by Dick Mac
Who gets in? Why? And why do we really care?
When I was younger, like in my 30s and 40s, I fantasized about doing a Halls of Fame road trip: Cooperstown, NY (baseball), Springfield, MA (basketball), Newport, RI (tennis), Toronto, ON (hockey), Canton, OH (football), Cleveland, OH (rock & roll) and maybe some lesser known Halls. It’s doable by car over a few weeks. It’s like a big loop from my home in New York City.
As the US economy has become more dystopian in the past twenty years, I
have become disenchanted by professional sports (which includes college sports,
because they have always been professional sports), and I really only follow
soccer now. My daughter became a hockey fan, so I do follow that sport
marginally.
I grew-up in Boston in the 60s and 70s, and through the 80s I was a basketball fan because the Celtics, in those years, ruled the roost. By the early 90s, the sport had changed so much that I now find the NBA unwatchable. I do have fond memories of basketball, but nothing after the Bird-Magic rivalry. It’s all pretty boring to me after that. I got to see Bill Russell, and Wilt Chamberlain, and Kareem, and Havlicek, and Dr. J., and Bird, and Magic. I even saw Michael Jordan play at the old Boston Garden. I had a good run with the NBA.
I do follow the WNBA. It is far superior viewing to the NBA because they
primarily play the game “below the rim,” where I believe true skill and talent
is needed.
The NBA is all “above the rim” and after a few years of Michael Jordan
flying through the air in the late 80s, I was done. I find the flying and
slamming to be a bit dull after a while. I like to watch dribbling and defense
and passing, which are no longer highlights of NBA viewing.
Admittedly, Brittney Griner is my favorite WNBA player, one of my
all-time favorite players in any sport, and she does play above the rim. All
arguments have soft spots, I suppose.
And, don’t get me started on the three-pointer! If it’s three points
from that line, why isn’t it four points from half-court, and five points from
the opposite three-point line? Why stop at three?
But I did not start this article intending to write about the NBA.
Most of my childhood and young adult years was spent as a baseball fan,
a Red Sox fan, specifically. I started attending games in 1966, when I was
eight, and continued visiting Fenway regularly until I left Boston in the late
90s.
In the 1960s, we lived in the Mission Hill Housing Projects, less than a
mile from Fenway Park. It was a relatively quick walk through a park (The Fens)
to Gate B at the corner of Ipswich and Van Ness Streets.
Gate B was where the yellow school buses carrying kids from summer camps
and youth programs would unload. Usually, they would have extra tickets to sit
in the bleachers and would hand them out to us (at the suggestion of the cop
and ticket takers at the gate) and we would get in to watch the game. If the
first pitch happened and the small group of us was still standing there, the
cop would usually open a door and wave us in. The place was rarely sold-out and
the twenty-five cents we spent on popcorn and Coke was another quarter of a
dollar in the pocket of the team. Nobody ever said anything and we were never
ejected.
In the 1980s, my partner and I purchased a condominium around the corner
from Fenway Park. I could decide to attend a game fifteen minutes before first
pitch, walk along Ipswich Street and always find a ticket, or grab a
day-of-game seat at Gate A.
I started visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, NY, with different boyfriends and girlfriends in the 1980s and 90s. I was a massive baseball fan, and Cooperstown was like a religious pilgrimage to me. I have many fond memories there.
When I became a New Yorker in the late 90s, I would attend games at
Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, but couldn’t support either team. I did find
happiness at Coney Island, supporting the Brooklyn Cyclones for a couple of
years.
I stopped following baseball in 2003, after the Baseball Hall of Fame
debacle where they canceled the anniversary of the movie “Bull Durham,” because
the president of the HoF didn’t like the politics of two of the stars. A
celebration of arguably the best baseball movie ever made, including the many
events that had been planned for years, was canceled because a milquetoast
former White House press secretary under Ronald Reagan didn’t like American
taxpayers exercising their freedom of speech by objecting to an immoral war
based on lies and deception. In this situation, I don’t care about the movie, I
don’t care about the actors, I care about baseball creating a political
controversy where none exists and deciding for baseball fans everywhere the
moral values of the sport. I simply stopped: I wrote letter to the Board of
Directors of the HoF and stopped attending games. I don’t support a team and I
don’t watch it on television. Nothing.
Except, of course, like my love for Brittney Griner, there is always an
exception: I became a dad in 2004 and I did take my young daughter to some
baseball games in The Bronx, Queens, and Coney Island, because I believed it
was my job to introduce her to everything from baseball to opera, from rock and
roll to organized religion, from art to political dissent, and let her sort it
all out as she matured. She has vehemently refused to attend the opera, which
breaks my heart a little bit; but now in her twenties, it’s her job to see the
opera.
My falling-out with baseball is irreparable. MLB is the scum of the
Earth and their product is unwatchable.
I’ve written about my love affair with, as well as my falling-out with
baseball many times. Here are two:
Baseball
(1997/1999)
Baseball Hall Of Fame – The Bull Durham Debacle (2003)
But I did not start this article intending to write about baseball.
I met Bobby Orr twice: once in the 1980s at my workplace, where the professional services company for whom I worked represented him, and once a number of years ago at a book signing of his autobiography at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue in New York. Both times he was charming, engaged, friendly, and happy, and he never stopped smiling. At the Barnes & Noble event, he shook my hand as I said: “Thank you for all the happiness you brought to my childhood.” He looked at me, smiled and said: “We had a good time, didn’t we?” I melted. One of my childhood heroes was even more gracious and more magnanimous than I could have imagined.
Not long ago, I learned that he is a Trump supporter, which means,
unequivocally, that he is actually a piece of garbage. Sad.
