Unsporting manners

Last Tuesday night, when we're told about half the world either put off going to bed or got up out of bed to watch the so-called 'boxing match' between Mohammad Ali and Ken Norton, there was a wild and bizarre scene outside Yankee Stadium that must be unique in the history of sports events in this country.

Now as everybody knows who's ever gone to a Cup Final or a Test match or a big fight, the human scene around a stadium is always like a vast school of salmon in full spate with the younger members of the tribe trying to get the jump on the swarm and producing confusion and some swishing tails in the general thrashing about, maybe here and there somebody gets a shin barked or an elbow bruised (I'm back to the humans now, I ought to say) but one of the American puzzles that I've never solved is that we have rarely, if ever, had over here at football finals, baseball championships, any huge sporting event, the outbreaks of blind violence that have caused such anxiety among the organisers of soccer in Great Britain. 

By now it's practically an axiom taught in school in Europe that there's a strong strain of violence in America that you can either trace back to the law of survival on the frontier or dismiss more glibly as an element of the national character that nobody seems able to do much about. Nobody that I know, certainly, has ever explained when fifty or a hundred thousand Americans are gathered together in a stadium, they never seem to indulge in bottle throwing or breaking down barricades or invading the field or a bloody free-for-all. The only theory that occurs to me – and I hope nobody's going to make a PhD thesis out of it – is that maybe the audience of sports in this country, though huge, is the more innocent part of society, that people with a criminal itch scorn games as naive as baseball and football, and concentrate their attention on hoping for a fixed race meeting or helping with welfare rackets or being runners for the exploiters of the national medical aid programme. There was, by the way, a whopping scandal out of Chicago this week in which it's calculated that the taxpayers of Illinois unknowingly pay out something like $400,000 a year to a man, or a couple of men, who run a whole chain of so-called medical centres and fake unnecessary prescriptions, rig the books and get the money from the state Medicaid agency. 

Well, that might explain the comparative purity of the big national games but only of the organisers, the people who run them. It doesn't explain the general orderliness of the crowds. A hoodlum is a hoodlum in any country and we surely have our fill of them but after reading about or seeing the violence at some English soccer matches, I'm always relieved, but still baffled, by the good behaviour and good nature of the enormous crowds that flock to the World Series, the annual baseball championship series which is coming up in a couple of weeks, the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, football games and so on. 

Somehow, in the sports department anyway, that national strain of violence seems to have been successfully exported but last Tuesday things were different. To put it as simply and accurately as possible, what happened was this. Outside Yankee Stadium, before and after the fight, a loose mob of hoodlums beat up people, picked pockets wholesale, looted and damaged motorcars and generally went berserk. They had the idea to do this from the well-publicised fact that several thousand New York City police were on strike for wage increases. Maybe these striking police would seize the opportunity of a huge crowd at Yankee Stadium to demonstrate there, and they did. While the mob was looting and pickpocketing, the striking police were parading around and chanting with banners. 

Now the mayor had anticipated this nasty prospect and assigned a hefty corps of non-striking policemen to control the crowds and keep an eye on the strikers and some police managed to do their unhappy duty. But many others cheered the strikers and even joined in the parade, so what we had was a roving movement of young gangs robbing and looting in full view of several hundred police doing nothing about it while the police sent to police the policemen did very little either and, here and there, turned on their police car sirens to show sympathy for the strikers and aggravate the general bedlam. 

This is a sort of paradoxical situation that would be very funny in a comic opera but was very ugly in life. The striking police showed acute, if lamentable, shrewdness in picking a sports event. Wherever 30,000 people are gathered together there's always the likelihood of big trouble if the police are not in charge and perhaps from now on sports will become the handiest ally of disgruntled citizens for the crowds for sports get bigger and more slap happy (and I dare to say more potentially vicious) precisely because everywhere sport is leaking out of sportsmanship as money floods in. I remember once, long ago, watching a tennis final at Wimbledon in which the great Bill Tilden was playing. Tilden was, shall we say, by nature quite as temperamental as Jimmy Connors or even old 'Nasty' Nastase but in Tilden's day, the tradition, the general understanding, if you like, was that bad manners showed you up as a bad sport and this tradition was very strong. 

