The Associated Press would write the day after, “It seems pro football has come of age.” The prescience of that announcement would become apparent the following year, when football telecasts began to rack up much bigger numbers.
Watching from a hotel room in Texas, the son of a wealthy oil family watched the game and thought, “Well, that’s it. This sport really has everything. And it televises well. Who knew what that meant?”10 Lamar Hunt would draw his own conclusions—and change the course of football history (see the next entry).
1959
STATUE OF LAMAR HUNT
I
n the late twentieth century, professional athletes in many sports earned two things: money and power. Lamar Hunt had as much to do with that as any other individual. He was a force in three sports: football, soccer, and tennis. In each case, he disrupted the status quo and in the process helped to build something better. That is why he is a member of the halls of fame for all of those sports, a unique achievement.1 Oh, and he was also one of the founding partners of the Chicago Bulls basketball team. Remarkably, Hunt did all this while retaining the respect of almost everyone he dealt with. In a field with more than its share of sharks, he was known as a good man and a loyal friend.
Hunt, a member of the Texas family that made serious money in oil and commodities, had little interest in drilling for more dollars. While his two older brothers stayed in the family business (and almost lost it all in a failed attempt to corner the world silver market), all Lamar Hunt wanted was to get into sports. Even as a college student, he set up a batting cage and miniature golf course.2 As an adult, he would think bigger.
He made his biggest mark in football. When the National Football League rejected his bid to start a new team in Dallas, the 27-year-old Hunt brought together eight other men who also wanted to break into the NFL. In 1960 he was the first among equals in the founding of the American Football League. The AFL struggled but prevailed, in large part because Hunt insisted on revenue sharing among all the teams, a principle that stabilized franchise finances. In 1966 Hunt was one of the AFL owners who negotiated the merger with the NFL, including a championship game between the two. How about calling it the Super Bowl, he mused? Hunt was also the one to suggest naming the Super Bowl trophy after Vince Lomardi. The Packers coach was no friend of the AFL, but Hunt thought the gesture would help unify the sport.3
His team, the Kansas City Chiefs (moved from Dallas in 1963), lost the first Super Bowl to Lombardi’s Packers, but it won the fourth (or IVth), Hunt’s proudest moment in sports. It was Hunt who suggested that the Super Bowls be numbered with Roman numerals,4 a rare lapse into pretentiousness for a zillionaire who flew coach. The Hunt family still owns the Chiefs; this statue outside the team’s Arrowhead Stadium honors him.
Then Hunt turned to tennis, helping to found and largely bankrolling the World Championship Tennis tour for men. Until 1968, when “open tennis” began (see the 1968/1975 entry on Arthur Ashe), pro players were banned from the four majors (Wimbledon and the Australian, French, and US championships). The WCT forced the issue when it recruited the “Handsome Eight,” a group that included five premier amateurs, John Newcombe and Tony Roche among them. This further stripped the amateur game of top players. The mandarins of tennis were forced to give in; the major tourneys were running perilously short of major talent.
After a difficult start, the WCT signed up a large share of the best players to healthy contracts, ran tournaments in major cities, and established a ranking system and a year-end championship. It also was the first tour to use the tie-breaker and to allow players to perform in something other than white attire. By 1970 almost all the top players had joined.
The International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) was the established tennis organization—essentially, the equivalent of the NFL. While it had mismanaged the game into near-irrelevance, it had the possessiveness and sense of entitlement of most monopolists. It saw the WTC, quite rightly, as competition for its own Grand Prix, which included three of the four majors. In 1971 it banned WCT players from Grand Prix events. That meant that John Newcombe could not defend his Wimbledon title, and Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and Arthur Ashe could not compete. The situation was both ridiculous and untenable.
Tennis politics is more boring than most; the upshot is that the WCT and ILTF managed to negotiate a semipeaceful coexistence for some years,5 but the WCT was marginalized in the 1980s as the players gained more power.6 In 1990 it was dissolved. But by establishing a well-run, well-funded circuit, the WCT had accelerated the formation of the open era, improved the financial standing of the players, and generally raised the game. Stan Smith, a first-rate player who turned pro in 1969, wrote to Hunt that he “would always consider you and your organization as the founders of our modern professional game.”7
While the WCT was getting started, Hunt also had an interest in the Dallas Tornado, the Texas entry in the obscure United Soccer Association. In 1968 that league merged with another obscure one to form the North American Soccer League. The NASL flared brilliantly, and briefly, on the back of the incomparable Pelé (see the 1975 entry on him), as well as on Hunt’s money. Then it fizzled just as dramatically. Hunt lost millions, but never gave up on soccer. He helped to put on the men’s World Cup in 19948 and was one of the founders of Major League Soccer two years later. MLS has not joined the athletic big time, but it is growing steadily. For a time, Hunt owned three MLS teams—Columbus, Dallas, and Kansas City—and the league may not have survived without his constant support. Hunt died in 2006, but he leaves a substantive legacy in three sports. Don Garber, the longtime commissioner of MLS, put it simply: “There’s no American soccer today, without Lamar Hunt.”9
1960
PETE ROZELLE’S TYPEWRITER
T
his is a mid-1940s Royal, the kind of clunker one could imagine a hard-bitten reporter pounding away at in a postwar noir flick. From the man behind its keys, however, came something rather different: a sports revolution. From 1960 to 1989, Pete Rozelle used this typewriter to transform the American sports landscape. On Rozelle’s watch, football became the country’s favorite sport, and the Super Bowl became an unofficial civic holiday celebrated rather more seriously than many official ones.
“Pete who?” That was the reaction when, out of exhaustion more than anything else, the 12 National Football League (NFL) owners named Rozelle commissioner in January 1960. They had deadlocked on their first 22 votes1 and needed a compromise candidate. As the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, Rozelle had proven his ability to herd cats by working with four fractious co-owners—two of whom wouldn’t even ride in the same elevator together.2 This, and the fact that no one disliked him enough to veto him, were his main qualifications. Rozelle himself called the idea “ludicrous.”3
Nevertheless, he took the job. The grand old men of the NFL were sure that the “boy czar” would just follow orders. Washington Redskins owner George Marshall called him a “good boy”; the less polite used the term “amiable mouse”4 or the “boy wonder.”
That was a colossal miscalculation. Rozelle became the most consequential commissioner in the history of American sports. He gave notice early on that he was willing to act with the authority of a czar, even to his elders. In 1962 he fined one of the NFL’s founders, George Halas of the Chicago Bears (see the 1925 entry on Red Grange), for intemperate remarks about officiating.5 In 1963 he exercised his czarist prerogative again, suspending two stars, Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions, for gambling.
Rozelle’s signature moment occurred in 1961. When he took over, the game was healthier than it had ever been; average attendance had risen from 23,356 in 1950 to 43,617 by the end of the decade.6 But Rozelle sensed that there was a much bigger market to be tapped, and that television was the way to do it. Taking a page from Lamar Hunt of the detested American Football League (AFL; see 1959 entry), Rozelle coaxed the NFL’s owners to agree to a unified, league-wide television contract—and to divvy up the loot equally. It took an act of Congress to make this structure legal, and he got that, too. In the first deal negotiated on these terms, the league got $9.3 million from CBS, a quantum leap;7 two years later, the figure was almost $28 million.8
This agreement, as well as other forms of revenue sharing, established the foundation for the NFL’s financial stability and competitiveness. Every time a contract was due to be renewed, Rozelle won better and better terms. The boy wonder was now the golden boy. Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney dubbed him “a gift from the hand of Providence.”9
An even bigger challenge was the formation of the AFL, which shook up the elder league’s complacent hegemony. Initially, Rozelle sought to throttle the infant league. There is no doubt that his desire to kill the AFL in its crib was genuine; the bad feelings between the two leagues ran deep. A by-product of the battle, though, was to keep football in the news even when it was not on the field.10 When the AFL failed to fail, Rozelle accepted that there needed to be a truce; players’ salaries were rising fast, and the owners in both leagues were feeling some pain. That would never do.
While negotiators settled the terms of the merger of the two leagues in 1966, Rozelle worked out a deft quid pro quo with two powerful Louisiana lawmakers, Senator Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs. The duo slipped in some language authorizing the merger in an unrelated bill;11 New Orleans got a franchise 11 days later.12 The merged entity, which Rozelle led, had strong teams, rich owners, natural rivalries, and national reach. It was ready to take over American sports, and did. By 1964 a national poll found that football had overtaken baseball as the country’s favorite sport,13 and the margin has widened since. The seven most-watched television shows are all Super Bowls.
1960
ARNOLD PALMER’S VISOR FROM THE US OPEN
W
hile the beginnings and endings of a golf era cannot always be established with precision, it’s broadly true that Ben Hogan was The Man for much of the 1950s, that Arnold Palmer had taken over by the end of that decade, and that Jack Nicklaus assumed the role by 1965. And for a few hours on June 18, 1960, on the back nine of the US Open at Cherry Hills, the past, present, and future of golf battled it out. The present, in the form of Palmer, won. But the past, Hogan, was tied for the lead at the seventy-first hole, and the future, Nicklaus, was two strokes ahead with six holes to play.
Going into the last round, Palmer was seven strokes behind, in fifteenth place. When he mused that a 65 would bring him to 280, a competitive score for the US Open, even his good friend, golf writer Bob Drum, was dismissive: “You’re too far back.”1 Palmer was nettled by the response. Also, he felt that while his first three rounds of 72, 71, and 72 were pedestrian, he was just a bump here and a putt there from going seriously low. There just might be a 65 for the taking.
