Mike Baughman on the Evolution of Sport, Homesickness, and Sports as an Antidote to Racism
“If everybody could spend some youthful time as an athlete, I’m sure we’d have a better world. ”
My grandfather - to me he’s Opa - was a high level football, basketball and volleyball player in his day. He tried out as a wide-receiver for the Detroit Lions and played forward for a U.S. Army basketball team in Europe. He later went on to run marathons and ultra-marathons. He also practiced an eccentric and pure style of hunting - running down deer. He was interviewed about this by The New York Times. Here is an excerpt from the interview:
I actually tried running a deer three or four times before I was successful. Of course one has to be fit, but the key is the country you do it in. It has to be open enough so that the animal can’t hide and rest.
The country I did it in was quite open, with occasional willow thickets and fairly gentle hills. It was almost always possible to see for hundreds of yards. Deer are like sprinters, and a conditioned distance runner should be able to exhaust one if the country is open enough. It took about four hours, and I estimate I ran about 15 miles. It was also about 80 degrees on that day, which probably helped because deer do not do well in the heat.
After his discharge from the Army, Opa became a writing and literature professor at Southern Oregon University. He’s published eight books. My favorites are Boat, a memoir about his childhood and fascinating life experiences, and Grower’s Market, a dark and comical novel about free enterprise in the northern California marijuana country.
Opa is a well-known fly-fisherman, perhaps best known for his book A River Seen Right, about Oregon’s famous North-Umpqua River..
He also wrote for Sports Illustrated for several years, and you can find his articles here. Opa has deeply influenced me throughout my life. Our relationship is unique in that he’s both my grandfather and one of my best friends. I sent him some questions about his time as an athlete. Below are his responses.
Opa is #33 in the center.
At what age did you become interested in sports, and when did you start playing on teams?
I grew up in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. That was football country then and as far as I know still is. I left when I was ten, and had already been playing tackle football for three years. I played three years of basketball as well. Youth sports, even elementary school sports, were covered in local newspapers. My father was what I’d call typical. He cared more about sports than anything else in my life. Looking back - and looking at what I see today - I’d say that kids that age would likely be better off with less attention and pressure. These days many social critics argue that youth sports are overemphasized, and I think they’re right. Many critics also claim that things were better in the old days. In my experience that’s not entirely true. I moved from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, and things were far more extreme there than they’d been in Pennsylvania. Our most important high school football games drew crowds of 30,000, filling Honolulu Stadium. I enjoyed my experiences, and sports were a positive influence in many ways - but there were serious negative outcomes too.
Why do you think sports were more extreme in Hawaii than in Pennsylvania? Can you speak to some of the positive and negative outcomes you mention above?
Hawaii is a uniquely isolated place, and for the decade after World War 2, before statehood and jet travel, it was far more isolated than it is today. There were no professional sports, and no meaningful college sports either. The University of Hawaii played their games against Army and Navy teams. There was no direct TV coverage of college games from the mainland. We got TV’s “Game of the Week” one full week after it was played, and that was it. This made high school sports, and especially football, absurdly important on the island of Oahu. High school teams - Punahou, Farrington, Roosevelt, St. Louis, Kamehameha - were far more important locally than Notre Dame or the Los Angeles Rams or New York Yankees. Newspapers dwelled on high school games, and high school stars experienced the kind of adoration that top college and professional stars get today. Of course there were upsides to all of this. We played very high-level football. We had excellent coaching. For example, Punahou coach Don Coryell went on to coach the San Diego Chargers during their best years. In my junior year season Punahou beat St. Louis 22 - 20 for the Interscholastic League championship, and at least a dozen of us who played in that game got football scholarships to major colleges - Stanford, Oregon State, USC, Boston College , Purdue, among others. The downsides - which were directly related to the upsides - weren’t so obvious at the time. Understandably, most young Honolulu athletes who were treated like stars, even heroes, came to believe that their sports mattered far more than anything else in their lives. Who could blame them? Their names appeared in headlines, their pictures in the sports pages. And, yes, they usually had the prettiest girlfriends. Punahou is a highly regarded prep school (Barack Obama, who played on the basketball team, graduated in 1979), but most of the athletes there in the 1950s, including me, dismissed academics as essentially irrelevant. We were too young, too spoiled, to acknowledge the fact that we’d likely live a long time after our athletic careers ended. We rarely gave that fact even a passing thought. Many of today’s young athletes suffer the same fate, and a lot of them live to regret it.
