#1584 The Red Barber Program
2024-01-29 00:52:43
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Welcome everyone to this podcast. introduction to this week's program.
I call it the Red Barber program, you know, I had Dr. Kurt Kemper on with David DeCantry and they really hit it off. They love to talk sports, but they're not just sports per se, but sports somehow as a window on the larger dynamics of American life. So I'm going to have them on for one or two segments once a month or every six weeks, but this time a full show, and our themes include the outsized salaries of college coaches, the phenomenon of Bill Walton as a sportscaster, the collapse of the intercollegiality concept of American college sports,
just these really interesting subjects, but also Draymond Green, you know, he's an amazing NBA basketball player for the Golden State Warriors, but he has serious temperament problems and has cost the Warriors not only games, but maybe a national championship, and is on sort of indefinite suspension. So I wanted to get their take on these things and if you have thoughts on questions I should put to them. when we meet from time to time, please let me know, because I'm by no means an expert on sport, but I have lots of thoughts and questions and I'm looking to these experts to really help sort them out. and it turns out. most of what I think I know may be factually true, but it doesn't really get at the underlying dynamics of all of this.
So thank you. If you can help us as we pursue this great dream of listening to America, as you know, I'm going to be on the road all this year with my Airstream, following John Steinbeck's Travels, with Charlie tour of 1960, and trying to, like him, to try to get at the soul or souls of America and to see what this monster country has to say as we approach the 250th birthday of our national experiment. So if you can help in any way, we would be thrilled, tax-deductible, of course, and we love it and need it. So let's go to the show.
Hello everyone and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkins, and a new feature in 2024 is going to be what I call the Red Barber moments. The late Red Barber was a frequent guest on NPR and he established a kind of relationship with NPR listeners that extended in some respects beyond sports per se. My two guests will be for this, Kurt Kemper, who is a historian, PhD from Louisiana State, professor of history at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota, and the author of several books, one of which is College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era. And secondly, David Necandery, our Enlightenment West Coast correspondent, who also has a fascination with sport. And I'm going to bring them on for a segment once a month or so to talk about my own uncertain and confused understanding of sports in America.
So welcome gentlemen. I want to start with you, David Necandery. Say a little bit about Red Barber and NPR.
Well, Red Barber was a legendary baseball broadcaster, first for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the back end of his career with the New York Yankees. He was fired in the mid 1960s because he had the temerity to point out how few people were attending a Yankees game. He asked the cameraman to pan the crowd. There were a few hundred people at Yankee Stadium. This was the 1965 season and he was fired.
He kind of got a third and last leg in life by being a frequent guest on Bob Edwards Morning Show. I think that's All Things Considered, or Morning Edition with Bob Edwards. He came on, I think, every Friday and it was a wide ranging conversation covering all aspects of sport, American culture more generally. But it was one of the Bob Edwards and his concluding testimonial when he, when he himself retired from NPR, talked about. among his highlights was his frequent conversations with Red Barber.
And you yourself, in addition to being a really important scholar of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and, more recently, the voyages of Captain James Cook, you have this really deep personal fascination with sport and sports talk. Say a little bit about that.
I do, Clay, and I think it actually relates to what you're trying to do with listening to America. Although the great preponderance of sports talk radio, I'm sure Kurt would agree, is quite an obnoxious media. But there are islands of cogency and cultural relevance, I dare say, as highfalutin as that sounds. It's not constant, but my favorite national show is Christopher Russo's broadcast on Satellite Radio. And it's the usual sports talk most of the time.
But Russo has the rare interest in history. He'll bring on historians like Candace Millard, for example, is the one, the name that comes to mind. He's fascinated by presidential history. in particular. He spent a lot of time in November talking about the Kennedy assassination, which I know, Clay, you equally are interested in.
So I do call in that show from time to time. That's my national favorite. Being a devotee of Oregon State sports, I call the show that runs out of Corvallis on K-E-J-O. That's also when I'm having lunch. If those guys are on a topic that interests me, and all things Beavers, football and baseball in particular, I'll chime in a couple times a week, maybe even more than a couple times a week.
Mad Dog Russo. I see him sometimes on ESPN, but his main gig is this Satellite Radio. So Kurt, I'm guessing, Kurt Kemper, Dakota State, author of several really important books on collegiate sports. I'm guessing you've never called in to a sports radio talk show.
Actually, I will freely admit that in my younger years I have. I'm not ashamed to admit that.
But, as Dave pointed out, there is a certain kind of bandwidth about sports radio that isn't so much about conversations and bouncing off of ideas as it is hot takes and somebody just wanting to say something. The thing about sports that I find intriguing, and it sounds like Russo may be onto this, is that it is a definitive form of American culture. It is probably what we would often define as low culture, but it is culture nonetheless. And certainly amongst professional historians, sports historians are sort of held at arm's length as if we don't do real history. This is a conversation I'm intrigued about where it's going, because I would argue, as I'm sure Dave does, and it sounds like Mad Dog, Russo wants to do the same, that sports just tends to reflect what's going on in America.