The place to make a dent was on the front nine. Located in the mile-high city of Denver, Cherry Hills was a great course, but its relatively short 7,004 yards played even shorter because of the altitude. The front nine was just 3,316 yards.2 There were birdies for the taking, and Palmer took ’em—six in the first seven holes. He made the turn in 30. A good start, but a long way to go; at this point, there were 11 players within three strokes of the lead.3 Two of them were Hogan, 47, who wanted very much to win a record fifth US Open, and Nicklaus, a student at Ohio State with a rising reputation.
By the twelfth hole Nicklaus was five under and in the lead. Palmer, Hogan, and two others trailed by a stroke. But Nicklaus three-putted the thirteenth to drop into a tie. Then he three-putted 14, to go one back, tied for second with Palmer and Hogan. Hogan birdied 15, making a nice 20-footer, and now he was tied for the lead with Palmer; a par on 16 kept him in position. Always known for his precision as a ball-striker, Hogan had hit every green in regulation—as he had in the third round as well.
At the seventeenth then, Hogan and Palmer were tied for the lead, at four under, with Nicklaus one back. Two pars would bring Hogan home in 280 and put some pressure on Palmer to match that or risk doing one better. The man the Scots approvingly called the “wee ice mon” for his cool and steady play could surely find two pars. Maybe he could have, but he decided to play aggressively. On his third shot of the par five, he went for the pin, which was sited perhaps 15 feet from a pond. Using his wedge, Hogan landed the ball almost exactly where he intended. “Almost” was not good enough; the ball spun and then splashed. Bogey. Angry but still fighting, Hogan again went for birdie on the eighteenth, but his effort to rip a big drive backfired, and he found water again. Triple-bogey. It must have been heartbreaking to watch, but Nicklaus was busy making his own mistakes, playing the last six holes in three over.
When Nicklaus and Hogan finished, Palmer was on the seventeenth, aware that he needed two pars for victory. And that seemed both doable and appropriate. After his electric start, Palmer had spent the back nine racking up par after par (plus one birdie) while all the other contenders imploded. So he now collected two more—and hit the magic number he had speculated would win, 280. His 65 was to that point the lowest round ever shot by the winner in the final of the Open. He jumped, whooped, and threw this visor into the air.
Nicklaus was second, two shots behind, the best showing for an amateur since 1933; six men tied for third, and Hogan tied for ninth. He would never come so close again; he could see the future coming. Hogan would tell the press he had played “with a kid who should have won this Open by 10 shots”—a compliment with a sting in the tail, and one Nicklaus never forgot.4 Palmer went home with a check for $14,4005 and notions of winning the Grand Slam.
The idea of a modern Grand Slam was relatively new; it didn’t exist in 1953, when Hogan won the first three legs but couldn’t compete at the PGA because it overlapped with the British Open. But the idea had been coalescing; in fact, Palmer published an essay in the Saturday Evening Post, “I Want That Grand Slam,”6 in which he maintained that a professional Slam should be the US and British Opens, plus the Masters and the PGA. Like everything he did at that time, it got people’s attention. Having won the 1960 Masters in dramatic fashion (birdieing the last two holes) and now the US Open, Palmer was halfway there. Next stop: the British Open, which he would play for the first time.
Today, of course, The Open is a highlight on every US pro’s calendar. In 1960, it wasn’t. Plane fares were expensive, and the British courses had been known to befuddle, even embarrass, American pros. St. Andrews had humbled Bobby Jones himself (see the 1930 entry on him). In addition, players had to survive two qualifying rounds to get any share of a small pot; in 1960, the winner took home just $3,500.7 The Brits even used a smaller ball. In 1959, no American golfer bothered to compete.8
As the son of a golf pro, however, Palmer had a strong sense of history,9 and the 100th anniversary of the British Open, to take place at the birthplace of golf, St. Andrews, was as historic as things get. Moreover, money was fast becoming no object to him. Since his breakout year, 1958, Palmer had become what was then a rare thing—a golf superstar. It was apparently impossible to write about the man without using the word “charisma” in the first paragraph, but this was a cliché with the force of truth. He had it, as well as rugged good looks, a powerful game, a flair for the dramatic, a warm personality, and a ton of sex appeal. When TV began covering golf, the camera could not take its mechanical eye off him.
Palmer, Nicklaus would say, “took golf from being a game for the few to a sport of the masses.”10 In 1960 he led the tour with $80,738 in winnings,11 a tidy sum for the era, and he earned almost twice as much12 from his various off-course activities, ranging from exhibitions to endorsements (ketchup, golf clubs, apparel) to a piece of a golf cart company. Palmer was the first golfer to professionalize his nontournament life—and he did (and still does) enormously well out of what became a corporate empire.
At St. Andrews in 1960 he came, he saw—and came one shot shy of conquering. He shot a wonderful 68 on the last round to tie the course record, but Australia’s Kel Nagle broke it, to finish one ahead. Still, Palmer made a lot of friends, and he reignited interest in the British Open, among both fans and other players. When he won in both 1961 and 1962, bringing tons of media and tourists in his wake, the tournament became an essential stop on the golf calendar.
1962
BILL RUSSELL’S 10,000-REBOUND BALL
B
ill Russell is the greatest winner in team sports. From 1957 to 1969 his Boston Celtics won 11 championships; he was the only player to be part of all of them. In addition, he won two national titles at the University of San Francisco and, in 1956, an Olympic gold medal. He also won five most valuable player awards.
Russell played defense like no one before him, and in a way that influenced everyone who came after. Psychologically intimidating, he dominated games from the defensive end, something that came as a revelation. His offensive statistics were useful but not gaudy, an average of 15.1 points per game for his career. But he didn’t need to pour in points for the Celtics to win, which is all that mattered to him.
When Russell joined the pros for the 1956–1957 season, pro hoops was still in its awkward phase, just seven years past the merger that created the National Basketball Association. There were franchises in Rochester and Fort Wayne, but not in Chicago or Los Angeles. Teams often played in low-rent venues and traveled on the cheap.
Russell quickly became the game’s first black superstar, in a league with only about 15 African American players.1 His was not a cuddly or anodyne public face. He frequently refused to give autographs and was frosty to the press. He once called basketball “the most shallow thing in the world”2 and was openly critical of America’s—and Boston’s—racial hypocrisies.
Russell would have been great anywhere, but he could not have landed in a better place than Boston. His previous relationships with coaches had been unfriendly and adversarial,3 but he clicked right away with Red Auerbach, who recognized his strengths. The Celtics had the core of a great team, including Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman, but it is no coincidence that they didn’t win a title until Russell arrived to anchor the defense.4 The next year, when he injured his ankle in the final, they faltered. Then they reeled off eight in a row. No one else, before or since, has won more than three straight. “We don’t fear the Celtics without Bill Russell. Take him out and we can beat them,” Lakers coach John Kundla said after the 1959 finals. “He’s the guy who whipped us psychologically. Russell has our club worrying every second.”5
The Celtics had only seven set plays; the offense revolved around getting turnovers or taking the ball off the boards. That was Russell’s specialty; he had a PhD in the geometry of basketball, as well as excellent timing and anticipation. This enabled him to out-rebound even bigger men. In 1962 he grabbed the ball shown here for his 10,000th rebound; for his career, he had 21,620 (an average of 22.5 per game)6 and recorded 9 of the top 20 seasons.7
Russell made the defensive rebound an offensive weapon. Before he even hit the floor, he could get the ball to the outlet, and the fast break would be on. This style of play required a high degree of intelligence, teamwork, and trust. Auerbach therefore sought, and found, men who were great teammates as well as great players. As a result, the Celtics became that rare organization anywhere in the 1950s and 1960s—multiracial and harmonious. There were no divas and no black or white cliques;8 the locker-room ribbing was both merciless and color blind. Russell remembered how one of his teammates mocked his brooding reputation: “I’d find him hunched over in the locker room with his fist on his chin, like Rodin’s Thinker, scowling ridiculously.” When Russell came in from the showers, he might see players sashaying around the locker room, modeling his stylish clothes.9
That attitude came from the top. Owner Walter Brown was genuinely beloved.10 The Celtics believed in Auerbach, who said he made decisions based only on what would help the team win. His actions proved it. In his first year as the Celtics coach, in 1950, Auerbach drafted the league’s first black player, Charles Cooper.11 In 1965 the team was the first to play five black starters, and three years later he named the first black head coach in any pro sport: Russell, who led the team to two titles in three years.
Russell’s prickly relationship to the game continued after his retirement. When the team wanted to raise his jersey to the rafters, he told Auerbach he would do it only in an empty Boston Garden, with a few teammates present.12 Three years later, he made it clear he did not want to be inducted into the Hall of Fame (he was anyway). But when it came time for the Celtics to honor Auerbach in 1985, Russell did return for that. Why? “Red Auerbach is my friend.”13
The NBA’s Coach of the Year Award is named after Auerbach; the MVP award for the finals is named after Russell. And that seems right. Together, they made the Celtics great and the NBA better.
1966
MARVIN MILLER’S UNION CONTRACT
T
wo men transformed postwar baseball: Jackie Robinson (see the 1947 entry) and Marvin Miller. Robinson opened the game to people of talent, regardless of color. Miller enabled that talent to have a say in their destiny—and to profit from their skills.
