FEATURE THIS: A PITCHER dissipates only lightly, gets to the park on time, avoids fistfights with his mates, keeps his head in the game, always gives at least 110, 120 percent. Only one thing: he insists on wearing his late father’s beat-up old fishing hat on the mound.
“You can’t wear a fishing hat on the mound!” cries his owner, and the umpires, and the commissioner himself.
“Why not?” the pitcher asks quietly. “People,” he adds with a smile, “wear baseball caps fishing.”
“Nobody in the entire history of organized ball has ever worn a fishing hat on the mound!”
“Ah,” says the pitcher.
Or this: A pass receiver hauls one in for a touchdown but when he enters the end zone he does not stop. He goes on to circle the entire field, holding the ball aloft, juking and springing into the air every few strides and engaging front-row fans in rudimentary dialogue, until at length a crotchety team physician fells him with a tank of oxygen.
One account begins: “Chicago edged the Lions 27–26 in Detroit Sunday to clinch the N.F.C. Central crown, as Bear wide receiver Freemason ‘Sweet-Tips’ Teal brought off a refreshing commentary upon the supposed finality of ‘scoring.’”
Another wire service reports: “‘Wide’ as applied to receivers was a cliché until Sunday, when Freemason ‘Sweet-Tips’ Teal opened the idea of wideness up and let it breathe, as the Bears edged. …”
Sound incredible? It may be the coming thing in big-time athletics.
Consider: When Dave Cowens, at the height of his trend-setting powers as an NBA center, left the Boston Celtics on an indefinite leave of absence without pay early one season, he shook everyone to the roots. Who ever heard of a man like that opting out like that? He didn’t have personal problems. He wasn’t holding out for anything. He’s got red hair, for Christ’s sake. It was unaccountable. Then came the follow-up quote from Pete Maravich of the New Orleans Jazz: “Dave Cowens did what I had been thinking about doing for some time now. It’s funny in a way, because Dave beat me to the punch. Now I can’t do what he did.”
Maravich has, however, done this: he has put Cowens’s step into perspective. Cowens may protest that he is “just a guy who quit his job,” but a field in which things must not be repeated is not a job. It is not a trade. It is not a craft. It is an art. Expression is now the need of big-time athletes’ souls.
Winning is no longer enough for them. (Especially in years when it looks like they might not even take the division.) Nor is money enough—now that, in these days of free agentry and renegotiation, there is so much of it. Sports stars now, it is becoming increasingly evident, want to make a statement.
Thus Reggie Jackson signs not with the Montreal Expos, who offer him more money, but with the New York Yankees—because, as Yankee owner George Steinbrenner puts it, “When we were walking around town last week, a couple of kids came up to him, kids who didn’t have a dime. And he told me later, ‘We can do something to make those kids feel better.’” (Not give them a dime, but give them a World Series winner.)
A grand and also a very allusive gesture. What is Reggie doing here but paying an hommage to the Babe’s promise of a homer to a hospitalized kid—and also, further and more tellingly, turning Shoeless Joe on his head: the kid comes up to this Jackson and says, in effect, “Say you’re the edge, Reg.” And this Jackson does not turn away.
Let us look again at the Cowens move. Only six feet eight in a position that had seemed to require seven feet, Cowens had already proved that less can be more, had established a new style of play, just as in the late nineteenth century Toulouse-Lautrec had proved that painters needn’t be tall (pace Anthony Quinn and Charlton Heston), at least in the demimonde. Cowens had done that already. He was repeating himself.
Then, I think, he heard about artist Robert Rauschenberg’s aesthetic coup of the fifties: erasing a drawing by de Kooning. Cowens, though, had long been negating other people’s work with his aggressive defense. He had even been upstaged in that department, imagistically, by a lesser player, Marvin Webster, whose flair for blocking shots had earned him the sobriquet “The Human Eraser.” Cowens decided to carry this concept further, to turn it in upon itself. He would erase his own work. Suddenly, the Celtics were without Cowens. Or rather, a phantom Cowens was on the floor forty-eight minutes a game, glaring in his absence, nonperforming inimitably. Within three. weeks of his departure, a headline in the Boston Globe referred to the UN-COWENS ERA.
Imagine Maravich’s vexation: Maravich, whose passes—bounced through his own and opponents’ legs, rolled the length of the floor, and so on—are so creative that nobody including the intended recipient is ready for them. And yet it is clear when the ball bounces off the teammate’s head that he should, ideally, have known the pass was coming, would have if his imagination had been as rich and quick as Pete’s. For years, Maravich has been like Bobby Fischer trying to play team chess. It is a hell of an act, one that many critics prefer to ordinary effective basketball, but Maravich has by now rung all the changes on it. He has of late even been toying with ordinary effective basketball. The more inspired stroke, though, would have been withdrawal. Like James Agee belatedly leaving Time Inc., Maravich could have built a myth of the hoop-artist-better-than-his-context, going on to various nearly realized freelance projects implying what might have been achieved if only the context had held up its end.