Put it a little more sharply and say that even nasty men who were very good at games were cowed on the court or in the ring or wherever by a general taboo against temper and temperament on display. In those innocent days, the crowd, at large, assumed that a sports hero was not only splendid at the game but was also a good loser, that he might exult decently in victory but bow to defeat with grace. Do I sound prim? Then I sound prim. The fact is when that Tilden, after a linesman's call threw his racket on the ground, the match was stopped. The referee beckoned the great man – then, the best living player – warned him that one more such tantrum and he would be disqualified. And next day, Tilden apologised and everybody forgave him. 

Today, it sounds, does it not, like something from 'Eric', or 'Little by Little' or from 'Tom Brown's School Days'? Today I have seen the absolutely top players swipe at the press, deliberately serve double faults, scream at the crowd and I remember one great woman player collect her rackets, after a line call, snarl an obscenity at the referee and march off the court. Since several hundred thousand dollars were entailed in the take, the referee begged her to come back and she consented to do so. 

The pressure of a bulging box office is the one that is not to be resisted. It has become the prime consideration in seeing that a sports event somehow gets through to the end no matter what. The promoters and the television sponsors and the broadcasting companies that pay for a showing by satellite overseas, they may, in the secrecy of their well-controlled consciences, they may be embarrassed, even furious at the childishness or viciousness of the performers, but if the thing doesn't go through, they are in the red. I remember a businessman responsible for signing his firm to television contracts for sponsorship of sports events. He was a decent, humorous man, talking about the decline of sportsmanship in sports about the more prominent exhibitionists, he said, 'I hate their guts but they're our best investment'. And I think this second thought is the controlling consideration in the staging of big, sporting events. 

Now, I ought to have said at the beginning that in the innocent days I'm talking about a good many of the graces that surrounded some sports – tennis, golf, cricket in particular – were a by-product of a different social system. You could stretch it and say 'the bloom on the face of social snobbery'. Those were the days of amateur sports. Gentlemen, as we called them, ran cricket and came out of their own gate and, while the professionals were just as good in cricket – better – they knew their place and their place assumed a working wage not much better than that of a busy bartender, which many of them in retirement became. In tennis, it was assumed that you had time and money to travel to England and America and France and pay your own way. Very nice. 

Well, all that's gone and a good thing too. For in our new, or changed, society, the organisers have had to allow that a gift for a game should not be hobbled by your origins and that a great performer in any sport is just as much of a great entertainer as a great actor, or singer, or jazz pianist and should be paid accordingly. 

A year or two ago, a fine pro golfer won three tournaments in a row and in two weeks won $120,000 and an old, great golfer, looking on – a man who 30 years ago racked up a record that still stands winning 11 tournaments in a row – mused sadly, 'He's won more in two weeks than I won in my whole professional career.' Well, that is the way the money tumbles. And it tumbles in tidal waves over the promoters of international sporting events that can be beamed by satellite overseas. The audience for the Ali/Norton fight was variously calculated at 100-200 million but even if this is a public relations man's exaggeration, there is no doubt that the probable take from people packing theatres in Paris and Bangkok, Stockholm and Manchester and Nairobi, and heaven knows where else, is beyond the collected dreams of the men we used to call 'great international promoters', men like the late Tex Rickard and C. B. Cochran. Maybe the television satellite is the villain, or a mixed blessing anyway. 

And when, as last Tuesday at Yankee Stadium $5 million hung on the outcome of a single, crashing punch to the jaw, the chance of seeing it must be irresistible to the envious and the tough, and especially the dispossessed. Where all this will end, as the late Henry Luce used to say, 'knows only God'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.