Game Faces: Five Early American Champions and the Sports They Changed

Epilogue

In a poem titled “Alumnus Football,” first published in 1908, Grantland Rice memorably wrote, “For when the one Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”1 Although these words are still fondly remembered, at the time when Rice wrote them, long before the 1920s, which made both him and his couplet famous, he was speaking out on behalf of an entrenched belief. For years early proponents of sport had been arguing that the recently developed games were supposed to be recreation and a therapeutic alternative to work. According to this philosophy play mattered and the outcome didn’t. Participants were encouraged to value the benefits of physical exertion and social interaction over the final score. However, Rice’s support for this ethic was tinged with awareness that it was endangered. He understood that by 1908 athletic events had already evolved into serious competitions quite different from the rude skirmishes they once were. Indeed, winning had grown very important to an everexpanding range of enthusiasts. The players who were currently training long and hard for events, the entrepreneurs who were arranging and promoting them, the crowds who Epilogue epilogue 186 were purchasing costly tickets for them, and the journalists, like himself, who were capitalizing on them for livelihoods affirmed that a tectonic shift had occurred and propelled sport beyond the wildest dreams of its earliest supporters. Martina Navratilova would spotlight our age’s distance from Rice’s view of sport with her observation: “Whoever said, it’s not whether you win or lose, probably lost.” The chapters of this book likewise stray from Rice’s maxim with their close accounting of wins and losses. Most were neither memorable nor important enough to be engraved alongside the names of my athletes in any grand tome of sport. In this quite different accounting, they are more like checkpoint measures in the development of their careers. But some victories do indeed stand out and legitimately warrant being remembered—and so too a few crushing defeats incurred along the way. Nevertheless, these profiles do emulate Rice’s standard in focusing on how these champions “played” during this seminal period of sport’s evolution into strenuous commercialized competition. Rice believed that playing well involved those long-esteemed traits of being vigorous and amicable, playing wisely, and abiding by the rules. Above all Rice believed that players should be good sports. Although the figures of this book were indoctrinated with these expectations, they were exceptionally driven to win and/or succeed, and being a good sport was well down their list of priorities. Frequently, their drive was so intense that it made them offensive and unlikable , but it also carried them to the forefront of their sports and contributed to the development of momentous events. If their intent on victory and recognition made them formidable adversaries, it also alerted them to the escalating importance epilogue 187 of money and organizations. They either shrewdly grasped or painfully learned that these sideline considerations were as essential to their success as their athletic prowess. These imposing obstacles had to be assessed and engaged as carefully as any of their opponents. Money, of course, was an advantage—and a necessity; either you had it, or you had to get it. The widespread support for amateurism privileged the wealthy, who could pay for their needs, but the surging interest in sport opened up opportunities for the needy to access funding, so long as they did so without pocketing direct payments. This potentially menacing minefield was either defused or worsened by the expanding authority of supervisory organizations. They and their supporters could provide financing to a person with promise or punish anyone who obtained it improperly. Moreover, they decided how the sport was to be conducted, developed a uniform set of rules, amended them as warranted, and assumed responsibility for their enforcement. These circumstances pressured these early combatants to realize that they were, in fact, involved in two games: the one in which they were competing and the one against these outside forces.2 Moreover, these dual games necessitated that they recognize the special challenges of each and develop effective strategies for both. Although this fuller record reveals that these early champions were not so successful against these outside forces, it deepens our understanding of their substantial contribution to the evolution of...