1975
I'm in the kitchen of my apartment, an empty bowl of Wheaties is in my hand. I'm just about ready to get on my bike and go to work. I have a nice job counseling school kids. I'm moving toward middle class. The radio is playing some song but I'm not paying attention to it. It is wallpaper. The seven o'clock news comes on. "Radical sports activist, Jack Scott has been implicated in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. FBI sources say that Scott shuttled Hearst from San Francisco to a farm house in rural Pennsylvania …" I lean against the sink.
FEBRUARY 1971
Springfield College. Woods Hall is filled. People are standing in the back. The Great Debate is about to begin.
In one corner are Jack Frost (his real name) and Ed Steitz. Frost is the Head of the Physical Education Department and Steitz is the Athletic Director (thirteen years later he will be enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame for bringing the three-point shot to the college game). Frost and Steitz insist on being called Doctor.
In the other corner are Jack Scott and my dad. Both have PhD's but they are introduced as Jack and Henry. Jack writes books, Athletics for Athletes, and The Athletic Revolution and runs the Institute for the Study of Sport in Society. He's trying to show that sport can be competitive without being soul-crushing; that players, even the well-paid players, shouldn't be chewed up and spit out. In 1968 Jack helped Harry Edwards, then a sociology professor at San Jose State University, organize a boycott by black athletes in the Olympics. When that didn't pan out, they helped Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their black power podium salute at the 200-meter medal awards ceremony. Elite athletes know Jack. The public, not so much.
My dad is chairman of the Psychology department and has been a longstanding pain in the butt to the PE department. He loves sports but this is not his field. My hands are sweating. I want my dad to do well, not be out of place in this sport discussion. I look at the men on the stage and see that Frost and Steitz are puffy and red faced, overweight and sweaty. Jack and my dad are not. Jack was a good football player and ran a 9.6 hundred. He is lean and strong and only in his late twenties. My dad was also a good football player, and wanted to be a coach. But that was about a quarter century ago. He runs every day and hardly anyone does (yet). He is wiry. The physical contrast between Frost and Steitz, and Jack and my dad is stark. I'm starting to feel confident. I'm smiling.
Frost and Steitz want to uphold the sanctity of sport; that competition is good, that winning is good, that sport toughens kids, gets them ready for real life. They think things are fine just the way they are, except maybe that they could use more money so they can make it all even more tightly organized.
Jack and my dad make the case for how all sports, from the Olympics all the way down to little kids making up games in the backyard, can make people happy, can help people learn about themselves; that sport can feed creativity and democracy. But the best way for this to happen is for the games to be run by the athletes themselves. Coaches, instead of blowing whistles and screaming, should be consultants who could assist players, but only when asked. This notion that seems so odd, even radical, even un-American, to Frost and Steitz and the coaches in the audience, is almost identical to that of basketball's inventor, and Springfield College alumnus, James Naismith, who said that the game should be "played and not coached."
Jack speaks in a calm voice, he always speaks in a calm voice, about how the win-at-all-cost mentality of big-time sport and corporate greed are connected, that people and players ought not be treated as chattel. He is death on racism and sexism and militarism and (well before his time) performance enhancing drugs in big time sports, hell all sports. Jack holds a special contempt for America's two biggest jock-sniffers, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
Last night Dave Meggyesy kicked off this two-day symposium on the value of sport in society with a talk about why he walked away from the NFL and a pretty good salary. He played for seven years but got tired of being a piece of meat. His book, Out of Their League, has made him a celebrity. (It will eventually sell 750,000 copies.) He's been written up in newspapers and magazines and he has made more than a few television appearances. My favorite was a few months ago when Dick Cavett had him on his show along with old-time Hollywood star Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and mistress of John Kennedy's father Joe), Margot Kidder (one day she'll be Lois Lane in the Superman movies) and a wobbly Janis Joplin (she will die eight weeks later) who held a Marlboro in one hand and kept rubbing Meggyesy's muscular right thigh with the other.
Meggyesy's talk is a tough act to follow but my dad and Jack absolutely kill. The audience screams and shouts. They obliterate Drs. Frost and Steitz. It is the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals (next year it will be Nixon and McGovern.)
