Take it from an old sportswriter who knows the score (though not much else). For the guru-on-the-mountaintop illumination of What It All Means, for how otherwise superficial endeavors fit into real life, there are folks like Hofstra University history professor Michael D’Innocenzo.
I was reminded of this last week in attending the school’s dedication of D’Innocenzo’s eponymous seminar room on campus. It was just the most recent in a fairly endless stream of awards, fellowships, recognitions and widespread praise earned by D’Innocenzo for his teaching, researching and writing about major events and consequential human affairs over six decades. And counting,
The man is a walking, talking historical landmark. An activist for non-violent social change. An expert on immigration and civil rights. (He was an instrumental figure in bringing Martin Luther King Jr. to Hofstra for a 1963 speech.) A big-picture guy who, for me, has been a vital source for understanding that sports—recess; fun and games—in fact are of significant consequence.
We met when my wife was taking D’Innocenzo’s “Sports and the American Character” class at Hofstra in 1974, and among the suggestions he posed to his students then was a doctoral dissertation on the effect of sports on the aspirations of people, particularly minority groups. Or sports’ effect on the male-female relationship. Or the effect of college athletic recruiting. On winning. On losing.
He spoke of how, for so long, “scholars, sad to say, looked at sports as frivolous,” never bothering to go beyond “mythology.” He saw the connection between sports’ “No. 1 mentality” and Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick Policy and how Americans “have always thought of themselves as models for the rest of the world. Sports has been an enormous factor in this country since the 1920s.”
Babe Ruth, he said, “was a sign of early America—up from the bottom with his broken home,” and ultimately a symbol of America’s post-World War I power.
D’Innocenzo noted the “robber-baron mentality” of sports, that “succeeding is the thing, no matter how you do it. Offensive holding is accepted as a part of football. Think of Ty Cobb in the ‘20s sharpening his spikes; anything to steal that base.”
So now I teach a sportswriting course at Hofstra, as an osmotic beneficiary of D’Innocenzo’s learned observations, and one of my objectives is to reinforce the fact that covering sports is more than balls and strikes. That it requires something of a sports anthropologist, willing to consider issues of race, gender equity, performance-enhancing drugs, the almighty dollar.
During the New York Yankees’ run of nine consecutive first-place finishes in the early 2000s, when they were operating with the league’s highest payroll, D’Innocenzo compared their ability to “go and buy some established player” to the United States “using its leverage with NATO to project our influence elsewhere in the world. Historians call that dollar diplomacy.”
In the relatively early days of the Super Bowl, as the National Football League began to wallow in self-importance, the league offered a $10,000 college grant to the teenager who submitted the best essay on “The NFL’s Role in American History.” D’Innocenzo found it interesting that the winner was a female “because she is not part of it, except from the outside. She is reinforcing the old status-quo that men participate and women appreciate.”
That is changing. And none of this is to say that D’Innocenzo is anti-sports. He’s a Mets fan, for goodness sakes, and for decades has been an eager practitioner of tennis and softball. He believes in “so many affirmative values in sports,” he said. “Discipline, though it can be perverted. The camaraderie. The sense of getting beyond one’s self.” He said he would love to see more of those qualifies in the classroom setting.
But surely it is a healthy thing to be shaken out of our passive spectating stupor by considering things beyond the final score. Long ago, I wrote down this quote from D’Innocenzo: “Anytime you study something closely you will find yourself being critical of parts on it. Even in the competitive world of sports I have come to know and love.”
I should get to work on one of those doctoral dissertations….