It's not really a diversion. It's not a pastime.
So you have written these books. You teach history and the humanities at Dakota State, and I believe you told me that your next book is on how people form lifelong associations with the colleges and universities that they attended.
Yeah. I think I want to start, I want to go back to the 19th century and figure out what it is that's relatively distinct here in the United States about identity that we want to believe that where we went to college says something about us, and then how we transpose that onto athletic teams and identity.
All right. We will forgive both of you for calling into Sports Talk Radio. What I notice as an occasional surfer through ESPN is that you could spend 24 hours a day watching Sports Talk, and if Aaron Rodgers says a snarky thing, the sports pundits will spend three or four days deconstructing it and having wild and sometimes passionate and sometimes angry debates about these things, as if it mattered. And, of course, in some sense it does, but in another sense you think, well, how much discourse time does a culture really have? And is there, Kurt, do you think there is a proportionality problem in the way we obsess about sports, to the point that the debates seem endless about things that happened in 30 seconds on the field?
No. I think actually, to just completely derail you where I think you wanted to go with this, I think the bigger problem right now is our discourse in America in general. Spending three or four days on something that was otherwise utterly inconsequential is no different than our other talk experiences in other forms of media. Because they're not conversations, they're echo chambers. And, as I said with Sports Talk Radio, you know, it's not intended to enlighten anyone, it's a chance for somebody as a caller, and I'll freely admit that 20 years ago one of those was me, so I could jump on it on a national, you know, sort of platform, get the plug in for whatever my team is.
And so I think the phenomena is a proliferation of broadcast outlets and satellite and all of that, and it's just the poisoning of American discourse in general.
Generally speaking, and let me just explain the rules of the game here to you and to our listeners. I don't know a lot about this, but I'm curious about things, and I often will call up Dave McCandery out of the blue and say, what do you think about this that I just saw, that happened? And he's always really interesting on this subject. And I want you to be free to disagree with me and tell me that I'm in the wrong direction or full of beans, or I don't quite understand or will never understand. I don't pretend to be an expert interlocutor here, but I do think that this is interesting.
And I wouldn't be doing this, Kurt, unless Dave McCandery had pointed me to your books as lenses on America through sport. In other words, sport per se is interesting, but it's not to me that interesting. But America is deeply interesting to me. So, for example, and I think Dave McCandery knows this, but after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the 25th of May 2020, I watched Fox and CNN and MSNBC and listened to NPR. And then I turned to ESPN.
And the fact is that the best conversation I heard about George Floyd was on ESPN. These extraordinary, extremely well-paid black athletes, some of the most famous men in America, and women, too, said to the host, you don't have to tell the host, who in this case was white, you don't have to tell your sons, when they go for a drive to the convenience store, that they might not come home, that if they're stopped by the police, that there is a set of gestures they must never make, that there is a kind of a trigger that can easily lead to mayhem. They were saying, you know, even though I am a famous sports figure who's paid tens of millions of dollars per year, I have been hassled by the cops. And I live in fear of what can happen to someone who's driving while black in this country. And it was deeper.
It was more insightful. It was more personal. It was more heartfelt. And I think it was more useful as discourse from what I heard on the usual echo chambers of the right and the left. And, Dave Dicandre, your view of all that?
Since you've given us the liberty to disagree with one another, I would, again, I would, make a differentiation between the best of sports talk radio and the garden variety. In Rousseau's case, the reason I like the show is that you can clearly tell from where people are calling and their attempts to drive the conversation or establish a narrative. You can tell where people are coming from. But here's the thing, guys. These people are from all over the country.
And, more to the point, they're all over the ideological spectrum. That's not true against the best of the sports talk shows. And I consider Rousseau's the only one that makes an effort. And I would just say, anecdotally, two things in conclusion. For better or for worse, I learned about riot at the Capitol because I happened to be listening to Rousseau, who was giving a blow by blow description of what was transpiring at the nation's Capitol.
Now, I don't. there are no other broadcasters in the sports world that I think would dare do that, that do create a kind of common ground, a national water cooler, where people across ideological spectrums of the spectrum are talking with one another. Long before I was a caller to these shows, I was listening to the postgame show of a University of Oregon football game. And this fellow, by the name of Max, calls it. I recognize the voice.
I'm thinking to myself, driving north on I-5, Max, I know Max. And finally, it dawns on me. It's Richard Maxwell Brown, who was the dean of the history department at the University of Oregon, and he was calling into the duck football postgame show. So that's just indicative that, however idiosyncratic you think my interest, Clay, is, it's not unique.
Curt, do you like McCandry's view of the national water cooler, that in some sense, people who are liberals and conservatives meet there, the people who are rich and poor meet there?
Well, I certainly think, for nothing else, that we currently need not only more of those, but more of them by the score. I would hope that sports plays that role. I don't know how many experiences. we have to share that experience. I'm deeply pessimistic about the nature of discourse in the republic right now.
