The Natural’s Bouquets
A thirty-four-year-old rookie walks into the dugout of the worst team in Major League Baseball. He carries a battered valise and a bassoon case containing a near-magical bat with “Wonderboy” branded on the barrel. He wears a dark beard and a grimace and comes bearing a short-term, minimum contract. The cantankerous manager looks him up and down and exclaims, “Oh, my eight-foot uncle, what have we got here, the Salvation Army band?”1
What the manager has, he learns, is a natural. The rookie, arriving from some rural nowhere, hits the cover off balls. He smacks home runs for sick children. He breaks record after record. He leads the club from last to first and into a tight pennant race. Sportswriters marvel at the rookie’s feats. He resembles, they write, “the burly boys of the eighties and nineties more than the streamlined kids” of the 1940s. “He was a throwback to a time of true heroes,” they tell one another, “a natural not seen in a dog’s age, and weren’t they the lucky ones he had appeared here and now to work his wonders before them?”2
Bernard Malamud discovered the muse for his classic baseball novel, The Natural, in 1947, when he watched Jackie Robinson take the field for the author’s hometown Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson’s debut had, Malamud’s biographer writes, restored his “youthful interest” in the game and given him some of the raw material for his protagonist and the natural of the title, Roy Hobbs.3 Malamud, then a high school English teacher with literary ambitions, scrapped a wandering autobiographical novel titled “The Light Sleeper” – six publishers rejected it, and Malamud burned the manuscript – and made the first notes toward a baseball novel that wedded Arthurian legend to the folklore and cornball clichés of the national pastime.
Malamud had watched Robinson break the color barrier at twenty-eight, old for a rookie, if not as old as Roy (or Malamud, a thirty-eight-year-old first-time novelist). He had listened as sportswriters declared Robinson, with a .297 batting average and twenty-nine stolen bases in his first season, a natural. The New York Times hailed Malamud’s 1952 debut as the first “serious novel” about baseball.4 The critic Leslie Fiedler celebrated the “lovely, absurd madness” of the story, describing it as “Ring Lardner by T. S. Eliot.”5 No one mentioned that Malamud had, at the dawn of the Black athlete, written a novel about a white natural, summoning him from a receding racial past, a time of burly boys and true heroes.
By the time Robert Redford rounded the bases in the 1984 film adaptation, most Americans, including the filmmakers, had ceased to believe that a white athlete could ever be a natural. Redford’s Roy Hobbs is more supernatural than natural. Ahmad Rashad, the broadcaster and former NFL wide receiver, observed in his 1988 memoir that he could close his eyes and listen to a football game and know right away which player was Black and which white. “When [a commentator] says that somebody is a ‘natural,’ so fluid and graceful, you know he’s talking about a black performer,” he wrote. “When you hear that this other guy’s a hard worker, or that he comes to play every day on the strength of guts and intelligence, you know that the player in question is white. Just open your eyes.”6 Rashad could see, as others had argued before and have argued since, that attributing athletic success to natural talent meant discounting other factors: intelligence, dedication, teamwork. “It is a wise warrior,” the sociologist Harry Edwards once wrote, “who proceeds with caution and discretion when an enemy tosses bouquets in his direction.”7
Malamud, born in 1914 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, could recall a time when the natural’s bouquets landed at the feet of a near-white working class: the immigrant from the streets of New York (Lou Gehrig, Hank Greenberg), the farm boy from the sticks (Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson). Indigenous athletes once received them (Jim Thorpe, Lewis Tewanima) and sometimes still do (the Kalenjin of East Africa, the Tarahumara of northern Mexico). The natural is a form of anti-Blackness, as Rashad and Edwards said, and it is something else and something more.
This book tells the story of the athletic gift since Roy Hobbs left the field. It is a book not about elite athletes but about how the way we imagine elite athletes affects the rest of us. It offers a theory of athletic racialization that, while concentrating on the nation’s long-running but ever-shifting investment in Black athleticism, suggests what a future after the Black natural might look like and whose interests it might serve.
Racialization makes inequality appear fair. Capitalism requires inequality, and racialization allows us to excuse emerging forms of inequality as deserved. New socioeconomic conditions create new categories of winners and losers, and racialization, adapting past categories, enshrines them as natural, permissible, intractable. The color line bends and blurs. Racialization lets us live with inequality. It hides it. It justifies it. And perhaps most of all, it encourages us to throw up our hands and say, This is how it is, and it can’t be helped.8
Sports are built on the appearance of fairness, and they inform how we talk about equality in other domains. The ideology of the level playing field can, as the historian Amy Bass writes, be “smoothly extended as a metaphor for racial and national equality,” and it is, all the time.9 The odd thing about the level playing field is that no one buys it. We all recognize that sports aren’t about equality but competing inequalities – inequalities of size, preparation, equipment, facilities, access, coaching, diet, health. The dominant ideology of sports is not the level playing field but the unequal playing field that the public accepts as fair. Which advantages do we deem legitimate? And which illegitimate? Where do we draw the line? May Roy use his strange bat? May Branch Rickey sign Robinson?
