BOOKS
THE SPORTING GRIPE
OUT OF THEIR LEAGUE. By Dave Meggysey. Simon and Schuster. $6.95.
BALL FOUR. By Jim Bouton. World Publishing Co. $7.95.
I've come to see that football is one of the most dehuman–
izing experiences a person can face . . . the racism and
fraud, the unbelievable brutality that affects mind as much
as body. To me, it is no accident that Richard Nixon, the
most repressive President in Amerioan history, is a football
freak, and that the sport is rapidly becoming our version of
bread and circuses.-DAvE MEGGYSEY
I believe that sport, all sport, is one of the few bits of glue
that holds our society together, one of the few activities
where young people can proceed along traditional avenues,
where objectives are clear, where the desire to win is not
only permissible but encouraged and, conversely, where a
man can learn how to lose without being destroyed by the
experience.
1
-SPlRo T. AGNEW
You can always be a teacher or a social worker when you've
reached thirty-five.-
JIM
BOUTON
In politics opposites guide, sustain and even comfort each
other, and it's no great surprise to find Dave Meggysey and Spiro
Agnew agreeing on what "sport" means, though not on what it does
to people. For them both sport represents society as it is or (for
Agnew) ought to be. Agnew might have written the scenario for
Meggysey's career, the poor Hungarian boy finding social identity as
a high school and college football star and going on to modest success
as a professional linebacker; and Meggysey's decision to quit, just as
some of the recognition and money he'd worked so hard for started
coming in, was a deliberate rejection of the "system" Agnew finds
sport upholding.
In theory, of course, they're right - any collective human activity
within a society in some way reflects the political structures that exist
there. Yet neither man says much about my own relation to sport.
Though athletics may well be good for young people, morally as well
1.
Sports Illustrated,
June
21, 1971.
\
A