I have not followed the NHL in many decades, but I do not specifically
avoid it. The strike/lockout in the 1990s was so laughable that I just couldn’t
be bothered with it any more. As an entertainment business, I just can’t take
it seriously. That said, I was at a game a few weeks ago with my daughter to
watch the Devils beat the Kraken. Neither of these teams were in the NHL when I
followed hockey. She was very happy, so I was happy.
But I did not start this article intending to write about hockey.
I started this article to write about the NFL.
In 1973, the Boston Patriots, the team I saw play at Fenway Park and
Harvard Stadium, left Boston. I no longer had a local football team to follow,
so I switched allegiances to the Oakland Raiders, who, to this fourteen-year-old,
were the baddest, toughest, most exciting team in the league. And they got
badder and better as the 1970s progressed.
I know you’re going to say that the New England Patriots are the “Boston
team,” and I understand the argument, but when they played in Boston I could
just walk down the street or take the subway to see them. Now they are playing
at a location I could not get to as a fourteen-year-old, so they were gone.
They may as well have moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, because that was just as easy
for me to get to as Foxboro (which is closer to Providence than Boston).
I continued to watch football on television. It is THE television sport.
In 1966, Pete Rozelle, commissioner of the NFL and Roone Arledge, president of
ABC Sports, held a summit where they reworked the rules of the game and the
broadcasting of the sport to maximize viewer satisfaction and profits. It was an
unmitigated success. No sport is more viewable than the NFL, it was packaged in
such a manner that it is actually easy to watch all those commercials.
As television changed in the 1980s, and advertising minutes were
increased, the games became unwatchable. It’s really three hours of commercials
with some guys talking about football, long stretches of guys in football gear
standing around, interspersed with about 16 minutes of guys actually playing
football.
I had Super Bowl parties in my party days, including a very fun party
when the Patriots made it to the Super Bowl in 1986 and lost to the Bears. But
those parties were always excuses for consuming stupid amounts of food and
booze followed by stupid amounts of cocaine. It was the 1980s.
By the 1990s, I wasn’t watching football at all, not even the Super
Bowl. My soon-to-be fiancée and I were in Amsterdam when Super Bowl XXXIII took
place in 1999, and we found ourselves in a bar at three o’clock in the morning
watching the Falcons lose to the Broncos. The next day we were in Paris where I
proposed marriage in front of Venus de Milo, at The Louvre. A different story
altogether. Oddly, the late-night Amsterdam Super Bowl viewing is as clear in
my memory as the much more monumental Paris event. I digress!
I know the Patriots went on to become one of the greatest teams of all
time in the 2000s, but I did not follow the NFL, or the Patriots, and didn’t
see any of their Super Bowl victories. I do know that my siblings, my daughter,
my nieces and nephews, and my old friends in Boston were overjoyed by this turn
of fortune for my lovable losers of the 60s and 70s. It meant nothing to me.
It is the Patriots teams of this century, and their coach, that led me
to write today.
ESPN reported: Sources: Bill Belichick will not be a first-ballot Hall of Famer
Most people probably thought that this winningest coach of the NFL would
be elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. I did. He
wasn’t.
Then one remembers that his team got caught cheating twice:
- Spygate,
where his coaching staff were caught spying on opponents during practices
and warm-ups. Chances are good that many teams did this, but Bill
Belichick and the Patriots got caught.
- Deflategate,
where the Patriots deflated balls used by their quarterback, affording him
a firmer grip on the ball than his opposing quarterback using properly
inflated balls.
I do not really know the veracity of these claims, and I am not even certain that I am properly describing them, but they were news stories that appeared on the news feeds of people who didn’t care, including me. They were treated as big news.
After football, Belichick’s reputation was further impugned when he
started dating a woman who was nearly fifty years his junior. Far be it from me
to judge the love life of a celebrity. Sure, I am curious, but I won’t stand in
judgment any further than raising my eyebrow and snickering a little bit (OK,
that is judgmental). It was news and it was not good for his already
questionable reputation.
The Baseball Hall of Fame has a “morals clause” and baseball has
historically had all sorts of “morality” guidelines that have hurt more than
they’ve helped. The baseball Hall of Fame won’t admit Pete Rose because of his
gambling. Major League Baseball once banned Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle from
the sport when they took jobs working for Atlantic City casinos. On the other
hand, Ty Cobb was a violent, racist fuck and Babe Ruth was a philandering
drunk, and both of those men are in the HoF and are venerated. Not that anyone
would ever accuse MLB or its HoF of having any integrity!
I do not believe other halls of fame has a morals clause, like baseball,
but they have ways of expressing disdain for those they do not like. In the
case of the football HoF, the electors show disdain by voting against admission
on the first ballot. They have shown by this action that they don’t like
Belichick. Does anybody?
A hall of fame is rife with problems in this day and age. Do we focus
only on the characteristics of the person related to that for which they're famous? Should someone caught cheating in their profession ever be honored by
induction? Should some who is famous in their field but otherwise morally
repugnant be included?
And who is deciding this? Who is setting the guidelines and deciding
inductees? The owners of sports teams have not been famous for being decent
people. Yeah, they are rich, but what else do they bring to the table? And
sportswriters? Why do they elect inductees?
I think all the questions and all the answers are valid, which leaves me
disenchanted about the entire notion of halls of fame.
Today, I can’t imagine spending one second or one penny at a hall of
fame.
Induct Bill Belichick or not. He’s a cheater, but he cheated for a team
that seems to be considered the greatest NFL team of all time. I don’t know if
that’s true, I just read it on the internet now and then.
If Belichick is inducted into his hall, should Pete Rose be inducted
into his hall?
Who knows? What do you think?
