Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  So, it is important to remember that the media can get its images wrong: or as Danny Ainge once said about Charles Barkley, back before Barkley emerged as a national charmer (someone with far greater talent to host a nightly talk show than Jay Leno), I’ve known a lot of bad guys pretending to be good guys, but Charles is the only good guy pretending to be a bad guy I’ve ever known.

  We ought to be aware that athletes, both white and black, who are often said to be religious, might in fact be narrow-minded and bigoted. We got a reminder of that this year with the Knicks. I am also aware that athletes who are presumed to be likeable, and are portrayed as likeable, are not in fact necessarily likeable, particularly as they have in recent years become ever bigger players in the sports–popular cultural scene, paid more and more, and, of course, coddled more and more, and, of course, shielded more and more from the rules and codes of the larger society.

  We ought to remember that some of them have learned not merely the ability to spin beat reporters, but in the case of Dave Winfield, for instance, allegedly a good guy—who will ever really know?—there were virtually full-time public relations people working for him to create an aura that Winfield was a concerned citizen and a good guy. (I was once assigned a magazine piece by the New York Times on Winfield, but by the time I had dealt with all the People from Dave, Paid for by Dave—and not the Yankees—his lawyers and his own PR people—I decided he wasn’t worth bothering with.)

  “What kind of guy is X?” I once asked my friend Steve Kelley, a talented columnist for the Seattle Times, mentioning a player on the Lakers a decade ago who seemed to be unusually pleasant and personable. “He’s athlete-nice,” Kelley answered. That struck me as a shrewd assessment—and a new category. What it meant was that X was within reason amenable to dealing with the world around him, was not a raving egomaniac, and would on occasion talk with people with some degree of openness and candor, and did not expect to be catered to at all times. But it had to be done on his terms and when it suited him and that he would be open and amenable was hardly a given.

  So, Kelley was offering me a different scale on which to judge athletes, one different from measuring other human beings, other than say stars of the movies and television. Everything tends to be done on their terms, and they expect everything to be done on their terms. We are grateful for their smaller attentions and we more readily forgive their medium-sized transgressions.

  As one of Mickey Mantle’s teammates once said of him, it was a function of his charm and his fame that he could play the worst practical jokes in the world on his teammates, and everyone would laugh because it was Mickey Mantle doing it.

  So, the question about Iverson is not whether or not he is likeable. Let us assume that he is neither more or less likeable than most professional athletes, although perhaps slightly more alienated as noted by lifestyle, not surprising considering the raw nature of his childhood. Let us assume that he is as much culturally outside the reach of the average middle-class white fan as the normal son of the ghetto who never makes it to professional basketball is—that is, that there is a lot of stuff that festers there.

  I suspect Iverson would not like the average person who roots for him very much, nor would, in fact, the average person who roots for him necessarily like him if they met in a neutral setting.

  Let us assume as well, that a certain amount of raw sexist and homophobic language is not that unusual in the average locker room—although to make a CD that demeans women and mocks gays takes it a good deal further and means that we are well-advised to hold back a bit more in our enthusiasms as to who he really is.

  But here is what we should remember, and it was something pointed out to me years ago by Roger Angell, the gifted New Yorker writer, when I asked him what a player on the Red Sox was really like. “They are what they do,” he answered, wiser in the ways of being around big-time athletes than I.

  That was it. They are what they do. Which strikes me as wise and as good a definition for measuring an athlete as we have. We do not, after all, have to buy the goods they flack for, the sneakers, and the soft drinks, the sunglasses, the telephone services. We do not have to hold them up to our children as role models. We are free to tell our children that John Lewis, the heroic Georgia congressman, or my friend Ron Ridenour, the grunt who blew the whistle on My Lai who died a few years ago, are better role models than any athlete.

  But if they are what they do is the test, then Iverson passes it handsomely this year. In a nation where too many people have what is now called attitude without talent, or attitude without passion, he has, it seems to me, all three, and ironically the more passion he displays, miraculously the less attitude we see—as if he has forgotten that in addition to playing so hard he also has to stick his finger in the world’s eye.

  So, that is why I have come to admire Iverson so much this season. Having come perilously close to being exiled to Detroit (and being saved only by Matt Geiger’s refusal to go along), he has shaped up.

  All the talent and all the passion have finally been fused to something larger—team. He has gotten along with his coach. He no longer sulks when he comes out of games. He is no longer late to practice. He has not only made his teammates better, the prime test of any basketball player, but the ferocity and intensity of his game has been infectious, and his teammates seem to me to have become an extension of him.

  Everyone on that team plays hard, and they play hard all the time. You cannot put the Sixers away. If the Lakers early in the fourth quarter make a major run of 10 or 12 points, enough for most teams to be a dagger in the heart, the Sixers are immune. They are not intimidated. Back they come. They never think they are going out of a game.

  Much of this, I think, comes from the psyche of Iverson. He seems to me to be lionhearted. He is supremely talented as well. He has not just played hurt, he has played very hurt. So have his teammates.

