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

Introduction

People today think of the early days of American sport in terms of the 1920s. This is not to say that they believe sports originated during this period, but rather they remember its champions: Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Helen Wills, and Bobby Jones. Each competed in a sport popular then and even more so now. The enduring fame of these athletes is, of course, rooted in their remarkable accomplishments, but it is equally indebted to a culture that aggrandized those accomplishments. Jay Gatsby’s “old sport” greeting of an acquaintance, dated though it sounds, attests to the widespread interest in sport at the time. Powerful commercial forces were stoking this interest and focusing national attention on athletes who excelled. Newspapers were the single most influential factor. By 1925 one-quarter of all newspapers sold were purchased for their sports pages.1 In 1919 400 journalists and 20,000 spectators attended the fight between Jess Willard and Jack Dempsey.2 Seven years later, at Dempsey’s first match against Gene Tunney, these numbers soared to 1,800 correspondents and 130,000 spectators.3 When Bobby Jones successfully achieved the fourth victory of the first Grand Slam, sportswriters cranked out an estimated two million words of coverage.4 Introduction introduction x Sales of radios, which only began with the opening of the first transmitting station in 1920, soared to the point that 40 percent of all households had one by the decade’s end. As the popularity of live reports of sporting events outstripped transmission capability, resourceful announcers learned to improvise eye-witness narratives from wired information. These “reporters” in distant station booths, like those actually at the event, skillfully cued the tenor of their voices to the emotion of the moment and accentuated the successes or disappointments of favorites. The blare of tabloids, another newcomer from 1919, intensified pressure on established newspapers to hire a new breed of sportswriter adept at personalizing athletes and enlivening their performances. Grantland Rice wrote himself into history with the famous opening of his New York Herald Tribune account of Notre Dame’s 1924 victory over Army: “Outlined against a bluegray sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden.” Along with Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, and Heywood Broun, he transformed accomplished athletes into legendary ones. Their presentation conceded immediacy to newscasters and crafted absorbing accounts that sold newspapers to readers already aware of the final score. They inspired a proliferation of sobriquets—“the Sultan of Swat,” “the Galloping Ghost,” “Little Miss Poker Face,” and “the Manassa Mauler ,” which aided in fashioning heroes who were simultaneously awesome and familiar. Sports reporters encouraged ordinary citizens to believe that they knew and understood their champions. Older introduction xi defenders of journalistic accuracy and respectability objected to this contrivance and perceived younger reporters as seeking the same fame and fortune that athletes enjoyed.5 “Present-day opinion of newspaper editors, psychologists, trades publication editors, advertising men, and journalism instructors is that sports on their present scale would be impossible without the sports section of the daily papers,” reported Editor and Publisher in 1927. “Without the assistance of the newspapers, sports would never have attained their present popularity.”6 In short, we remember the champions of the 1920s because newspapers, radios, and newsreels so effectively branded them on the consciousness of our culture. The figures in this book date from an earlier era when sports were still developing and beginning to attract this kind of notice. Except for automobile racing, the sports represented here—bicycling, football, tennis, and mountaineering —originated during the aftermath of the Civil War and were powerfully influenced by the surge in industrialization and commercialization that war unleashed. To hard-working middle-class Americans, these two developments increased the appeal of recreation and sport as meaningful alternatives. Prior to the Civil War, as the country converted from Calvinism to capitalism, responsible citizens believed that they had to work hard and save. Industry, productivity, and perseverance determined the success of the individual and the nation. Leisure and idleness, on the other hand, were vices fraught with moral, financial, and political hazard. However, the new and enlarged middle class that emerged following the Civil War had the capital and the incentive to question and then amend the puritanical values they...