UNR prof writes excellent history of sports

SPORTS IN AMERICAN LIFE
By Richard Davies
447 pp. Blackwell. $44.95

The greatest thing about being a college professor is that you get paid well for doing what you love: teaching, writing, researching. The worst is faculty meetings.
Faculty gabfests are boring. They last twice as long as necessary. They repeat ad nauseam what has been said for years. And some faculty members love to hear their own voices.
On the other hand, serving on the University of Nevada, Reno, Promotion and Tenure Committee is a pleasure. It leaves you in awe at the caliber of UNR professors.
People like Dick Davies, UNR history professor, fine teacher and excellent researcher. He is one of the top five sports historians in America.
His latest book, “Sports in American Life,” is spritely, informative and evocative for long-time sports fans. But he is no starry-eyed sports lover. He tells bald truths about sports in America today. Namely:
• Universities have adopted the shameful professional model as opposed to British collegiate amateurism. “The principles that underpinned the rise of intercollegiate sports were the same that guided the American system of capitalism:…the primacy of profits (and) capitalistic greed.” The commercialism gainsays everything universities should mean.
• Student athlete is an oxymoron. “Fabricated admissions documents, the funneling of players into special classes in which a professor is known to look kindly on athletes, ghost-written term papers…and other fraudulent academic schemes abound.”
• Professional sports teams threaten to move if cities don’t build them new stadiums. Cities almost always yield to the blackmail. The taxpayers lose.
• Boxing has become like professional wrestling: a joke. No boxing commissioner, an absurd proliferation of “champions” and an equally absurd proliferation of weight divisions.
• The Olympics are more about “international politics, social dogma or religion” than sports.
• No other country approaches America in its “massive sports enterprise,” its spending of “astronomical sums” and its $50 million annual sports budgets.
His book teems with fascinating stories. The courageous boxer who fought for 119 rounds and was knocked down 80 times before collapsing and dying. Satch Paige, the greatest pitcher ever, even if he exaggerated when he said he had pitched 300 shutouts, 55 no-hitters and won 2,000 games.
And Ben Hogan. He was a natural left-hander but could not afford left-handed clubs. So he became one of America’s greatest golfers by playing right-handed. Then there is Jim Thorpe, Olympic hero and football star, called America’s greatest athlete. That’s endless Hot Stove League talk. But there is no argument about the greatest baseball player: Babe Ruth. He was a brilliant pitcher as well as a legendary home run hitter.
Davies is particularly good on the terrible discrimination of blacks in sports. He portrays the monumental sagas of Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. Not black heros. American heroes. Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball and Ali, with Thoreauvian civil disobedience, beat the constant white hopes--and even the black white hope, Floyd Patterson.
Davies is also a good debunker. He notes that baseball was not invented by Abner Doubleday. He finds no evidence that Knute Rockne ever urged Notre Dame to win one for the Gipper. But he needs more radicalism.
While he rightly excoriates the White Sox players who threw the 1919 World Series, he devotes just seven words to their scandalous low pay. College athletes should be paid, ending the hypocrisy of calling them amateurs. Coaches get rich and their schools reap huge TV revenues while players toil 40 hours a week at their jobs.
As William Rhoden wrote in a recent New York Times column: “What’s persistently galling is our approach to the big-time, blood-money intercollegiate sports of football and basketball. Adults make millions and the ‘kids’ ” get nothing but the pittance of scholarships.
And, yes, admit Pete Rose and Mark McGwire to the Hall of Fame. And, yes, Shoeless Joe Jackson and, when he is eligible, Barry Bonds, one of the greatest hitters ever. The Hall honors baseball prowess--not ethics.
Davies also needs a tough editor as does everyone who writes. He also should reread Strunk and White annually as all writers should. He uses lame modifiers like somewhat, greasy words like utilized, Latinized expressions like prior to and archaic usages like upon instead of on. Davies is positively addicted to unneeded of courses.
Nevertheless, this is a fine history.
Sports provide what Davies calls “a useful diversion from the pressures of daily life.” Sports entertain, give the delight of “your” team winning and the one you hate losing. They also provide blessed relief from the grim political climate under President Bush.