A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (12 page)

These sturdy German-Americans continued to excel in
sports over the next decade. The University of Michigan, in
particular, featured numerous All-Americans with names like Schulz,
Maulbetsch, Oosterbahn, Friedman, Pommerening, and Heikkinen. Big
league heroes included the likes of Lou Gehrig and Harry Heilman.
This alarmed Hitler, who knew that if he were to conquer the world
militarily, at some point the United States would have to be
defeated. Hitler feared that the “best Germans” were no longer in
Germany. The most courageous, forthright and impressive ones had
long ago departed Germany for America in the 19
^th
Century. Their offspring were now entrenched American citizens. One
of them, a former West Point football star named Dwight D.
Eisenhower, would stand in Hitler’s way when he eventually tried to
carry out his maniacal plans.

Hitler also figured that the “flower of German
manhood” had been lost in the carnage of World War I. America’s
“German manhood” had survived intact, since U.S. casualties were
scant compared with the other warring nations. Now these survivors
were running off-tackle and blasting long home runs. Hitler would
have been well advised to follow his initial instincts against
opposing such forces of nature.

USC broke new racial ground. In 1925, their first
All-American football star was a black man, also of Cherokee
heritage, named Brice Taylor. He was also handicapped by the use of
only one hand, but still excelled on the playing field. In the
1920s and 1930s, USC dominated in football, elevated by its
incredible rivalry with Notre Dame. Stanford coach Pop Warner left
the school out of frustration over his inability to defeat the
Trojans. UCLA replaced California as a major conference rival.
Standards of excellence separating Los Angeles from San Francisco
were being formed. When the 1932 L.A. Olympics were a big success,
this caused further angst in the north. When Hollywood went to
“talkies,” it revolutionized the industry, immediately providing
Los Angeles with a world class industry that overshadowed the Bay
Area even more. Political power shifted to the Southland as
population growth created more Congressional delegates.

Both California and Stanford reacted with sour
grapes. Unable to defeat USC, they accused the Trojans of
“professionalism” and “academic impropriety.” When many USC
football heroes went on to sterling careers in the law, medicine,
politics, the entertainment industry, business, journalism, and the
arts, these accusations were exposed as lies.

The Great Depression consolidated much of the
political fissure between the Bay Area and the Southland. The ports
of San Francisco became breeding grounds for the labor movement.
Nascent Communism began to take root through these movements, often
with violent results. The success of the Olympics infused Los
Angeles with a more optimistic outlook. The Southern and Midwest
entrepreneurial spirit of the Southland – many Southerners were
Scots-Irish who tended to their own needs out of fear of the
government – combined with Christian sensibilities to ward off
efforts by the Communists to take root in Los Angeles. A strong
Christian revival movement had sprung up in the 1920s, largely as a
result of the catastrophe of world war. Los Angeles, with its
wide-open spaces and rural enclaves, had taken to it with great
fervor. “Tent revivals” were common in the area, and the Coliseum
was the scene of large-scale Christian gatherings.

In the 1920s and 1930s, California produced an
extraordinary number of great athletes: baseball stars, football
heroes, basketball players, tennis players, swimmers, tracksters,
Olympians. San Francisco probably had the greatest all-around
collection of baseball talent in America, but Los Angeles was a
close second. One L.A. high school, Fremont, would produce more big
league ballplayers than any other. Junior college sports became big
in the Golden State, too.

World War II had an enormous effect up and down the
West Coast. Shipbuilding yards and Naval bases were established in
Seattle, San Francisco, Richmond, Oakland, Vallejo, Sausalito, Los
Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego. Huge numbers of Southern blacks
moved to California, with tremendous effects on politics, society,
the economy and sports.

More servicemen passed though the state on their way
to and from the front, or to train at numerous military stations.
They fell in love with what they saw, often deciding to stay once
they became civilians again. A tremendous number of officer
candidates attended OCS at Southern Cal, UCLA, California and
Stanford, some even playing sports at those schools. When the war
concluded, California grew more than ever before.

