Sports in America

by James A. Michener

  The gravamen of the case was twofold. First, governing bodies can no longer tell eighteen-year-old voters where they must live. Second, the possibility that a boy, through his athletic prowess, may gain a college scholarship and later a contract for hundreds of thousands of dollars with a professional team is a property interest which may not lightly be abused; an eighteen-year-old boy is free to move to whatever school can best advance his economic interests. American sports are going to discover a lot of new horizons in the future, and this case indicates where some of them are going to be.

  My friend Robert Casey, Auditor General of Pennsylvania, turned up a cute trick the other day. In the course of his investigations into various aspects of education, he found that Mount Carmel Area School District, long a powerhouse in coal region football, seemed to be allowing boys with unusual athletic ability to attend the eighth grade twice. This had the commendable result of delaying application of the state’s rule that once a boy enters ninth grade, he has only four years of eligibility left. Mount Carmel players were entering the ninth grade a year older and a year stronger than boys in other schools. This manipulative process, known as redshirting, had reached down into the grade school!

  A closer investigation showed that it was not the Mount Carmel schools that were responsible for this peculiar state of affairs. It was the parents, who realized that if their boys could move into high school older and stronger, they could play as freshmen and accumulate good statistics, which could give them a better chance of winning university scholarships later on. In college they could be redshirted again, which would give them an enormous advantage in winning a professional contract for real money. If a father has a son with athletic ability, he must plan the boy’s career carefully, and the planning should begin no later than the eighth grade.

  Pressures in this area are so lethal that I fully expect to find that some parents are redshirting their sons in sixth grade, so they’ll have a better chance to excel in grammar school, etc., etc., etc.

  The logical consequence of this breakdown of common sense and decency came in the summer of 1973 at Akron, Ohio, where the thirty-sixth annual running of the Soap Box Derby ended in scandal.

  The name Soap Box, of course, had already become a travesty. Boys whose predecessors in 1938 had coasted down the incline in soap boxes fixed with axles and wheels using peach-basket rims as steering wheels, now used ultra-sophisticated mechanical marvels that could cost as much as $20,000 each. Some had been tested in wind tunnels and all had been honed to engineering perfection, not by the boy drivers but by professional engineers who appreciated what the Soap Box Derby had become: a deathly struggle between clever men who knew how to build cars that would come close to breaking every rule in the book … and win.

  There are many ways to cheat in the Derby, but why anyone would want to remains a mystery, because the prize is not excessive: a gold cup, a gold ring and a $7,500 scholarship. The children aged eleven to fifteen are supposed to build their own cars and spend not more than $75 in doing so. The cheating begins when men with top engineering skills build the fuselages, using molds for the handling of liquid plastics. A good fuselage might cost $900. A super-extra axle might run $250.

  An important way to cheat concerned the tires. They could be treated with a highly penetrating liquid which expanded the rubber temporarily. When it evaporated, the tires would contract, making them smoother and able to roll faster.

  Another way to cheat was to slip in extra weight, so that the force of gravity had a larger mass on which to work. Also, the bearings could be doctored up.

  It was claimed later, with some evidence, that many of the 138 finalists in 1973, including quite a few girls and contestants from Canada, Germany and Venezuela, had cheated in these and other ingenious ways, but it remained for the team sponsoring Jimmy Gronen of Boulder, Colorado, to come up with the winning gimmick.

  Jimmy was originally from Dubuque, Iowa—note how many of the children caught in such messes have left home to live with friends or relatives—but he had moved to Boulder to live with an uncle, Robert Lange, Sr., an engineering wizard who had made a fortune by inventing a superior plastic ski boot and whose son, Robert Junior, had won the Derby the year before. The remarkable car in which Robert Junior had raced mysteriously disappeared as soon as investigators wished to inspect it, which caused speculation among the men who built cars for others to use. It was suspected that Lange Senior might have pulled a ‘fasty.’

  So fourteen-year-old Jimmy Gronen began to build his $75 racer. First a female model of the fuselage was constructed at the Lange workshop. Then liquid plastic was poured in to form an aerodynamic monocoque, which was then sandblasted, polished and perfected. When special axles had been attached to a rigid cast frame, the entire contraption was shipped to California for testing in the Cal Tech wind tunnel.

  As a result of those findings, the weight of the car was subtly altered. To accomplish this, Lange had to buy four sensitive doctor’s scales, one for each wheel, and adjustments were made in distribution of body weight so that a perfect harmonic balance was achieved.

  Then came what professional racers call ‘the goody.’ A Soap Box car has no engine; it coasts down a steep hill solely by gravity. In order to keep the noses of the cars precisely in line, a heavy metal plate rises out of the pavement, so hinged that when the starting gun sounds, the plate falls backward and downhill into a recess in the road, allowing the cars to move forward, pulled ahead by simple gravity.

  Robert Lange, Sr., realized that if his car carried a strong electric magnet hidden in the nose, that magnet, when activated just before the race began, would follow the backward fall of the iron plate, making his car spring forward just a little faster than the opponent’s. And that slight advantage of an initial spurt might be just enough to win.