Somebody, I don't know, I think it was on NPR, we've stopped being comfortable, being uncomfortable. We don't want to talk to anybody who doesn't agree with us. We have no ability, I think, on a national macro level, you know, to sort out differences. And so it drives us to echo chambers, whether it's, you know, in politics or sports. But I certainly think that there is a great benefit in a society that styles itself as a democratic nation, to be able to converse with one another and find these common grounds, because, God knows, if we don't find them soon, I think we're in deep trouble.
Agreed. You know, you live in a red, red state, South Dakota. I live in North Dakota. You teach at a university, which is a bit of an island, I would say, anywhere. When you published your books, do you get any ideologically based pushback or feedback?
No, but I would say, so this is the consequence of being a humanist on a technology-based school. I would say very few people are very specifically aware of my scholarship, shall we say.
This can happen, of course. We're going to take a break here. When we come back, I want to raise my first real question, and that is the suspension of Draymond Green, because we'll take a short break. We'll be back. I'm talking with Dr.
Curt Kemper of Dakota State in South Dakota and Dave McAndrey of the Enlightenment in the state of Washington.
Welcome back. We're talking about sports as metaphor in America, or sports as a lens on larger dynamics of American life. Dave McAndrey, I've been a kind of Golden State Warriors fan for a while. Curry really changed the nature of basketball with his extraordinary capacity for three point shots, and now everybody does it, and he's less unusual today. I'm not sure that it's really the best thing for the game, but it is what it is, as they say.
But his teammate, Draymond Green, is an extremely gifted player, superb at feeding others, manages the floor, has an energy level that's unusual even in the elite world of NBA professional basketball, and yet he has a serious problem of temperament. He gets more fines and more technical fouls than almost any player in the NBA, and he's frequently suspended, and sometimes suspended at key moments in a season, and he's recently been sort of on a terror and suspended in a huge way by the Warriors. What do you make of this?
Curry's attractiveness, charm, visibility, and winning style creates the stark contrast that makes Draymond Green's comportment, or deportment, I'm not sure which word is the right one there, stand out. And in a way, and being a lifelong fan of the Warriors, going back to Will Chamberlain in the 1960s, first of all, Green, when he's playing well, when he's settled, when his temperament is on an even keel, he's a marvelous player. Unfortunately, he has a low boiling point, gets easily frustrated, and has had any number of, I'll call them kerfuffles, and that's an obvious euphemism. He's been into many difficult, if not ugly, situations in his playing career, including most recently. It's actually cost the Warriors a championship.
I mean, they had won in 2015 the first time, and in 2016, they're up three games to one against LeBron, James, and the Lakers, and he got into a, he stamped on the foot, or the body of a player, he got suspended for two games, and the Warriors lost their mojo, and they had three to one in the final, and they lost because Draymond Green lost his temper. But I think to give Kurt a platform here, as gifted a player, as vital a player as Draymond Green is, he's emblematic in this respect. He has a low boiling point, he's easily frustrated, which becomes explosive to his detriment and that of his team and teammates. He's an angry man.
My perception, as somebody who's not deep into the world of professional or collegiate sport, is that the NBA has become a much more violent game in the last 20 or so years than it ever was, and that enormous number of injuries, and there are lots of incidents, but the incidents that are perpetrated by Draymond Green are really deeply troubling, where he'll actually punch somebody in the mouth or stomp on somebody, and I don't think it's good for the game. It's part of America's love affair with violence. I think some people are watched because they want to see him pop. What do you make of the phenomenon of, sort of the gladiatorial phenomenon that I'm trying to edge my way into here?
Boy, there's a lot. you've given me some openings for there. I think. specifically with regards to the NBA, the size and the speed of the players have, in my mind, literally outgrown the game. And by that I mean, if you watch an NBA game, from the three-point line, those guys can take two steps and dunk it.
now. The size and speed of the players have created a much more complex thing for officials to manage, and when we're talking about keeping control of a game, a lot of that has to fall on the officiating. You hear players talking about ways in which they can get away with stuff, how they position their body so that the officials can't see it. So this is part of the gamesmanship at the professional level, but the size and speed and just raw athleticism of these guys, also in the things that make the game much more watchable, because it is so much more athletic, though has also elevated, I'm sure, the sort of aggregative, low-level or mid-level kinds of annoyances that I would imagine sort of lead to a lot of these boil-over points. And Green's not unique.
He maybe is the poster child, but unfortunately this is not something that we've never seen before in the NBA. As somebody who is not an aficionado of basketball and who would view it as soiling the true church, I think the NBA should honestly consider expanding the size of the playing field, lengthening the court. To me, what I like about the aesthetics of basketball is the end-to-end movement, and you have very little of that in the NBA, because those guys are so fast and so big. And then I'll leave up to somebody else whether we also want to raise the height of the rim.
When March Madness comes around, my wife and I will watch far more women's games than the men's games, because there's a lot less, what's the right word, on-court drama than you see in the men's games, collegiate or professional. Is that fair, Kirk?
