Sports, now and then

 From my novel Kerouac's Scroll:

7: Rap #1 – Sports, now & then

“Compared to the fifties,” I began, “sports suck. Especially professional sports. What’s the difference? Lack of team spirit. Lack of personal character and class. Today team sports are a game of inflated egos. Look at professional football. Some lineman sacks the quarterback. Big deal. That’s his job. That’s what he gets paid to do. So what does he do? He does a little dance and pounds his chest and struts around like he’s the best lineman of all time. What an asshole.”

“And how they carry on after scoring a touchdown!” Hooker put in.

Hugh McElhenny

“Exactly. All that showoff garbage. Can you imagine Huge McElhenny doing a dance after scoring a touchdown?”

“No way! Or Jim Brown, Alan Ameche, Joe Perry, Gayle Sayers.”

“It’s disgusting. And they’re all  millionaires.”

“More millionaires are sitting on the bench,” said Hooker.

“You got that right.”

“You know what started it?”

“Expansion.”

“And free agency,” Hooker added. “No player is loyal to a team anymore.”

“Exactly. I mean, it used to be every team, no matter how far down in the standings, had its superstar. The Pirates had Ralph Kiner. Know what I mean?”

“I do,” said Hooker. “There was stability. You rooted for the home team. You knew all the players and knew they’d still be around tomorrow.”

“They played on grass, for God’s sake! I can’t believe they started playing on carpet.”

“Sports heroes used to be heroes, somebody to look up to.”

“Exactly. When I was a kid, I used to collect autographs.” I told the story again, even though Hooker had heard it many times before, about how as kids a friend and I would go to the Green Hotel in Pasadena, where I grew up, to get autographs from visiting teams coming in to play the Los Angeles Rams. On one occasion, my hero, Hugh McElhenny, asked Roger and me to help him pick out a birthday present for his nephew. We spent an entire afternoon with him! It was like hanging out with God.

“Once McElhenny was asked to compare college ball and pro ball,” I continued, again telling Hooker what he’d heard countless times. “I like pro ball all right, he said. But I don’t like the salary cut.”

Hooker said, “I ever tell you about meeting Archie Moore in an airport?”

Of course he had. Many times. He told me again.

“Now there was a gentleman,” Hooker concluded. “There was a man with class.”

“That’s what jocks don’t have today. Nobody has any class. I think Cassius Clay started it.”

I glanced at Hooker. He looked at me with narrow eyes. I continued.

“He’s the template for egomania in sports, right? He started the loud, flamboyant, show-offy style. The media loved it, nurtured it. Now any third string jock has to strut around like Cassius Clay.”

“Mohammed Ali,” Hooker corrected me. “Who was one of the great heavyweights of all time.”

Boxing was Hooker’s sport, not mine. 

I said, “You can defend his skill but you can’t say he had class. He was a loudmouth.”

“He was psyching his opponents.”

“In the beginning maybe, but it became his trademark even after he’d established how good he was.”

“He had the balls to live by his convictions,” Hooker said.

“I understand he’s one of your heroes, Red. What I’m saying is, the rampant arrogance in sports today may well have begun with him.”

“Maybe.”

After a silence I said, “I feel sorry for kids today. You look up to a jock and he ends up beating his wife or doing drugs or creaming some asshole in a bar. At the very best, he’s just an arrogant jerk who couldn’t walk in the shoes of a player from the fifties.”

“I don’t know about that. Records keep getting broken. Jocks must be getting better.”

“Improved technology, sure. Steroids and all the other enhancement drugs they take. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. Soon we’ll be building robots that break all the records, too, but so what? Where is the team spirit? Where is the humility? Where are the jocks a kid can look up to?”

“They do look up to them now,” said Hooker. “That’s the problem. You watch a basketball game in the park lately? Kids after school or on the weekend? They strut around as much as their heroes. They obviously look up to them and mimic them.”

“That’s depressing.”

“But there it is.”

“Arrogance begets arrogance.”

Hooker said, “Parents can be just as bad. Look at Little League games. Parents cussing out the umpire, screaming at their kids, even getting in fights.”

“Winning matters too much.”

“Maybe it always mattered too much.”

I said, half singing, “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I think it was true once. When I was a kid and played what used to be called sandlot ball, sometimes I was on the winning team, sometimes the losing, but the game was fun no matter what side I was on. It was sports. It was fun. Winning or losing was just what happened on a particular day. Didn’t you feel that way?”

“Yeah. But it’s different if it’s your job, the way you make your living. Because then winning means more money.”

“It always comes down to money, doesn’t it?”

“The bottom line.”