  He has been the invincible man, refusing again and again, when faced with opponents who have superior ability, to lose. He has driven himself and his teammates to a level where they normally would not be. He has helped take a team that is, in a technical sense, not necessarily that talented, and not only lifted it to the Finals, but he has made it competitive with an L.A. team that appeared ready to roll over it just as it had rolled over everyone else lately.

  He has given us a competitive Finals. That’s worth admiring.

  * * *

  FOOTBALL

  It was football, but it was never about football. It was about belonging. On those fall Saturdays, we belonged for the first time.

  THE GAMES HARVARD PLAYS

  Inc.,

  October 1990

  * * *

  SUNDAY, BORING SUNDAY: A FAREWELL TO PRO FOOTBALL

  From New York Magazine, December 16, 1974

  I am still young enough to remember the golden age of professional football, an era which preceded by a few short years the present decline and fall of professional football. Those were great years: Tittle, Graham, Motley, Casares, Ameche, Matson, Marchetti, Lipscomb, Unitas, Moore, Rote, Gifford, Huff. The coronation, of course, was the 1958 overtime Colts–Giants championship game. Who will ever forget those years, the epic struggles of the New York defense against Jimmy Brown, or the even more epic struggles to find a good working television set, one reasonably free from electronic snow?

  They were years of twisting rabbit ears and trying to find friends who lived on the high ground. We began the era in neighborhood bars, which were the first to venture into large black-and-white sets; we moved into private homes only with the coming of mass ownership of sets. Then into bars again with the coming of color, and then, as the cable finally arrived in New York, back into the homes again. Gay Talese was the first on our block to own a color set, and many of the great Sundays were played in the immortal shadows of Talese Stadium (that is, once Nan Talese learned how to tune the set). Those were great years: it was a living part of our life, escapism at its high-quality best.

&n
bsp; Though I worked in many different cities over those years, there was always a tacit agreement among friends about Sunday: yes, we cared about the game, we knew who had the best local reception, we knew who would play on Sunday, and we would all show up. More, we were the embodiment of the modern fan. We did not root for specific teams (though, of course, in the Super Bowl we rooted for the Jets against the Colts; regionalism had some uses, though given the excitement Namath generated, we would have rooted for him if we’d lived in L.A.). We did in a perverse way root against certain teams—Dallas in particular because of its sudden infamy, and because to me at least Tom Landry was the least sympathetic of coaches, looking more like a regional director of the F.B.I. than anything else. What we really rooted for was the game itself, or more specifically, for the two-minute drill. Thus we rooted for the spread to be under seven points midway through the fourth quarter so that we could see Tittle or Conerly, or Unitas or Starr at his best. We were football sybarites rather than loyalists. But we were also good fans: we knew the game, we knew the teams, we knew their idiosyncrasies (I don’t think any of us ever lost any money betting on Roman Gabriel in a big game during his Rams years).

  In those days football seemed the almost perfect sport and it seemed unlikely that we could ever get enough. Yet even the golden years finally reached their peak, the height of an era. My own instinct is to choose the latter part of the Lombardi Era, in particular the N.F.L. championship game of 1967 when Green Bay defeated Dallas 21–17. It was a lovely match-up: Green Bay was at the height of its fierce powers; Dallas, a pre-expansion expansion team, was probably more talented but also more mechanical. It was a climactic moment: the game was so fine, the sport so good, the technological coverage of it so superior, that an offensive lineman, one of the most obscure players on the field, was able to dictate (not write) his memoirs and thus produce a major national best seller. Significantly, his title, like the game itself, was an ode to technology—Instant Replay. Yet, at this very dizzying moment, the forces which would quickly undermine the game were already at work. The leagues were in the process of merging, there had already been a common draft of far too many teams, there were football doubleheaders on the way. There was, in fact, a football glut. Soon we would be served more and more of less and less. What television did in making pro football our national sport and thereupon what television and rank commercial greed did in destroying it is a parable for our time.

  From the beginning television was crucial to the success of professional football, just as it has been crucial to its erosion (not unlike the role of television with the president: to slay the dragon we must first inflate him). The game itself had always been much better than its pretelevision status. It was, in fact, a brilliant national sport lacking only national exposure. It had been forced to compete with college football, with its great regional strengths, in a way that pro baseball, for example, had never had to compete with college baseball. It was for its loyalists (and those in many cities lucky enough to have tickets) an absolutely stunning sport. Television removed it from obscurity; its growth paralleled the growth of television in this country. Before 1956 there was only scattered hit-or-miss coverage; in 1956 CBS picked up the N.F.L. games regularly; the Colts–Giants game, which many use as a way of marking the coming of pro football, was in 1958. Now compare that with the coming of television: in 1951 there were only 10 million television sets in the country; the next year there were 15 million sets and 70 CBS affiliate stations; by 1958 there were an estimated 41 million sets and 189 CBS affiliates. We now had a truly national audience and a truly national sport.

