Jeremiah of Jock Liberation

"It did not take a genius," says Jack Scott, director of the Institute for the Study of Sport and Society, "to see a couple of years ago that the counter-culture was going to have an impact on the nation's athletics, one of the most conservative, narrow and encrusted segments of our society." It did take a kind of Jock Jeremiah, though, to spread the word and to preach the gospel of locker-room dissent. That Scott has done. After teaching a course called "Intercollegiate Athletics and Education: A Socio-Psychological Evaluation" at the University of California at Berkeley last year, he founded his nonprofit institute to hold seminars, publish a newsletter and "help interpret what's going on in sport and make it what it can and should be." His new book, called The Athletic Revolution (Free Press; $3.45), is long on rhetoric and short on solutions, but its compilation of articles, speeches and case histories is nonetheless the most penetrating of the spate of recent books* that question not only the structure but the philosophy of sports.

Scott, 29, a 9.6 man in the 100-yd. dash before an arthritic ankle cut short his track career at Stanford, contends that the "quasi-militaristic manner" in which "racist, insensitive" coaches coerce their "captive athletes" robs sport of its "best justification--that it is fun to do." The problem, he says, is that "sport in America is more spectator-than participant-oriented." Though he allows that competition is necessary to develop talent, he emphasizes that "the process of sport is more important than the product. The beauty is in the classic struggle of man against man, man against nature and man against himself. The index of how well you do is how well you struggle. If you don't struggle well, you should feel badly. But you shouldn't feel badly just because you lose. The final score should be almost incidental."

Violence and Sadism. Scott's thesis would be scorned by such hard-nosed coaches as Leo Durocher ("Nice guys finish last") or the late Vince Lombardi ("Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing"). Though Scott is primarily interested in reforming college athletics, the ramification of his ideas nevertheless carries through all sports, from the professional game right down to the Little League. When Dave Meggyesy quit his $35,000 job as linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals last season, he holed up in Scott's apartment for four months to write Out of Their League. The book is an angry, sometimes self-righteous attack on the "incredible racism," "dehumanizing conditions" and "violence and sadism" of pro football. Sparing no one, Meggyesy rails against coaches, trainers, who "do more dealing in drugs than the average junkie," and players, one of whom (Jim Ringo, former All-League center for Lombardi's Green Bay Packers) supposedly told Meggyesy in all seriousness that "in football the Commies are on one side of the ball and we're on the other."

The sport establishment--coaches, athletic directors, team owners, league officials--usually tries to dismiss its critics as a few isolated malcontents; but the charge simply doesn't wash. In The Athletic Revolution, Scott notes that since 1967 the athletics programs at more than 100 schools "have been rocked by some form of disturbance." Most have involved athletes protesting what they consider racism and unfair disciplinary rules. The extent of what Scott calls "the turmoil in sport" does not stop with amateurs. Just last month, no less a pro star than George Sauer, the brilliant wide receiver for the New York Jets, announced that he was quitting football because it "works to mold you into someone easy to manipulate." With Scott coaching from the sidelines, Sauer said he loved the game but not the "system" that tries "to keep players in a prolonged state of adolescence."

Given to Excess. It could be argued, of course, that instead of dropping out, a reform-minded athlete would be more effective working from within, through the increasingly militant players' associations. Though Sauer made his announcement through the Institute for the Study of Sport and society, Scott says that he did not urge Sauer to quit but simply "helped him make the transition from jock back to human being." Scott's critics scoff at his institute as a kind of halfway house for troubled athletes (in fact, it is a family operation which Scott and his wife Micki run out of an office above his apartment in Oakland, Calif.). They regard his work as inconsequential if not unfair--and indeed Scott is sometimes given to excess. In an earlier book called Athletics for Athletes, he delivered the sweeping and undocumented charge that too many coaches "have problems with latent homosexuality."

Nonetheless, the movement that Scott represents cannot be easily dismissed. The aspects of sport he explores in his book--racism, "shamateurism," drug abuse, dictatorial coaches, overemphasis on winning, the role of athletics in education--are problems that organized sports, like it or not, must grapple with in the 1970s.

It will be a long, hard struggle. Marshaled against jock liberation is what Scott calls the "paternalistic authoritarianism" of the sport establishment. "The dominant philosophy in American athletics," as Scott calls it, is summed up in a speech by Max Rafferty, the former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction. At a conference of athletic directors, Rafferty, a onetime high school football coach, allowed that "there are two great national institutions which simply cannot tolerate either internal dissension or external interference: our armed forces and our interscholastic sports program. Both are of necessity benevolent dictatorships." Describing athletes as "decent, reasonably patriotic Americans" who are "under increasing attack from the kooks, crum-bums and Commies," he avowed his love of sports as symbolizing "the clean, bright, fighting spirit which is America itself." Rafferty, reports Scott, was given a standing ovation.

Joyous Activity. Organized sport will undoubtedly continue to move away from Rafferty's ideal of a benevolent dictatorship; but it will surely fall somewhere short of Scott's grandiose vision of "a humane, just society in which sport will flourish as a meaningful, joyous activity." In the era of Joe Namath, the old image of the sports hero as a crewcut, Wheaties-eating, All-American boy is fast fading, as are many of the petty restrictions on an athlete's lifestyle. What will linger is the traditional ethic that winning is synonymous with success. At colleges where alumni contributions have a way of varying in direct relationship to the success of the football team, coaches who value their jobs will still strive to win at almost any cost. Among the pros, where players are supposedly beyond the age of character building, sport will remain spectator-oriented for as long as admission is charged.

If winning is to be an end in itself, Scott would like to change the means to that end. "Lombardi and the other over-authoritarian coaches have proved that heavy discipline can produce winners," he says. "But it is also possible to learn and develop in a more free and creative atmosphere. You can be a human being without sacrificing quality." Such is the struggle that sports will play out in the 1970s. The opening whistle in fact has just sounded.

* Including Out of Their League by former St. Louis Linebacker Dave Meggyesy, Swimmer Don Schollander's Deep Water, and The Way It Is, by Curt Flood, the rebellious outfielder who last month abandoned his comeback try with the Washington Senators.

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