Athletic racialization sorts athletes into two broad categories: the gifted and the gritty. The gifted athlete is the recipient of God-given talent. The gritty athlete receives nothing. The gifted athlete owes the team, the coach, the fan, God, nation. The gritty athlete owes no one. Athletic racialization is a form of ontological accounting. A gift, as Jacques Derrida wrote, establishes a relation of giver and recipient that, even when entered into without conditions, presupposes that the recipient owes something in return. The giver establishes a “hold on” the recipient that makes a genuine gift, a gift without debt, all but impossible.10 Giftedness is a gift with an ambiguous donor. It carries a free-floating debt that others, who may have no relation to the gifted athlete at all, can claim. When LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 to sign with the Miami Heat, Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, a cofounder of Quicken Loans, published an open letter to Clevelanders. “You simply don’t deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal,” he wrote on the NBA’s website. “You have given so much and deserve so much more.”11 LeBron was gifted, and Gilbert and Cavs fans had claimed the debt and expected a return on investment. LeBron would, as he announced on an ESPN special that summer, be taking his talents to South Beach, and Clevelanders demanded a percentage back. LeBron owed them.
Most theorists of race attribute racialization not to organizations – MLB, the NBA, the Cleveland Cavaliers – but to the state. In the first edition of their classic Racial Formation in the United States, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, writing amid the civil rights rollback of the Reagan administration, defined racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.” The sociologists observed that new racial knowledge had been “most definitively institutionalized by the state,” and they dedicated much of that edition, and have dedicated much of every edition since, to the “racial state.”12 Others have followed their lead. The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore compares the state’s management of racial categories to how it maintains roads, electrical grids, and other forms of infrastructure: They need to be “updated, upgraded, and modernized,” or they will crumble.13 The historian Nikhil Singh defines racialization as the state’s ongoing differentiation between “zones of protection from and vulnerability” to state-sanctioned harm.14 The cultural theorist Lisa Lowe describes it as the violence through which the state constructs the boundaries of the universal human.15 (I’m also a card-carrying Omi-and-Winantian, having written books about how the state has made race by defining who may act in self-defense, who may claim the entitled status of veteran, and who must wait on freedom and for how long.)16
Most theories of racialization do not attend to the individual. The reason is obvious: Other than a few world leaders, the individual is not making or moving racial boundaries. We act, it seems, in the long shadow of the racial state. But, as Gilmore writes, we do, all of us, “make places, things, and selves, although not under conditions of our own choosing.”17 We make them within a social structure. Racial knowledge does not trickle down from the state to the individual but gets formed, from above and below, at the intermediate level of the organization, where state and individual interests collide. This is where sports come in, where Dan Gilbert and Cavs fans get their say. Sports leagues and franchises, their owners encourage us to believe, belong to us – our national pastime, America’s game. But they don’t. Gilbert owns the Cavs, not Cleveland. The sports organization acts as a public good when it suits its interests and as a business when it doesn’t. It functions as a structural go-between, facilitating the transfer of racial meaning from the state to the individual and from the individual – owner, administrator, coach, athlete, writer, fan – to the state.
I’m far from the first to ask how sports form racial knowledge. The sociologist Ben Carrington theorizes, with a nod to Omi and Winant, what he calls “sporting racial projects,” in which, as he writes, “sport helps to make race make sense and sport then,” having given racial categories a veneer of observable common sense, “works to reshape race.”18 Bass shows how sports science has long sustained a waning but, it seems, unkillable commitment to race as biological difference and how Black athletes have seized the belief in their own athleticism as a resource to transform the nation and themselves.19 The sociologist Douglas Hartmann defines sports as “contested racial terrain,” a terrain that can, as one of our biggest cultural stages, “transform racial formations.”20 Carrington builds his argument outward from Jack Johnson’s 1908 ascent to the heavyweight boxing title, Bass and Hartmann theirs from Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s 1968 Black-gloved salute in Mexico City. This book investigates not the big swings in the racial life of sports – the birth of the Black athlete, the rise and decline and rise again of the political Black athlete – but smaller, more subtle shifts in athletic racial knowledge since the civil rights era. Working at the more modest scale of the racial shift, I aim to illuminate the mechanism through which sports make race, what I call giftedness, with the hope that sports might allow us to see race not as it was but as it forms, live, on the field and in the stands. I sketch the architecture of what could be called a social “pre-emergence” or “structure of feeling.”21 This is a book about sports that asks whether we can, if we catch the right line of sight, peer around the racial corner.
The athletic gift took on new meaning after civil rights. The ascendent countermovements of the 1970s succeeded in casting the most modest forms of racial redistribution – affirmative action, busing, the enforcement of voting rights – as state-issued gifts to communities of color, and a rising class of free-market ideologues reframed all human relations in terms of creditors and debtors, givers and takers. Black athletes, who made small fortunes and achieved greater fame, found themselves caught between backlash and financialization, celebrated and derided as paradigmatic gift recipients. The athletic gift structured how the public talked about civil rights and social debts. It furnished a language – gift and grit, talent and hustle – through which Americans encountered genetics, immigration reform, crime, college admissions, media, and finance. There’s nothing natural about the natural. The assignment of giftedness reflects time-bound interests. It will change as they do.
Athletes we’d now call white once bore the burden of the gift. Roy Hobbs was “a natural,” his bench coach tells the manager, “though somewhat less than perfect because he sometimes hit at bad [pitches].”22 The manager frowns. “I mistrust a bad ball hitter,” he says. “They sometimes make some harmful mistakes.”23 The foreshadowing is not subtle. Roy makes one harmful mistake after another, on the field and off. The novel ends with him chasing a bad ball. (In the movie, he hits a towering, slow-motion home run.) When the franchise’s crooked owner refuses to negotiate a new contract, the fans organize “Roy Hobbs Day” and shower the natural with gifts: two TV sets, six crates of lemons, a frozen side of hog, a four-burner electric range, a deed to a lot in Florida, twelve pairs of monogrammed shorts, a bearskin rug, a Chris-Craft motorboat, and a white underslung Mercedes-Benz, which Roy drives around the outfield, waving to his benefactors.24 He owes them, he knows, not for the TVs and car but for his athletic gift, the debt to which they have staked a claim. He must either settle the debt, with a pennant, or live the rest of his life as someone who wasted a gift, who failed when success had been handed to him.