  Football and television adapted extraordinarily well to each other. The camera has an almost whimsical ability to like or dislike people, institutions, and events. It had an instant love affair with football. Where the subtle and less violent skills of baseball were often minimized by the camera and where the geometric proportions of the game often escaped the camera’s mastery, football was quite different. The ball was large enough to see, football action centered remarkably well for the camera, and indeed the camera found action where the naked eye, preoccupied with following the ball, had seen only vague blurs. There were, we discovered, plays within plays. Offensive linemen struggling with defensive giants became as absorbing as following the ball itself. In the Sixties, video tape came and allowed even more postplay action. The naked eye had clearly been outstripped by technology. And if baseball seemed by its very pace to be designed for a more leisurely America, an America where Lincoln and Douglas could debate for hours on the courthouse steps (in large part because the audience, having spent hours driving by wagon to hear them debate, wanted its time and money’s worth), football was again different. Television had speeded up the pace of American life because it demanded action and because action could be filmed; football was part of a growing demand for action and confrontation—socially, politically, and athletically.

  What also made the game so good in those days was the quality of the teams and the sense of identity that they projected. There were only twelve teams and they were, by and large, good ones. They had character and identity and continuity. College football was limited by a lack of continuity; great players came to college, but quickly graduated. Now, with the coming of pro football, the continuity was prolonged. A player’s cycle might last seven or eight years; a team’s cycle—the coming together of seven or eight truly great players—might be four or five years. This continuity was crucial to fan commitment; the longer the duration of a team’s character, the longer the fan was likely to be genuinely interested.

  Teams coming together like that over a long period of time began to have genuine characters and identities which the fans could readily grasp. And here again was the essence of pro football at its best. It was not good players against other players, but identifiably great players against other great players. And as such the game transcended regionalism and became, in the best sense, a national sport. The perils and troubles of the regional team were secondary; even if the Giants were lagging, the interest in pro football continued—there were so many other good teams to watch. One reason that the sport was so good was that the mathematics of it was so good. By and large there are about ten or twelve blue-chip players a year coming into the pros and about 50 players worthy of pro selection. In a pre-expansion draft of twelve teams each club could draft four times within the first 50. A weak team could strengthen itself reasonably quickly; a strong team could nonetheless replenish some of its gaps. One of the agonies for a Jets fan for the last couple of years has been the knowledge that the weaknesses in the team are appearing much faster than the capacity to replenish them, that the team steadily gets older and has more weaknesses, while Namath, the superstar, also becomes older.

  Obviously some sort of expansion was inevitable; in a country of 200 million, and given the talent bank in America, I suspect the ideal number would have been sixteen. But under the projected Rozelle expansion plans, the league will go to at least 32 teams; this means that the reward for being the best team in football will be to pick the thirty-second best college football player in the country; that is, a player two-thirds of the way down on the third round of what would have been the old draft. (For an even better example of how expansion can ruin a sport, I give you hockey, where in a decade the sport went from one league with six teams to two leagues of 28 teams, all of this from a talent bank of 21 million Canadians.)

  Clearly the very success of pro football in the Sixties led to its undoing. It was an irresistible temptation: here, every Sunday, millions of the nation’s most affluent citizens were locking themselves into rooms for three and six hours with television sets. Seventy-eight million Americans watching on a given day! Clearly anything as good as that could and should go on forever. Clearly also, the more teams, the more games, and the more games, the more commercial possibilities. If CBS could have its league, NBC would have a league too. Without NBC’s television contract, the A.F.L. might well have failed, and, most likely
, only two or three of its teams would have been incorporated into the old league. But television guaranteed survival of even the bad teams. Everyone got richer and richer. Greed was at the heart of it.

  Instead of the controlled expansion of the past there was now a quantum jump in teams and in the number of games. Then a merger and a common draft. Which meant that overnight the quality of the N.F.L. roster was cut in half and the number of truly great players on any given team cut even more drastically: every great player lessens your chance of ever again drafting another great player. Where once there might have been six or eight great players on a team, now there will be two or three. The few interesting teams this year—Miami, New England, Buffalo—were, not surprisingly, the A.F.L. teams at the very bottom at the time of the combined draft.

  I realize that I write this farewell to football as a resident of a city possessing two genuinely bad teams with little hope of any short-term improvement. But in the past that would not have mattered; the rest of the league would have been enticing. Now, by and large, the rest of the league is boring, more and more faceless, characterless teams with less and less identity; the chances of two interesting teams’ playing on a given Sunday are very slim. The great strength of pro football a decade ago was that it was a national sport; now, with expansion, it has largely become a regional sport. Too many teams with too little talent, the quality eroding faster than the draft can replace it. There is a slow but inevitable convergence on competent, boring mediocrity. Eventually everyone will have a record of 7-5 except for a few teams which are 6-6 and a few more which are 5-7 (Curt Gowdy will just as inevitably hail this as a sign of improvement in the league, the fact that any team can beat any other team on a given Sunday).