The obsession and the snarl became the emblem of modern sports. The old standard, that it was honorable just to compete, went out the window. The obsession will be on full display during the Super Bowl, and so will another of the evils of modern sports: Lombardi had nothing to do with this one; it was the work of another revered sports hero.
Muhammad Ali taught the modern athlete and the modern fan that it is not enough to win, that you must utterly vanquish your opponent by stealing his pride and his dignity. Ali gave us the modern successors to sportsmanship: Ali's style was not simply to beat his opponent, but to humiliate him. He got away with it in much the same way Lombardi did: I was as susceptible to those charms as anyone else. Still, I must now hold these men responsible for the harm they have done.
SPORTSMANSHIP'S DECLINE BEGAN WITH HEROES
Sports has always had people like Lombardi and Ali, of course. But it seems peculiar to the modern age that we hold them up as paragons. I recently saw a tape of a fight between Ali and Floyd Patterson. It struck me that here was the Armageddon of the old and the new in sports: Ali postured and pranced through the fight, clearly the superior athlete and the superior fighter, but also clearly the inferior man.
The next time you see Deion Sanders primping and preening, the next time you see some defensive lineman pounding his chest after a sack, the next time you see two basketball players up in each other's faces, sneering and taunting, think of Floyd Patterson, and of how sports used to be.
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Like many other Americans, I will watch the Super Bowl, and I'll be thrilled if it's a good game, and I'll admire and cheer for the excellence of the athletes, and I'll root hard for my team, and I'll really, really want to win. But I'll think of Lombardi and Ali as I see the spectacle play out: I'll think of them and of how they dragged sports down to the level of life on the mean streets, and of how those streets just keep getting meaner. Hear new episodes of the true-crime podcast Felonious Florida now.
I saw, somewhere, the unlikely statement that half the world would have watched or listened to Wimbledon before its hundredth anniversary was all over. I fancy I hear the high, protesting voice of Muhammad Ali crying, 'No way brother! Not one tenth of the world is going to watch that tennis but the whole world watches me because I'm the best, the prettiest! Miss Evert reached to lob a return of Miss Wade and, according to the umpire, made the return and won a point.
But she shook her head and pointed out that she had not reached the ball before its second bounce. It's a small thing and would have gone unremarked ten, twenty years ago but today, in the money jungle of professional sports, it shone like a candle in a naughty world. Some months ago, some time in the autumn, I think, I tried to say something useful about the increasing embarrassment of having to use the word 'sport' about the greedy branch of show business that is professional games playing. Well, since the autumn, many things have happened to make some of us think a little more about the topic.
The organisers of sports events seem powerless to do much about the growth of the sports industry. They either shake their heads or rub their hands. But some sportswriters have started to say that enough is enough, that throwing your racket on the ground in a spasm of temper is one thing and making obscene gestures at the umpire, the press and any other protestor in sight is another. Bill Tilden, about — oh about 50 years ago — threw his racket at Wimbledon and was warned that one more tantrum like that and he would be thrown out of the tournament.
And he didn't do it again.
Sportsmanship in Black: Muhammad Ali – The Sportsmanship Guy
Whereas no more than two years ago I saw one of the most famous of women tennis players reel with shock at a linesman's call. She walked over to her chair, gathered the four or five rackets which now seem required to play one game of tennis, tucked them under an arm, raised her forefinger at the umpire in an obscene invitation and walked off the court. She hadn't quit, she was just biding her time and temper until the officials came running, or kneeling, and begging her to return, which, about five minutes later, she graciously condescended to do as the thousands of spectators came to their feet to pay tribute to her bravery in giving the umpire his comeuppance.
The umpire didn't take her out and paddywack her. He didn't fume or shout.
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He knew he'd behaved badly. He seemed truly sorry and the crowd applauded their heroine again and forgave him. And it's this sort of thing which led an American political columnist, at the end of last year, to offer some pointed advice to Mr Carter, who was then about to begin his term as president.
At the end of 20 numbered tips, most of which had to do with political tactics, the writer put down three: Don't invite athletes to the White House ever, but have the courage to decide, with Harry Truman and I quote, 'that sports is a lot of damned nonsense! Now, this attack of bile may have been brought on by unpleasant memories of Mr Nixon, for nobody in American history I dare say has ever used the language of sports and sportsmanship so often to describe a strategy of crookery.
It sent us back 20 more years ago to a famous old American baseball manager, Leo Durocher, who really wrote the text by which so many athletes today seem to conduct their professional lives, 'Nice guys come in last'.
At the end of last year too, the most gifted, the raciest writer and the most knowledgeable of American sportswriters wrote a piece called 'Whatever happened to Frank Merriwell? Today, I suppose, he would provoke loud and raucous laughter as a square and a sissy because, to use the quaint old phrases, he always played fair, he lost with grace.
Sports to him was synonymous with what we used to call sportsmanship. Well, it now seems ages ago since we had such a character looming large on the American sports scene. The tone of the s is now set by the most popular, the richest, gamesman in America. Not baseball players by a long shot.
Baseball now ranks about fourth in popularity behind, in ascending order, ice hockey, American football and, at the top, basketball. The basketball stars get prodigious salaries, they are admiringly interviewed, given the same adoring space as rock stars about their lavish pads, their king-size beds with the sable quilts, their ceiling mirrors, their European cars, their sleek girls in every port. Basketball stars now earn more money than the President of the United States. That has got to be the reason, a primary reason anyway, why the insulted umpire sent his officials to beg the slut of a tennis star to return to the court and go on with the game.
She earns a fortune. The fans pay to subsidise that fortune. The fans come today not merely to see a game superlatively played, they have learned to expect high jinx and very low jinx as part of the show and any sports promoter will tell you that 'hell hath no fury like a sports crowd spurned!