Everything They Had (9 page)

Professional football ascended in popularity like a comet. In 1960, a second league was founded, and its star quarterback Joe Namath, coveted by both leagues because he had star quality, signed for $400,000. In just a few years more, the leagues merged, and played the defining event of America the Superpower in the Super Century, the Super Bowl.

The rise of the nation in the postwar era to this pinnacle was constantly contentious. Isolationist before the war, it was now a leading international power. On the way the debate over race had become ever more barbed. In the early Fifties there had been a powerful challenge to the existing Jim Crow rules in the South. By the late Sixties, the existing laws had fallen, but the mood of American blacks was changing, and there were constant signs of the powerful alienation just under the surface. The black power movement began to flourish in the late Sixties—its slogan was black is beautiful, and in northern cities, the old religious ties which had been so important to black life in the South had begun to wither. A new movement, that of black Muslims, seemingly threatening to whites—its principal leaders spoke of white people as devils—had taken root among the deeply embittered blacks of the nation's northern cities.

That meant that a young man named Cassius Clay, who rose to fame as a heavyweight boxer, was to become at once the most dazzling, and the most controversial athlete of his era, a symbol of all the powerful societal forces let loose in the Sixties.

He also in some way understood that television had changed the nature of sports, and no one, it would turn out, was a better entertainer; no one knew better how to hype his own fights. He was, he understood, as much actor as he was fighter, and he was exceptionally skilled at casting not just himself, but his opponents to his specifications. He himself, he liked to proclaim, was beautiful. His opponents were not. Sonny Liston, the most threatening of men until Ali completely defanged him, was too ugly, he boasted, to be the champ.

He was the most volatile of superstars, joyous, talented, angry. Sportswriters, at least the younger ones, loved him, but Madison Avenue avoided him like the plague. He was the perfect figure to illuminate the contradictions of America in the late Sixties, as it surged past mere superpower status, and became even more affluent: Yes, the nation was making great progress in ending age-old racist laws, but no, the progress was never fast. Yes, the country was a bulwark against a totalitarian power in Europe, but yes, too, it had become an anti-revolutionary force fighting on the wrong side in a war of independence in Asia. He touched all of our fault lines and it was not surprising that attitudes toward him on the part of sportswriters and sports fans tended to divide along generational lines—a reflection of an America which was fighting a war not so much against the Vietnamese, but against itself, a great power with a fractured soul.

Ali was not going to be like Joe Louis, or for that matter Floyd Patterson, the benign black fighter who knew his place, was grateful for his opportunity, was respectful to all in authority around him, no matter how sleazy they were or how tenuous their hold on a position of authority, and watched carefully what he said and did. Ali represented a new and angrier generation of more alienated blacks: A lot of damage had been done over centuries of slavery and neoslavery, and a lot of anger had been stored up.

In the end he was a marvel, a figure not only of sports but, like Jackie Robinson, though in a different way, of history itself. The day after he became heavyweight champion, he had announced that he was a Muslim and that his name was Muhammad Ali. A few years later, because of the war in Vietnam, he refused induction into the army, citing his religious principles. So it was that he lost his crown—and the ability to fight—for more than three years.

Politically, time worked on his side: By the Seventies, the Muslims were perceived to be less menacing. Dissident, and alienated, certainly, as blacks who lived in the poorer parts of America's cities might well feel alienated and dissident, but not that threatening. As for the war in Vietnam, that became something of a badge of honor, that Ali had dissented, and acted upon his dissent; he, it turned out, had paid the price for others on a war which was something of a scar on the national conscience.

In time he regained his crown. Older now, several critical years wasted, he returned, his conscience having been served, to fight better than ever, to demonstrate in his fight with Foreman in Zaire and in three wondrous battles with Joe Frazier his true greatness.

His was a sobering challenge to America's self-image at a volatile and emotional time. He, the most marginally educated young man, barely able to get through high school (he got his high school degree only because the officials at his school realized that he was going to be the school's most famous product, and that it would shame the school rather than Clay if he did not graduate), had turned out to be right about a war about which the most brilliant national security advisers who had gathered around the President—including the Dean of Harvard College, the former head of the Ford Motor Company, and the former head of the Rockefeller Foundation—had turned out to be wrong. That was sobering, a reminder that America at the height of its affluence and power in this century had lost sight of what its true meaning and purpose was. The arrogance of power, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator William Fulbright, called it. Ali would never have been able to come up with a phrase like that—instead he simply said, “I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong.” He had acted upon conscience; the advisers, even when they were later burdened by doubt as the war went forward, had not. He had paid the price for his actions when he was young; they, the architects of this disaster, would pay it when they were older. That, for a nation which in its increasing power had become too prideful, too sure of its value and its rectitude, was a sobering lesson. No wonder, then, by the Nineties he had become something of a beloved national figure.

The success of Ali, the quality of his singular struggles, so much of it political, makes a sharp contrast with that of the final surpassing athlete of this era, Michael Jordan. The two had much in common: Both were supremely talented, both were black, both with their looks, their talent, and their style transcended their sports, appealing to millions of Americans who nominally had little interest in either boxing or basketball.