Jack and some of my non-jock friends go back to my parents' house for pizza and wine and I sit there thinking how much I like Jack. How much I want to be like him. He loves sports. I love sports. He's a good athlete. I'm a good athlete. He protested the war. I protested the war. He has trouble with coaches and their authoritarian ways and I can only remember one coach that I ever really liked.
Later that night I drop off Jack in the parking lot of a Travel Lodge in the middle of Springfield. He stands by the door and then leans back in. "If you're ever in the Bay Area stop by."
*****
MARCH 1971
It's six weeks later. Chip and Tony and I have quit college to travel around America. We reach California and begin our trek up the coast. We try to figure out who we could stay with. There's a kid back at college who's from Stockton but we don't know him that well. His sister lives in San Francisco. We don't know her at all. We figure staying with her would be a long shot.
"How about Jack?" I ask.
"You think he meant it?"
We get a phone book, find his address in Oakland, right near the Berkeley city line, and walk up the stairs to his old Victorian house. "Come on in. So good to see you." Jack introduces us to his wife, Micki, and then takes us to the third floor where there are six or eight cots. It is a much smaller, much friendlier, much more sober version of where we stayed in Albuquerque a week earlier, the Christ House of Rest men's homeless shelter. "Make yourself at home."
And we do. We stay for ten days.
Many people drift in and out of Jack's and Micki's house. Some stop in for small chats, some share the third floor with us. Everyone has a story. Chip and Tony and I feel like all this was order up especially for our pleasure, but this is just Jack and Micki being Jack and Micki. They don't pry, they don't judge, they offer food and comfort and conversation. People find them.
Phil Shinnick is one of Jack's best friends, and along with Micki, helped Jack start the Institute for the Study of Sport in Society. His face is narrow and the rest of him is tall and long and lean. He is a captain in the Air Force doing some sort of desk job. His real job is the long jump. He made the Olympic team in 1964 and 1968. In 1968, he jumped against Bob Beamon who became a bird for a few seconds and flew nearly two feet farther than anyone on earth had ever flown before. The world rejoiced. Five years earlier Phil also flew farther than anyone in the world had ever flown before … by one inch. And no one cared. Because no one bothered to set up the wind gauge, because no one expected him to set a world record, because he had only jumped in four or five meets before this one. Everyone who saw it said there was no wind. One guy said if you dropped a feather it would have fallen straight down. The jump didn't count. Phil was ignored. It happened in Modesto, such a perfect name for such a thing.
And all of this is interesting, but what I cannot get out my mind are his stuffed sinuses. "I found a doctor who figured out what to do. He stuck a needle, about yay long, up my nose and drained them. Feels much better." I shiver.
Sam Goldberg bunks with us on the third floor. Sam is crazy. He is small, maybe a hundred fifty pounds, was a very good decathlete at the University of Kansas and just missed making the Olympic team. This bothers Sam a lot. But, Sam does not sit and stew. He's preparing a petition to the International Olympic Committee and its Chairman, Avery Brundage. He wants Woodstock Nation to compete as an independent country in 1972. We don't think it has a chance but Sam is so serious we can't say anything. We laugh instead. "I'm not kidding," Sam says borderline angry.
Sam has just come from court where a judge has sentenced him to something like a hundred hours of community service for inciting to riot. At halftime of the Cal – Stanford football game, a very big deal in the Bay Area, Sam had unfurled a giant Viet Cong flag and marched up and down the field to the jeers of some and the cheers of others. Fights broke out. Sam's defense in court is that football is also a riot and since no one from either team was arrested why should he have been?
Another Chip stops by. This Chip, Chip Oliver, like Dave Meggyesy, has just quit the NFL. Chip has no political leanings, he has joined a commune in Mill Valley – The One World Family of the Messiah's World Crusade. I don't like communes and I don't like messiahs any more than I like coaches. Chip works in the commune's natural foods restaurant and owns two pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, and a pair of boots. He used to weigh 240 pounds when he was a linebacker for the Oakland Raiders. Now he weighs about 170, maybe less. He had the right stuff to be really good. Al Davis, the general manager, owner and messiah of the Raiders, said that he was one of the best prospects in the NFL. But then Chip started to raise his consciousness. Whatever that means. He stopped eating meat, does massive amounts of yoga, stopped drinking and stopped using greenies. His teammates think he is incredibly weird. He says he is going to go further. He has been experimenting with "breathetarianism" because, he says, if you breathe right you can get all the nutrition you need. "It's all there, man. Everything. It's nature. Just breathe, man." Chip will also write a book about leaving the NFL. (His editor, Ron Rappaport, cleans it up for public consumption. He takes out all the really odd things. There are many odd things.)