In 1947, a very important event occurred with major
implications. The Pacific Coast Conference and the Big 10 signed an
agreement to play each other in the Rose Bowl every New Year’s Day.
Up until this time, the Rose Bowl had been dominated by USC, who
usually played Southern schools. Duke, Alabama, Tennessee and
Georgia Tech were among the teams from Dixie who tested their
national mettle against West Coast champions in Pasadena. The Big
10 had not played in the Rose Bowl since Cal pasted Ohio State,
28-0 in 1921. In succeeding years, the prestige of Michigan,
Minnesota and the Big 10 Conference had suffered because their
teams did not play in bowls. It was increasingly apparent that if a
team were to be considered a legitimate National Champion, they
needed to win a bowl game as USC had already done nine teams.

If the West Coast was considered superior prior to
World War II, that notion was dispelled when the Big 10 dominated
PCC teams in Rose Bowl games for the better part of a decade
beginning on January 1, 1947. Finally, the West Coast population
surge of the post-war era, which swelled the size of California
little leagues, high schools, and then colleges, helped the West
Coast gain parity with the Big 10 which, along with Notre Dame, had
established the Midwest as football central USA. The biggest
beneficiary of this dynamic was UCLA. As a public school, they
accommodated the largest student body and therefore had a huge
talent pool with which to fill out sports rosters. UCLA also moved
ahead of the curve when it came to recruiting black athletes,
surpassing the original trendsetters in this area, USC, and
therefore surpassing the Trojans as a football power in the 1950s.
A recruiting scandal involving Cal, USC, UCLA and Washington,
however, set the PCC back just as they were establishing the
conference as the best in America.

USC dominated in almost all sports. In 1948, they
defeated Yale and future President George H.W. Bush in the College
World Series. Coach Rod Dedeaux’s Trojans repeated the act a decade
later. Under coach Dean Cromwell, USC became the greatest track
program in history, eventually winning an unprecedented 26 NCAA
titles. The tennis and swimming teams dominated. The American
Olympic teams consistently resembled Troy in red, white and blue.
The USC basketball team made it to the NCAA title game in 1952.
Such hoops stalwarts as Bill Sharman, Tex Winter and Alex Hannum
came out of USC, where the “triangle offense” was invented.
Southern Cal established itself as the greatest athletic program of
all time.

The first big-time professional sports franchise in
California were the San Francisco 49ers, who started in the
All-American Football Conference before moving into the National
Football League. The Pacific Coast League had been underway for
decades, with a colorful history of producing great teams and
players such as Joe DiMaggio and the Waner brother, Paul and Lloyd.
But pro football was a growing phenomenon. It was mainly successful
either in cities that did not feature major college programs, or
diminished college football in others, as it had in New York and
Chicago. Once-thriving Columbia, Fordham and the University of
Chicago had lost their luster if not their programs entirely.

The effect of pro football on the West Coast was not
without casualties. Loyola, St. Mary’s, Santa Clara and San
Francisco all had national reputations on the gridiron, but were
eclipsed by the 49ers, Rams, and later teams such as the Raiders
and Chargers. But the NFL, while probably depleting college
attendance to some extent, never had a truly deleterious effect on
any of the major programs. What probably hurt the likes of Santa
Clara, St. Mary’s and USF more than anything was the changing
social dynamics of sports in the 1940 and 1950s.

West Coast teams steadily integrated during this
period. The South remained segregated. The small California schools
had been successful in Southern bowls, the Orange and Sugar, but by
the 1950s USF found its unbeaten team disinvited from the Sugar
Bowl because they had black players Burl Toler and Ollie
Matson.

The Rams, after an inauspicious start in Cleveland,
moved to Los Angeles and were a big hit. In 1952 they captured the
NFL championship. Stars such as quarterback Bob Waterfield (whose
girlfriend was the glamour queen Jane Russell), Tom Fears, Elroy
“Crazy Legs” Hirsch and Jon Arnett popularized the team. The
rivalry with San Francisco intensified, but just as Dodger Stadium
would give the Dodgers an edge, so too did the Coliseum work in
favor of the Rams. Crowds upwards of 100,000 came to see monumental
Rams-49ers match-ups in Los Angeles. The venerable stadium was a
monument to American greatness, and the Rams were a big part of
it.