  Looking at a mock-up of the contraption that Lange produced for the 1973 race—and perhaps for the 1972 race also, although as I said, that car has disappeared—I cannot comprehend how the inspectors who examine the cars before the race starts could have missed finding it. In the rear of the car, hidden under the fuselage, was a large, heavy battery of the kind used to start trucks on cold mornings. Running from the battery the entire length of the car were two electric cables. In the nose of the car there was a large coil magnet, which would become active as soon as electricity reached it from the battery. But how to activate the system?

  A special set of cables ran from the battery to a point just behind the driver’s plastic helmet, and there Lange ringed a switch that could be activated by backward pressure of his nephew’s head.

  Jimmy won. His ultra-sophisticated car leaped off the starting blocks, drawn forward by the magnet. The sanded aerodynamic fuselage, on the illegal axles, carrying suspicious tires, sped down the hill to victory and glory, followed by a national scandal. And all this preposterous nonsense in a race for fourteen-year-olds. (A girl was awarded second place.)

  The rest of the story is simply told. Because of the national outcry, officials simply had to do something, although it seems probable that they had been aware for some years of growing infractions. In a non-judicial arrangement supervised by the courts in Boulder, Robert Lange, Sr., agreed to contribute $2,000 to a boys’ club. Derby executives promised to outlaw the worst abuses, like magnets and professional axles, and intimated that manufacturing devices like female molds for plastic monocoques should be forbidden.

  It was left to Lange to summarize what has been called the Boys’ Watergate. In a series of interviews he proved markedly unrepentant:

  It is common knowledge that eleven-year-olds cannot build winning racers. That was why there were adult professional builders who build cars for sale to participants or race the cars themselves with young, lightweight drivers who are known as chauffeurs.

  After seeing my nephew work hundreds of hours to build his own car, knowing that he would be competing in Akron against professionally built cars, and against cars that would be in violation of
the official rules, and having heard that some fast cars in Akron would be equipped with a magnetic nose, I determined that he should build and install a magnetic nose so as to be competitive. I knew that this was a violation of the official Derby rules and consider it now to be a serious mistake in judgment.

  He concluded by saying that cheating had become so rife at Akron that all he did was to even his nephew’s odds in a dirty system.

  Any writer with a little time could prolong this series of horror stories interminably. The evil always begins with adults who desperately want to win championships which were denied them when they were boys. They use children, often not their own, to achieve this dream, and in doing so, pervert the normal experiences of youth. With shocking frequency they destroy the child’s interest in further sports, and the outcome of their overly ambitious programs is apt to be a cynical realization by the children that they have been misused.

  Bill Veeck tells the archetypal story of adults and children competing in a hyped-up world. He cites the meanest pitcher in the history of baseball: ‘He was never reluctant to concede that he was mean enough to knock down his mother. “But only if she was digging in at the plate.” ’

  Unlike most professional baseball players, this pitcher wanted his son to be a Little League star and one day he took him out for some batting practice. The boy dug in, took a toehold, and laced one of his father’s pitches against the outfield wall. On his next pitch he fired right at his son’s head, knocking him flat. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he asked a bystander. ‘The little bastard hit my curve ball, didn’t he?’

  What should parents who want the best for their children do? My answer stems from a series of events which surfaced during the last days of World War II.

  In northern France, where the fighting had been heavy, many children were left orphaned. In one district they were piled into an existing orphanage run by Catholic nuns. Overworked, and with no chance of finding help, these good women kept their charges in small rooms, clothed them decently, and fed them regularly. But love and boisterous games and the knockabout relationships that children prize were not possible.

  In a neighboring district there was no orphanage, and the only thing the townspeople could do was throw the abandoned children into a home containing insane women, imbeciles and worthless paupers. There the children had few clothes and less food. They were tossed helter-skelter among the crazy women and were, in a memorable phrase from one report, ‘kicked around like footballs.’

  When liberation came, the Free French forces, aided by British and American troops, rushed into this district—and what do you suppose they found?

  At the orphanage the children were listless, underweight, underdeveloped in speech, vacant of eye and so damaged psychologically and emotionally that they would never recover. The crucial, formative years of their lives had been aborted for the simple reason that they had had no human beings to interact with, no rowdy games in which to test themselves against their fellows. In spite of the fact that they could walk and move, they were perpetually crippled.

  On the other hand, the children who had grown up in the insane asylum were robust, hearty kids, undernourished, to be sure, but lively and well adjusted both to the crazy adults and to their child playmates. Some had physical scars where the women had knocked them about, but they had healed. And every child had formed some deep attachment to one or another of the women. They knew what love and movement and fighting with one’s peers signified, and they were well prepared for adjustment to normal living that would now be possible outside the asylum walls.