The novel ends with the greatest debt collector cornering the natural. “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” a boy on the street, thrusting a newspaper at him, asks.25 The headline alleges that Roy had thrown the final game of the season. The boy, reenacting a story, untrue but enduring, about Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox scandal, had invested his innocence in the natural, and Roy had let him down and will, the reader knows, die a social debtor. Gilbert told the same story about LeBron in 2010. “This shocking act of disloyalty from our homegrown ‘chosen one,’” the Cavaliers owner wrote, “sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn.”26 The natural, the chosen one, the shoeless South Carolina mill hand with the swing you couldn’t teach – they all owed us, and owed our children.
The debt of giftedness weighs on athletes but heavier on the communities for which they act as cultural substitutes. But Malamud’s natural no longer carries the debt of others. Roy, making his big-league debut in the 1940s, succeeds and fails as an individual, not as the athletic stand-in for a race. The Immigration Act of 1924, which curtailed the flow of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, severing ties to ancestral homelands, and the first Great Migration, in which millions of Black Southerners relocated to northern cities, transformed the white races into a white race of confederated “ethnicities” made legible through a contrast with Blackness.27 The immigrant natural and rural natural turned into white athletes who, vanishing into the norm of white male embodiment, shed their gifts. Roy, the white natural, straddles two racial worlds, looking back to a time of disaggregated whiteness and forward to the age of the Black athlete, whose arrival instilled the new consolidated whiteness with a no-duh common sense.
The athletic color line shifts. It fractures. It crosses other lines of difference. It serves one interest and then another. This book follows the athletic gift as it moves through track and field, baseball, boxing, football, and basketball, and into conversations about science, language, law, affirmative action, entertainment, and gambling. The gift carries a debt and the open secret of how sports make race in America. We need to know the natural’s bouquets before we can pick them up and throw them back.
The athletic gift is not discovered but constituted through the search. In the quarterfinals of the 100 meters at the 1988 US Olympic Track and Field Trials in Indianapolis, Florence Griffith Joyner – lane 5, one-legged purple speed suit – lowered herself into the blocks and ripped off the fastest time ever recorded in the event: 10.49 seconds. She had lopped more than a quarter second off the world record. (She would run faster than the former record in all four rounds that week, three times with legal wind readings of below 2 meters per second.) The broadcasters did not react at first. She couldn’t have run that fast. It had to be an issue with the stadium scoreboard or the wind gauge, which registered 0.0 meters per second. “It cannot be. No one can run that fast,” one said. “The heat here must be doing something to the electronics.”28 It had to be the weather.
It wasn’t the weather. Officials determined that the clock hadn’t malfunctioned and that the wind reading would stand. There must be something wrong, others decided, with the sprinter herself. “Florence, in 1984, you could see an extremely feminine person,” the Brazilian middle-distance runner Joaquim Cruz said in a TV interview that summer. “But today she looks more like a man than a woman.”29 Pat Connolly, who had coached Evelyn Ashford, the woman whose record Griffith Joyner had broken, observed that the sprinter’s face had changed “almost overnight,” hardening “along with the muscles that now bulged as if she had been born with a barbell in her crib.” Connolly wondered whether Griffith Joyner had “found herself an East German coach.”30 The sprinter’s critics had no evidence that she had taken performance-enhancing drugs. She hadn’t failed a test. But something was off, they decided, about how she embodied her gender. She was too masculine, too muscular. She bore an excess, a gift of some kind, whether received (talent) or taken (performance-enhancing drugs). If it wasn’t the clock or the wind, it had to be something. No one can run that fast.
Griffith Joyner’s critics felt that she owed them an answer. She had run too fast for a woman. How? Judith Butler, then an assistant professor at George Washington University completing a book – you’ve heard of it – in which they claimed that we don’t have genders but perform them into being, thought that women’s sports could transform the gender categories we inhabit. Butler, a tennis fan, had followed the career of Martina Navratilova since the late 1970s, when she won the first of her record nine Wimbledon singles titles. The sport had received the young Navratilova, twenty-one when she first rose to world number one, as a threat to the gender ideal of the women’s game. She was muscular. She was aggressive on the court. She lifted weights. She showed her frustration with officials. She dated women. But broadcasters and tennis writers celebrated the older Navratilova, who won her final Wimbledon title in 1990, as the new ideal, a model for Steffi Graf, Conchita Martínez, and other emerging stars. Women’s sports had “the power to press the boundaries of gender ideals,” Butler wrote in 1998, reflecting on an unusual collaboration between Stanford’s Department of Comparative Literature and its Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation. Navratilova’s career had, Butler thought, established women’s sports as a “distinctively public way” in which we reencountered “woman” as “a limit to surpass.”31 Butler did not see Navratilova’s transformation from threat to ideal as evidence of degendering or a return to some lost state of nature but as one sign of a crisis of knowledge through which gender categories could change. The sport had reimagined Navratilova’s gift as grit, her threat to a gender ideal as the ideal. She had earned her muscles and her titles. She didn’t owe tennis a thing, not a cut or an explanation. (Navratilova has since taken a lead in the campaign to bar trans women and girls from competitive sports, policing the categories she once challenged. I would guess that she has lost Butler as a fan.)