There the comparisons end, and the Americas they performed for differ. They are produced by different Americas: Ali by an America which seemingly closed off all of its benefits to a young talented black man from the South, other than the most brutal, primitive road to fame, boxing; Jordan, born in a time which made him a beneficiary of all the modern civil rights struggles. He was born in 1963, a year before Ali as Clay won the heavyweight title. He went to integrated public schools and was able to go on and star at North Carolina, a school which only recently had been closed to black undergraduates and which at the time of his birth still had not fielded a black basketball player on its team. His parents were comfortably middle class, his father by dint of victories in another hard-won battle—that of blacks in the American military. At Carolina Michael received the kind of great education and exceptional coaching that had been denied black athletes in the past.

Jordan was the most charismatic athlete of his era, and he was the best big-game, fourth-quarter player of a generation. He helped carry a team which often in other ways seemed somewhat ordinary to six world championships. He was the perfect figure for the American communications and entertainment society as the century came to a close, the first great athletic superstar of the wired world, arguably the most famous person on the planet. In his last season as a player, he earned some $78 million, $33 million in salary and $45 million in endorsements. It seemed only proper that as the century ended, he was engaged in serious negotiations to buy a large part of an NBA team.

He was a new world prince, graceful, beautiful, but a warrior or samurai nonetheless, and easily recognizable to the rest of the world as such. He arrived, unlike those before him, such as Robinson and Mays and Aaron, in a nation which had begun finally to realize that it was not a white nation, and as much as any other American he was proof that America, in some way, despite all its ethnic and racial divisions, was moving toward the beginning of a universal culture.

He gave the nation nothing less than a new concept of beauty. Not surprisingly, his comfort zone was singularly high. He was gifted, he worked hard, and was beautiful in a nation which was now willing to accept a more complicated definition of beauty. America, after some 30 years of racial turbulence, was delighted to have a gifted young black man who seemed to be smiling back at it. If he endorsed sneakers, millions of Americans bought them, and in time he sold hamburgers and soft drinks and underwear and sunglasses and batteries and a telephone company.

As the century ended, he was known everywhere in the world, for the sport he played, basketball, was easily understandable, and traveled smoothly across borders in a way that American football and baseball did not. For in the new age of inexpensive satellites, America exported not its autos or its machine tools, but its culture—its music, its sports, and finally, the informality of its lifestyle. And Jordan was the most luminescent figure of the new world, his deeds the easiest to comprehend and admire.

It had been, all in all, an astonishing century for America. No other country had ever changed so much in so short a time—rising to a position as a monopoly superpower, gaining steadily in power, affluence, and innate self-confidence. In this period much of the change, and the interior struggle, could be witnessed in the world of sports. It was not so much a metaphor for the society as a window on it—the tension, the conflicts, and the constant progress had often taken place first (and been witnessed more widely) in the world of sports. That was true, whether it was the rise of black athletes or the greater independence of the athletes themselves as they enjoyed greater personal freedom. Throughout the century, sports had served as a remarkable reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation—its diversity, its hungers, its excesses, its rank commercialism. But above all the fact that the athletes always seemed to get bigger and stronger and faster, and the games themselves better.

The question before us today is sports and tragedy, most particularly Sept. 11. Is there a connection, and how important is it? Does the world of sports heal, and does it make us stronger, and give us precious, badly needed relief from the darker concerns and burdens of our lives, as so many people (most of them connected to the world of sports, and therefore with no small amount of vested interest) keep saying?

I have my doubts … strong ones, as a matter of fact. Serious readers of this space will note that I disappeared from it for some 10 months after Sept. 11, largely because I could not find it in me for a long time to want to write about sports. That world seemed to shrink on me overnight. Instead, I wrote about the men of our local firehouse, 12 of whom had perished on that apocalyptic day. So, along with my doubts, I have my prejudices.

I like sports, enjoy the artistry of them enormously. I love to watch great athletes compete against each other in big games or matches, like Sampras beating Agassi in the U.S. Open final. But I think there is an important faultline out there somewhere: The world of sports is the world of sports, and reality is reality.

Sometimes sports mirrors society, sometimes it allows us to understand the larger society a little better. But mostly, it is a world of entertainment, of talented and driven young men and women who do certain things with both skill and passion. I am always amused at playoff time by those obsessive superfans, who cast the players from their home team as the good guys, and the visitors as evil—they hate the opposing players and do not understand that, in most circumstances, the players they root for are closer to the players they hate than they are to their adoring fans, and would almost surely rather go out for dinner with the alleged enemy than they would with the home-team fans.

I am wary, as well, of those people who say after a given World Series or Super Bowl victory that it saved the city, made it whole and healed deep-seated racial grievances. When I hear things like that—and I often do—I usually think, “I'll give it about two weeks before it all unheals.” In truth, if making your city whole demands a World Series victory on behalf of athletes who more often than not flee the city the moment the season is over, then your problems are probably harder to solve than you realize.

Nor did I think, during the Vietnam years, that the link between the NFL and the Pentagon (all those jet fighters flying overhead at the Super Bowl) greatly helped the war effort, nor factored into the NVA or the Viet Cong's schedules. I was not much moved by the Army's television recruitment commercials showing teamwork between NFL players, who most demonstrably had no intention of serving in the military.

So back to the question at hand—did sports help bind us in the days, weeks and months after Sept. 11? Did we need to be so bound? The answer to the first question is, I suspect, a little bit, and my answer to the second is, I fear, surprisingly negative. If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.