Yeah, I would say so. I'm not in any way a consumer of the WNBA, but I would very wholeheartedly agree that the women's basketball game, because they lack some of the size and the strength, they have to rely on a different style of game, and it's a game I find personally more aesthetically appealing. I love watching good, crisp passing. It's essentially what Ivy League basketball often is, or at least it was with P.D. Carrill at Princeton.
It's a game that is not played above the rim, but is also not played with a chest-thumping braggadocio. that I don't find appealing.
Kirk, you had mentioned the increased pressure on the referees and the officials. When I watch some NBA games, it seems to me everything is a foul, and some of them are going to get called and some of them aren't. Someone will go make an underhand layup, and he'll be battered in three or four ways before he reaches the rim, and the officials will just play on. And so you think, wow, that really shows the athleticism, that you can take several body blows, including on your shooting arm, and still put that ball into the hoop. It doesn't seem very poetic to me anymore.
It seems like a contact sport, pretending to be a finesse sport in many respects, which, Dave, is one reason. I like Curry, because he can get open in an amazing way, and he's not a great physical player. In fact, one of his successes is that he's able to outrun physical contact. Let's exit here. What should happen to Draymond Green?
I think Steve Kerr is a very, very talented coach, and he's doing his best to find a way to use Draymond Green without having to trade him. But I think the time is coming when Green will be suspended for a year.
Quite honestly, Clay, I mean, this is a famous instance of a long-distance diagnosis, and I'm not even a psychiatrist or psychologist. But just as one human being thinking of another, I think Draymond Green needs mental health counseling. And, you know, there's an epidemic of need in that sector in this country, too, but I'll leave it to others to go into deeper analysis as to why that might be the case.
All right. So, Curt, I want to ask—I'm going to shift gears here and talk about the salaries of coaches. You know, a professor of history at Dakota State is paid something well under $100,000, I feel certain, per year. And maybe you get, like, a parking thing, or you might even have to pay for that. A coach is paid in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at most collegiate institutions.
And I was just shocked when, a few weeks ago, I saw that Jimbo Fisher of Texas A&M—is that his name?
—was released, but his contract was such that they paid him $74 million to complete the contract. And I thought, that seems obscene to me. I get the market and so on, but, you know, you are a distinguished historian who's published books that will be read 50 or more years from now. about sport. When I was teaching and studying at the University of Colorado, they won the Orange Bowl, and, as you can well imagine, the college bookstore was turned into a merch shop after that, and enrollment skyrocketed and so on, and there were parades, and there were huge rallies, and, you know, etc.
And then that same year, somebody won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and he got a little reception. This doesn't seem to me to be okay. What do you say, Kurt?
Well, as a panel of three intellectuals, we're all sort of in, I'm sure, universal agreement on this. I think the question you really want to get is, what the hell does it say about America? There's a lot of context for this. I mean, we have seen, going back to the 19th century, a willingness to pay for mass culture. I mean, I don't know how far off of how analytical you want me to get here with this, but, I mean, if you look at the recording industry, you look at the rise of professional baseball in the 1870s, when we first started paying players, some of it under the table, even spectacles, you know, the bare-knuckle prize fights mid-century, we were always willing to pay for that, far in excess of what those individuals' contribution, you know, to any sort of collective society was.
As a historian of culture, I would argue that, in particular, mass culture in Western industrialized societies are so appealing because we find so much else about modern life to be disorienting, to be alienating, and one of the things that makes mass culture so appealing is its sensuality, and by that I mean its appeal to the base elements of the human experience. And we're willing to pay through the nose for that. I mean, you know, what does it cost to go to a rock concert now that we would have loved to have gone to back when we were younger men with hair and hearing, you know? I mean, it doesn't matter if it's sports, if it's musicians, if it's actors, I think it's a willingness in the West to pay for a mass cultural experience that, for whatever reason, we find to be otherwise unavailable in our day-to-day contemporary lives.
Agreed, and I'm just going to slightly move in a different direction for a second here. I think that's why you say that, you know, the sports, mass entertainment sports and other mass entertainments are, in a sense, an escape from the wearying contentiousness and so on of our national political discourse and our economic debates and so on. I think that's why, when football players refuse to kneel or kneel during the national anthem and make it clear that there's a kind of a quiet protest, that that's one reason why so many fans are so upset, because they think, oh, not, here, too, you know? Does it have to creep into this arena, too?
Well, so I think there's two things to this. One, I would challenge that I, my view on mass culture is not that it is something that is detached from everyday life, it's that it creates satisfactions and validations that we don't get in everyday life. Now, whether some people don't like contemporary life crowding into their sports world, they say that, but I actually don't believe that. What they don't like are parts of contemporary life that they don't like crowding into their sports world. When we look at, for example, the beginning of an NFL game and we see the flyover of military jets or a ten times larger than life, you know, American flag, for example, that's politics.
That isn't politics. most of us find offensive. But, to be sure, that's an expression of American militarism, that's a very specific definition of patriotism. I don't see too many people pushing back and saying, hey, you know, we need less of that. I'm just here for the football.