Jack and Micki and our-Chip and Tony and I and whoever else happens to be living in the house, all sit down for dinner each night as if we are a family, and I suppose for those ten days we are. The conversations run from personal to political to cultural to the Super Bowl to the war to who wants to cook the next night's meal. Tony volunteers us. He is Italian and his mother taught him how to cook an excellent sauce which Tony calls gravy because he's from Brooklyn. Our food gets applause. In the middle of supper, the phone rings, and since I am closest to the phone, Jack asks me to get it.
It's for you, I say. Jack is gone for five or ten minutes, long enough for his spaghetti to cool.
Micki asks, "Who was that?"
"George Sauer. He's retiring from the Jets tomorrow and wants to go over a few things before he makes his announcement. I'll call him back after we eat."
George Sauer, Jr. is borderline football royalty. He led the AFL in receptions in 1967 and two years later caught eight passes from Joe Namath when the Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in the third Super Bowl. He has excellent bloodlines. His father, George Sauer, Sr., played for the Green Bay Packers in the 1930's, coached at a bunch of big schools, including the Naval Academy, and is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame. The icing on the cake is that George Junior played his college football at one of the biggest football factories in the country, the University of Texas. He also has had enough. Never again a piece of meat. His quitting will be a very big deal, every newspaper and sports program will cover it, but it is just another meal with Jack and Micki.
Chip and Tony and I make our pilgrimage to Berkeley. We walk through Sproul Plaza and it is 1964 and Mario Savio has the microphone and thousands and thousands of students protest for free speech. We walk past People's Park and can see Ronald Reagan in 1969 sending State Troopers to break up a demonstration by students and neighbors who want to keep this small place a makeshift park and not give it back to the university so it can become a football field. James Rector was killed on this spot.
Back at supper Jack and Micki tell us they made their van into a kind of ambulance and tended to people who were beaten and bloodied during draft riots. It fits perfectly. Their hearts are with the protesters but they help anyone who needs it. Anyone.
As we leave to go on the rest of our trip, Jack stands by the car. "Say hi to your dad for me."
FEBRUARY 8, 2000
It is Sunday. My dad and I are watching some sport on TV but mostly we read newspapers together. He tosses me the obituary section of the New York Times. "Take a look." It is Jack's. He died a few days ago. Throat cancer. My dad and I are quiet. "I really liked him," my dad says. Me, too.
Jack Scott, a prominent critic of organized athletics during the 1960's and early 1970's who later gained national attention when he was suspected of helping Patricia Hearst elude capture in the Symbionese Liberation Army case, died Sunday night in Eugene, Oregon. He was 57.
About half of the rest of the obituary talks about things that make me smile again: That he and Micki founded the Institute in their attic. That a couple of years after The Great Debate, he was hired as the Athletic Director and Head of the PE department at Oberlin College. That he used an electric muscle stimulator gizmo to heal Olympians like Carl Lewis, Joan Benoit-Samuelson, and Jackie Joiner-Kersey. What makes me smile the most is that the obituary says Spiro Agnew, before he had to resign the vice presidency in disgrace, said at a dinner honoring Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, that Jack was an enemy of sport, a guru from Berkeley, a devotee of Che Guevara, and a "permacritic," whatever the hell that means.
The rest of the obituary is about Jack and the SLA and Patty Hearst and how he drove her to a farm in Pennsylvania where they stayed for two months.
But it never mentions that Jack got involved only because he wanted to write a book about the SLA. He said the whole horrible episode was, in his words, "my generation gone crazy." It doesn't mention that he was blindfolded and taken to their hideout. That guns were pointed at him, that he spent the long and terrifying night convincing the three surviving members of the SLA, Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris, all nervous and panicked and armed to the teeth with bombs and grenades and automatic rifles, that he would only take them to the safe place in Pennsylvania if they walked away from the weapons. And they did.
I have no idea what happened during that time in Pennsylvania. All I know is what I experienced. Jack's calm voice. Jack's persistence. Jack's desire to help people who needed it. No matter who. Maybe even Patty Hearst.