When someone says, “It’s not about the money,” it’s reasonable to assume that it is. In the case of the baseball players’ union, however, it was not entirely about the money. The players had justified grievances that went much deeper. Specifically, due to the reserve clause, they had no say in where they played, and because of custom, they had almost no say in anything else.
The reserve clause, which dated to 1878 and eventually became a mandatory part of every contract, stated that players were the property of the team that signed them. Forever. Simply by enduring, the clause gained a kind of legitimacy. In congressional hearings in 1951, for example, a number of players, including Jackie Robinson, actually testified in favor of it.1 They had absorbed the idea that baseball would collapse in a heap without it.
There were other concerns, however, including the pension plan and working conditions. In 1954 the players started the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA). This had a few minor successes, but it had only one part-time executive and acted as an interest group rather than a full-blown union.
On July 1, 1966, that changed forever, when the MLBPA hired a longtime labor executive, Marvin Miller, as its first paid, full-time executive director. The picture on the following page shows that first contract; his confident signature is on the lower right. Miller had two great advantages. First, he knew labor law cold. Second, he was an outsider. Where baseball people saw practices such as the reserve clause as engraved on horsehide tablets, for example, Miller considered it “the most abominable thing I’d ever seen.”2
He was schooled in the facts of baseball life early on, when the owners summoned him a few weeks after he started, to inform him that they were changing the basis of their pension contributions. No discussion, no negotiation; here’s the deal, thanks for coming. Then it was Miller time. He proceeded to school them in the facts of labor law. You can’t do that, he told them. The MLBPA is a duly empowered collective bargaining agent—and that means you have to talk to me. Round 1 to Miller, by a technical knockout.3
In 1968 he negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement (CBA), winning a substantial increase in the minimum salary (from $7,000 to $10,000)4 and establishing some rules of engagement. It wasn’t easy. The owners, in the words of the MLBPA general counsel, Dick Moss, were both “hostile and patronizing”; they fought tooth and nail over everything, from meal money to baseball card fees.5 In 1970 Miller negotiated another CBA. Although this did not deal directly with the reserve clause, it contained a bomb, hidden in plain sight in the language of Article X, that would later explode the owners’ comfortable superiority. This was the establishment of binding arbitration to resolve player grievances.6
For a time it didn’t seem to matter. Management saw off Curt Flood’s courageous challenge to the system when he opposed his trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia before the 1970 season.7 In June 1972 the Supreme Court rejected Flood’s argument, on antitrust grounds, that he had the right to negotiate with teams other than the one that had signed him once his contract expired. The justices described the sport’s antitrust exemption as an “established aberration” that it was up to Congress to change.8 Between the lines, they advised baseball to play nicer. The owners failed to take the hint.
Nor did they appear to recognize how the game had changed with regard to the MLBPA. In early 1972 the players went on strike, mostly over pension issues. The owners didn’t believe they would do it, but they did. Then management was sure they would fracture. They didn’t. After 13 days and the loss of 86 regular season games, the owners blinked—and got their first inkling that the union was for real.
Although Flood’s lawsuit had failed, it was a useful failure that told Miller he could not look to the courts for action on the reserve clause. The case also brought the issue to public attention, and many people began to question, like Flood, the decency of a system that looked in all essentials like indentured servitude.
And Miller kept chipping away, improving conditions bit by bit while waiting for the right moment to strike at the reserve clause. One break came in 1974, when Catfish Hunter, the Hall of Fame pitcher, won a grievance against the Oakland A’s owner, Charles Finley, for failing to fund an annuity promised in his contract.9 The game’s independent arbitrator, Peter Seitz—the human form of the arbitration time bomb planted in Article X—ruled that Finley had indeed violated the contract, and that Hunter could sell his services on the open market. This he promptly did, signing with the Yankees for $3.75 million for five years, about seven times what he was making with the A’s. That opened players’ eyes to the reality that their market value—if a market could be established—was much higher than their pay.
With the authority of the arbitrator established, the next step was to figure out how to challenge the reserve clause itself. The language of the standard player contract read that if a player refused to sign, the club could “renew the contract for a period of one year.” Baseball had always interpreted this as one year, year after year, a perpetual renewal machine. Miller thought otherwise. Pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally agreed to play out their contracts and thus provide the basis for a test case.
Again, the case went to Seitz. The owners argued that baseball would descend into chaos and certain ruin without the reserve clause staying exactly the way it was.10 Miller and the MLBPA argued that a year meant 365 days, not forever. Again, Seitz agreed with the union. He had barely finished reading his decision when he was handed a note telling him that baseball no longer needed his services, but the decision stood. Messersmith, who became baseball’s first true free agent, promptly signed for more than double what the Dodgers had been offering.11
In the next CBA, the players and owners worked out a structure to allow players free agency after six years of service. It was a compromise that rewarded clubs for developing talent while allowing players to control part of their professional destiny. In its essentials, this system still exists.12
Settling a framework for free agency did not, of course, herald an era of good feelings. There have been numerous strikes (1980, 1981, 1985, 1994–1995) and lockouts (1973, 1976, and 1990).13 The loss of the entire 1994 postseason disgusted fans and probably killed the Montreal Expos. And while the MLBPA was surely on the right side of history in its first decade, it has not always been so since, such as in its approach to steroids (see the 2007 entry).
Marvin Miller set baseball players free—and set an example for football (free agency in 1992) and basketball (1996). For almost a century, the negotiating position of the owners was “take it or leave it.” Thanks to Miller, players forged a third option. It was the difference, Miller would say, “between dictatorship and democracy.”14
And the money wasn’t bad, either. In 1966, the year the players hired Marvin Miller, the average salary in baseball was $17,664. By 1982, the year he retired, it was $245,000,15 and in 2015, it was $3.4 million.16 The changes Miller provoked also made the owners much richer. In 1973 George Steinbrenner led a consortium that bought the Yankees for $8.7 million.17 In 2015 the market value of the team was estimated at $3.2 billion.18 The least valuable team, the well-run but largely unloved Tampa Bay Rays, was worth $625 million.
Like many prophets, Miller was not honored in his own time. Three times before his death in 2012, he was up for induction into the Hall of Fame. Three times the vote fell short, as did another try in 2014. His lack of a plaque in Cooperstown is almost incomprehensible—until one remembers it was just such stubborn blindness that he fought, and usually conquered.
1967
KATHRINE SWITZER’S BIB FROM THE BOSTON MARATHON
K
athrine Switzer was not the first woman to run America’s oldest marathon; at least one woman, Roberta Gibbs, finished it as an unregistered “bandit” in 1966, after hiding in the bushes near the start.1
But Switzer is much better remembered because she was the first woman caught trying to run it. In 1967 she registered for the race under the name K. V. Switzer. It was a cold, blustery Patriots’ Day. Instead of running in her lovingly prepared burgundy shorts and top,2 Switzer ran in baggy sweats (and lipstick).3 Her fellow runners could have been under no illusions about her sex. To a man, in fact, the 740 other runners welcomed her.4
A few miles in, however, a race official in an overcoat and fedora planted himself in the middle of the road and reached out to stop her. Switzer dodged and went on. A few moments later, she heard the thud of leather chasing her from behind. The marathon codirector, Jock Semple, had spotted her figure and semi-bouffant hair and diagnosed her as female. Outraged at this feminine mistake, he lunged at Switzer and yelled, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers,” as he tried to rip her bib off; a slight tear on the upper right of the bib is visible evidence of the effort.5 With the help of friends, Switzer shrugged him off and finished in 4:20:02. (Gibbs, running as a bandit again, finished in 3:27:17.)6
The Semple/Switzer picture made front pages all over the country. Semple did himself no favors by continuing to open his mouth: “My wife is so mad at me over this,” he said at one point, that “she gave my roast beef to the dog and made me buy my own Swanson’s.”7 His colleague Will Cloney chirped, “If that girl [Switzer] were my daughter, I would spank her.” Curmudgeons, yes, and the butt of much richly deserved ridicule, but the two had their allies. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped Switzer of her membership for, among other things, running in a competition longer than the 1.5 miles then allowed for women.
Women runners would have the last laugh. Over the next four years a few more ran the marathon unofficially, and in 1972 Boston allowed them to register. Male runners had no problem sharing the roads with women, and there was no rule or law to bar them. Resistance was futile.
In the end, Semple displayed a puckish graciousness about the whole thing. Spotting Switzer at the starting line before the 1973 race, he grabbed her and said, “C’mon lass, let’s get a wee bit o’ notoriety.” And kissed her soundly.8 The two became friends, finding common ground in their love of running. Semple respected Switzer once he saw that she was a serious athlete; Switzer respected Semple for keeping the Boston Marathon going through some very lean decades. She ran Boston eight times, finishing second in 1975 with a personal best of 2:51:37. She also organized races all over the world and played a role in the addition of the women’s marathon to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.
One thing Switzer couldn’t do was to keep up with the competition. As more women took to the sport, they got much better. Nina Kuscsik won the 1972 Boston marathon in 3:10:26. In Los Angeles in 1984, Joan Benoit Samuelson, a proud daughter of New England, won the first women’s Olympic marathon in 2:24:52.
