Tobacco brands at the 1991 World Baseball Series - 1 November 1991

This is going to be a talk about a baseball occasion, but not a talk about baseball. Well in the late evening of what has been called the first dark day of autumn they were doing or abandoned their usual television programme and tuned into CBS, the network that this year bought, at the usual prodigious price,the exclusive televising of the World Series, the play-off for the baseball championship between the two teams which at the end of the season led their separate leagues.

This year the contest was between the Minnesota Twins and the Atlanta Braves. The series is always played for the best of seven games, of course it's not always necessary to go to seven, in fact it's rare. But this year when the Atlanta Braves arrived in Minnesota on the Sunday, they were all-square, three games each. Somebody would have to win the final game, if it took all night. It has indeed taken till two or three in the morning.

Well, half an hour before midnight on that bright, tingling Sunday, there was no score and the last innings, the ninth was over. Baseball, you'll have gathered, abhors a draw and so they go into extra innings. So Atlanta went in again and went out again, with no score. It was now up to Minnesota. All they needed was one run. Turned out that with two men on base, all they needed was one hit and Minnesota had won one to nothing. They were the 1991 world champions.

We learned on the following Tuesday that about 90 million had watched all or some of the seventh, the last game, at home and another 10 million in bars, restaurants or college dormitories. I don't off-hand remember another event which has attracted to the tube 100 million of America's 255 millions. Baseball fanatics will spend much loving time going over what it seems were at least a dozen records and oddities of the series.

For me, two things stand out in memory which have nothing to do with the playing of the game. One is the picture, the cutaway shot that you see over and over again, of the men in the dugout, the batting team waiting their turn and their manager. The manager, any manager, is usually in his 50s or early 60s and is portly, has a capacious bay window anyway, that is itself practically a beer commercial. The manager is always stoical, rarely expressing any emotion. He paces up and down and from time to time he spits and then he goes back to chewing. The camera pans across the dugout and the sprawling, leaning, hunching players and almost all of them are chewing, one I recall, an exception, delicately blowing small balloons of bubblegum. But the fascinating thing to me is what the rest were chewing was tobacco.

They must be the only trade, profession in America, that retains the habit. Why? I can only guess it's because ball players, baseball players, always did chew and so, as little boys, saw their heroes do it, they learned and do it still. When I arrived here in the early '30s, gum chewing was universal and tobacco chewing was as common among rural characters and ball players as beer swilling and in the lobbies of most hotels there were, down by the legs of the easy chairs and sofas, spittoons, dignified always by the name of cuspidors. As the chewing habit declined, the cuspidors vanished. Today, I believe they are as rhare as hitching posts.

Well this year's World Series was not unique for the chewing and spitting proclivities of the players but, on the last night, a camera, swooping round the stadium, steadier for a moment on two words flashing in lights. They were the name of a brand of chewing tobacco. Two days later, a prominent item on the evening news was the decision of the Federal Trade Commission to forbid the shooting, filming on television, of signs that advertise tobacco in any form. Now cigarette advertising here, as in many other countries, has been forbidden on television for 20 years, but the commission specified the appearance on a nationally televised sporting event of a brand name of a tobacco from now on is verboten. This is bad news for a lot of people.

I'd better say first how powerful the Federal Trade Commission is. It was created by act of Congress in 1914 as, I quote, an independent quasi, quasi judicial commission of five members, to promote fair competition by preventing cabals and illegal combinations in restraint of trade between the states. Such powerful combinations were rampant at the time and, as often happens, a disciplinary body created to police one sort of illegality stays on, watches out for many others. Such as with the FTC price-fixing or other discriminatory agreements between producers or distributors.

Lately, we've heard more of the FTC as the judge of fraudulent or deceptive advertising, as with the advertising of foods that falsely claim low fat or no salt or no cholesterol. But now they've taken a big leap sideways into the fringes of advertising and, for the first time, question whether it's legal to allow a roving television camera to show, in passing, a stationery poster, sign, billboard for a product which is, by law, banned from direct television advertising. I hope I'm making myself clear.

By act of Congress television ads, commercials for tobacco are forbidden, so also for liquor, spirits, strong drink if you like. Beer commercials hang on, though not without incessant protest from teetotallers, child guidance groups, parents' associations and other purists. But what the FTC seem to be saying now is that if, during the televising of a sport, when the camera's going about its business of following a football or cutting to the cheering crowd, it suddenly reveals a cigarette or a whisky poster, oops, the network is in trouble.

Of course I'm sure the chewing tobaccos firm is already mobilising its lawyers, ready to arrive in court like an army with banners, protesting that their sacred rights under the First Amendment, freedom of speech, are being violated. Perhaps the FTC will just cite the chewing tobacco guff as a warning, but if they're serious, then heaven or some collateral sponsor help the firm, the products that actually sponsor sports events. For instance, one of the biggest tournaments in the tennis year is arranged and sponsored by a well-known brand of cigarette. Its name and logo are plastered all over the place, not least on the wall behind the baseline. There's no way that the cameras can show the action without catching shots of the brand name, which, of course, is the whole idea in the first place.

That particular sponsor has been weathering attack for some time, for linking a healthy sport with an unhealthy habit and many top players certainly are uncomfortable with it, just as any public person in the United States is uncomfortable to be associated with cigarette advertising in any form, since every pack sold in the United States and every advertisement, large or small, in any magazine or public place, is required to print in bold letters beneath the full colour photos of laughing girls and muscular men, one of the many warnings from the surgeon general, to the effect that smoking can cause emphysema, cancer, heart disease, can harm pregnancy and so on. Imagine, if this prohibition were introduced in Europe, where I sometimes think it's impossible to see a football match and even, in some places, a golf tournament, without seeing also whacking great billboards advertising some beer or, so help us, whisky.

I said there were two memories of the 1991 World Series likely to stick with us, apart that is from the actual sporting details, as memorable items of what you might call social history, which is after all, my bag or cup of tea. Well the second item will be remembered longer than the scoring statistics, I believe because it's typical of a growing movement across the nation, among so-called minorities, Hispanics, blacks, homosexual men and women, for equal status as citizens and equal protection of the laws. An outgrowth of the movement is a rash of sensitivity to what has long been normal idiom, terms of description. We are never to say Orientals, but Asian Americans. Blacks must now be written about as African Americans, so on. Now the lowly Indian has risen up in protest. He is not to be called an Indian but a Native American.

One of the competing teams in the baseball finals was from Atlanta, as I said, the team is called the Atlanta Braves. The Braves was chosen to signify, in the old American sense, fine, fearless warriors on the Indian model. The Atlanta fans have a gesture they use to applaud their heroes and to urge them on. It's known as the tomahawk chop and as you can imagine, is a slicing movement through the air with the forearm. Seeing 20,000 fans perform this in unison is a rousing experience, but not any longer to the Native Americans. Two tribes have formally protested for the first time. They see themselves mocked. Everybody tries to brush it off lightly but I have the feeling that such ceremonials, such names are on their way out. After all, said Arsenio Hall, the very engaging young black, I mean African American, who runs a late-night talk show, after all, he said, my people don't take kindly to the Cleveland Browns. How would you like a team called the Iowa Caucasians, unless, of course, it was a basketball team?

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