SPORTS WARS: ATHLETES IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS Review

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SPORTS WARS: ATHLETES IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS ReviewSPORTS WARS
Reviewed by Richard Arlin (Dick) Stull, Department of Health and Physical
Education, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California
archived from Arete Sport Literature Association
OCTOBER 5, 2004
Dream On
It was 1970. I stared across my desk in my high school English class into the intense eyes
of a guest lecturer -- a well-muscled, bearded ex-football player whom I'd seen for years
on television destroying hapless NFL running backs. He had a message that astounded
me: that football was a capitalist, racist, exploitive game -- and that he had just retired at
the top of his career to try to affect social change.
The class was silent. I considered whether I should hazard a question. Tentatively, I
raised my hand and asked, "Don't you think you're being unrealistic and idealistic?"
He looked through me and paused for a moment.
"It starts with you," he said.
Like those running backs I'd seen careening out of bounds after a jarring hit, I was shaken
up. The player was former St. Louis Cardinals linebacker, Dave Meggyesy. A product of
the Sixties, Meggyesy was one of many athletes who were outspoken about their political
beliefs. The very meaning of sport in society was being challenged, not only by the
athletes that played them, but also by students, academics, and even university
administrators. Many also questioned not only the notion that athletic participation builds
character but the methods used to "build character."
These issues, according to author David Zang in his book Sports Wars: Athletes in the
Age of Aquarius occurred in the Sixties on many fronts, from Muhammad Ali's defiance
of the military draft, to the exposés and autobiographies that questioned every aspect of
sport and the institutions that were part of sport. Well written, well referenced and
thought provoking, this is a must-read for American Studies, American History,
Sociology or anyone who is interested in the role of sport in American society.
Zang writes:
Many factors impinged on the old sports ideology-the quest for profits, television ratings
points, and advertising dollars. Certainly, beginning in the 1950's, big money, television,
and critical media helped to create a climate of inescapable scrutiny and overexposure
that was inhospitable to myth making. But these things, along with a large influx of black
athletes and the beginnings of female insistence on sharing the playing fields, were only
parts of a fuller explanation.
Money and celebrity were always a part of our sports, but what you cannot trace back
beyond the Vietnam era is the cultural tension that undermined SportsWorld's claims to
character building and the tenets by which organized sports were conducted: sacrificial
effort, submission to authority, controlled physical dominance, victory with honor, and
manliness (for, above all, organized sports were self-consciously male before this time).
Zang opens his book with an account and analysis of the volatile reaction to
singer/guitarist Jose Feliciano's rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at Tiger Stadium
on October 7, 1968, before Game Five of the World Series between Detroit and St. Louis.
Feliciano's "personal expression" was met with approval by some, derision by others.
Zang contrasts the careers and lifestyles of Olympic wrestlers Dan Gable and Dave
Sanders in Chapter 2. The Spartan, maniacal training methods and zeal of Gable vs. the
counterculture, free-spirited Sanders is living myth at its best.
Zang writes, "As Gable was following the unswerving path mapped by his conviction,
Sanders was moving through life like mercury on a tabletop." He cites Warren Susman's
observations about the collision of two visions -- "self-sacrifice and self-realization."
Chapter 3 is a classic case study of an institution trying to reconcile the conflicting values
inherent in the volatile mix of sports and academia. Zang gives the reader an overview of
University of Pennsylvania's Athletic Director Jeremiah Ford II's (1953-1967)
experimentation with a de-emphasis on winning; that is, playing for its own sake: "The
tension between Ford's approach and the response of angry alumni had roots in Penn's
schizophrenic institutional history and the role of athletics in the school's identity."
One of Chapter 4's themes is the introduction of new prototype athletes in America. 1972
Olympic marathon gold medallist Frank Shorter, for example, had the "body of a
bookworm, and the gentle instincts of a hippie." And sport wasn't necessarily just about
winning any more. It was about personal fitness and even self-transformation.