MILAN HIGH SCHOOL LETTER JACKET AND OSCAR ROBERTSON’S CRISPUS ATTUCKS JERSEY
S
ometimes life imitates art, sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes the two are so close together as to make no difference. That is the case with the stories of Milan and Crispus Attucks high schools. In 1954 Milan (enrollment 161) became the smallest school ever to win the Indiana state basketball championship. The following year Crispus Attucks became the first all-black team to win. The two schools weave together the two strands of Indiana’s hoops culture: one rural and predominantly white, the other urban and mostly black.
Milan’s victory made the team of crew-cut farm boys local heroes, and they became national legends in 1986, thanks to the movie Hoosiers, which was based on the Milan miracle. The Milan Indians were no fluke, however. They had reached the state tourney’s Final Four in 1953 and had gone 19–2 during the regular season. Milan, about 50 miles west of Cincinnati, was home to 1,100 people at the time; the school also served nearby communities like Pierceville (population 45), birthplace of the star guard, Bobby Plump. When a new coach, 24-year-old Marvin Wood, came to town in 1952, bringing both modern tactics and a serious case of the fundamentals, he clicked with a critical mass of boys who had been playing together for years.1
The game was different in 1954, in ways that made it possible for teams that looked overmatched to compete. Most important, there was no shot clock. If Milan got ahead, Wood called for the “cat and mouse”—that is, the stall. In one game in the 1953 tournament, Plump held the ball for eight interminable minutes.2
The cat and mouse played a major role in the 1954 championship game against much bigger, much taller Muncie Central, which had won the title in 1951 and 1952. This was not a great game, on the merits; both teams shot poorly, and at critical times, the play was sloppy. As the fourth quarter opened, the score was 26–26. With six-plus minutes left and Muncie leading 28–26, Wood called for the cat and mouse. If the Indians were fouled, they could sink free throws. Otherwise, the idea was to keep the game close and take their chances at the end. So Plump stood near center court, cradling the ball and occasionally looking over at Wood for guidance. For more than three minutes, nothing happened. It is not the most thrilling hoops sequence ever filmed, but it is oddly compelling.3
With three minutes left, the action resumed. Plump missed a shot from the top of the key; Muncie rebounded, but turned the ball over. Milan scored to tie, 28–28, with a little more than two minutes left. Plump drew a foul and sank two free throws. Milan up two. Muncie took the ball in, and on yet another careless pass, Milan took it back.
No cat and mouse here. Milan’s Ray Craft found himself in position inside, went for it—a basket would give them a decisive four-point lead—and watched his shot curl out. Muncie tied it up with a backdoor layup. Forty-five seconds left. Plumb got the inbound pass, dribbled in place—the lack of defensive pressure is astonishing—then made his move with six seconds to go. Dribbling with his right hand, Plumb drove, faked left, stepped right, and drained a 14-footer as time expired. Final score: 32–30 for Milan. A legend was born. A few weeks later, the players were rewarded with letter jackets; this one belonged to Gene White, the 5-foot-11 center.
A 32–30 victory betokens something less than a masterpiece, but there was a lot more to Milan’s play than strategic standing around. The team could certainly score, putting up 60 against Terre Haute in the semis and 39 in the first half against Crispus Attucks High School in the quarterfinals.
Crispus Attucks was founded in 1927 to segregate black Indianapolis students; they were not allowed to attend any other public high school. Then, because Crispus Attucks by definition was for blacks only, state basketball authorities barred it from entering the state tournament on the grounds that it was not open to all.4 That catch-22 was dissolved in 1942, but a number of Indianapolis schools continued to refuse to play the Tigers. Ray Crowe, who became coach in 1950, used to tell his players that they were playing five against seven—the team could expect no close calls from the all-white referee crews.5
Talent has a way of asserting itself, however, and the Tiger teams of the 1950s were stuffed with talent, including two future Harlem Globetrotters. The biggest star of all was Oscar Robertson, who was a sophomore when Milan beat the Tigers in 1954. The next year, Crispus Attucks was ready to break through. After losing just one game during the regular season, it beat Gary Roosevelt 97–74, becoming the first all African American team to win the championship. Robertson wore this jersey in the final, in which Crispus Attucks set a record that still stands for most points scored—a style of play a world away from Milan’s hold-and-hope strategy.6
In 1956 Crispus Attucks did itself one better, going undefeated and repeating as state champions.
It would be pleasant to report that all of Indianapolis embraced the Tigers, the first team from the city to win the tourney. The team did make the traditional parade, riding a fire truck from Butler Fieldhouse to Monument Circle downtown. But unlike the teams in every other year, the Tigers were not allowed to get off and take pictures. Instead, the truck made a circle and headed to the black side of town.7 The players suspected, bitterly and probably correctly, that the authorities feared they would make trouble.8
There can never be another Milan miracle. Hundreds of small schools disappeared through consolidation, and in 1997 Indiana eliminated its single-class state tournament. Now schools of similar size play only against each other. But Hoosiers keeps the story alive—and also pays quiet homage to the history of Indiana hoops. In the climactic scene, the hero from Hickory High takes his final shot from the exact same place on the floor that Plump did.9 And in another art-imitates-life moment, the coach of the other team is played by Ray Crowe—Crispus Attucks’s longtime coach.10
1955
PAINTING OF STILLMAN’S GYM
D
irty, smelly, clouded in a fog of tobacco, filled with characters straight out of Damon Runyon, and run by a crusty lifer with a foul mouth: that is the stereotype of the midcentury boxing gym.
It is also a precise description of Stillman’s, the “University of Eighth Avenue,” as boxing writer A. J. Liebling called it.1 The second-floor gym was a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, Ring magazine, and the Neutral Corner, the saloon of choice.2
As the capital of American boxing for three decades, Stillman’s was as famous as its fighters. Outsiders paid 50 cents for the privilege of watching the workouts and of getting abused by proprietor Lou Stillman. Everyone paid, even Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, who were known to go to the gym for a break between sets. Marlon Brando took in the place to prepare for his role as a washed-up pug in On the Waterfront.3 The gym itself had a major role in Somebody Up There Likes Me, the 1956 film starring Paul Newman as fighter Rocky Graziano.
There were rules, of course. “No rubbish or spitting on the floor, under penalty of law,” read one sign,4 above the gobs of spittle and litter. For Stillman, the grime was a matter of principle: “I keep the place like this for the fighters’ own sake. If I cleaned it up, they’d catch a cold from the cleanliness.” Featherweight champ Johnny Dundee noted of fresh air, “Why, that stuff is likely to kill us.”5
Naturally, Stillman was not Stillman’s real name. Born Lou Ingber, he was a beat cop before he went to work for an eccentric philanthropist, Alpheus Geer, who ran something called the Marshall Stillman movement, designed to reform burglars through boxing.6 Ingber became so identified with the establishment that he changed his name; everyone called him “Stillman” anyway. The do-gooders abandoned the program when their equipment was stolen. Stillman decided to keep it going as a business, eventually moving it from uptown Harlem to midtown Manhattan.
His trusty sidekick was Whitey Bimstein, the inspiration for the trainer in the Rocky movies. Bimstein figured he trained more than 7,500 boxers;7 he was also one of the great cutmen. When Graziano got nailed above the eye during a middleweight championship fight, Bimstein lanced the hematoma with a silver dollar in less than a minute. Graziano won three rounds later.8
Georges Carpentier (see the 1921 entry) trained at Stillman’s when he was in the United States. Primo Carnera, Joe Louis, and Gene Tunney dropped in on occasion.9 Jack Dempsey, Lou Ambers, James J. Braddock, Billy Conn, Kid Gavilan, Billy Graham, Willie Pep, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jersey Joe Walcott—champions all—were regulars. Tough but democratic, Stillman described his management philosophy this way: “Big or small, champ or bum, I treated ’em all the same way—bad. If you treat them like humans, they’ll eat you alive.”10
At its peak, some 375 boxers paid a monthly fee to Stillman’s, and the place was so crowded fighters could get hurt shadow-boxing. But time and television took a toll. Instead of going to the Friday night fights, fans stayed home and watched them. That meant fewer fights, and thus fewer fighters, and thus fewer people training. “The racket’s dead,” Stillman said in February 1959,11 estimating that only 75 fighters were enrolled in his school of hard knocks. The gym closed a few weeks later.
This painting is by John Cullen Murphy, the author’s father. Murphy’s early career was in sports illustration; he then began drawing Big Ben Bolt, a comic strip featuring a college-educated boxer that ran from 1950 to 1978. In the image above, painted around 1955, Murphy captures the dingy camaraderie of the place. There is, however, a glaring flaw. Light didn’t flow into Stillman’s with such golden brilliance. The windows were never cleaned.
1956
YOGI BERRA’S CATCHER’S MITT
Y
ogi Berra participated in 19 World Series as a player, manager, and coach. He was a 15-time all-star and a three-time most valuable player (1951, 1954, 1955).1 The number Berra liked most, however, was 10. That’s how many World Series–winning teams he played on—more than anyone else in baseball history.2
If there was an award for most likable athlete, Berra might have won that, too. And he certainly would have won the prize for being the most quotable. Among the jewels in the Yogi lexicon are the following:
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
“It’s deja vu all over again.”