San Francisco, on the other hand, played in a
glorified high school facility called Kezar Stadium that had drawn
crowds of over 50,000 for Lowell-Poly games in the 1920s. Located
in the middle of Golden Gate Park, it was picturesque from the
outside but had no parking. It offered splintery wooden bench, fans
crammed together elbow-to-elbow, knee-into-back. The bathrooms were
a nightmare, the extras’ non-existent. Fans brought bottles of
booze in, shouted and cursed in a decidedly non-family atmosphere,
advocating violence to opposing quarterbacks. The bottles would
roll under the seats, crashing into dangerous splinters of glass.
The low-rent Kezar, the home of the annual Turkey Day high school
games championship game to this day, offers as its best memory the
image of
Dirty Harry
Callahan torturing a serial killer in
order to determine the location of a 14-year old victim suffocating
to death in the Marin Headlands, above the Golden Gate Bridge.

The post-war rise in Southern California sports
fortunes mirrored its political and economic successes. After years
of New Deal policies, America’s role as a global superpower infused
the nation with profound sensibilities based on the concept of
American Exceptionalism, which were embodied by the Republican
Party. In 1946, a young attorney and Navy veteran, Richard M.
Nixon, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a
district that at that time straddled the city of Los Angeles, the
growing suburbs of Artesia and Whittier, on into a thriving new
conservative base, Orange County.

Nixon immediately seized on the hot-button issue of
the day: anti-Communism. In no place was anti-Communist fervor
greater than his district and the surrounding Southern California
heartland. His voters had happily ousted New Deal Congressman Jerry
Voorhis in favor of Nixon. Almost immediately, the case of a
lifetime landed in the young Congressman’s lap: the espionage
accusations of Whittaker Chambers against Alger Hiss. This would
vault Nixon into national prominence in the form of two separate
stints in the White House.

Chambers was a rumpled writer who took to Communism
as a young man in Baltimore in the 1920s. He became an editor for
the
Daily Worker
, the newspaper of the American Communist
Party. At some point Chambers was approached by Soviet handlers and
told to change from an overt Soviet propagandist to a covert spy.
Throughout the 1930s, Chambers worked with the U.S.S.R. against the
United States. Several of his handlers and fellow turncoats were
rising Democrats in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. They
moved from such New Deal programs as the Public Works
Administration to high-level positions in the White House and State
Department. One of them was a polished Ivy League attorney named
Alger Hiss. Hiss was the embodiment of the Eastern establishment;
from his looks, his family, connections, education, upbringing and
breeding. He rose to the highest place within Democrat Party
circles. He had all the attributes Chambers did not, and therefore
was much more valuable to the Communists. All the while, he was a
paid Soviet spy who worked for Russia out of deep hatred for
America; a strong conviction that our way of life was inferior to
Communism.

When the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Von
Ribbentrop pact with Nazi Germany early in World War II, ostensibly
a promise by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin not to attack each
other, it discouraged Chambers. He had seen the Soviets as the last
hope against Nazism. Around this same time reports of Stalin’s
atrocities became public. Millions had died under his rule, many
via forced starvation when the Communists insisted on
collectivization of farms with disastrous results. Walter Duranty
of the
New York Times
had gone to the U.S.S.R., seen the
devastation, knew about it,
but instead wrote that Communism was
an effective political ideology.
For this he was awarded
the
Pulitzer Prize!
Despite this disinformation, by the 1940s the
truth about the Soviets was known, and Chambers for one began to
see Communism for what it was.

Then Chambers had a religious epiphany. The Truth of
the Lord Jesus Christ manifested itself before him. Suddenly freed
from the bonds of Communist ideology, Chambers immediately realized
that
America
was the last, best hope of Mankind. He went to
the FBI and told them all about Hiss and other Soviet infiltrators.
The FBI investigated and discovered that Chambers was correct. They
went to President Roosevelt, informing him that he had numerous
Soviet spies in his administration. Roosevelt used a word that
begins with an “f” and ends in a “k” followed by the word “off.”
Either he refused to believe it, or if he did know about it, he
apparently did not think Soviet spies in high-ranking positions of
American power was such a bad thing. Either way, the spies
continued to serve FDR and move up the ladder.