SPRING 2008 Community College Magazine - Northampton ...

an icon of American popular culture. His celebrity helped all
recently arrived Italians to see themselves as Americans. Hank
Greenberg, the slugging Detroit Tiger, did much the same for
immigrant Jews. In Indiana, the little College of Notre Dame du
Lac turned an ethnic slur (“Fighting Irish”) into an emblem of
ethnic and religious pride by beating the daylights out of the elite
eastern universities at their own game of football. (Ironically, that
little college has become an elite presence in college football,
with a billion dollar endowment, its own television network and a
national recruiting base).
Closer to our time, in 1997 Tiger Woods won the Masters
Tournament by a whopping 12 strokes. Among his most-devoted
fans that weekend was the (mostly African American) house staff
at Augusta National Golf Club, an organization that refused to let
a black person play in the Masters until 1975. Woods’s victory
and subsequent emergence as the greatest player in the game have
reshaped the way Americans think about golf and who can play
it well. Tiger Woods is today the most recognizable and famous
athlete on earth and is that singular kind of role model combining
prodigious ability with a relentless work ethic.
Occasionally, sport can move beyond the boundaries of its own
subculture and transform the larger society. In 1947, when General
Manager Branch Rickey brought up Jack Roosevelt Robinson to
play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and break the major league baseball
color line, it shook the very foundations of segregated America.
Not only did several teams threaten to boycott any games in which
Robinson played, but the player himself was the subject of such
vile abuse and degradation that he considered leaving the game
in his first year in the majors. Ben Chapman, the Alabama-born
manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, perversely commented to
Robinson while being photographed with him, “Jackie, you know,
you’re a good ballplayer, but you’re still a n----r to me.”***
Robinson heroically toughed it all out, remaining faithful to
his promise to Rickey not to fight back for at least two years. His
breathtaking skills and Hall of Fame career slowly won over his
teammates, then Brooklyn fans, and then American society. More
African American and Latino players followed him, and today,
great players from every part of the world have the opportunity
to play with and against each other. In 1954, seven years after
Robinson broke through the segregation barrier, the U.S. Supreme
Court declared school segregation unconstitutional. Robinson’s
contribution to this sea change in American society was not
insignificant. The columnist George Will once pointed out that
while Martin Luther King was the most important person of the
ensuing Civil Rights movement, Jackie Robinson was the second
most important.****
Finally, there are moments in sport that reveal the best in the
human spirit. In 1984, during the women’s marathon in the Los
Angeles Olympics, Gabriela Andersen-Scheiss of Switzerland,
suffering from heat prostration and multiple sclerosis, entered the
Coliseum hours after Joan Benoit Samuelson had won the race.
Struggling mightily just to reach the finish line, the entire crowd of
80,000 rose and cheered her on to the finish. She left the Olympics
medal-less that day but victorious nonetheless, faithful to her goal
and herself. Her performance made real the potential nobility of
sport, with her athleticism a visible manifestation of her personal
strength and will.
Getting back to those golfers celebrating a hole in one, for
most of us, sport is about enjoying life, exulting in the moment,
rejoicing in modest victories and agonizing over small defeats.
Images of sport decorate our lives and benchmark our memories.
Lucy will never let Charlie Brown kick that football, and even
without Abbott and Costello, “Who” is still on first. Super Bowl
Sunday has become an unofficial national holiday, and Seabiscuit
is winning those photo finishes again, this time in the movies.
Little League dads and soccer moms have entered the pantheon of
American stereotypes, and parents still urge their children to eat
their Wheaties in faint hope of seeing them grow into the athletes
on the box.
Any reflection on sport in America would be incomplete
without a deferential nod to the Aristotle of sport, Yogi Berra.
Dispensing insights like “90 percent of baseball is mental, and the
other half is physical,” and “if people don’t want to come out to
the ballpark, how are you going to stop them,” Yogi reminds all of
us to enjoy sport for its own sake. If we get too analytical about it,
we miss the point, and the fun. u
About the Author: A historian by training, Dr. McGovern’s fascination
with the past ranges from intellectual history to industrialization
and European immigration patterns in Pennsylvania to baseball
lore. Not just a student of sports, he enjoys golfi ng and hiking.
He confesses that he “spends an inordinate amount of time hoping
that the Phillies will win the World Series again in his lifetime.”
SPRING 2008 ● NCC 21