Griffith Joyner never shook her debt. The sprinter died in 1998, at thirty-eight, after suffering a seizure in the middle of the night and suffocating in her bed. The coroner attributed her death to an undiagnosed cavernous hemangioma, a congenital condition with no known association with steroid use. Her husband, the triple jumper Al Joyner, called the coroner’s investigation his wife’s “final, ultimate drug test.”32 Some of her critics relented. Others didn’t care what the coroner said; they had seen what they’d seen. “In 1987, [Griffith Joyner] looked like a normal woman athlete,” one wrote in the Times after her death. “By the following year, almost miraculously, her body was strong and rippling.”33
Tennis learned to love Navratilova’s muscles. Track and field never forgave Griffith Joyner for hers. Why? Navratilova, who fled her native Czechoslovakia at eighteen, underwent a second transformation that Butler did not acknowledge: The tennis star entered the 1980s as an Eastern Bloc émigré – a status then associated with state-sponsored Soviet and East German doping – and exited the decade as an American athlete who, during the Reagan administration’s reescalation of the Cold War, could be counted on to condemn the communist government of her homeland. Griffith Joyner, a young Black woman, achieved fame and moderate fortune at the height of another war on drugs and as the president defended cuts to social services by telling stories about Black female welfare cheats wearing furs and driving Cadillacs. The tennis player’s social debt shrank, and the sprinter’s grew. Giftedness offers a shorthand for talking about human value – whom we owe and who owes us, whom a norm must accommodate and who must accommodate it. Navratilova could not have become tennis’s new ideal without a natural. She needed someone else’s more salient gift to turn her own into grit. Navratilova troubled gender. Gender troubled Griffith Joyner.
Take American football. It once constituted an ideal form of masculine athleticism. But the sport’s image changed as the athletes who turned out and made the cut did. Now almost no white liberal middle-class parents would, white liberal middle-class parents declare, let their sons take the field because football is violent, dangerous, militaristic, racist. It is too much. The masculine norm had moved on. I’m not defending Roger Goodell’s NFL or condoning the perpetuation of an epidemic of brain trauma, but the ease with which we now dismiss football as an aberrant masculine culture follows a pattern. “Masculinity,” the gender theorist Jack Halberstam writes, “becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white middle-class body,” and giftedness is what we call that legible gender in sports.34
Athletic racialization is as unstable as what Butler called athletic genders. It assimilates ideological racialization (Navratilova’s anticommunism and the “whitening” of the former Eastern Bloc) and gendered racialization (Griffith Joyner’s criminal muscles).35 It does not conform to a rigid color line. It reuses old racial categories but is not a “new plantation.” It changes because it has to; it has to stay ahead of an also evolving but ever-lagging dominant antiracism. (Describing college football programs as plantations, as some do, is a strategic overstatement, not a historical argument. It serves a purpose but perhaps at the cost of seeing the racial present as it is.)36 Athletic racialization lets us believe that the fastest woman in the world owes us something for all that she’s been given. The gift is an excess that we claim as our rightful cut of athletic capital.37
Marcel Mauss did not see the gift as an instrument of capital. In his 1925 Essai sur le don, published in English as The Gift, the anthropologist argued that the persistence of gift giving under capitalism signaled the limits and perhaps the inevitable failure of the market. People desired forms of reciprocation that did not begin and end with the exchange of goods and labor, and Mauss found evidence of the gift’s presence all around him. He identified the rise of state social services as the return of a “group morality” that he believed Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Pacific Islands observed in their gift-giving practices.38 But Mauss did not see the state as the gift giver but the indebted recipient. The worker “feels now as he has always felt – but this time he feels it more acutely – that he is giving something of himself, his time and his life,” he wrote. “Thus he wants recompense, however modest, for this gift.”39 Workers offered the gift of their labor – a gift constituted of surplus value as well as, for Mauss, “a part of oneself” – and the state ought to compensate workers for what they gave to the nation it governed.40 W. E. B. Du Bois agreed, enumerating in The Gift of Black Folk all that Black people had contributed to the United States – and all, he implied, that the United States owed in return.41 Griffith Joyner was not, for Mauss and Du Bois, the recipient but the gift giver. She had shared her athletic labor with the public. It owed her.
Derrida thought that Mauss had, in a book titled The Gift, managed to write about “everything but the gift.”42 If a gift demanded reciprocation, as Mauss said it did, then was it a gift at all? Was the practice of gift giving that the anthropologist regarded as a counterweight to the market nothing more than an act of exchange with a moral facade? Derrida thought that the gift, if it gave at all, gave time, time for the recipient to reciprocate – time that also bound the recipient in a debt relation. Mauss regarded the social bonds formed through gift giving as the foundation of human relations of care, Derrida as conditions for coercion. The anthropologist David Graeber, a champion of Mauss’s thought, dismissed Derrida’s critique of the gift as pretentious and predictable. “Those who like to think of themselves as engaged in cutting-edge critical theory,” he wrote in 2001, now engage with Mauss through Derrida, who examines the “concept of the gift to discover – surprise! – that gifts, being acts of pure disinterested generosity, are logically impossible.”43 Derrida published his most thorough engagement with Mauss, Donner le temps, in 1991, and it landed for some, including Graeber, as an overfamiliar trick. But perhaps we should see the difference between Mauss’s gift and Derrida’s not as a transhistorical philosophical disagreement but as measuring the distance from 1925 to 1991. “Homo economicus is not behind us, but before us,” Mauss wrote.44 At the height of Derrida’s fame, it was us.