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
“You can observe a lot by watching.”3
“You got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.”4
His geniality, combined with his unique command of language, sometimes made Berra the butt of patronizing comments. That was to underestimate the man greatly. Almost every Yogism had the truth of a mystically inflected epigram. That was appropriate: Lawrence Peter Berra did not get his nickname—the best ever, hands down—from a cartoon bear. It dated, he said, from his boyhood, when he and a friend saw a film that featured a yogi; for some reason the figure evoked young Larry. From then on, to everyone but his immediate family, he was Yogi.5
In every important way, this son of Italian immigrants was not just a winner but a man of wisdom and character. As a seaman second class, he manned a machine gun on a rocket boat to Omaha Beach on D-Day, ahead of the landing forces.6 He had a happy, 64-year marriage. He was financially shrewd; indeed, he was one of the first players to hire an agent. Berra dropped out of school after the eighth grade, but in later life gave his time, money, and attention to a well-regarded learning center in New Jersey. His calm dignity made people like Yankees owner George Steinbrenner look small.
The glove pictured here is from Berra’s eighth World Series, in 1956, which the Yankees won in seven games against the Brooklyn Dodgers. Berra used this glove to catch journeyman pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game—the only one in World Series history. Larsen, who had lasted less than two innings in his first Series start, would later say he didn’t shake off Berra once during his 97-pitch masterpiece,7 a tribute to the catcher’s hard-won baseball savvy.
Berra had struggled defensively as a young player, so manager Casey Stengel asked Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey to tutor him. Berra soaked it all in, and in his prime he was regarded as one of the smartest backstops in the game.8 Ted Williams said that more than any other catcher, Berra noticed when he or other hitters shifted their feet—a subtle sign of their intentions.9 “Talking to Yogi Berra about baseball,” baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once said, “is like talking to Homer about the gods.”10
As an individual, Berra became a cherished national institution who was willing to poke gentle fun at himself. As a player, he is best understood as a key Yankee in the team’s most dominant era. From his first full season in 1947 to his last, in 1963, Yankee teams won 15 pennants.
This was not the only Yankee dynasty. Love them, or more likely, loathe them, they are by far baseball’s most successful team. The Yankees won their first pennant in 1921, after trading for a certain George Herman Ruth, and their first World Series in 1923. Since then, they have racked up 26 more. St. Louis ranks second, with 11.
The Yankee championships have occurred over several distinct dynastic eras. There was the Age of Ruth (1923–1928), when the team won its first three championships. Then there was the Age of DiMaggio (1936–1943), when they won six more, followed by the Berra-Mantle era (1947–1964). After a pause for mediocrity—call them the Horace Clarke years—there was the Age of Crazy. From 1976 to 1981, the Yankees went 2–3 in the World Series. Finally, there was the Age of Jeter (1996–2001), in which the teams managed by Joe Torre chipped in four more, plus another in 2009.
Yogi Berra was not the greatest player the Yankees ever had. But he was the greatest winner—and the most beloved. Shortly before his death in September 2015, at age 90, he summed his life up in his own inimitable way: “If I had to do it all over again, I would do it all over again.”
1958
FIRST MODERN ARTHROSCOPE
“A
rthroscopic surgery” does not describe a procedure, but rather the device that enables it: the arthroscope, whose name derives from the Greek arthron (meaning joint), and skopein (to look at). An arthroscope, then, looks at joints.
In medical terms, this is not a new instrument. A primitive kind of scope was found at Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by a volcano in AD 79. The first remotely modern arthroscope dates to the early 1800s, when a German doctor illuminated two tubes with a candle to examine the inside of the bladder. The instrument slowly grew in sophistication, though it still seems a case of the examination being worse than the illness. (One French doctor ignited a mixture of turpentine and gas to create light that would bounce off mirrors to provide a view of the bladder.)1
In 1912 a Danish physician used a scope to examine the inside of the knee joint; he also coined the term “arthroscopy,” which stuck. Arthroscopy advanced steadily from there, and after World War II a Japanese doctor, Masaki Watanabe, continued the work. He designed scope after scope, adapting electronics and optics to create the finest arthroscopes in the world. His masterpiece, completed in 1958 and known as Watanabe number 21, is considered the first modern arthroscope.2 The twenty-first-century version, shown here, does not look much different from Watanabe’s finest.
So what does all this have to do with sports? For centuries, the arthroscope had satisfied curiosity and helped in diagnosis. But with Watanabe’s version, it also became a means of treatment. He performed the first arthroscopic knee surgery on a 17-year-old who had twisted his knee playing hoops. The young man went home that day and was back on the court weeks later. American surgeons began cautiously using the procedure in the early 1970s; by the end of that decade, it was routine.3
For his work, Watanabe is routinely referred to as the “father of modern arthroscopy.”4 But he could be also be called the “father of second chances,” because that is what arthroscopic surgery, the most common orthopedic procedure in the country,5 has offered to thousands of athletes.
Its great advantage is a small one. Rather than carving up a whole joint to see the problem, in arthroscopic surgery, the doctor makes a small incision—as short as a quarter of an inch—into which the scope can be inserted to look and operate through. That means less trauma to the body and a swifter recovery.
In late 1981 downhill skier Steve Mahre underwent arthroscopic surgery on both knees; five weeks later, he became the first American man to win a World Cup race.6 Gymnast Mary Lou Retton (see the 1984 entry) was back in the gym the day after her operation.7 In both cases the surgery was relatively minor. Not so Adrian Peterson’s. The Minnesota Vikings running back ripped up his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in December 2011. After arthroscopic surgery, he was back on the field, at full speed and strength, at the beginning of the next season.
Arthroscopy can be done on any joint, including hips, wrists, and ankles.8 But along with the knee, the most famous kind has to do with the elbow—better known as Tommy John surgery. In a fairer world, it would be known as Frank Jobe surgery, for the doctor who invented it. In this procedure—officially “ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction”—an elbow ligament is replaced by a tendon from another part of the body. Tommy John was the first pitcher to try it; he pitched for another 14 years.
Like any medical procedure, there is risk involved, but arthroscopy has proved its mettle. As of 2015, more than 500 major league pitchers had undergone Tommy John surgery;9 about 80 percent made it back to the majors,10 and two-thirds pitched to the same standard as before.11
For sports fans, arthroscopic procedures have brought longer careers for great athletes, but also a sense of wistfulness. Red Grange, Billie Jean King, Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, Joe Namath, Bobby Orr, Gale Sayers, Smoky Joe Wood, and many others—what more could they have achieved if arthroscopy had been available for them?
1958
ARTIFACTS FROM THE “GREATEST GAME”
T
his wasn’t the greatest game in history, not by a long shot. There was too much sloppy play and not enough of the really stirring big moments—the downfield bomb, the broken-field run—that make for a classic. The kicking was appalling.
But that is to look at a beautiful landscape and see only the litter. If a great game is one that gets people so involved that they won’t leave the couch to get another beer, the label fits. And even though this contest wasn’t the greatest game in pro football history, it is undoubtedly the most important.
The date was December 28, 1958. The place was Yankee Stadium. The occasion was the twenty-sixth National Football League championship. The teams were the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts. Fifteen Hall of Famers were involved.1 The first football championship to be televised nationwide, it was watched by 45 million people, the largest viewing audience for an American sporting event to that time. When it ended, the NFL had broken through in a way it never had before.
For three quarters and 13 minutes, the game was good, but slipshod. Both teams missed chances and gave away opportunities; there were two missed field goal attempts. The Giants fumbled four times; two of these fumbles, by the normally sure-handed halfback, Hall of Famer Frank Gifford, set up two Colts touchdowns and a 14–3 halftime lead.
In the second half, the Colts had a first and goal from the three and didn’t score. The Giants defense would not let them pass, twice stuffing fullback Alan Ameche.2 Given new heart, New York’s offense stepped up and capitalized on their limited opportunities to score two touchdowns. The Giants could have sealed the deal late in the fourth quarter with one more first down, but Gifford was stopped just short. After a punt, the Colts took possession on their own 14, with 1:56 left, down 17–14.
It was the kind of situation that Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas, 25, was born for. Rejected by Notre Dame and Pitt, then cut from the Pittsburgh Steelers without throwing a pass, he knew the hard knocks of football life. He had been playing semipro ball for $6 a game when a fan tipped the Colts to give him a shot. This was his second year as a starter. Even though he hadn’t played particularly well thus far, with a fumble and an interception, Unitas had the essential quality of the true leader: he could inspire others to believe in him and in themselves. Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey would say that at moments like these, it was “like being in the huddle with God.”3
In the cool and misty early evening air, as patches of ice began to appear on the field, Unitas picked apart the Giants’ secondary, informed by the game plan featured in this photo. After a first-down pass to flanker Lenny Moore, three straight throws to wide receiver Raymond Berry, who would have 12 catches on the day, moved the Colts 62 yards. Forty years later, Giants Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff would say that “Unitas to Berry,” the phrase he heard so often that day, “still rings in my ears.”4
With seven seconds left, Steve Myhra used this shoe to kick this ball through this goal post for a 20-yard field goal to tie the score 17–17. For the first time in NFL history, a game went into overtime. The first team to score would win the game—and the title, and the $4,718.77 winners’ share.5
The Giants won the toss to get the first possession and could do nothing with it. Unitas, playing with complete cool, could. He directed a 13-play, 80-yard drive of such precision and unpredictability that the Giants defense was befuddled. “When you thought he’d call a running play, he’d pass,” Huff would recall, “and when you were sure he was going to pass, he’d call a run.”6 The famous image of the final play tells the story. It shows Ameche running in the game-winning touchdown from the one-yard line. The hole he is running through is, quite literally, big enough for a truck to go through.7 The Giants had been expecting a pass.8
Even at the time, people realized that this game had meant something special. Commissioner Bert Bell was overcome: “This is the greatest day in the history of professional football!”9 The Associated Press would write the day after, “It seems pro football has come of age.” The prescience of that announcement would become apparent the following year, when football telecasts began to rack up much bigger numbers.
