The Big Time

Michael MacCambridge

23 annotations Feb 2024 data

Epilogue

  • "That which we do is what we are. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been, or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists." —Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

Chapter 1

  • "Americans still find it difficult to take the Seventies seriously," wrote the historian Bruce J. Schulman in his account of the decade. Indeed, through the lens of the present day, the era that Thomas Wolfe dubbed "The Me Decade" is primarily noted for possessing the wildest clothes, the stupidest fads, and some of the most ridiculous controversies in the nation's history.
  • The reputation of the '70s has remained resolutely subpar, cut-rate, even fraudulent in the collective imagination since then, perhaps predictably so for any era in which shag carpeting on walls served as a defining characteristic. In popular perception, it was a decade of inconsequential lassitude between the tumult of the '60s and the Reagan Revolution of the '80s. One history of the '70s was titled It Seemed Like Nothing Happened
  • So much about the decade was marked by letting things go—hair, clothing, styles, morality, social conventions, the color of appliances. Writ large, this saw the country acting at times like there was no history, no gravity, and no consequences for the present moment of freedom. Psychically, much of the decade had the feeling of third-drink revelry descending into something darker, fourth-drink recklessness bound for a hangover.
  • In this, the decade in sports closely resembled the American decade as a whole: unruly, unhinged, unpredictable, and in the end, unsustainable
  • The most profound change was greeted with the most skepticism at the time. Women had been exercising their right to vote since 1920, but as the decade began, they were still fighting for their right to exercise. While they had started to realize gains in some other segments of society, women were treated with indifference or condescension, or both, in sports.
  • Change came slowly and then, in America, very quickly. In 1972, tucked within the larger Education Amendments Act, Congress passed Title IX legislation that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions. As it turned out, that included interscholastic and intercollegiate sports. The interpretation of this law brought about a different kind of revolution; the Pill had altered the dynamic between men and women in the '60s, and Roe v. Wade would change the balance of power further, but Title IX arguably had an even more visible impact, because it affirmed equality for women outside the private spaces of bedrooms and doctors' offices.

Chapter 2

  • Each league was mindful of its own priorities. Baseball teams exerted their own grandfathered autonomy; many were the primary occupants of their stadiums, meaning that pro football teams were often at the mercy of Major League Baseball teams in fashioning their schedules. (In all but one year during the period from 1965 to 1971, the Kansas City Chiefs opened each regular season with their first three games on the road.)

Chapter 8

  • Sports had always had its share of flakes, oddballs, and obsessives, but in the new decade they seemed to hit a rich vein of eccentricity.
  • Color television, in the words of sports fashion historian Paul Lukas, "changed everything in terms of uniforms, and it really mirrored what was going on in civilian clothing. A lot of it had to do with new fabrics and the increased use of polyester which allowed for a wider range of dyes to be used. And of course in the '70s, sort of coming on the heels of the '60s, with the counterculture and LSD and all sorts of psychedelic things became part of youth culture. And then hand in hand with that we also saw the rise of color TV, which certainly led to greater use of color in uniforms."
  • The decade would see pop music insinuate itself into the fabric of the games. At Cobo Hall in Detroit, the Pistons of the early '70s would warm up to the strains of Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets." "The song had the perfect rhythm and rallied the fans," recalled the Pistons' coach Ray Scott, "who would respond by clapping their hands in time and singing along.
  • "If our society goes down the drain," Hayes said, "and there are big signs it might, then historians will report: 'Here is a nation founded on team play that went down because they forgot about it.' If you want to destroy a society, talk down the heroes… Nations are built on the positive approach, just like football teams."

Chapter 9

  • But as the Steelers' head coach Chuck Noll used to say, "Pressure is what you feel when you aren't prepared."
  • "In a single tennis match, Billie Jean King was able to do more for the cause of women than most feminists can achieve in a lifetime," wrote the New York Times editorial page.

Chapter 13

  • "The battle was about saving football," said Carole Oglesby, the AIAW's first president. "They didn't give a shit about the larger implications for girls and women. It was about saving football, and they just didn't want the federal law to have anything to do with football." This was not an opinion held only by members of AIAW. "There was a group of older ADs in our league," said Bill Hancock, then with the Big Eight, "who were set in their ways, who were, at all costs, determined to protect the revenue and the experience from college football, who were upset that Title IX had come through, and then that we were going to have to add women's sports."

Chapter 16

  • The Cowboys' computerized system used a standardized evaluation sheet, in which scouts, based on game films and interviews with coaches and other staff, would evaluate each player on a scale of 9 ("Exceptional Rare Ability") to 1 ("Poor") on the general traits of Character, Agility, Competitiveness, Mental Alertness, and Strength and Explosiveness.
  • That generational schism was felt throughout sports by the late '70s, as an old set of conventions and assumptions began to make way for a new order in which athletes were worth more and, in turn, treated differently. It didn't change overnight, and there were outposts of resistance in every quarter, but what steadily occurred was a recalibration in the relationship between athletes and their own bodies.
  • Erving once said, "I've had an effect in three main areas. First, I have taken a smaller man's game, ball-handling, passing, and the like, and brought it to the front court. Second, I've taken the big man's game, rebounding, shot-blocking, and been able to execute that even though I'm only six-foot-six. What I've tried to do is merge those two types of games, which were considered to be separate—for instance, Bill Russell does the rebounding, Cousy handles the ball—and combine them into the same player. The third thing I've tried to do, and this is the most important thing, is to make this kind of basketball a winning kind of basketball, taking into account a degree of showmanship that gets people excited. My overall goal is to give people the feeling they are being entertained by an artist—and to win."
  • A Pinkerton security executive agreed, describing the "root problem" as "the tremendous decline that has taken place in standards of public behavior. Sports fans today are wild in ways they never used to be." But Dr. Arnold Beisser, a behaviorist at UCLA, saw it differently. "The socioeconomic distance is so great between most fans and highly paid athletes," Beisser said, "that the athletes don't seem like real people. So the fans are more apt to be callous towards them."
  • The crowd could be a feral, unruly organism. Yankees fans stormed the field after Chris Chambliss' walk-off home run to win the 1976 American League Championship Series (he had to fight his way to actually touch home plate), a scene repeated a year later when the Yankee Stadium crowd stormed the field at the end of the World Series. By the end of the night, there were nearly fifty injuries, thirty-eight arrests and a fan hospitalized with a concussion.
  • Football, more than any other sport, embraced change. The NFL became fiendish about specialization, as rosters grew nearly 20 percent in the space of a single decade. That brought the third-down back, the nickel defensive back, the long snapper, and a new distinction between blocking and pass-catching tight ends.
  • "The best solution would appear to be 'stacking' the schedule. This would be achieved by pitting strong against strong and weak against weak (based on previous year's standings) for the out of division games… it would ensure a great increase in attractive games for TV, but also give us the strong likelihood of fantastic divisional races with many more teams staying in contention longer."

Chapter 19

  • Even the U.S. Olympic Committee resisted the call but, by mid-April, by which time Carter was threatening legal action to enforce the boycott, the USOC relented and went along with it. The CIA analyst David Kanin viewed Carter's actions as a response to the sense of powerlessness Americans felt with hostages being held for over a year in Iran.