Sports World: Money, Fame, New Records

Sports over the past 90 years have been the perfect illustration, for good and ill, of our core thoughts - who we are, what we think, what our values are, what we aspire to, what we fear, and what we loathe.

They influence us enormously because they display themselves so dramatically in such bold relief on such huge public stages - the Olympics, Super Bowl, Final Four, Rose Bowl, World Cup.

We watch all of these events and more, and we see ourselves - in many cases - as we'd like to be. We see desire, strength, skill, perseverance, excellence, adulation, wealth, and victory. We also see defeat, which we identify with more easily.

Sports are a mosaic in which the elements demonstrate for all to see how our thinking has evolved concerning ourselves, blacks, women, television, technology, behavior, and money.

Consider that until 1920, there was no NFL. Hard to imagine. Each of the first 11 teams that formed the league was bought for $100 each. One of those teams, the Chicago Bears, has an estimated worth today of $400 million. The new Cleveland franchise recently was bought for $530 million.

Or put it another way. In 1962, the NFL had a television contract worth $4.65 million, which meant $320,000 for each of the then 14 teams, according to "The Law of Sports." This year - just 36 seasons later - television is worth $2.2 billion to the NFL, which means $75 million to each of the 30 teams.

Or put it another way. Premier sports agent Jack Mills says that in 1970, he represented four first-round selections in the NFL player draft. Each got a first-year salary of $25,000 and a signing bonus of between $40,000 and $75,000. Fast forward 25 years. Jack Mills represents first rounder Tony Boselli, a Jacksonville offensive lineman. Boselli got a first-year salary of $750,000 and a signing bonus of $6 million. Mills rolls his eyes.

We all do. But if we as a nation weren't fascinated by football, these numbers wouldn't exist. We'd never have met the Goodyear blimp.

It's not just football, of course, where money talks and often screams and yells. For example, the average major league baseball salary in 1976 was about $52,000; today it is nearly $1.4 million.

Sports over 90 years have become so imbedded in the culture that even the most dedicated nonsports fan can't avoid them. Almost everyone has heard of Muhammad Ali and Joe DiMaggio.

The 1920s were arguably sport's most important period. It was an age of larger-than-life heroes, like boxer Jack Dempsey, football star Red Grange, golfer Bobby Jones, tennis player Bill Tilden, the incomparable baseball luminaries Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth.

Also in the '20s, a new profession - advertising and public relations - developed and sports were the perfect partner. A signal event occurred in 1927 when Dempsey fought Gene Tunney, a battle heard by 50 million people on 73 NBC radio stations. The prospect of what could be done with huge audiences like this turned heads of those in these fledgling businesses of selling and promoting.

This all dovetailed nicely some two decades later when something called television showed its screen. In 1949, fewer than 1 million families in the country had sets; four years later, 20 million did; by 1959, 9 out of every 10 families did.

Television and sports are a sensational union. It was ABC Sports executive Roone Arledge who was first to see how the two might dance; he created Monday Night Football. Suddenly, events we could only read about or envision as we listened to radio were events we could witness. We were there via TV when Reggie Jackson hit three consecutive homers in the 1978 World Series, when Joe Namath taught us how much we could love brashness if supported by talent and courage, when Pel astounded and when Michael Jordan astonished.

Regrettably, television also taught us how others acted and too many patterned their behavior after what they saw. In the early '70s, Romanian tennis star Ilie Nastase started catering to television with colorful and often obscene outbursts. America's Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe watched and proved quick studies on inappropriate behavior.

Soon, television was showing us sleazy end-zone dances and players pointing to themselves in raging arrogance and fans painting their faces and more.

But while television, advertising, and sports scratched one another's backs, the most significant social change in sports over 90 years was the arrival of African-Americans. Pro football had a few blacks from its inception but the watershed was Jackie Robinson in 1947 becoming the first black to be allowed to play major league baseball - by far the dominant sport then.

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