Loran - Smith
Loran
Lately, I have often been remembering my longtime friend, John Underwood. Mainly because of a book he wrote, Death of an American Game.
If you are an old-timer who has kept up with sports with a serious bent, you are likely to have read some of his work. He wrote for Sports Illustrated in the magazine’s heyday of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. He was also a highly acclaimed author and was serenaded for his books on Ted Williams. Underwood was the hitter’s best friend—even though the irascible slugger danced to a different beat from the rest of the world, and that included John.
Nobody knew the inside story of Williams’s life and career like John. They hunted and fished together. John was a great admirer of the man the experts say was the greatest power hitter in history of baseball. He recorded conversations with Williams and spent countless hours over meals and social outings, which enabled Underwood to become the foremost authority on this complex personality.
In 1979, Little, Brown and Co. published John’s book ( Death of an American Game), but it was based on the mayhem that had taken place in football—not recruiting based on commitments going to the highest bidder.
John’s book is replete with vignettes about the brutality that had come to the sport. At that time, it was a treatise on how sissies were not welcome in the game.
Players took umbrage with fellow players who did not have the mettle for playing hurt. Then the next thing we know, it became a “hit ‘em in the numbers” tackling routine, and we all know what that led to.
The game will always be physical, but anytime a discussion comes up about why so many head-related injuries came about over the years, I recall a conversation with Georgia great, Charley Trippi, who died a few days before his 101st birthday.
The Bulldog immortal played high school, prep school, military football, college football, and ten years in the National Football League and lived a long life without any hint of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) issues. One day, I asked him about that and he said poignantly, “It was simple, we led with our shoulders and not our heads.”
I remember a story about a group of potential Olympic athletes being given a hypothetical survey. If there were a supplement that would pretty much guarantee them an Olympic gold medal, but would shorten their life expectancy by 15 or so years; would they take the supplement?
All but a couple said they would take the supplement. The response naturally reflected the trend of thought based, in part, on age. That was a reminder of what Bob Goalby once said about PGA Tour players when he and a few other old timers asked them to support the Senior PGA tour when it was in its formative stages. “Someday
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you will be where we are,” Goalby said to the young players. Then he came with this disclaimer: “When you are twenty, you don’t think you will ever be fifty.”
John Underwood passed away before NIL and excess stipends to college athletes—principally football and basketball players—became standard, with the potential of bankrupting college sports.
Congress now has an opportunity to do some good for us, but if we get a law that we believe will work, chances are that it won’t. Maybe we should do away with scholarships altogether.
In 1954, the Ivy League agreed to award all scholarships based on need. I have enjoyed several Ivy League games, including seeing the Harvard-Yale Game in Cambridge, and have also taken in military academy games including the annual Army–Navy headliner. There was as much pure fun, excitement, and prideful cheering as you find at the Georgia–Florida, Oklahoma–Texas, and Alabama–Auburn games.
Although there is considerable ambiguity with all suggested plans, there seems to be a growing consensus that something must be done.
Somebody out there with the energy and cogency of a Billy Payne needs to surface with a concept that will work. There was only a handful of his closest friends who thought that he could pull off bringing the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta, but everybody knows the result of that remarkable story. If only Billy were twenty years younger.
This past weekend on the UGA campus, nothing could top the pure joy of the Georgia Bulldogs defeating Mississippi State to earn a berth in the College World Series.
There was drama, there was excitement, and there was euphoria with the Bulldogs of Athens, coming from behind twice to take the measure of a quality opponent in a classy performance that made the day of every Dawg (only those who hail from Athens, of course).
That once was the way it was with football. I sincerely hope we’re not going to let greed ruin the greatest of games.
