Athletic Pocketbooks

I HAVE ALWAYS been suspicious about sports books. Most of them serve only to glorify sport and perpetuate the looking-glass world myth that surrounds it. Written for the fanatic fan who will devour anything concerning his favorite superstar, the books only attempt to provide an "inside glimpse" into the life of the athlete as told to a ghostwriter. But the private life of a Bobby Orr or Willis Reed is of little instrinsic interest to me.

Occasionally a sports book comes along that tries to put sports in a proper perspective rather than gratifying an athlete's ego and pocketbook. Paper Lion is, perhaps, one of the only intelligent, perceptive ones I can think of, Joseph Durso's The All-American Dollar-The Big Business of Sports, qualifies as another. Although Durso, a well-respected sports journalist for the New York Times, fails to destroy the sports myth or attack with much zest, he often offers an insight into sport as a capitalistic, cut throat enterprise, controlled by television, run by businessmen in the front office, and played by athletes who continually keep their salaries in mind.

Armed with impressive research, statistics, and interesting anecdotes, Durso methodically examines each of the major professional sports, from baseball to boxing, from football to golf. He charts the skyrocketing purses and salaries, the mushrooming gates, and the high TV revenues in a calm, understated style. His collected, unassuming assurance sharply contrasts with his perplexing, chaotic subject.

He neglects nothing related to the business aspect of sport. Durso shows how football's history led from its early struggles for financial survical to an affluent state where a one-minute TV commercial for the Super Bowl costs $200,000. The concentration on the financial aspects of sports, however, are only initially interesting. The quotation of astronomically figures eventually becomes boring, and it is only Durso's good writing which rescues his intelligent intellectual approach from an oblivion of six-diget numbers.

When Durso examines the intricate clockwork of sport he is most successful in jarring our conceptions. He tells us that sports became big business to maintain a profit. Athletic corporations frantically searched for new markets in the face of spiralling costs, wage and labor disputes, and a dollar squeeze. In the process, Durso thinks, sports businesses like Madison Square Garden, the owners of a racetrack, a basketball and hockey team, an ice show, and boxing interests, fomented a revolution which saw money supplant entertainment as professional sport's raison d'etre.

The book points out time and again that network television was the major force behind the sports revolution of the sixties. Durson says TV is primarily responsible for the gigantic quantity of money being thrown around (totalling $150 million a year), and makes the difference between huge losses and modest profits for baseball franchises and football teams. He argues that "the sports world's share of this money pie put television firmly in the picture, to say nothing of firmly in the saddle, of the sports revolution of the sixties and seventies."

TV GOLD had become so important, he says, that program directors routinely signal referees to call time for a commercial. Durso points out that increasing costs put the networks in a bind: "None of the networks could particularly afford to pay the escalating prices for sports, but then none of them could particularly afford not to pay them either."

Television's expansion of profit and audience transformed the life of the professional athlete. It forced him to become a businessman in order to share in TV's financial bonanza: "Two things accompanied the money athletes on their road to the banks of America, in addition to the hoopla and cash: agents and confrontations with the sports establishments." The book explores the new sophistication of the athlete, who brought his lawyer-agent to the contract bargaining table, and sat around checking his investment portfolios instead of playing poker as he did in an earlier era. Durso discusses the Curt Flood suit, and the player strikes objectively, assessing the ramifications of the new legalistic bent in professional athletics. Unfortunately, he hesitates to draw conclusions, but merely offers observations. His professional sports-writer perspective prevents any penetrating analysis.

But it does enable him to speculate about the future. While discussing the growth of sports, he asks whether the pall mall race for the dollar will continue. He views sarcastically the greed of the owners and players, and wonders.

When does the bubble burst? Will the inflation of the nineteen sixties lead to deflation in the nineteen seventies? Are the new athlete-capitalists on a collision course with their employers? Or is everybody on a collision course with antitrust laws and a decade of legal tangles?

Durso fails to answer his own question, or even attempt to, but he is not optimistic.

Durson's book would have been more successful if he had been more critical. His subtle, sarcasm paints a clear picture of the capitalistic nature of pro sports, but he never takes sides. In forcing his reader to find the answers, he avoids the condemnation his data warrants. On his opponents' one yard line, he elects to go for a sure field goal and a tie instead of a risky TD and a win.