Thanks very much. I would argue that sports has been freighted with those kinds of meetings from the very, very, very beginning. If you go back to the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress passed sumptuary laws trying to distance, you know, a Republican ideal from British luxury and banned horse racing and gambling and all of that stuff. So we've always, I mean, what makes sports such a viable crucible through which we can examine, you know, in American life is because it's always in the mix. It's never been something that is completely detached, you know, as Jim Murray used to say, sort of an adult comic section in prose.
And the pattern that Kirk describes so ably here, it's only becoming more accentuated. For example, the normalization or the standardization of the singing of God Bless America at the seventh inning stretch post 9-11.. I mean, that didn't used to happen. It seemed to me singing the national anthem at the beginning of the game would have been more than satisfying enough, for whatever need was being fulfilled. But now it seems to me most games I watch, certainly those I attend, there's another patriotic song sung in the seventh inning stretch.
So I think Kirk makes a great point. It's the type of external interjection that people object to, not external interjection.
Yes, except that the people that like the flyover and like the patriotic song and so on, don't think that's politics. They think that's America, right?
Yes. And that's why I think what Kirk explained here is perhaps the central insight of this conversation, because it kind of calls out, kind of something that's in the deep background that we don't think of as being a political interjection. If you just think about it for a second, it most obviously is.
I don't understand, frankly, why we play the national anthem before a ball game.
Well, it's tradition. at this point. It goes back to your man, Teddy Roosevelt.
So I watched the Super Bowl, or at least the first hour last year, before the first kick was kicked, pageantry in every direction. It was like singing the song of America from a super patriotic point of view, and then a ball game. And it strikes me as something that, and this is sort of right into your zone, Kurt, it's about football, but it's way, way more than football, isn't it?
Oh, yeah. Well, the Super Bowl is in a whole other class by itself in terms of not really being about football. And it hasn't been, I think, for a long, long time. I mean, it's literally become a secular holiday, a phrase that at some point we might want to get to is the concept of civil religion, which, you know, baseball for years enjoyed, but Super Bowl has really nudged baseball aside as a national holiday. So there's all kinds of things going on there.
Probably the thing, the values that it triumphs the most, is not athleticism, but consumerism. But yeah, I mean, to Dave's point, I think we do certain things in sports because of tradition. Something that Dave is, you know, frankly probably in therapy for right now, is the dissolution of the Pac-12 and the orphaning of Oregon State and Washington State. And in the national media, one of the things that has come up time and time again is, you know, these guys have been playing each other for 90 years. There's been a West Coast conference for 90 years.
And I share Dave's angst as a, you know, as a fan of UCLA, and I hold UCLA accountable for some of the demise of this. But at the same time, we have this insistence in sports to see this continuity. And when we find change in it, it's very alienating. And I think it gets to the role that sports plays in our society, because we don't just watch it for the games. You know, I mean, if baseball is maybe the best example, if you think about, certainly from a literary perspective, the way in which the game is portrayed, you know, Casey at the bat, the natural, Bull Durham, you know, all of these references, yeah, Field of Dreams, that's a great example.
The struggle between a boy and his father and the way in which things are passed down generationally and values, so much of sports in the United States is freighted with those things. So when we start messing, you know, I suggested a minute ago we should change the size of the basketball court, and I'm sure somebody somewhere is probably penning me a very angry letter right now. You know, these are the things that you mess with at your peril, because they mean such outsized things. You know, as a fan of college football, New Year's Day for me is literally one of the most important holidays of the year. Just on Monday, we ate chili in my house.
It's the same recipe we've been eating in my family on New Year's Day for 50 years, as far as I can tell. And the fact that that may be changed because we're going to a 12-team playoff is a grieving thing for me. So these are the things that I think that, with sports, is very,
you know, they're landmines out there. They really are.
So, Kurt, you're wearing two hats here. I mean, one hat is the humanist analyzing sport, and the other is a person who grieves when sports change in ways that violate your chili fest.
Yeah, it's a little weird. I have to, you know, it's forced me to, I think, honestly be a good listener, because I have to sometimes think to myself, okay, am I reacting here as a fan, or am I reacting as an analyst that really understands the larger forces at play here?
Yeah, we need to take a break, but I just want to say about New Year's Day, when I was growing up, New Year's Day was bowl day. And you would, you know, you would plan your day, and maybe the Rose Bowl, which was always the last one. And at that time, color television was just coming in. And you saw Pasadena. And you believe California was a kind of earthly paradise.
And here was the Coliseum, like the greatest stadium in the world at the time. And then the Rose Parade princess would come out. And I mean, it was, it was extraordinary. And the Cotton Bowl and the Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl. And now when I've tried, I don't know enough about this anymore, but it feels like you've got to have a TV guide over about a two-and-a-half-week period if you want to follow the bowl games.
I think the Rose Bowl is still centered on day, on January 1st, right?
Yes, and every year, except for when it's on a Sunday. And then they always play it on a Monday.
I mean, it's a, it's not what it once was. in terms of, that is the day of the year for college football.