I remember discussing with you a crucial difference between the youth sports of our respective eras. How were your offseasons different from mine?
Even though we were deadly serious about the teams we played on, after a season ended - football, basketball, baseball, track - we forgot about whatever sport it was until the next season’s practice began. Our last football game was always on Thanksgiving Day, and on the following Monday I reported to the basketball team without having touched a basketball, or thought about basketball, for half a year or more. When basketball season ended I ran track, and then came summer vacation, when my friends and I surfed, spear-fished, played volleyball, paddled in outrigger canoe races, and dated tourist girls from the mainland that we met on Waikiki Beach. We didn’t give football a serious thought until the first day of practice in late August. Weight training didn’t exist yet, and no one knew much of anything about nutrition or conditioning. Today’s athletes, who often specialize in a single sport, are bigger, faster and stronger than we were, but they don’t have as much fun. Another difference is that in my time young athletes relied almost exclusively on their natural talent. Today it’s possible for athletes at the high school and sometimes even the college level to improve through dedicating time and effort to intelligent training and preparation, and then end up surpassing less ambitious athletes who may have more natural talent but aren’t inclined toward hard work. But the most important truth in any era, under any set of circumstances, is that athletes at any level have to understand that a meaningful life includes more than sports.
In your memoir Boat you describe the homesickness you felt when you left for college. What made you choose Boston College, and how difficult was the transition coming from Hawaii?
I had a very ridiculous reason for choosing Boston: my father had mentioned that I’d been offered a scholarship there to a friend of his who told him he’d heard that the coach there was “pretty good,” whatever that meant. But no matter where their offers came from, high school football players in Hawaii didn’t take recruiting visits to mainland campuses. They showed up to wherever they were going in September, hoping for the best. When my English teacher during my senior year at Punahou, a Harvard graduate (Harvard’s in Boston of course), asked me why I’d chosen Boston, the best answer I could come up with was, “Maybe the girls there are prettier than they are in Hawaii.” He broke out laughing, and when I got to Boston I understood why. But it turned out to be a fine university and a nice old city, and I made good friends there, but Boston Harbor wasn’t anything like Hawaiian beaches. I soon became very homesick. In Hawaii I’d played football in temperatures of 75 to 85 degrees, so by November in Boston I thought I might freeze to death. When I came back to the dorm from practice on cold afternoons I sat on the heater in my room for half an hour to thaw out. It was often even worse for native Hawaiians who’d never been on the mainland before. For example, a year after I graduated from Punahou a former teammate who was a year younger than me, a big, fast Hawaiian running back, took a scholarship to Michigan State. During his freshman season we heard that Michigan State’s famous head coach, Duffy Daugherty, had predicted that the boy would likely become the best running back in the school’s history. But it didn’t happen, because he quit school before the end of his freshman year and went back to Hawaii and stayed there. That’s an extreme example, but the important point is that high school athletes lucky enough to be offered multiple scholarships should choose their colleges carefully.
What kind of advice would you give to a talented high school athlete who’s deciding on which college he or she is going to play for?
In the 1950s recruiting wasn’t anything like what it’s become today, especially at the major universities. Here’s the lead sentence of a recent Associated Press story about college basketball: “The University of Kansas apologized for its risque Late Night at the Phog event in which rapper Snoop Dogg performed, stripper poles were wheeled onto the Allen Fieldhouse floor and fake money was shot over the heads of prospective recruits.”