Neither Mauss nor Derrida wrote about giftedness. Who gives it? Whom does the gifted person owe? You’d think the answer would be God or no one. But the athlete identified as gifted owes the team, the coach, the fan, Dan Gilbert, the boy who asks his hero to “say it ain’t true” – all make claims on the athlete’s unearned talent. The assignment of giftedness burdens the athlete with a free-floating debt, and another word for free-floating debt, after civil war and civil rights, is race. “Emancipation instituted indebtedness,” Saidiya Hartman writes. The “gift of freedom,” as freedmen’s manuals and other Reconstruction-era literature described the Thirteenth Amendment, defined the terms of a new, related form of unfreedom, a servitude more durable than the last because it was cast as liberation, a gift that could never be forgiven.45 Refugees in the Global North have suffered under their own version of that gift, which obliges them, as Mimi Nguyen observes, to show thanks to a state that may have razed their homeland and which binds them to a “colonial order of things.”46 Griffith Joyner did not live in servitude, and she had not lost her homeland. But she did make a comfortable living as an athlete after civil rights, and some thought that the state had, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and Title IX, given her something, that it and the nation it governed had contributed to her success. Others on the left thought that she, as a Black athlete, had an obligation to speak out against injustice and carry on the legacy of what the journalist Howard Bryant calls “the Heritage.”47 Du Bois’s gift of Black people and Mauss’s gift of workers had been reversed, and the athletic gift – a gift as enigmatic as freedom – taught the public how to measure the debt.
The criticism may have bothered Griffith Joyner, but she had a good life. She won three gold medals at the Olympics in Seoul, where she twice broke the world record in the 200 meters. She returned to endorsement deals that netted her an estimated $4 million in 1988. She modeled athletic wear and high heels. She wore a milk mustache for the Got Milk? campaign. She sold nail accessories and a doll – the Flo Jo Doll; tagline: “let your dreams run free.” Advertisers could not, one writer observed, get enough of her “exotic beauty.”48 (The gender excess her critics assigned to her did not have to be a masculine excess. Some found her too feminine. She couldn’t win.) But advertising executives grumbled about her and her manager’s demands, telling the Times that they had nicknamed her “Cash Flo” for the high cost of doing business with the sprinter.49 The executives also complained that she hadn’t returned their calls in the first week after Seoul, when her name recognition would have been highest. She owed them a discount and a call, they thought. Her fifteen minutes were almost over, and they were doing her a favor. Where was her gratitude?
Griffith Joyner had grown up in public housing in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and died in a big house that she had bought for herself and her husband in a tree-lined, oceanside Orange County suburb. She had made it, and she would return business calls when she wanted, if she wanted. But the debt of giftedness is shared. It informs how we think about difference and deservedness and human value. We might call it the “burden of over-representation” or “symbolic labor” or a “racialized form of consumerism.”50 But the accounting is the same. The gift died with the last breath of the fastest woman ever, but the debt lived on, unforgiven.
Flo Jo returned from Seoul as Cash Flo because of a man in an office building in downtown Cleveland. Mark McCormack founded International Management Group in 1960 with one client, the golfer Arnold Palmer. There was, at first, nothing international about it. Palmer was from the steel mill town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and, as one of the biggest stars on the PGA Tour, his total annual income, including tournament winnings and endorsements, amounted to less than $60,000.51 His contract with Heinz earned him $500 and all the ketchup he could eat.52 But McCormack, an amateur golfer who had competed against Palmer in college, had big plans. He thought that athletes could be “more popular, better commercial vehicles for companies to sell their products,” and he turned Palmer into one of the most saleable brands in sports – signature clubs, Wheaties boxes, ads for auto insurance and watches and cigarettes and later Nicorette.53 He also, like Griffith Joyner, had a doll (“ages 4 to 104,” “fully posable figure!”).
McCormack took his cut and expanded. He moved into other sports and then into fashion and music. He bought events and stadiums and training academies. He took on corporate clients. He added a broadcasting division and offered financial management services. He signed Jack Nicklaus and Pele and Venus and Serena Williams and Tiger Woods and Gisele Bündchen. Golf Digest named him “the most powerful man in golf.” Tennis Magazine called him “the most powerful man in tennis.”54 Sports Illustrated declared him, in an issue with Michael Jordan on the cover, “the most powerful man in sports.” IMG had, it wrote, “tentacles that reach into the backwaters where sport and the dollar meet.”55
McCormack invented the commercial athlete. Adolf Dassler, the founder of Adidas, may have been the first to use athletes as brand ambassadors. Jesse Owens wore a shoe of Dassler’s design at the 1936 Berlin Olympics after the German cobbler visited him in the athletes’ village. But McCormack recognized that athletes could be made into lucrative brands themselves. What did Arnie know about lawnmowers or photocopiers? Nothing. How often did he and O. J. Simpson rent cars at a Hertz desk? Never. Did it matter? McCormack thought it didn’t, and he was right. He was “the first to realize that sportsmen could be marketed like soap powder or Cornflakes,” the Economist wrote in a critical assessment that wouldn’t have bothered McCormack.56 He liked to introduce himself not as the most powerful man in sports but, writing the script for all future agents, as the facilitator of others’ fortunes. “I am probably better known as ‘the guy who made Arnold Palmer all those millions’ than I am by my own name,” he liked to say.57 Some have celebrated McCormack as the athlete’s liberator. Matthew Futterman, of the New York Times, has credited him with freeing athletes from the “grand old men” of sports, and a direct line can be drawn from McCormack to LeBron’s agent, Rich Paul, and the athlete empowerment movement of the 2010s.58 The athlete got rich, and all that McCormack asked was a cut of the take.