No, but I think fortunately we've reached peak bowl. And with the expansion of the college football playoff that Kurt was referring to earlier, I think some of the egregious successes, commercializations of the sport, we've probably reached the high watermark with the Pop-Tarts Bowl, which was the ultimate in bowl game silliness.
We need to take a break. I'm talking to Kurt Kemper and Dave McHenry. It's a fascinating, for me, bizarre, conversation we're having. You're listening to a special issue of Listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to the spirited conversation with Dave McHenry and Kurt Kemper. At least today you're wearing civilian clothes. I was, I wore sunglasses the time we had our last recording, when you were both suited up in your tribal gear. I'll never forget going to a tailgate with David McHenry at the University of Minnesota. And I had no idea that a tailgate party could be as elaborate as requiring deployments, of territorial protections, of advanced planning, of letting different people have their best bratwurst or their famous cheeseburger.
There's a whole world of sports that I just don't get, but I'm fascinated. I think this is really a question for a cultural historian and an anthropologist. But let me go back to coaches' salaries. I get the market, of course. You want the best coach.
You pay what the market can bear. They're adding tens of millions of dollars, sometimes much more, to the coffers of the colleges and universities that they play for. We've aggrandized these things well beyond the old notion of intercollegiate sportsmanship, as it was sort of understood a long, long time ago. But when you hear that someone has paid $75 million or $100 million to coach a team and professors are earning more than a living wage, but they certainly aren't getting rich, it seems to me that that, in a sense, is automatically a violation of the idea, the capital idea, of a university, Kurt.
Well, it is. But I would argue that intercollegiate athletics is a violation of that, and it has from the very jump. Intercollegiate athletics is an odd fit. From the very beginning, we said that winning was the thing that mattered the most. We tried to dress it up.
Walter Byers famously came up with the phrase from the NCAA, the student athlete. A lot of people maybe don't know this. The very first intercollegiate contest was a rowing match between Harvard and Yale in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. And a real estate developer paid them to go up there and pull out against one another in an effort for them to be able to sell lakefront lots, and they got paid for it. So we've commercialized intercollegiate athletics from the jump.
Why it is housed in universities is a much longer conversation, and I'll be happy to bore you all with that at length at some other point. But, you know, it's not so much that this has been a recent departure. It's a weird sort of appendage that we have oddly duct-taped on there from the beginning, and we've always tried to rationalize why it fits, but it never has.
All right. So, Kurt, what if the University of South Dakota or the University of Minnesota passed a resolution saying that no coach should be paid more than three times what a full professor is paid? What would happen?
Well, for starters, some states have those laws already. And the way they get around them—Colorado is one of them, for example—is that the state pays the guy a salary based on, you know, what's in the database. But then there's the nonprofit education association, which is a booster group, that ends up paying, you know, 80 percent of the freight, or also buys them, the house and the jet and all the other accoutrements that make up for that kind of a life. So we can get around that, which is, you know, gamesmanship is a classic sort of American, you know, way of doing things. Or the other thing is you can acknowledge that you're never going to win another football game again if you do that, and then you get into, okay, well, why do we have football then?
And the answer is—and I don't know, you know, how you want to get into this—but it's basically because, for whatever reason, a bunch of people think it matters. And a bunch of those people happen to be 18-year-olds and their parents, who are willing to drop 20,, 30, 40, 50 grand a year in tuition. The fact is that winning football is perceived as something that makes a university authentic, legitimate, you know, however, you want to describe it. I mean, it's tapped into the marketing of higher education now.
But when you see the institutions that do not do sport, that, you know, they're sort of snobby, we don't do that, you know, or we only have intramural sports here, I get why that's not a crowd-pleaser and why alums don't like it, and so on. But I also feel that there's a certain nobility in that. And when I see the kind of obscene salaries that are paid to coaches, athletic directors, etc., and now athletes, it turns me off. It lowers my capacity to think that it's interesting. And I know, Kurt, your view is, well, deal with it.
I mean, it just is.
Well, those schools that can largely do that and achieve academic excellence, and I'm thinking of University of Chicago, Emory, MIT, Rochester, those schools can afford, for lack of a better phrase, to be negligent about that element of the undergraduate extracurriculum because they already have other cachet. My brother, who considered going to MIT at one point and then going to Lehigh, my brother's 10 years older than me, he's sort of my hero, and I was like, how did you not get into MIT? And he says, you've got to be smarter than God to get into MIT. So there's already a cachet that those schools have. You know, every one of them, they're what we call selective admissions, highly selective.
Washington University, for example, in St. Louis, I think less than 10% of their applicants get in. You know, maybe the only one that plays big-time sports, I think, that is close to Stanford. You know, those are schools that can afford to turn away that demographic or that interest point because they offer other things that are highly sought in the marketplace.
If this is a cultural sign of what America values, it erodes the significance, prestige, and importance of universities as places where we search for truth.
I don't think it has to be a binary alternative that, you know, we have to devalue athletics because the academics should be making more. You know, we can get into the status of intellectualism in the United States and why intellectuals are compensated or respected or whatever. But I think that there are avenues for excellence in the academic world where you can, you know, sort of be well compensated. Those are generally just not in the lecture hall. You know, if you watch shows like this, what the History Channel used to be 25 or 30 years ago, you know, if you remember the Ken Burns biography, you know, a handful of those academics became household names because they were excellent at telling stories and making complex things sound simplistic to populist audiences.