Watching from a hotel room in Texas, the son of a wealthy oil family watched the game and thought, “Well, that’s it. This sport really has everything. And it televises well. Who knew what that meant?”10 Lamar Hunt would draw his own conclusions—and change the course of football history (see the next entry).
1959
STATUE OF LAMAR HUNT
I
n the late twentieth century, professional athletes in many sports earned two things: money and power. Lamar Hunt had as much to do with that as any other individual. He was a force in three sports: football, soccer, and tennis. In each case, he disrupted the status quo and in the process helped to build something better. That is why he is a member of the halls of fame for all of those sports, a unique achievement.1 Oh, and he was also one of the founding partners of the Chicago Bulls basketball team. Remarkably, Hunt did all this while retaining the respect of almost everyone he dealt with. In a field with more than its share of sharks, he was known as a good man and a loyal friend.
Hunt, a member of the Texas family that made serious money in oil and commodities, had little interest in drilling for more dollars. While his two older brothers stayed in the family business (and almost lost it all in a failed attempt to corner the world silver market), all Lamar Hunt wanted was to get into sports. Even as a college student, he set up a batting cage and miniature golf course.2 As an adult, he would think bigger.
He made his biggest mark in football. When the National Football League rejected his bid to start a new team in Dallas, the 27-year-old Hunt brought together eight other men who also wanted to break into the NFL. In 1960 he was the first among equals in the founding of the American Football League. The AFL struggled but prevailed, in large part because Hunt insisted on revenue sharing among all the teams, a principle that stabilized franchise finances. In 1966 Hunt was one of the AFL owners who negotiated the merger with the NFL, including a championship game between the two. How about calling it the Super Bowl, he mused? Hunt was also the one to suggest naming the Super Bowl trophy after Vince Lomardi. The Packers coach was no friend of the AFL, but Hunt thought the gesture would help unify the sport.3
His team, the Kansas City Chiefs (moved from Dallas in 1963), lost the first Super Bowl to Lombardi’s Packers, but it won the fourth (or IVth), Hunt’s proudest moment in sports. It was Hunt who suggested that the Super Bowls be numbered with Roman numerals,4 a rare lapse into pretentiousness for a zillionaire who flew coach. The Hunt family still owns the Chiefs; this statue outside the team’s Arrowhead Stadium honors him.
Then Hunt turned to tennis, helping to found and largely bankrolling the World Championship Tennis tour for men. Until 1968, when “open tennis” began (see the 1968/1975 entry on Arthur Ashe), pro players were banned from the four majors (Wimbledon and the Australian, French, and US championships). The WCT forced the issue when it recruited the “Handsome Eight,” a group that included five premier amateurs, John Newcombe and Tony Roche among them. This further stripped the amateur game of top players. The mandarins of tennis were forced to give in; the major tourneys were running perilously short of major talent.
After a difficult start, the WCT signed up a large share of the best players to healthy contracts, ran tournaments in major cities, and established a ranking system and a year-end championship. It also was the first tour to use the tie-breaker and to allow players to perform in something other than white attire. By 1970 almost all the top players had joined.
The International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF) was the established tennis organization—essentially, the equivalent of the NFL. While it had mismanaged the game into near-irrelevance, it had the possessiveness and sense of entitlement of most monopolists. It saw the WTC, quite rightly, as competition for its own Grand Prix, which included three of the four majors. In 1971 it banned WCT players from Grand Prix events. That meant that John Newcombe could not defend his Wimbledon title, and Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, and Arthur Ashe could not compete. The situation was both ridiculous and untenable.
Tennis politics is more boring than most; the upshot is that the WCT and ILTF managed to negotiate a semipeaceful coexistence for some years,5 but the WCT was marginalized in the 1980s as the players gained more power.6 In 1990 it was dissolved. But by establishing a well-run, well-funded circuit, the WCT had accelerated the formation of the open era, improved the financial standing of the players, and generally raised the game. Stan Smith, a first-rate player who turned pro in 1969, wrote to Hunt that he “would always consider you and your organization as the founders of our modern professional game.”7
While the WCT was getting started, Hunt also had an interest in the Dallas Tornado, the Texas entry in the obscure United Soccer Association. In 1968 that league merged with another obscure one to form the North American Soccer League. The NASL flared brilliantly, and briefly, on the back of the incomparable Pelé (see the 1975 entry on him), as well as on Hunt’s money. Then it fizzled just as dramatically. Hunt lost millions, but never gave up on soccer. He helped to put on the men’s World Cup in 19948 and was one of the founders of Major League Soccer two years later. MLS has not joined the athletic big time, but it is growing steadily. For a time, Hunt owned three MLS teams—Columbus, Dallas, and Kansas City—and the league may not have survived without his constant support. Hunt died in 2006, but he leaves a substantive legacy in three sports. Don Garber, the longtime commissioner of MLS, put it simply: “There’s no American soccer today, without Lamar Hunt.”9
1960
PETE ROZELLE’S TYPEWRITER
T
his is a mid-1940s Royal, the kind of clunker one could imagine a hard-bitten reporter pounding away at in a postwar noir flick. From the man behind its keys, however, came something rather different: a sports revolution. From 1960 to 1989, Pete Rozelle used this typewriter to transform the American sports landscape. On Rozelle’s watch, football became the country’s favorite sport, and the Super Bowl became an unofficial civic holiday celebrated rather more seriously than many official ones.
“Pete who?” That was the reaction when, out of exhaustion more than anything else, the 12 National Football League (NFL) owners named Rozelle commissioner in January 1960. They had deadlocked on their first 22 votes1 and needed a compromise candidate. As the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, Rozelle had proven his ability to herd cats by working with four fractious co-owners—two of whom wouldn’t even ride in the same elevator together.2 This, and the fact that no one disliked him enough to veto him, were his main qualifications. Rozelle himself called the idea “ludicrous.”3
Nevertheless, he took the job. The grand old men of the NFL were sure that the “boy czar” would just follow orders. Washington Redskins owner George Marshall called him a “good boy”; the less polite used the term “amiable mouse”4 or the “boy wonder.”
That was a colossal miscalculation. Rozelle became the most consequential commissioner in the history of American sports. He gave notice early on that he was willing to act with the authority of a czar, even to his elders. In 1962 he fined one of the NFL’s founders, George Halas of the Chicago Bears (see the 1925 entry on Red Grange), for intemperate remarks about officiating.5 In 1963 he exercised his czarist prerogative again, suspending two stars, Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions, for gambling.
Rozelle’s signature moment occurred in 1961. When he took over, the game was healthier than it had ever been; average attendance had risen from 23,356 in 1950 to 43,617 by the end of the decade.6 But Rozelle sensed that there was a much bigger market to be tapped, and that television was the way to do it. Taking a page from Lamar Hunt of the detested American Football League (AFL; see 1959 entry), Rozelle coaxed the NFL’s owners to agree to a unified, league-wide television contract—and to divvy up the loot equally. It took an act of Congress to make this structure legal, and he got that, too. In the first deal negotiated on these terms, the league got $9.3 million from CBS, a quantum leap;7 two years later, the figure was almost $28 million.8
This agreement, as well as other forms of revenue sharing, established the foundation for the NFL’s financial stability and competitiveness. Every time a contract was due to be renewed, Rozelle won better and better terms. The boy wonder was now the golden boy. Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney dubbed him “a gift from the hand of Providence.”9
An even bigger challenge was the formation of the AFL, which shook up the elder league’s complacent hegemony. Initially, Rozelle sought to throttle the infant league. There is no doubt that his desire to kill the AFL in its crib was genuine; the bad feelings between the two leagues ran deep. A by-product of the battle, though, was to keep football in the news even when it was not on the field.10 When the AFL failed to fail, Rozelle accepted that there needed to be a truce; players’ salaries were rising fast, and the owners in both leagues were feeling some pain. That would never do.
While negotiators settled the terms of the merger of the two leagues in 1966, Rozelle worked out a deft quid pro quo with two powerful Louisiana lawmakers, Senator Russell Long and Representative Hale Boggs. The duo slipped in some language authorizing the merger in an unrelated bill;11 New Orleans got a franchise 11 days later.12 The merged entity, which Rozelle led, had strong teams, rich owners, natural rivalries, and national reach. It was ready to take over American sports, and did. By 1964 a national poll found that football had overtaken baseball as the country’s favorite sport,13 and the margin has widened since. The seven most-watched television shows are all Super Bowls.
1960
ARNOLD PALMER’S VISOR FROM THE US OPEN
W
hile the beginnings and endings of a golf era cannot always be established with precision, it’s broadly true that Ben Hogan was The Man for much of the 1950s, that Arnold Palmer had taken over by the end of that decade, and that Jack Nicklaus assumed the role by 1965. And for a few hours on June 18, 1960, on the back nine of the US Open at Cherry Hills, the past, present, and future of golf battled it out. The present, in the form of Palmer, won. But the past, Hogan, was tied for the lead at the seventy-first hole, and the future, Nicklaus, was two strokes ahead with six holes to play.
