The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America
The 1970s were gaudy, tacky, and self-absorbed—as synthetic and inauthentic as those hot, scratchy, polyester double-knits. Some would argue that nothing real happened.
In this breezy epic, Michael MacCambridge argues that when it comes to shaping sports as we play and watch them today, everything happened. Why the ’70s, versus the ’60s, when John Carlos and Muhammad Ali raised the specter of race in sports? Or the ’90s, when the internet gave every niche sport and its fans a place to amplify and validate their voices?
MacCambridge’s argument of a confluence is persuasive. At the dawn of the decade, Commissioner Pete Rozelle had raised the profile of the NFL but yearned for a broader market. Roone Arledge had made his name by bringing his up close and personal (UCAP) stories of the athletes on ABC’s Wide World of Sports every Saturday afternoon. Both were looking for ways to enhance their early success. Ali was a force waiting for the courts to unleash him. Curt Flood had just filed his suit against the reserve clause in the hope of becoming a free agent. Billie Jean King had risen to prominence among women tennis players yet was paid a pittance compared to her male counterparts.
But forces did not coalesce to move those stories forward and shape sports as we know them today—until the ’70s.
He is not encyclopedic. Instead, MacCambridge applies a theme to each chapter to thread the narrative of the predominant characters and their causes. But, be warned: Some of any given reader’s fondest memories are bound to receive short shrift.
To those who contend that the ’60s were where it was at in terms of social change and significance, MacCambridge asks his readers to consider that in 1969, the NFL was still dominated by crew cuts and Vince Lombardi. Walter Byers was the overlord of an NCAA sports empire where women need not have applied. Prime time TV was reserved for The Beverly Hillbillies, Perry Mason, and Mission Impossible. Not a single sporting event appeared on television past 6 on a Sunday evening, or anytime on a weeknight.
So, he makes a persuasive case that the ’70s was a—perhaps the—pivotal decade in American sports. By its end, sports occupied a more central role in American popular culture and had become, “a decidedly big business, a microcosm of the larger social fabric, a social glue that crossed all demographic boundaries.” (5-6)
The telecasts attracted women and advertisers eager to tap into their considerable buying power. And after proving that football was neither too male nor parochial, the floodgates opened for other sports.
He is not encyclopedic. Instead, MacCambridge applies a theme to each chapter to thread the narrative of the predominant characters and their causes. But, be warned: Some of any given reader’s fondest memories are bound to receive short shrift. You will not find more than a passing reference to Tom Seaver and his multiple Cy Youngs, hockey’s Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union, Al Davis’s rebellious and contentious antics as owner of the Oakland Raiders, or Secretariat, the GOAT of thoroughbreds. The omissions drive home the point that we tend to forever romanticize the players and coaches who helped us fall in love with sports.
Yet, the end product is both universal and personal. It is universal as it follows the arcs of four movements that reshaped and redirected sports, setting their form and course for what we know today. Through the personal experiences of recurring characters, MacCambridge covers more or less chronologically how sports turned the corner on four cornerstone issues:
Media Coverage. In the ’60s, sports coverage was reserved for weekend afternoons. Thanks to ABC Monday Night Football, it moved into prime time. MacCambridge returns several times to Pete Rozelle, the NFL Commissioner with enough marketing savvy to realize that he had exhausted ways to appeal to young and middle-aged males. To grow the game, he needed women. He also needed a broadcast partner, whom he found in ABC’s Arledge. After making his reputation on Wide World, Arledge transferred his winning UCAP formula to football. He took every opportunity to show the players on the sidelines, helmets off, and hired an entertaining trio of broadcasters in the smooth Frank Gifford, abrasive Howard Cosell, and downhome Don Meredith.
The telecasts attracted women and advertisers eager to tap into their considerable buying power. And after proving that football was neither too male nor parochial, the floodgates opened for other sports. Within eighteen months, World Series and NCAA titles games moved to prime time, as did expanded Olympic coverage—all at a time when deadlines prevented newspapers from providing final scores for games in half the country. So that by the end of the decade, ESPN could launch as a curiosity, in search of content and a direction.
Athlete Autonomy. A fascinating cast of characters led the way through a tangle of legal issues that ultimately shifted the balance of power away from the owners and governing bodies and closer to the athletes. Flood, Marvin Miller, Oscar Robertson, and John Mackey in turn took up the causes of free agency. None lasted long enough in the sport to enjoy the fruits of their struggle.
MacCambridge also focuses on expressions of individuality, perhaps best exemplified on the court by the ABA’s Julius Erving. MacCambridge makes his case that because of the league’s lack of media coverage, Erving is the last of the mythic athletes whose just due is lost and whose exploits were best experienced in person. Balderdash: Reels of footage survive from his NBA days to thoroughly document his panache.
He makes a better case for off-court individuality: from the loosening of standards on facial hair, to the emerging egos of owners such as Ted Turner and George Steinbrenner, to players like style mavens Walt Frazier and Joe Namath struttin’ ’round the town in the garish outfits that make the ’70s seem outlandish and irrelevant. And then there is the case of Jack Nicklaus, who grew weary of being typecast as evil, fat and out of shape. He lost 20-plus pounds, let his hair grow, changed his clothes. No longer nicknamed Fat Jack, the Golden Bear was freed from the yoke of serving as Arnie’s archenemy, gathering a loyal gallery of fans and tons of endorsements.