While we can decry the status of what Texas A&M is paying Jimbo Fisher not to do, I bet there's less than 20 football coaches in America who are making that kind of crazy money. I'm not sure that it has to be an assertion that this is a horrible statement about intellectualism in the United States because they're willing to pay so much for football. Not the least of which is because if we weren't paying Jimbo Fisher that $74 million, that $74 million is not going to the library at Texas A&M, by the way. You know, it's not like we're making the honors. kids have to start paying for Dairy Queen to go to an honors conference because the football team is being so well compensated.
You know, the question is whether I'm going to pay that money into the booster fund so Jimbo Fisher can buy his own luxury yacht or I'm going to go my own luxury yacht. Neither way is it really helping the intellectualism of America.
I remember when Joseph Campbell did the Bill Moyers lectures, which are magnificent, and they showed scenes from Salt Lake City, and Campbell said, the temples we build tell us who we are. More recently, you have like the temple, the LDS temple, in Salt Lake City, but he showed office buildings that were much more grand. And today, when you look at what our culture wants to pay an enormous amount of money for, it's the stadium of the Dallas Cowboys. It's the professional sports stadiums. They often cost now up to two billion dollars and they're spectacular.
You look at them and you're sort of in awe at the sheer grandiosity, opulence of these things. But it doesn't seem like. that is what a civilization really does, unless it's Rome.
All I can come back with is the fact that the concern, for lack of a better phrase, about the decline of America or the West is a long-standing tradition amongst intellectuals. One of the books I assign my undergraduate students in 20th, 19th century, 20th century history is a very slim book by Michael Kaysen called Amusing the Million. It's about Coney Island at the turn of the century and the cultural disdain amongst elites for Coney Island and amusement parks in general. And they make the same argument that we're building these temples to leisure and values. and this one commentator described the behavior of the masses at Coney Island as, quote, primitivism unleashed.
So we've always had a little bit of an angst about our leisure time and our willingness to purchase it. While I would say that, yes, professional sports or any sports facilities are temple-like in their grandiosity, I don't know that we are lacking the ability to devote resources elsewhere at the same time.
I want to change the subject to one of my very favorite subjects, which is Bill Walton. Let me just say that I'm utterly fascinated by Bill Walton. I can't stop whenever I happen upon, I don't look for them, but when I happen upon him broadcasting a game, I listen for a few minutes just to be amused, and then I wind up listening for the entire game, because the stuff that comes out of his mouth is so weird, so interesting, so provocative, so personal, so unrelated to the game that I just find him to be a very important American phenomenon and I don't understand it. So, Kurt, he began his life as an extremely talented basketball player.
Yeah, well, one of the things I think about Walton that is intriguing. relative to contemporary athletics, Walton was still allowed to be a college student, and by that I mean there was no expectation that he was going to remain in Westwood over the summer and do nothing but work out basketball, you know, that he was going to be in the gym for four hours a day and watching game film, and, I mean, John Wooden, I'm sure, had demanding practices and expected those guys to work hard. and you don't win ten national championships unless you do that, but, you know, Walton was able to take advantage of a very good education at UCLA and, you know, peak interests. and when he starts spouting off about things, one of the things when he talks about it in the basketball is usually his travels and the reading he does in preparation for these travels, it's very much a 19th century aesthetic kind of preparation almost, and I think, you know, I think a lot of people laugh at Walton about this, but in part that's one of the things that's a very genuine expression about Walton, you know, he did not view higher education as simply a route to basketball and when he graduated from UCLA, he did not view his education as finished then and I think that's the thing that most of us probably find so intriguing about Walton is that he continues to be a lifelong learner and then he just wants to tell all of us about it.
Regarding Walton as a player, we talked about great talents in the history of the game and I referenced Draymond Green's ability to pass the ball from the center post. Walton was non-parial in that regard, both as a player at UCLA and then later professionally with the Trailblazers and the Celtics. I actually do make, I've begun to make a note of when he's broadcasting. I hear him on the local show in Corvallis, whenever he's going to be in town to do an Oregon State game for ESPN or the Pac-12 network, and he's always entertaining. He has great fun on the Corvallis show and that speaks to Kurt's point about his, and your observation about his area edition.
perhaps coming from a surprising quarter. He can be asked one question and talk straight without hesitation, for 30 minutes or more, without needing or allowing for.
a follow-up. It's great entertainment. So, you know, Kurt, you said that he often does sort of research before he goes to a place, you know, if he's in Baltimore, he'll say, now, I went to the John Wilkes Booth grave the other day and it's a fascinating subject. You should read this book about Booth's attempt to escape into the Virginia heartland, and, you know, Booth was an actor and he was a brother of a famous actor, and that, I think, is actually a real contribution, because he's reminding us that there's more to it than just what's going on on that court and that every arena is in a community and that community has a history, it has diversities, it has economic successes and failures, and he often talks about specific athletes as if he's done extensive research on them, and, I mean, he does that and it's zany and it's even crazy, but he shows a deep commitment to the formation of young men and women, which I think is extraordinary. He knows what he's talking about.