Going into the last round, Palmer was seven strokes behind, in fifteenth place. When he mused that a 65 would bring him to 280, a competitive score for the US Open, even his good friend, golf writer Bob Drum, was dismissive: “You’re too far back.”1 Palmer was nettled by the response. Also, he felt that while his first three rounds of 72, 71, and 72 were pedestrian, he was just a bump here and a putt there from going seriously low. There just might be a 65 for the taking.
The place to make a dent was on the front nine. Located in the mile-high city of Denver, Cherry Hills was a great course, but its relatively short 7,004 yards played even shorter because of the altitude. The front nine was just 3,316 yards.2 There were birdies for the taking, and Palmer took ’em—six in the first seven holes. He made the turn in 30. A good start, but a long way to go; at this point, there were 11 players within three strokes of the lead.3 Two of them were Hogan, 47, who wanted very much to win a record fifth US Open, and Nicklaus, a student at Ohio State with a rising reputation.
By the twelfth hole Nicklaus was five under and in the lead. Palmer, Hogan, and two others trailed by a stroke. But Nicklaus three-putted the thirteenth to drop into a tie. Then he three-putted 14, to go one back, tied for second with Palmer and Hogan. Hogan birdied 15, making a nice 20-footer, and now he was tied for the lead with Palmer; a par on 16 kept him in position. Always known for his precision as a ball-striker, Hogan had hit every green in regulation—as he had in the third round as well.
At the seventeenth then, Hogan and Palmer were tied for the lead, at four under, with Nicklaus one back. Two pars would bring Hogan home in 280 and put some pressure on Palmer to match that or risk doing one better. The man the Scots approvingly called the “wee ice mon” for his cool and steady play could surely find two pars. Maybe he could have, but he decided to play aggressively. On his third shot of the par five, he went for the pin, which was sited perhaps 15 feet from a pond. Using his wedge, Hogan landed the ball almost exactly where he intended. “Almost” was not good enough; the ball spun and then splashed. Bogey. Angry but still fighting, Hogan again went for birdie on the eighteenth, but his effort to rip a big drive backfired, and he found water again. Triple-bogey. It must have been heartbreaking to watch, but Nicklaus was busy making his own mistakes, playing the last six holes in three over.
When Nicklaus and Hogan finished, Palmer was on the seventeenth, aware that he needed two pars for victory. And that seemed both doable and appropriate. After his electric start, Palmer had spent the back nine racking up par after par (plus one birdie) while all the other contenders imploded. So he now collected two more—and hit the magic number he had speculated would win, 280. His 65 was to that point the lowest round ever shot by the winner in the final of the Open. He jumped, whooped, and threw this visor into the air.
Nicklaus was second, two shots behind, the best showing for an amateur since 1933; six men tied for third, and Hogan tied for ninth. He would never come so close again; he could see the future coming. Hogan would tell the press he had played “with a kid who should have won this Open by 10 shots”—a compliment with a sting in the tail, and one Nicklaus never forgot.4 Palmer went home with a check for $14,4005 and notions of winning the Grand Slam.
The idea of a modern Grand Slam was relatively new; it didn’t exist in 1953, when Hogan won the first three legs but couldn’t compete at the PGA because it overlapped with the British Open. But the idea had been coalescing; in fact, Palmer published an essay in the Saturday Evening Post, “I Want That Grand Slam,”6 in which he maintained that a professional Slam should be the US and British Opens, plus the Masters and the PGA. Like everything he did at that time, it got people’s attention. Having won the 1960 Masters in dramatic fashion (birdieing the last two holes) and now the US Open, Palmer was halfway there. Next stop: the British Open, which he would play for the first time.
Today, of course, The Open is a highlight on every US pro’s calendar. In 1960, it wasn’t. Plane fares were expensive, and the British courses had been known to befuddle, even embarrass, American pros. St. Andrews had humbled Bobby Jones himself (see the 1930 entry on him). In addition, players had to survive two qualifying rounds to get any share of a small pot; in 1960, the winner took home just $3,500.7 The Brits even used a smaller ball. In 1959, no American golfer bothered to compete.8
As the son of a golf pro, however, Palmer had a strong sense of history,9 and the 100th anniversary of the British Open, to take place at the birthplace of golf, St. Andrews, was as historic as things get. Moreover, money was fast becoming no object to him. Since his breakout year, 1958, Palmer had become what was then a rare thing—a golf superstar. It was apparently impossible to write about the man without using the word “charisma” in the first paragraph, but this was a cliché with the force of truth. He had it, as well as rugged good looks, a powerful game, a flair for the dramatic, a warm personality, and a ton of sex appeal. When TV began covering golf, the camera could not take its mechanical eye off him.
Palmer, Nicklaus would say, “took golf from being a game for the few to a sport of the masses.”10 In 1960 he led the tour with $80,738 in winnings,11 a tidy sum for the era, and he earned almost twice as much12 from his various off-course activities, ranging from exhibitions to endorsements (ketchup, golf clubs, apparel) to a piece of a golf cart company. Palmer was the first golfer to professionalize his nontournament life—and he did (and still does) enormously well out of what became a corporate empire.
At St. Andrews in 1960 he came, he saw—and came one shot shy of conquering. He shot a wonderful 68 on the last round to tie the course record, but Australia’s Kel Nagle broke it, to finish one ahead. Still, Palmer made a lot of friends, and he reignited interest in the British Open, among both fans and other players. When he won in both 1961 and 1962, bringing tons of media and tourists in his wake, the tournament became an essential stop on the golf calendar.
1962
BILL RUSSELL’S 10,000-REBOUND BALL
B
ill Russell is the greatest winner in team sports. From 1957 to 1969 his Boston Celtics won 11 championships; he was the only player to be part of all of them. In addition, he won two national titles at the University of San Francisco and, in 1956, an Olympic gold medal. He also won five most valuable player awards.
Russell played defense like no one before him, and in a way that influenced everyone who came after. Psychologically intimidating, he dominated games from the defensive end, something that came as a revelation. His offensive statistics were useful but not gaudy, an average of 15.1 points per game for his career. But he didn’t need to pour in points for the Celtics to win, which is all that mattered to him.
When Russell joined the pros for the 1956–1957 season, pro hoops was still in its awkward phase, just seven years past the merger that created the National Basketball Association. There were franchises in Rochester and Fort Wayne, but not in Chicago or Los Angeles. Teams often played in low-rent venues and traveled on the cheap.
Russell quickly became the game’s first black superstar, in a league with only about 15 African American players.1 His was not a cuddly or anodyne public face. He frequently refused to give autographs and was frosty to the press. He once called basketball “the most shallow thing in the world”2 and was openly critical of America’s—and Boston’s—racial hypocrisies.
Russell would have been great anywhere, but he could not have landed in a better place than Boston. His previous relationships with coaches had been unfriendly and adversarial,3 but he clicked right away with Red Auerbach, who recognized his strengths. The Celtics had the core of a great team, including Bob Cousy and Bill Sharman, but it is no coincidence that they didn’t win a title until Russell arrived to anchor the defense.4 The next year, when he injured his ankle in the final, they faltered. Then they reeled off eight in a row. No one else, before or since, has won more than three straight. “We don’t fear the Celtics without Bill Russell. Take him out and we can beat them,” Lakers coach John Kundla said after the 1959 finals. “He’s the guy who whipped us psychologically. Russell has our club worrying every second.”5
The Celtics had only seven set plays; the offense revolved around getting turnovers or taking the ball off the boards. That was Russell’s specialty; he had a PhD in the geometry of basketball, as well as excellent timing and anticipation. This enabled him to out-rebound even bigger men. In 1962 he grabbed the ball shown here for his 10,000th rebound; for his career, he had 21,620 (an average of 22.5 per game)6 and recorded 9 of the top 20 seasons.7
Russell made the defensive rebound an offensive weapon. Before he even hit the floor, he could get the ball to the outlet, and the fast break would be on. This style of play required a high degree of intelligence, teamwork, and trust. Auerbach therefore sought, and found, men who were great teammates as well as great players. As a result, the Celtics became that rare organization anywhere in the 1950s and 1960s—multiracial and harmonious. There were no divas and no black or white cliques;8 the locker-room ribbing was both merciless and color blind. Russell remembered how one of his teammates mocked his brooding reputation: “I’d find him hunched over in the locker room with his fist on his chin, like Rodin’s Thinker, scowling ridiculously.” When Russell came in from the showers, he might see players sashaying around the locker room, modeling his stylish clothes.9
That attitude came from the top. Owner Walter Brown was genuinely beloved.10 The Celtics believed in Auerbach, who said he made decisions based only on what would help the team win. His actions proved it. In his first year as the Celtics coach, in 1950, Auerbach drafted the league’s first black player, Charles Cooper.11 In 1965 the team was the first to play five black starters, and three years later he named the first black head coach in any pro sport: Russell, who led the team to two titles in three years.
Russell’s prickly relationship to the game continued after his retirement. When the team wanted to raise his jersey to the rafters, he told Auerbach he would do it only in an empty Boston Garden, with a few teammates present.12 Three years later, he made it clear he did not want to be inducted into the Hall of Fame (he was anyway). But when it came time for the Celtics to honor Auerbach in 1985, Russell did return for that. Why? “Red Auerbach is my friend.”13
The NBA’s Coach of the Year Award is named after Auerbach; the MVP award for the finals is named after Russell. And that seems right. Together, they made the Celtics great and the NBA better.