But McCormack, who died in 2003, contributed something else to the business of sports. In selling the athlete as a brand, he also invented the modern fan, the customer for his client, and he offered himself as a model. McCormack may have been best known, as he claimed, for his association with Palmer, but millions knew him as one of the best-selling authors of business advice books at a moment when, in the first flush of neoliberalism, the genre was reaching new heights. This was the time of In Search of Excellence, The Art of the Deal, and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, which topped the New York Times Best Seller list for twenty-one consecutive weeks in 1984 and 1985, McCormack introduced a formula that writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis would later ride to the airport book rack: He used sports as a delivery mechanism for simple business lessons. He acknowledged that signing Palmer, Nicklaus, and Gary Player (golf’s “Big Three” of the 1960s) as his first clients was “like winning a lottery.”59 But he couldn’t bank on luck, he wrote, because athletes were the riskiest kind of investment. Athletes got hurt, got old, retired young, attracted scandal. He had mitigated that risk, he explained, with a client list of more than a thousand. If one client’s career didn’t pan out, he had another who could sell Buicks and Michelob Ultra. “Björn Borg can break a leg,” he liked to tell his vice presidents. “Wimbledon cannot.”60 The smart investor was in the Wimbledon business, not the Borg business. Borg, an IMG client, was McCormack’s favorite example because he had retired from tennis, without warning, at twenty-six. What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School used sports to illustrate business advice, but it also used business to illustrate sports advice. Fans should think like investors, McCormack believed. You couldn’t count on one athlete. You had to hedge one’s career against the other. Don’t get attached. Get out of the Borg business and into the Wimbledon business.
The most powerful man in sports turned the athlete into a brand and urged the fan to become an investor. McCormack boasted that the margins in his business could be as high as 60 percent. The athlete had a gift, an excess, and the smart fan, acting as an investor, claimed it as a debt and expected a profit. McCormack had not, as he and Futterman claimed, liberated the athlete. He had liberated himself and the fan, whom he advised in business and sports, from the risk of being an athlete. Michael Jordan needed Michael Jordan to succeed. Mark McCormack didn’t. Why be like Mike when you can be like Mark?61
McCormack thought the fan should be an investor. Theodor Adorno thought the fan might be a fascist. The philosopher could see trouble ahead when, at the end of his life, he delivered a radio lecture about what kind of education, for children and adults, could guard against another Holocaust, and whether sports fueled or mitigated mass violence. Football could, he allowed, “have an anti-barbaric and anti-sadistic effect by means of fair play, a spirit of chivalry, and consideration for the weak.” But it could also “promote aggression, brutality, and sadism.”62 He worried most not about athletes but about the people in the stands, who “do not expose themselves to the exertion and discipline required by sports but instead merely watch.” The fan, whose behavior reminded Adorno of the “good old authoritarian personality,” ought to be “analyzed systematically.”63
C. L. R. James shared some of Adorno’s concerns. But James, who credited cricket with much of his early political education, did not condemn fans as a class. He was troubled by one kind of fan above all others: the American fan. When the Trinidadian intellectual moved to the United States in the late 1930s and attended a baseball game – he had been told that it was like his beloved cricket – he could not believe the “howls of anger and rage and denunciation” that fans “hurled at the players as a matter of course.”64 It was like nothing he’d seen before, and it disturbed him.
James wrote his book on cricket. Adorno never wrote his on the fan. He died three years after the radio address. What might he have said? Adorno had moved to the United States around the same time as James, fleeing Nazi Germany. His time there, in what Thomas Mann called “German California,” informed his and fellow Frankfurt school émigré Max Horkheimer’s theory of the “culture industry,” which manufactured not mass culture but a mass audience deluded by a belief in the freedom of consumer choice. In the early 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer had radio, magazines, and most of all film – they were in Southern California, after all – on their minds. Perhaps the older Adorno would have included sports in his definition. Perhaps he would have seen, as still too few do, sports as culture – and as the kind of mass culture through which “the whole world is made to pass through.”65 Adorno was unsure about the athlete. He feared the fan.
McCormack did not. He sought to monetize the kind of fervor that worried Adorno, and he thought he could do it best with a certain kind of athlete. Though McCormack had built IMG through the white country-club sports of golf and tennis – he didn’t think athletes in team sports had the same reach, and he didn’t want to deal with franchise owners and general managers – McCormack had long sought a Black star. In the 1970s, he wrote to tournament organizers in Europe, urging them to invite the Black American golfer Jim Dent, the longest driver on the PGA Tour. “I have a very interesting suggestion insofar as a black player is concerned,” he wrote one. “He is receiving a lot of attention and a lot of publicity.”66 In What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, McCormack mourned the endorsement earnings that Muhammad Ali had left on the table. He could have made a king’s ransom, McCormack thought, had Ali cultivated a more “positive, wholesome, ‘nonboxer’ image.”67 In 1990, McCormack circulated an article about a ten-year-old Venus Williams to his vice presidents.68 He later met with Don King, who promised he could “deliver” Venus to IMG.69 McCormack did sign Venus and her sister Serena and, after years of carefully orchestrated overtures, a golfer out of Stanford named Tiger Woods.