But Cowens—ironically a quintessentially functional, winning, “team” player—beat Maravich to the punch; left him holding the ball. Cowens leaving the Celtics, a class act that he had to a great extent defined, is like E. B. White in the late thirties taking off from regular employment at The New Yorker, which he had seemed essential to; going off into the country to do some things on his own. (“He’s out right now on a tractor,” Cowens’s mother told a reporter, “bush-hogging, clearing some ground.”)
For some time now we have been hearing athletes say things like, “I don’t want to be thought of as just a goalie.” (Or “just a SuperSonic,” or “just a person with incredible quickness,” or even “just Professor Up There Novotney.”) “I want to be thought of as a human being.” It is not much of a jump from there to “I want to be recognized as a person of vision.”
There was Ali—vaunting, rope-a-doping, making himself up as he went along. There was Wilt, missing free throws in rather the same way that Theodore Dreiser dangled modifiers. An early earth-artist was Richie Allen, writing cryptic words (Mom, Coke, No) in the base-path dirt with his foot. Baseball perhaps had its Duchamp in Jimmy Piersall, who circled the bases backward after hitting a home run. But Piersall was before his time. Baseball thought he was not an innovator but crazy.
Ten years ago, basketball would have thought Cowens was crazy. But today even crusty Celtics general manager Red Auerbach concedes that the eccentric, no-nonsense Cowens has his own way of doing things and that he knows what he is doing.
Never apologize, never explain. Surely it will not be long before other NBA’ers will be off on new departures. The concept of “moving without the ball” may be extended—dancing without the ball, moving without the ball or shorts, moving without the coliseum …
As usual, the owners, administrators, and legislators of sport (except for the NCAA, which has cannily suppressed spiking and dunking for years) have misperceived the threats posed by the new independence of players. The danger is not that they will sell themselves so freely and dearly to various high bidders as to destroy the respective structures of their sports, but that they will begin to express themselves so freely in what Rauschenberg has called the gap between art and life (as opposed to the gap between center and left, or the gap between tackle and end) that ball games will begin to look like halftime shows conceived and directed by John Cage.
Hockey will be staged—as wrestling already is—on gelatin. Baseball on ice. Quarterbacks will begin to experiment with form—standing behind the guard, for instance, to see what happens when the center’s snap sails straight up into emptiness. Antonioni has given us tennis without the ball. Writers of free verse, according to Robert Frost, have given us tennis without the net. Ilie Nastase may give us tennis with golf balls. Who knows?
It behooves the custodians of sport, then, to start thinking of ways to accommodate the artist in the athlete. Efforts may be made to channel the new impulses into off-the-field activity: theater groups, leather craft, bizarre private behavior.
But changes are also going to have to take place on the playing fields to allow for experimentation and the development of varying styles. Heretofore the picture of a sport has been cast almost entirely in terms of points scored—a sort of intense, or perhaps reverse, pointillism, the new sports critic might suggest. Henceforth more attention will be paid to the different modes of sport. An all-star game between baseball’s nine best sluggers and its five or six worst pitchers. Surely the judging of lay-ups in terms of quality—form, brio, hang time, degree of difficulty—along the lines of Olympic gymnastics scoring is long overdue. Why should Julius Erving get no more points for a whirling triple-pumping behind-the-back two-hand slam-dunk than Phil Jackson gets for an inelegantly coordinated tip-in? Football referees might award yardage for fresh, well-articulated insights and provocations (anybody can simply call the man across from him a fag) at the line of scrimmage.
Inevitably, of course, the new wave in sport will be co-opted. Owners will see the commercial potential in expressiveness and will begin to pay players not for statistics but for magicality, for je-ne-sais-quoi quotient. A Dick Stuart, who is brilliant in the role of the terrible defensive first baseman, will be encouraged more than the solid but uncreative Gold Glover. Players who have built careers on just meeting the ball and always throwing to the right base will be asked at contract time, “So where is that at? Why couldn’t you once ask for a trapeze at the plate so you could ‘swing from the heels’? Why don’t you ever throw to the hot-dog vendor? You’re not mercurial, you’re not alive to the moment out there.” Coaches will begin inculcating the three I’s: Inspiration, Imagination, Impishness. Clutch hitting as such will be out—Tommy Henrich was doing that in the forties. Choking and then calling for a microphone to tell the crowd about it—how it felt, what you saw your parents doing when you were six years old, which probably had a lot to do with it—will be in.
Dave Cowens, of course, terminated his leave of absence after two months. I think this was a failure of nerve. “I was taking a lot of flak from many circles,” he said—he who has given and withstood so much flak around hoops. You would think he might have found some way to emulate Dante, who stayed in exile and consigned all the circles to hell. Or he might have waited until the sports pendulum had swung to the ultimate in expressionism. And then come back and kicked ass.