1966
MARVIN MILLER’S UNION CONTRACT
T
wo men transformed postwar baseball: Jackie Robinson (see the 1947 entry) and Marvin Miller. Robinson opened the game to people of talent, regardless of color. Miller enabled that talent to have a say in their destiny—and to profit from their skills.
When someone says, “It’s not about the money,” it’s reasonable to assume that it is. In the case of the baseball players’ union, however, it was not entirely about the money. The players had justified grievances that went much deeper. Specifically, due to the reserve clause, they had no say in where they played, and because of custom, they had almost no say in anything else.
The reserve clause, which dated to 1878 and eventually became a mandatory part of every contract, stated that players were the property of the team that signed them. Forever. Simply by enduring, the clause gained a kind of legitimacy. In congressional hearings in 1951, for example, a number of players, including Jackie Robinson, actually testified in favor of it.1 They had absorbed the idea that baseball would collapse in a heap without it.
There were other concerns, however, including the pension plan and working conditions. In 1954 the players started the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA). This had a few minor successes, but it had only one part-time executive and acted as an interest group rather than a full-blown union.
On July 1, 1966, that changed forever, when the MLBPA hired a longtime labor executive, Marvin Miller, as its first paid, full-time executive director. The picture on the following page shows that first contract; his confident signature is on the lower right. Miller had two great advantages. First, he knew labor law cold. Second, he was an outsider. Where baseball people saw practices such as the reserve clause as engraved on horsehide tablets, for example, Miller considered it “the most abominable thing I’d ever seen.”2
He was schooled in the facts of baseball life early on, when the owners summoned him a few weeks after he started, to inform him that they were changing the basis of their pension contributions. No discussion, no negotiation; here’s the deal, thanks for coming. Then it was Miller time. He proceeded to school them in the facts of labor law. You can’t do that, he told them. The MLBPA is a duly empowered collective bargaining agent—and that means you have to talk to me. Round 1 to Miller, by a technical knockout.3
In 1968 he negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement (CBA), winning a substantial increase in the minimum salary (from $7,000 to $10,000)4 and establishing some rules of engagement. It wasn’t easy. The owners, in the words of the MLBPA general counsel, Dick Moss, were both “hostile and patronizing”; they fought tooth and nail over everything, from meal money to baseball card fees.5 In 1970 Miller negotiated another CBA. Although this did not deal directly with the reserve clause, it contained a bomb, hidden in plain sight in the language of Article X, that would later explode the owners’ comfortable superiority. This was the establishment of binding arbitration to resolve player grievances.6
For a time it didn’t seem to matter. Management saw off Curt Flood’s courageous challenge to the system when he opposed his trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia before the 1970 season.7 In June 1972 the Supreme Court rejected Flood’s argument, on antitrust grounds, that he had the right to negotiate with teams other than the one that had signed him once his contract expired. The justices described the sport’s antitrust exemption as an “established aberration” that it was up to Congress to change.8 Between the lines, they advised baseball to play nicer. The owners failed to take the hint.
Nor did they appear to recognize how the game had changed with regard to the MLBPA. In early 1972 the players went on strike, mostly over pension issues. The owners didn’t believe they would do it, but they did. Then management was sure they would fracture. They didn’t. After 13 days and the loss of 86 regular season games, the owners blinked—and got their first inkling that the union was for real.
Although Flood’s lawsuit had failed, it was a useful failure that told Miller he could not look to the courts for action on the reserve clause. The case also brought the issue to public attention, and many people began to question, like Flood, the decency of a system that looked in all essentials like indentured servitude.
And Miller kept chipping away, improving conditions bit by bit while waiting for the right moment to strike at the reserve clause. One break came in 1974, when Catfish Hunter, the Hall of Fame pitcher, won a grievance against the Oakland A’s owner, Charles Finley, for failing to fund an annuity promised in his contract.9 The game’s independent arbitrator, Peter Seitz—the human form of the arbitration time bomb planted in Article X—ruled that Finley had indeed violated the contract, and that Hunter could sell his services on the open market. This he promptly did, signing with the Yankees for $3.75 million for five years, about seven times what he was making with the A’s. That opened players’ eyes to the reality that their market value—if a market could be established—was much higher than their pay.
With the authority of the arbitrator established, the next step was to figure out how to challenge the reserve clause itself. The language of the standard player contract read that if a player refused to sign, the club could “renew the contract for a period of one year.” Baseball had always interpreted this as one year, year after year, a perpetual renewal machine. Miller thought otherwise. Pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally agreed to play out their contracts and thus provide the basis for a test case.
Again, the case went to Seitz. The owners argued that baseball would descend into chaos and certain ruin without the reserve clause staying exactly the way it was.10 Miller and the MLBPA argued that a year meant 365 days, not forever. Again, Seitz agreed with the union. He had barely finished reading his decision when he was handed a note telling him that baseball no longer needed his services, but the decision stood. Messersmith, who became baseball’s first true free agent, promptly signed for more than double what the Dodgers had been offering.11
In the next CBA, the players and owners worked out a structure to allow players free agency after six years of service. It was a compromise that rewarded clubs for developing talent while allowing players to control part of their professional destiny. In its essentials, this system still exists.12
Settling a framework for free agency did not, of course, herald an era of good feelings. There have been numerous strikes (1980, 1981, 1985, 1994–1995) and lockouts (1973, 1976, and 1990).13 The loss of the entire 1994 postseason disgusted fans and probably killed the Montreal Expos. And while the MLBPA was surely on the right side of history in its first decade, it has not always been so since, such as in its approach to steroids (see the 2007 entry).
Marvin Miller set baseball players free—and set an example for football (free agency in 1992) and basketball (1996). For almost a century, the negotiating position of the owners was “take it or leave it.” Thanks to Miller, players forged a third option. It was the difference, Miller would say, “between dictatorship and democracy.”14
And the money wasn’t bad, either. In 1966, the year the players hired Marvin Miller, the average salary in baseball was $17,664. By 1982, the year he retired, it was $245,000,15 and in 2015, it was $3.4 million.16 The changes Miller provoked also made the owners much richer. In 1973 George Steinbrenner led a consortium that bought the Yankees for $8.7 million.17 In 2015 the market value of the team was estimated at $3.2 billion.18 The least valuable team, the well-run but largely unloved Tampa Bay Rays, was worth $625 million.
Like many prophets, Miller was not honored in his own time. Three times before his death in 2012, he was up for induction into the Hall of Fame. Three times the vote fell short, as did another try in 2014. His lack of a plaque in Cooperstown is almost incomprehensible—until one remembers it was just such stubborn blindness that he fought, and usually conquered.
1967
KATHRINE SWITZER’S BIB FROM THE BOSTON MARATHON
K
athrine Switzer was not the first woman to run America’s oldest marathon; at least one woman, Roberta Gibbs, finished it as an unregistered “bandit” in 1966, after hiding in the bushes near the start.1
But Switzer is much better remembered because she was the first woman caught trying to run it. In 1967 she registered for the race under the name K. V. Switzer. It was a cold, blustery Patriots’ Day. Instead of running in her lovingly prepared burgundy shorts and top,2 Switzer ran in baggy sweats (and lipstick).3 Her fellow runners could have been under no illusions about her sex. To a man, in fact, the 740 other runners welcomed her.4
A few miles in, however, a race official in an overcoat and fedora planted himself in the middle of the road and reached out to stop her. Switzer dodged and went on. A few moments later, she heard the thud of leather chasing her from behind. The marathon codirector, Jock Semple, had spotted her figure and semi-bouffant hair and diagnosed her as female. Outraged at this feminine mistake, he lunged at Switzer and yelled, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers,” as he tried to rip her bib off; a slight tear on the upper right of the bib is visible evidence of the effort.5 With the help of friends, Switzer shrugged him off and finished in 4:20:02. (Gibbs, running as a bandit again, finished in 3:27:17.)6
The Semple/Switzer picture made front pages all over the country. Semple did himself no favors by continuing to open his mouth: “My wife is so mad at me over this,” he said at one point, that “she gave my roast beef to the dog and made me buy my own Swanson’s.”7 His colleague Will Cloney chirped, “If that girl [Switzer] were my daughter, I would spank her.” Curmudgeons, yes, and the butt of much richly deserved ridicule, but the two had their allies. The Amateur Athletic Union stripped Switzer of her membership for, among other things, running in a competition longer than the 1.5 miles then allowed for women.
Women runners would have the last laugh. Over the next four years a few more ran the marathon unofficially, and in 1972 Boston allowed them to register. Male runners had no problem sharing the roads with women, and there was no rule or law to bar them. Resistance was futile.
In the end, Semple displayed a puckish graciousness about the whole thing. Spotting Switzer at the starting line before the 1973 race, he grabbed her and said, “C’mon lass, let’s get a wee bit o’ notoriety.” And kissed her soundly.8 The two became friends, finding common ground in their love of running. Semple respected Switzer once he saw that she was a serious athlete; Switzer respected Semple for keeping the Boston Marathon going through some very lean decades. She ran Boston eight times, finishing second in 1975 with a personal best of 2:51:37. She also organized races all over the world and played a role in the addition of the women’s marathon to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.
One thing Switzer couldn’t do was to keep up with the competition. As more women took to the sport, they got much better. Nina Kuscsik won the 1972 Boston marathon in 3:10:26. In Los Angeles in 1984, Joan Benoit Samuelson, a proud daughter of New England, won the first women’s Olympic marathon in 2:24:52.
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