McCormack never articulated why he thought a Black star would be good for IMG. But he did, it seems, see value in Blackness itself; I can’t think of much more that Ali and Woods have in common. Perhaps he thought that the Williams sisters and Woods could sell their sports to a wider audience. Or perhaps he thought they would let tennis and golf fans believe that their sports weren’t all that elitist after all, or at least not racist. He sold Dent’s services to golf pros as a bargain, charging one-fifth of what he did for his bigger-name clients, but the Williams sisters and Woods were among the best compensated athletes in the world. What was McCormack selling to advertisers? And what were they selling to consumers? McCormack the business advice author determined that the strongest form of relation between the athlete and the consumer was the investment. The consumer must, like an amateur agent, invest in the athlete, and the best kind of investment was the one with the biggest return. Perhaps McCormack knew that a fan would feel entitled to more from some athletes than from others. “With fame and fortune comes responsibility,” the Augusta National chairman said in 2010, after revelations of Woods’s extramarital affairs. “It is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here. It is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids.”70 With fame and fortune comes, for the gifted athlete, an unforgiveable debt.
Sports Illustrated recognized McCormack for having “built an entire industry.” But the magazine deserves some credit. In 1960, Time Inc. founder Henry Luce installed André Laguerre as managing editor, and Laguerre, a former Time Paris bureau chief who had hobnobbed with Albert Camus and other French intellectuals and artists after the war, refashioned SI as a new kind of sports magazine – sophisticated, self-knowing, investigative, a New Yorker for the man in the stands. He introduced the long-form “bonus piece” and recruited novelists and cultural critics as contributors. Sales surged as Ali rose to fame, and Laguerre assigned more features on race and athletes’ involvement in the social movements of the time, including Jack Olsen’s celebrated 1968 series “The Black Athlete.”71 The sportswriter, long derided as a hack, authored long meditations on Ali and other Black athletes and reemerged as a man of letters. Frank Deford, whom Laguerre hired out of Princeton in 1962, acknowledged that the staff was then limited to his “own kind: the male WASP” and that he couldn’t have timed his arrival in the profession better.72 ESPN followed with men in suits sitting at Cronkite desks, and before long sports talk overshadowed sports. Fans – immersed in never-ending discussions of draft busts, bad trades, exorbitant contracts, and drug cheats – needed time to assess their investments.
Harvard Business School teaches students about IMG. It recognizes McCormack for having “invented the field of sports management.”73 But he did more than invent a field. He established sports management as the dominant way to be a fan.
McCormack thought athletes could sell lawnmowers and Buicks. Bill Clinton hoped they could sell his agenda. He named Griffith Joyner the cochair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and ran four miles with her and her husband and a staff photographer along the Potomac River. (Al dropped out after three. “They’re in pretty good shape,” he said of his wife and the president.)74 In 1998, Clinton made ESPN a stop on his fifteen-month “national conversation on race,” with network anchor Bob Ley moderating a roundtable that included Jim Brown, Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, and Griffith Joyner’s sister-in-law, Jackie Joyner-Kersee. “Rightly or wrongly, America is a sports crazy country,” Clinton said in his opening remarks at the thousand-seat Cullen Theater in downtown Houston, “and we often see games as a metaphor or a symbol of what we are as a people.”75 The president, then embroiled in the scandal over his affair with a White House intern, handed things over to Ley and receded into the background. He may have been thinking about the hundred reporters massed at the back of the theater, all waiting for a chance to ask him about Monica Lewinsky. The administration had added the event, Clinton’s communications director said, because sports hold “the imagination of a very large sector of the American public, including people who are not otherwise engaged in issues of public policy, let alone race.”76 The initiative’s executive director said that the White House aspired to reach one elusive demographic with the event: “men who are sports fans.”77
But President Clinton struggled to articulate what sports had to do with race. It had something to do with fairness, he suggested. Or it was about teamwork? Perseverance? He didn’t know. But his first thanks went to ESPN, a cable network that could not hope to reach the audience of the big four networks and that prohibited ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox from airing more than four minutes of the ninety-minute event. Clinton knew, as McCormack did, that sports ran through the organization – MLB, the NBA, Wimbledon, the self-declared worldwide leader in sports. The state looked to ESPN to have a national conversation about race.