He's widely read. You know, what other sportscaster, a play-by-play sportscaster, has, the sort of immediate area edition that he routinely shows? Dave? Well,
the other thing I think it's important to point out is that Bill Walton grew up with a profound speech impediment, and I don't remember the specific chronology, but at some point he ran into a famous broadcaster from New York in the 1940s and 50s, maybe even further back, Marty Glickman, and Walton was talking to him and he told me he wanted to be able to speak better, wanted to have a career in broadcasting, and he took lessons from Marty Glickman and maybe from other figures, and so from someone who was a garbler of words, he has great style, great knowledgeability, and he's endlessly entertaining. He's easily parodied, but you can.
never really tell the difference between the parody and the man himself. Just one full disclosure here, David and Kendra, you have actually made contact indirectly with him and presented him several of your books, and he has mentioned those books while broadcasting and knows a great, I like him because he knows a great deal about Lewis and Clark, but he also seems to know about Captain James Cook, and it won't be long before you're at his Christmas parties too, I think. It's a point.
of pride, I guess. Yeah, I do have Bill Walton's phone number and email in my directory. He doesn't consider his education to be finished and he thought that Stephen Ambrose was the sine qua non of the Lewis and Clark story, but if anything, I kind of wrote the anti-Stephen Ambrose, Lewis and Clark book and he loved it, so he's a great man in my book. Well, here's what I think.
we should do. I think we should get Kurt's books, and particularly the collegiate basketball book, into the hands of Walton, because he would love those books. He would be utterly fascinated by.
this idea, don't you think, Dave? Certainly. Well, I haven't read the basketball book, but I can't imagine, since that's the sport Bill played, he wouldn't love it, but the UCLA story, going back to our previous show regarding the 1962 Rose Bowl, I mean, the free speech movement, the civil rights focus of the student body, Bill Walton lived all of that in his own time as an undergraduate. He would love reading about that and Kurt's tropes. He got arrested one time.
as a student at UCLA in an anti-war protest, actually. So we're going to make this happen,
Kurt, if you're willing. I mean, I think we're going to have a summit. I'll just be like the ball boy and bring you guys towels and so on, while Bill Walton and you have your moment. Dave, who's his straight man? I mean, his straight man is one of the great straight men I've ever seen.
Well, his ESPN straight man's a guy named Dave Pash.
Exactly. He's outstanding.
And you've got to be various. Bill's, a force of nature in terms of verbal horsepower, and you've got to be really savvy to be able to manage it. And he can be a real challenge. He's got the guys in Corvallis completely buffaloed because he asks one question and it's off to the races.
One of the interesting things with the dynamic between he and Pash, they do not get together the day of the broadcast. That kind of annoys Pash. And it took Pash a while to get into this habit. But Walton wants nothing scripted. He just did a stream of consciousness.
And Dave's just got to keep up with, you know, as they say in music, watch for the changes and try to keep up.
I think I really admire Pash, because you can hear that you can, you know, he's annoyed a fair amount of the time and just thinks, how do you deal with this guy?
Patience a joke.
But he doesn't take the bait. He almost never takes the bait, which is the only way that this can go on. So, Curt, you closed today. We're out of time. Thank you both.
This is going to be a really, this Red Barber routine, I think, is going to be extremely well regarded by our listeners. But, Curt, what are you looking for? What are you watching in the year 2024 in sport?
Well, I think we're going to reach some rapid denouements on the status of amateur athletics or college athletics. I think the court system is going to force some changes. And I think the openness of the commodification of college athletics is going to free them. I think for a long time, college athletics had to maintain the veneer of gentleman, amateurism. And now that we've ripped that Band-Aid off, and we all recognize that they're just minor league sports, it's actually going to be kind of freeing for them.
I don't know what it's going to look like. I'm almost certainly not going to like it. But I can't deny the fact that everybody's been making money off the players except the players. And so I really can't begrudge that.
David Dick Henry, I think your idea of nirvana is Mad Dog Russo, mentioning you 10 times this year. What are you looking for in the year 2024??
I'm finding the whole antitrust, legal entanglements of college, realignment, media relationships. There's a much bigger story there. Again, it's kind of typical. Sports. journalism has kind of taken a surface-only view of realignment and how programs or schools like Oregon State, Washington State, have been marooned.
There's a deeper, darker story there. One side of me is sad. there was a settlement between the two and the 10 and the Pac-12, because if that had gone to trial, and we had gotten to see the really deep, dark, seamy underside of ESPN and Fox Television's role in the deconstruction of the Pac-12 conference, that could have been a game changer in terms of the corporatization of the sport.
I feel like Dave Pash myself. Thank you, gentlemen. I look forward to our continuing conversations. And to all of you who are listening, we'll see you next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
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