The early career of Muhammad Ali is the subject of Chapter 5. The juxtaposition of Ali's
self-analysis compared to Zang's is highly enlightening. Zang quotes Ali:
All kinds of people come to see me. Women come because I was saying; 'I'm so pretty,'
and they wanted to look at me. Some white people, they got tired of my bragging. They
thought I was arrogant and talked too much, so they came to see someone give the nigger
a whuppin'. Longhaired hippies came to my fights because I wouldn't go to Vietnam. And
black people, the ones with sense, they were saying, 'Right on, brother; show them
honkies.' Everyone in the whole country was talking about me.
Contrast Ali's personal take with Zang's cultural analysis:
Even stranger was Ali's own paradoxical contribution to the meaning of race and color:
that he, light-skinned and pretty, suspicion of white blood tainting his claims to racial
exclusivity, had come to embody the hopes, anger, and venom of so many blacks- had
risen to become king of the world not only by beating other blacks but also by
humiliating them publicly in the demeaning language used for centuries by whites- by
addressing them as 'nigger' in the most casual of utterances, by pronouncing them dumb
and unworthy, and by pointing out their similarity to apes. If Joe Frazier was, as Ali
constantly maintained, a 'gorilla' in contrast to his own café au lait look-it was a stern
refutation of more than Frazier's countenance. If black was truly beautiful, then how
could Frazier be an 'ugly gorilla.'
A recent HBO special and public comments by Frazier attest to the psychic effects that
Ali's unfair characterizations had upon Frazier, effects far more profound than the
punches he took in his three epic fights with Ali.
Chapter 6 deals with the revolt of the University of Maryland football team against their
traditional coach Bob Wade. Among the many interesting anecdotes in this chapter is a
player commenting on the coach's seeming inability to accept the notion that talent might
trump hard work.
Finally, Zang briefly surveys American sports films and follows with a critical analysis of
the 1976 comedy, Bad News Bears. In contrast to Best Picture of the Year, Rocky, "The
Bears offered the first film portrait of a new culture that no longer believed sport and
good character were synonymous terms."
Zang's agile alliterations and similes ("the baby boomers moved through society like a
pig in a python") add to his already alluring analysis. He is at his best in alluding to how
sport could not escape the greater cultural earthquakes of opposition to the Vietnam war,
racial strife, and the counterculture movement. During the 60's, sports as last bastion for
patriotism and American values was openly challenged by courageous athletes who
risked establishment disapproval, their reputations and their livelihoods.
Ever since Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (1987), where the activists and
students of the Sixties were portrayed as spoiled, self-indulgent, uncritical and selfinvolved,
popular culture has trivialized the era. The era has become a parody, a
caricature in TV sitcoms, and a whipping boy for conservative politicians, talk-show
hosts and authors for many of today's social ills. Zang refuses to simplify the era or the
athletes who were a part of it. In our current age where the standard mantra is often
"there's no team in me," or "show me the money," it is inspiring to see how and why
certain individuals challenged basic societal assumptions from within the most
conservative of our institutions -- sports. Zang writes:
Of course, those mythical fields never really existed, and in ignoring the '60s when
confronting our dissatisfaction with the state of organized sports at the turn of the
century, we are running from a past. What we are dismissing or avoiding is the
realization that many baby boomers- in some cases, against all probabilities- once
wrestled in sports with the same sense of oppression, of limits, and of corruption that led
a great number of young people to the counterculture.
After reading Zang's book, I reread Dave Meggyesy's groundbreaking Out of Their
League (1970) and watched the movie Bad News Bears (1976). They still seemed
contemporary. And Meggysey is still crusading for social justice in 2004. Dream on?
David W. Zang. Sports Wars: Athletes in the Age of Aquarius. Fayetteville, Arkansas:
University of Arkansas Press, 2001. 180 pages. Photographs and bibliographic
references. $25.00 (hardback). ISBN 1-55728-713-9.
Copyright © 2004 by Richard Arlin StullSPORTS WARS: ATHLETES IN THE AGE OF AQUARIUS Overview

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