In the year I was born, 1938, the white Christian males who ruled the sports world considered their various games and pastimes as definers of righteousness, crucibles of character, and a preparation for dominance in business and war. Anyone who played but didn’t look like them was an interloper, clearly operating with some kind of performance enhancers.

That was made clear in a book published that very year by one of the premier sportswriters of his time, Paul Gallico. It was called Farewell to Sport and in it he declaimed that the “colored brother” was so good at boxing because he “is not nearly so sensible to pain as his white brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands”; that New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, “like all people who spring from what we call low origins… never had any inhibitions”; and that the reason basketball “appeals to the Hebrew… is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart aleckness.”

I was particularly struck by his observation that Mildred (Babe) Didrikson Zaharias became one of the greatest athletes of the century (and in so many sports!) “simply because she would not or could not compete with women at their own best game—man-snatching. It was an escape, a compensation. She would beat them at everything else they tried to do.”

The backstory to that observation holds a key to the more general misogyny in sports then, if not in society in general. During a friendly golf game, Gallico and Zaharias were talked into a footrace by the famous sportswriter Grantland Rice. The Babe ran Paul into the ground, and he rarely wrote about her again without mentioning her muscles, Adam’s apple, and loud voice. After all, how could a real woman beat a real man?

I came to wonder if the values of sports were faintly in the best interests of this country, much less any individual—and, in the end, came to believe that they’re not.

By the time I read Farewell to Sport at age 15, Gallico had produced several sappy bestsellers, including The Snow Goose. At the time, I was a mere four years away from answering an ad for a copyboy job at the New York Times sports department. My first year at the paper, 1957, would prove a turning point for New York sports fans in their realization that the industry by no means returned their devotion. After all, the elopement west that year of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers (to become the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers) was considered a total betrayal. Hadn’t those teams been part of our extended families? Wasn’t loyalty to them promoted almost as a Judeo-Christian duty?

On the other hand, expansion also made the big leagues national and kicked off the boom that lifted sports into the highest levels of entertainment (where it now resides).

And in that context, consider what follows an old sportswriter’s meditation on sports at the end of a tumultuous political year—with its tribalism, violence, false narratives, and dangerous entertainment—that seems to have made what was once my prime area of study superfluous. After all, who really needs a Super Bowl (or a sportswriter) after Trump’s mob of fans attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and were rewarded with a ticker-tape parade of pardons by the reelected mobster-in-chief on January 20, 2025?

Sometimes, I think I’d like to run this past Gallico. Was his bigotry just the expression of a sportswriter of his times, or was he an early Trumpist?

In 1938, sports were generally considered a positive force for the national psyche, a way for children to learn courage and self-control, old people to find blissful nostalgia, and families to discover congenial areas of communication. In fact, it was there that we would then all find a unifying language. The melting pot may have been a myth, but we would all come together in the ballpark.

I came to call that web of aspirations and attitudes SportsWorld (the title of one of my books) and thought of it as an imposed infrastructure meant to help contain our natural energies; divert our political passions; and socialize us for work, war, or depression. In my years as a sportswriter for the Times, I came to wonder if the values of sports were faintly in the best interests of this country, much less any individual—and, in the end, came to believe that they’re not.

Winning is everything? Think where that’s taken us.

In a Trumpian world where white Christian males have renewed their manifest destiny of ruling over everything as they drive the ball toward that goal line, the character of everything else has indeed changed, and sports, at least as we once imagined it, is gone.

Growing up as a casual spectator rather than a participant—my Dad and I went to the library together, but never played catch—my take on the games I came to cover as a reporter would prove to be sociological rather than fan-based. I never bought into games as gauges of courage, manhood, or success.

In fact, there were too many questions I found I couldn’t take for granted. My favorite example: the first time I covered the annual major college national basketball tournament—dubbed March Madness, I thought, to pardon its excesses in advance—I noticed how many top teams fielded three or four Black players on their starting fives from student bodies that were routinely 90% white.

Other sportswriters shrugged when I mentioned it, not because they necessarily thought the point irrelevant but because it had become too routine to mention without annoying editors (who believed that our readers didn’t care). And I think it was true that most didn’t care because they hadn’t been conditioned to see sports as anything but a dreamworld. If you covered horse-racing, would you note it every time the owners of those horses were predominately upper-class whites, the trainers middle-class whites, and the stable hands mostly men of color (and a few white women)? It is what it is, as we were told on ESPN.

And then there was sports gambling, illegal at the time except in Las Vegas, yet still the pumping heart of the fans’ game. The first time I covered a pro basketball game at New York’s Madison Square Garden in the early 1960s, I was confused by some Knicks fans (you could tell by the team jerseys they so often wore) cheering when the other team scored. I finally asked an older sportswriter what to make of that and he gave me a funny look before saying, “the spread,” and patiently explaining that more sophisticated fans often bet on the disparity of the final score rather than simply who won or lost.

Betting was then so verboten as an obvious corrupter of the purity of games that several baseball and football stars were suspended for seemingly harmless gambling or simply associating with casinos. And that came to be considered hypocritical, since everybody gambled. It should be legal, fans insisted. Now, of course, almost every sports entity has an official connection with an online gambling site and there have already been betting scandals in basketball and baseball.

I lasted 14 years in my first stint in the Times sports department. After I left, I found that I missed the people and the paper, but not sports itself. I rarely watched games. Most of my next 20 years were spent writing books and appearing on television which, while less satisfying than newspaper writing, was considerably easier. And when I did do a sports piece for TV, my subjects tended to treat me with far more respect. The jocks wanted to be on TV, too.

The bestselling sports narratives tended to flare and disappear. Trump, however, proved to be the comeback player of the century.

In fact, one shrewd old football coach, Eddie Robinson of historically Black Grambling State University, made a deal with me—full access with camera and crew to his locker room in return for his players having a Q&A session with us on how to break into TV. These days, former players and coaches dominate sportscasting (as they undoubtedly should). Their insider insights go further in enhancing the entertainment of the event than anything most everyday sportscasters might do.

During the 20 years between my gigs at the Times—1971 to 1991—it seemed as if performance-enhancing drugs, traumatic brain injuries, and the commercialization of amateur sports made far greater inroads than the most obvious positive trend, the growth of women’s sports, particularly pro basketball’s WNBA. However, in 2024, when the women’s league finally produced a transcendent superstar, Caitlin Clark, jealousy with overtones of racism marred the........

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