  I believe that children, like little animals, require play and competition in order to develop. I believe that play is a major agency in civilizing infants. I believe that big-muscle movement helps the infant establish his balance within the space in which he will henceforth operate. I believe that competition, reasonably supervised, is essential to the full maturing of the individual.

  Children should have the widest possible experience of play—there are ‘exercises’ that even two-month-old infants can be given by their parents—but heavily organized competition with end-of-season championships should not be initiated before the age of twelve, if then.

  A sense of competition is natural in children, provides healthy emotional outlets and must not be suppressed; but it should not be exaggerated, either. Adults must not dominate the play of children; practices such as recruiting, redshirting and fake adoption are repugnant.

  On balance, I think it permissible for a community to sponsor things like Little League baseball and Pop Warner football, but only if those in charge follow carefully the latest counsel from such associations; the men in the head offices have been warned where the dangers lie and are taking steps to eliminate them.

  *On December 30, 1975, Peter McGovern, Little League president who had taken the abuse when Taiwan was outlawed, announced that the ban against foreign teams had been lifted. By a vote of 12–1 directors of the league decided to reissue invitations, making the competition once more a real world series. This was probably a mistake, but McGovern did make certain stipulations: the foreign teams could not practice all year long; they must abide by the rule governing maximum population of the area from which the team is chosen; and they must adhere to the principle that ‘the important thing isn’t to win but to have fun.’ Tell that not to Taiwan but to Destiny’s Darlings up in Schenectady, or to the American coaches preparing for next year’s series!

  FIVE

  Women in Sports

  Because I attended a small Quaker college which had been co-educational since the day of its inception in 1869, I had always been vaguely informed about women in sports. Our co-eds were good in basketball and some had played on all-American teams in field hockey. We were proud of them.

  But in spite of this favorable indoctrination, I visualized women’s sports as something off to one side. Although 51 percent of our student body were women, I saw nothing improper in giving them the smaller gym, the inconvenient hours in the pool and the farthest fields, because it was men’s sports that really counted. Alumni never crowded to watch a girls’ hockey game, and none of our women graduates ever pitched in professional ball the way George Earnshaw and Curly Ogden had done, or played football for the Frankford Yellow Jackets, like Pete Richards.

  Women were a cherished and respected part of everything at Swarthmore—professors, deans, board of managers, librarians—but in athletics they did not need to be taken seriously.

  And then one day I saw the budget of the university I shall be discussing in Chapter VII. It was a state institution, supported by tax funds, with a student body divided fifty-fifty between men and women. The athletic department had $3,900,000 to spend, and of this, women received exactly $31,000, a little less than eight-tenths of one percent. On the face of it this was outrageous.

  I decided to draw up an honest allocation of such a fund, and to do so I would apply my three criteria of fun, health and public entertainment.

  The first would argue for an equal division of the money, since women are certainly entitled to as much fun in life as men, especially when such fun fortifies mental health. But our traditions are such that in all branches and aspects of our society we tend to budget more for men’s recreation than for women’s, and I was prepared to justify a slight imbalance here.

  The second criterion, health, permitted no imbalance. Women are 50 percent of our human pool, and their health is at least as important as men’s. Indeed, since they bear and nurture the next generation, I incline toward a belief that their health is more important. To allow public schools and universities, supported by public money, to put the health of women in an inferior position is criminal. The worst abuse in the entire field of American sports is our denigration of women where health programs are concerned, and I was not prepared to accept any rationalizations on this point. I think the present conduct disgraceful.

  Now, if the public interest were concerned only with Criteria I and II,
and if the athletic budget had to be divided only between them, decisions would be easy, say sixteen tennis courts for men and twelve for women, since experience has shown that men will use the courts a little more frequently. Absolute equality would govern the use of the swimming pool, and if only one gymnasium were available, women would be assured of getting some of the good hours. I would not hesitate to serve on a committee trying to iron out such problems, for I would feel confident that within a period of two or three years we could approximate a rough justice that would satisfy most students. If I were the final arbitrator, my first impulse would probably be to divide the $3,900,000 budget into something like $2,100,000 for men and $1,800,000 for women (men 54 percent; women 46 percent), and I believe that both men and women would ultimately approve this division after some preliminary bellyaching about details, which I would be eager to adjust.

  It is with the third criterion, public entertainment, that the trouble comes. A big university with a big-time athletic program catering to public spectators who pay to see games, requires a large football stadium, which no women’s team can yet fill. It also requires a large indoor arena for basketball and ice hockey, and again no women’s team can fill that, except perhaps in the atypical case of Iowa, where girls’ games outdraw boys’, or the gratifying emergence of Immaculata College in suburban Philadelphia and Delta State in Mississippi, whose girls’ basketball teams were a 1975 sensation. The games that men play to entertain the public require more expensive equipment for larger squads supervised by more coaches. Almost everything men athletes do in a big way costs more, so that even if outside box-office money were not involved, my proposed $2,100,000–$1,800,000 division of the budget would prove unworkable. If the big-time public presentation of sports is to continue, men need more money than women.