Racial Integration. Ali had lost much of his prime waiting for the courts to clear his path. Upon his return, though, he raised his bouts to what we could call culture wars, forcing the audience to take a side and invest personally. Ali provided a jumping-off point, but others cast a spotlight on the issue as well. MacCambridge focuses on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who struggled to differentiate in the public’s perception his Muslim faith from Ali’s early alliance with the militant Nation of Islam, even as he was admired for his undefendable sky hook. Henry Aaron endured death threats as he chased Babe Ruth’s home run record, which White fans claimed as their own. And the Steelers’ Mean Joe Greene humanized all football players by sharing a Coke, a smile, and a football jersey with a kid.
… ironically and correctly, MacCambridge argues that no athlete’s popularity in the ’70s exceeded O.J. Simpson’s.
“From one perspective,” he writes, “the 1970s in sports was a long experience of Whites—fans, coaches, administrators, athletes—slowly beginning to reach a dim understanding of the difficulties and double standards of the Black experience. Which wasn’t the same as solving those problems.” (288)
Yet, ironically and correctly, MacCambridge argues that no athlete’s popularity in the ’70s exceeded O.J. Simpson’s. The record-setting running back of the Buffalo Bills, Simpson segued into a career as the first Black spokesman for a national advertising campaign, Hertz rental cars. “In the case of Aaron, Ali and Abdul-Jabbar, the racial manners and mores of the time meant they were right to be accepted on their own terms. Simpson, by contrast, pointedly avoided any declaration of his own race. And that was enough to make him, by some measure, the most admired man in America.” (181)
The Rise of Women. More than television or the popularity of big events like the NCAA basketball tournament, Super Bowl or Olympics, MacCambridge posits that the evolving roles of women in the ’70s have proved most impactful. “The women who’d been so long on the margins sensed a moment of glorious potential.” (160) By the decade’s end, they were involved in unprecedented numbers as coaches, administrators, athletes, spectators and sportswriters. To drive home the significance, MacCambridge begins his book with the story arc of Billie Jean King and returns to her more times than any other athlete: as founder of the Virginia Slims women’s professional tennis tour, through her drubbing of Bobbie Riggs in prime time, founding the Women’s Sports Foundation, then passing the torch to others, such as Chris Evert in tennis and Julie Foudy in soccer.
Her story and impact are well-documented, the heroes who campaigned for acceptance of Title IX less so. As one of his main protagonists, MacCambridge chose Charlotte West, former women’s athletics director at humble Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and one of the driving forces in structuring women’s college athletics as the autonomous and utopian Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW). Upon meeting West, he said, “I remember thinking to myself, this is what Ken Burns felt when he had his first sit-down with Buck O’Neill.” 2 West was part of a team of coaches and AIAW administrators avowed to hold their ground and claim their share of funding against the imperious Byers, executive director of the NCAA. Their success proved their undoing, though. Following victories in court and the gradual opening of the purse strings, the AIAW dissolved, unrecognizable, into the NCAA’s infrastructure.
MacCambridge said that at the outset of researching the book, he knew less about this fourth cornerstone than the others. Like him, we suspect many readers will come to the book with fond memories based on the first three but fewer romantic notions about the last. Hence, they might disagree with him about the impact of women in sports. But he got it right. I know because I lived it. As I said, this book is personal.
I started the ’70s, sitting next to my dad and brothers on the couch, watching afternoon football. We had family squabbles over NFL supremacy: my Little Brother and Dad, the Tom Landry-Roger Staubach lovers, versus my Other Brother, a devout Steelers-Mean Joe Greene fan. “I hate those Cowboys. And Cowboy rooters,” he would say, lunging at our Little Brother to put him in a headlock.
… MacCambridge begins his book with the story arc of Billie Jean King and returns to her more times than any other athlete: as founder of the Virginia Slims women’s professional tennis tour, through her drubbing of Bobbie Riggs in prime time, founding the Women’s Sports Foundation, then passing the torch to others, such as Chris Evert in tennis and Julie Foudy in soccer.
As Arledge’s cameramen scanned the sidelines and stood for perky coeds on Saturdays, Dad would say to me, “You could be one of those pretty gals.” This, from a man who played a semester of college football, years of semipro softball, and continued to practice on our backyard court until he had perfected the 5-foot-11 man’s version of Abdul-Jabbar’s sky hook.
I never turned into one of those pretty gals on the sidelines. Instead, I stuck my toe into high school athletics in the mid-’70s, just as they opened to us gals. I played Power Puff Soccer, an intramural version of the sport started before the other high schools in the area were ready to field a team. I joined the track and field squad, running the half-mile and the mile, jealously cheering on my male counterparts in the two-mile. In that era, cross country was off the table: No girl could run two and a half miles, administrators declared, even though coaches had us running 5 or 6 every day in our track workouts.
I finished the decade at the University of Missouri, three years into earning a journalism degree that led to a career in sports writing. Among the highlights of my three decades in sports were multiple interviews with both King and West.
So, I heard their stories and intuitively grasped their significance, long before MacCambridge. But he brought their stories to an audience that was sympathetic to the era, perhaps for touchstone moments in football, baseball, basketball, or hockey. He reveals the ties that bind them all and makes them part of a continuum, each intertwined with the success of the others. Rather than a patchwork, crazy quilt, however, the end result resembles a tapestry: tautly woven, subtly varied, rich, and luxurious.
