Once upon a time, the first thing I would have done on picking up the New York Times in the morning was turn to the sports page. And the last thing I would have done at night was watch or listen to a Mets or Knicks game as I was preparing for sleep. From the time I began going to Ebbets Field as a kid in the early 1950s to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, I was a fervent fan first of that team (and then of the Mets after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957), the New York (football) Giants, and somewhat later the New York Knicks basketball team. And honestly, for a kid from a distinctly nonreligious family, such fandom was probably as close as I ever got to a religious experience.
So, my question (to myself) now is: How in the world did I lose my -- can I actually call it this? -- faith in sports? Today, endless months pass and, unless I'm at my grandson's house, I never see even a few moments of a ballgame of any sort. I no longer have the slightest idea what any of the New York teams have done or are doing this year and find I have no curiosity about it whatsoever -- and if that isn't a loss of faith, I don't know what is!
And then, to my surprise, as I was leafing through the Times recently, a sports story caught my eye and I actually stopped to read it. The Mets, it reported, had lost -- I had to look up his position -- pitcher Edwin D-az by offering him a mere (and indeed, let me italicize that!) three-year, $66 million dollar deal (yes again, $66 million!). Instead, he accepted a $69 million offer from the Dodgers. And the Times piece responded to that by suggesting that the Mets "have been curiously cautious in free agency."
So, in the world I had long left behind, it wasn't enough to offer a star $66 million. Of course, there were also significant sports salaries once upon a time. Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, at his peak in 1930, made $80,000 a year, the equivalent of about $1.7 million today. As it happens, though, baseball's average salary at the moment tops $5 million, and the Mets led baseball with a $322.6 million payroll this year.
Now, mind you, I'm hardly against players being well paid. But I think those figures tell you something about a sports world that has entered another universe from the one most of the rest of us inhabit (if you leave aside this country's 900-plus billionaires). And of course, we're also in a world where the truly unmissable "sport" of any day is whatever President Donald Trump happens to be doing. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular and former New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, offer his own goodbye to a sports world that, in so many ways, has entered another universe. Tom
A Farewell to Sports
Winning and Losing Are Not So Clear Anymore
In the year I was born, 1938, the White Christian males who ruled the sports world considered their various games and pastimes as definers of righteousness, crucibles of character, and a preparation for dominance in business and war. Anyone who played but didn't look like them was an interloper, clearly operating with some kind of performance enhancers.
That was made clear in a book published that very year by one of the premier sportswriters of his time, Paul Gallico. It was called Farewell to Sport and in it he declaimed that the "colored brother" was so good at boxing because he "is not nearly so sensible to pain as his White brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands"; that New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, "like all people who spring from what we call low origins" never had any inhibitions"; and that the reason basketball "appeals to the Hebrew" is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart aleckness."
I was particularly struck by his observation that Mildred (Babe) Didrikson Zaharias became one of the greatest athletes of the century (and in so many sports!) "simply because she would not or could not compete with women at their own best game -- man-snatching. It was an escape, a compensation. She would beat them at everything else they tried to do."
The backstory to that observation holds a key to the more general misogyny in sports then, if not in society in general. During a friendly golf game, Gallico and Zaharias were talked into a footrace by the famous sportswriter Grantland Rice. The Babe ran Paul into the ground and he rarely wrote about her again without mentioning her muscles, Adam's apple, and loud voice. After all, how could a real woman beat a real man?
By the time I read Farewell to Sport at age 15, Gallico had produced several sappy bestsellers, including The Snow Goose. At the time, I was a mere four years away from answering an ad for a copyboy job at the New York Times sports department. My first year at the paper, 1957, would prove a turning point for New York sports fans in their realization that the industry by no means returned their devotion. After all, the elopement west that year of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers (to become the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers) was considered a total betrayal. Hadn't those teams been part of our extended families? Wasn't loyalty to them promoted almost as a Judeo-Christian duty?
On the other hand, expansion also made the big leagues national and kicked off the boom that lifted sports into the highest levels of entertainment (where it now resides).
And in that context, consider what follows an old sportswriter's meditation on sports at the end of a tumultuous political year -- with its tribalism, violence, false narratives, and dangerous entertainment -- that seems to have made what was once my prime area of study superfluous. After all, who really needs a Super Bowl (or a sportswriter) after Trump's mob of fans attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and were rewarded with a ticker-tape parade of pardons by the reelected mobster-in-chief on Jan. 20, 2025?
Sometimes, I think I'd like to run this past Gallico. Was his bigotry just the expression of a sportswriter of his times, or was he an early Trumpist?
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