Sports a launching point into social issues
After Jack Johnson, a black man from Galveston, defeated Tommy Burns, a white man, in a heavyweight bout in 1908, Jack London, who occasionally interrupted writing adventure novels to cover boxing for the New York Herald, alarmingly wrote the “white man must be rescued.”
London’s “Great White Hope” was Jim Jeffries.
The sports writers at the New York Times, unlike London, knew Johnson was a superior boxer and warned nothing should be read into his inevitable victory.
“If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors,” the Times wrote before the 1910 fight in Reno.
Sam spawns dialogue
Less than three decades later, Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, although also black, had become known in U.S. sports sections as Great American Hopes because of their potential to deliver propaganda blows to Nazis, who subscribed to Aryan superiority. So why all this history? It seemed a good time to lend perspective to the attention paid by sport media to Missouri defensive end Michael Sam since his revelation that he is gay.
Jerome Solomon, my Chronicle colleague, and I have received numerous responses to our columns last week about Sam, many suggesting we confine our opinions to action between the lines “like sports writers did in the good old days.”
The difficulty he and I have is identifying when
those good old days were.
Real life gets in the way
I knew where to start this column, with sports writers commenting on social issues, especially those involving race, more than 100 years ago.
I don’t know where to end it because, as seen in recent weeks with coverage of Sam’s homosexuality, inferences of racism in criticism of Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, the attempt by college football players to organize a labor union, threats of terrorism at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the inappropriateness of the Redskins’ nickname, concussions, overemphasis on youth sports … ad infinitum.
“I understand people wanting a refuge from the front pages,” said John Schulian, a former sports columnist who moved on to write for television, creating “Xena: Warrior Princess” before returning to sports journalism by editing anthologies.
“But sports writers can’t just turn a blind eye to the effect of society on sports. Real life is always going to intrude.”
It intruded tragically in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy and the debate in sports pages about whether the NFL should cancel games the following Sunday, and in 1972 with the massacre of Israeli athletes and coaches during the Munich Olympics. My guess is many people received their initial education on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from ABC’s Jim McKay.
It intruded four years earlier with the Tommie Smith-John Carlos black-power salute on the medal stand in Mexico City, Muhammad Ali’s conversion in 1964 to Islam — many sports sections continued for years to refer to him as Cassius Clay — and his conviction in a Houston federal court in 1967 for draft evasion, the boycotts of the 1980 and ’84 Summer Olympics, the failed drug test in 1988 of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson and the continuing saga of the steroid era, and the 1991 HIV announcement by Magic Johnson.
Red Smith, a New York Times Pulitzer Prizewinning sports columnist, inspired the boycott of the Moscow Olympics with a column, writing that the United States shouldn’t send athletes because of the Soviet Union’s “offense against international law” with the invasion of Afghanistan.”
President Carter read it and requested that the U.S. Olympic Committee boycott.
Not batting 1.000
Sports journalists haven’t always been on the correct side of issues or at least on the side that might be almost universally accepted as correct today. Could London write today that whites need to be rescued from — whom? — LeBron James?
Or could sports writer Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram write of a woman athlete: “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.”
He wrote that about Port Arthur native Babe Didrikson in the 1930s.
Smith wrote when Ali refused to submit to the military draft that the boxer was “as sorry a spectacle as those unwanted punks who protest and demonstrate against the (Vietnam) war” and then later became one of Ali’s most avid supporters, calling him “the best thing that has happened to boxing” and a folk hero.
Perhaps too much was made in sports sections of Ali’s religion. Does that mean we made too much of Tim Tebow’s? Maybe too much has been made of Sam’s homosexuality. Does that mean we made too much of Tiger Woods’ heterosexuality?
If you can’t stand these intrusions upon the box scores, you should skip past the sports pages and turn to the comics. But don’t read “Gil Thorpe,” who has addressed issues like divorce, drugs, teen pregnancy and abortion.