There’s great diversity among high schoolers who go on to compete in college. Every year a small pool of extremely talented young athletes will attract the kind of attention that includes rappers, stripper poles and showers of fake money (the real money is distributed in secret). But no matter what kind of prospects you have, certain basic considerations should matter.
First, though, I think there’s an understandable condition shared by nearly all successful high school athletes: optimism. Looking back, I had six or seven reasonable college offers, and, without giving it a lot of thought, picked Boston. Why? Because I was ready for a change of scene, and, for no logical reason, felt sure that things would work out well no matter where I went. With very little thought, I traded warm Hawaiian beaches for an icy Boston Harbor. The only plausible explanation I can offer is that I was young and naive. I ignored nearly everything I should have considered before making such a choice. How successful is the school’s football program? How many athletes transfer out after a year or two? Does the coach care at all about any variety of academic success? (In recent years there have been outstanding college basketball programs with player graduation rates near or at 0%.) Though many (most?) young athletes don’t much care about academics, they should. And, is a school located somewhere you’re certain you want to live for four or more years?
So the only suggestion that applies generally is to look hard for information and advice any way you can, about any school, athletic program, city and state you might choose. And then think hard about what you’ve learned before making an important choice.
Is there a distinctive memory of some negative experience in sports that helped you grow as a player and as a person?
What comes to mind didn’t involve me directly, it was something I saw out on a weekend night with an athlete who was my close friend. We were both in college, and he was two or three years older than me. Appearances can be very deceiving, and Frank didn’t look like an athlete, wearing thick-rimmed eyeglasses and baggy clothes. We were part of the young crowd at a restaurant-bar, and he ordered a pastrami sandwich. After it was delivered a man suddenly appeared beside our booth, reached and grabbed the sandwich out of Frank’s hand, and took a huge bite. At the time Frank was the NCAA 191 pound wrestling champion, and a couple of years later would compete in the Olympic Games. The young man who had grabbed the sandwich outweighed him by 30 or 40 pounds. When kindly asked to buy another sandwich to replace the one he’d taken, the big guy just laughed, then took another bite. Calmly, Frank warned him that he’d better buy the sandwich, but the advice was rejected, and they ended up going outside together. I went too, and Frank’s opponent was also accompanied by a friend. The fight, in an alley just outside, didn’t last long. They started off boxing, and Frank scored four or five clean knockdowns in less than a minute’s time. “Wrestle him!” the victim’s friend finally yelled. “He probably can’t wrestle!” That was some of the worst advice anybody ever gave anyone. Within eight or 10 seconds, the big guy had bounced off both of the alley’s brick walls. Then, lying on his back between two garbage cans, he had enough sense to quit. Frank helped him up, helped him back inside, and bought all four of us pastrami sandwiches. He talked to his adversary, gave him sound advice about how to behave in public places, and how he ought to interact with strangers. He was sincere. He was kindness personified. What I learned as an observer was that people who are smart, or talented, or tough - who are good at a sport or anything else - have no rational excuse for being arrogant, vain, or vengeful. I know that what I saw that night made me a better athlete, and, more importantly, a better person.
What do you think is the most valuable aspect about playing sports?
This might be too personal, but a moral and social lesson I learned thanks to sports stands out in my memory. Here are the names and ethnicities of some of the boys I played high school football with 65 years ago: Shimamoto, Oshiro and Arizumi (Japanese); Hee (Chinese); Ane, Kamakana and Iaukea (Hawaiian); Pacarro (Filipino); and Taa (Samoan). Racism has been a more or less disastrous component in every country on earth for a very long time. Even though Hawaii is often called “the melting pot of the world,” racial feuds and alliances exist there too, and always have, and probably always will. But when you play on a team, you’re so close to teammates that you get to know them well, and many of them become friends. You may not like all your teammates, but if you dislike some of them it’s because of who they are, not what they are. Ever since I grew up as an athlete in Hawaii, I’ve understood that racism is absurd. No matter where you are or what you do, that’s valuable knowledge. If everybody could spend some youthful time as an athlete, I’m sure we’d have a better world.
