In a new collection of essays, A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports, sports fan and scholar Gerald Early levels criticism as freely as a family member, exposing myths, delusions, and racial biases without hiding his love of the
games.
You call baseball “a sport, more than any other, that fosters incredible national self-deception.” Any examples?
Americans want to believe that baseball is still America’s game. Which it is not. Football is America’s game. Baseball hasn’t been the national pastime for probably 30 years. Second, we think it’s this pastoral game—it wasn’t invented on farms in the Midwest, it was invented in cities in the northeast, and it wasn’t too long until it became professionalized! Baseball’s origins aren’t even American. Most of them are British—cricket, rounders. And baseball is not about innocence and democratic values. It’s a business. All the myths we built up are delusions that reflect how we want to see ourselves. Nothing demonstrates this more than looking back at old baseball movies. Field of Dreams and The Natural trotted out every cliché about baseball that’s out there. I mean, I like both of those movies. They’re real sentimental. But it’s all a lot of hooey.
You write that we mythologize sports, romanticizing cultural virtue. How?
Sports movies do this all the time. Three things will happen: First, the movie will glorify the relationship between an athlete and his coach, or an athlete and her trainer. The brilliant thing about Bad News Bears was, it satirized all of that. Second, there’s the glorification of the training of the athlete. The Fighter is a perfect example: It’s glorifying his commitment, his dedication, his perseverance. Third, the movie’s always going to glorify the underdog. Those are the things people want most out of sports. The movies aren’t inventing the mythology; they’re just reflecting it to us.
Does analyzing sports’ cultural framework ruin your fun as a fan?
No, it heightens my interest. But it probably drives my friends crazy.
You write that “high-performance athletics is perhaps the most theatrical and emotional form of ritualized honor that we have left in the world.” What does it do for us?
It provides catharsis, hope, inspiration. Athletics is the one area we have left that dramatizes not only victory but defeat. I think people go to sports to learn how to deal with adversity. Much of it has to do with honor: how the person acts who wins; how the person acts who is defeated. There are not a lot of things in our society right now that directly speak to honor.
You make the point that nobody complains about actors’ high salaries, or plastic surgery…yet they complain about sports salaries and steroids.
Yeah. One, we want to be athletes are out there playing for the love of the sport, and two, we feel as though athletics should be something pure. We go looking for virtue. We don’t go to other art forms looking for virtue.
How would you have reacted, had you been there, to August A. Busch Jr.’s 1969 speech about how baseball made the pros’ lives great, and meanwhile they took “few, if any, of the great risks involved”?
[He laughs, hard.] I would have said, “Why don’t you put some cleats on and come out here and play a few games and see how you feel?” It’s a typically capitalist view: “I’m putting up the money, so I’m taking the risk.” I don’t deny that you are taking a risk—but only with your money. The pressure is on the athlete for performance—and an injury could end their career.
In 2003, Rush Limbaugh said of Donovan McNabb, of the Philly Eagles football team, “The media has [sic] been very desirous that a black quarterback do well.” He later insisted his remarks carried “no racist intent whatsoever.” Your opinion?
See, Limbaugh likes to play around with race. He says some stuff that is borderline racist at times, and he knows it, because it has a certain appeal to his audience. Was it was true that the press did want to see a black quarterback succeed? Yes. Was it kind of a racist thing for Rush Limbaugh to say? Yeah, that’s probably true too. Because Limbaugh knows how to throw out the kind of red meat his audiences want. And his audiences hate affirmative action; they hate the idea of blacks getting anything special.
Schools have done a better job launching blacks into sports than into other professions—why?
Oh, God, if I had an answer to that question! Bad black schools in core areas usually will be good at two things: athletes and bands. Lots of theories go around about this. Some say African Americans feel more comfortable dealing with sports and music. Others say schools only expect African Americans to do well in sports and music, and students wind up internalizing that expectation. They not only internalize it, they racialize it themselves: If you are smart, they say, “You are acting white!”
Only 8 percent of Major League Baseball players today are black; in the mid-’70s, nearly one third were black. You say, “The real reason black Americans do not play baseball is that they do not want to.” Is that because they’re not buying the romanticization of the sport?
They never did. So much of baseball is nostalgia. For black people, it’s hard to get nostalgic, because when you get nostalgic, you are looking back at Jim Crow. Baseball is weighted down with this history of segregation. When you look back, you are reminded that this was a lily-white game, and they didn’t want you to play it.