The sociologist Victor Ray sees the organization as the missing link in how social scientists theorize race. Most organizational theorists, he observes, discount race, seeing it as “in” but not “of” the organization. Most race theorists discount the organization, seeing it as subordinate to the state. Ray identifies what he calls “racialized organizations” as structures that “consolidate resources along racial lines” and “limit the personal agency and collective efficacy of subordinate racial groups while magnifying the agency of the dominant racial group.”78 He offers segregation in the civil rights era as an example. The racial state acted through the organization, authorizing the segregation of restaurants and local public transportation, as did the individual, choosing to enforce or subvert the color line. We remember the legislation and heroic (or infamous) individual but struggle to see the mediating structures that hold things in place and through which change occurs. The sports organization is a racialized organization with an audience. Most of the organizations that Ray investigates do not interest people enough to sustain a TV network of around-the-clock channels devoted to their every move. Most people don’t wear shirts with their homeowner association president’s name on the back or tailgate shareholders’ meetings. The sports organization is a racializing organization. It consolidates resources along racial lines, as Ray suggests, but it also offers a model for other organizations. It draws the lines. The sports organization establishes the parameters of what Pierre Bourdieu called the “sporting field,” and the sporting field has offered a ready metaphor for other fields, from law to education to finance.79 Bourdieu himself often relied on sports metaphors to articulate his theory of the social field.80 People want to see the org chart of World Athletics, Major League Baseball, the sports magazine, the college athletic department, ESPN, and the National Football League. The Clinton administration’s ESPN “town hall” wasn’t a break from the serious business of government. It was the racial state in action.81
A half hour into the ESPN event, the discussion turned to the natural. An audience member, a high school student whose question the network had vetted beforehand, asked whether the belief that Black athletes are “physically equipped better” than white athletes constituted a form of antiwhite discrimination. We’re “really not getting to the point,” Brown responded. Thompson asked if he could swear on the live program. Another high school student, conflating affirmative action with college athlete recruitment, asked why “minority athletes” should be admitted to competitive universities and colleges over white students with better grades and test scores. Thompson, running out of patience, pointed out that most recruited athletes weren’t students of color and that there were a lot of other more consequential preferences worth considering. “Our society is about special preferences,” he said.82
Clinton ducked the questions about Black athleticism and college admissions. But when Ley next turned to him, the president seemed to answer them. “Do you think athletes have a special responsibility,” the ESPN anchor asked the president, “or is that unfair?” “No, I don’t think that’s unfair. I think anybody with a special gift has a special responsibility,” Clinton said. “If you have a special gift, if God gave you something that other people don’t normally have, and no matter how hard they work they can’t get there, then you owe more back.”83 The answer earned him one of the biggest ovations of the evening. President Clinton wouldn’t say whether he thought Black athletes had a gift or whether a college’s decision to admit athletes of color constituted a gift, but he didn’t hesitate to say what he thought about gifted athletes: They owed us. God had given them an advantage, something others don’t have, and it was fair for the public to demand something in return. The president of the United States was calling in the athlete’s debt.
I must have been listening.
I was ten years old at the time. When adults asked me what I wanted to do when I got older, I would tell them that I wanted to be like my dad, a baseball fan. I achieved my career ambitions early, in the summer before third grade, when my team, the Seattle Mariners, made an improbable run to a division title and then defeated the New York Yankees in a thrilling American League division series. The team’s (and the league’s) biggest star was centerfielder Ken Griffey Jr., whom the Mariners had drafted first overall a week before I was born, in June 1987. Griffey hit home runs and stole bases. He wore his hat backward. He rocked back and forth in the batter’s box, as if he couldn’t wait for the action to resume. He was a daring fielder, sometimes to his own detriment. (He missed three months of the 1995 season with a broken wrist, after chasing a ball into the outfield wall. But he caught it and held on, his gloved hand dangling from his forearm.) He made cameos on The Simpsons and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and in the movie Little Big League. Nintendo, which owned the Mariners, released Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball and Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run for Super Nintendo and then Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. for Nintendo 64. Adults called him “The Kid.” Kids called him “Junior.” The Mariners roster included other stars and future Hall of Famers – Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, a young Alex Rodriguez – but, for a Northwest kid in the 1990s, Major League Baseball was the Griffey show. We shushed our parents when he was batting. We held our bladders and our breath.
I was a fan. I had done it. I listened to the Mariners games on the radio in the evening and checked the box score in the morning. I rocked Griffey’s first signature shoe, the Nike Air Griffey Max 1, until the soles fell off and wore a T-shirt that announced him as a candidate for the White House: “Griffey in ’96.” I don’t think I got the joke. Had I been old enough to vote and he old enough to run, I would have cast my ballot for the candidate with the beautiful swing. And I wore my too-big Mariners hat every day – backward, of course.
I thought Ken and I had an understanding. But in 2000, after eleven seasons with the Mariners, he left. Griffey signed with his father’s former team, the Cincinnati Reds. He wanted to live closer to his family, he said, and he wanted to honor his father. He switched his number from 24 to Senior’s number 30. He had attended high school in Cincinnati and watched his father win two World Series with the Big Red Machine. “I’m finally home,” Griffey said in his first news conference as a Red.84 The Mariners had offered him a larger contract (an eight-year, $148 million extension compared with a nine-year, $116.5 million deal), but he turned it down. He had other priorities – his wife, his kids, the dreams of his younger self.
I hope now, at thirty-seven, that I would have the confidence to make the same kind of decision that he had. But at twelve, I felt cheated. Didn’t Griffey owe me something? Didn’t he owe Seattle? The Mariners? Hadn’t we given him something that entitled us to his signature on that extension? I had learned the language of American fandom, the language that the president himself – the man who defeated Bob Dole and the Mariners centerfielder in the 1996 election – endorsed. Griffey had a gift from God, and we could ask more of him.
I was a fan of Mark McCormack’s design. I had bought the merch. I had invested in Griffey, I thought, and held an imagined debt. What made me, a white middle-class kid from central Washington, think that a young Black man from Cincinnati, whom I’d never met, owed me? I had been a recipient of the gift of Griffey’s athletic labor, but I couldn’t see that then. This book is, among other things, an investigation of my ugly feelings on that day in 2000 when Ken Griffey Jr. signed with the Cincinnati Reds.
What, C. L. R. James asked himself amid the turmoil of a second world war, do people live by? What, beside food and shelter, sustains them, allows them to go on? One thing people wanted, he realized, was sports, and they wanted them “greedily, passionately.”85 His observation held in the United States, but there, he discovered, they wanted something more: a return on investment. Fans tossed bouquets wrapped in debt-collection letters. He was horrified. Couldn’t they see that they were the lucky ones that the athletes on the field had appeared here and now to work their wonders before them?
