Sports in America

This book was written by a man who loves sports.
 
It would not be extravagant to say that twice in my lifetime sports have made the difference between life and death, and I must therefore treat them with respect. The first incident occurred when I was a boy, and it was spiritual in significance. The second took place when I was fifty-eight, and was completely physical.
 
Like many future athletes, I came from poor surroundings. Many of the boys with whom I played got into serious trouble and found themselves sentenced to Glen Mills, the local reformatory. I can still remember with awe the account of one street-mate who returned from Glen Mills: “As soon as the door slams behind you, a guard knocks you down, other guards grab you, and they beat you with a leather strap.”
 
“Why?” I asked.
 
“To let you know who’s boss.”
 
I developed a healthy fear of Glen Mills and determined not to find its door slamming behind me, but at the same time I was drifting into dangerous companionships. I knew that I was falling, almost against my will, onto perilous terrain.
 
I was saved by athletics, and by the generosity of a remarkable man. George Murray was an almost illiterate roofer who never earned more than a few dollars a day. An extremely shy man, he never married, but took upon himself the fathering of disadvantaged boys. He formed what was known as the Doylestown Boys’ Brigade, which had bits of military fol-de-rol and a tenuous allegiance to the Presbyterian Church. Most important for us, he gained access to a defunct meeting hall which had been erected for some aborted purpose. The second floor of this rather small building he converted into a basketball court, and there I spent my youth.
 
The court had every conceivable deficiency. The baskets were hung flat against the end walls, which meant that those of us accustomed to using them mastered the art of dashing headlong at the wall, planting our right foot high against the planking, and vaulting upward toward the basket, ending high above the rim so that we could then dunk the ball downward. This was a shot fairly hard to stop by a bewildered defender who had never before seen such a court.
 
The ceiling was unusually low, with a wide, heavy rafter right above the basket, and we became expert in speeding down the floor, and with maximum force slamming the ball vertically upward, so that it caromed back down through the basket. This, too, was a shot difficult to stop if you were not accustomed to it.
 
On this bizarre floor the Doylestown Boys’ Brigade fielded teams with far more than normal skills. We once went for a period of three years without losing a home game, even though we played teams that had better reputations and much taller players. At the time I thought we were pretty good, but now, looking back on those years, I realize that even superlative opponents would have required about three-quarters of a game to familiarize themselves with our peculiar floor and its strange rules. Our victories were tarnished.
 
“Wait till we get you on a real court!” our defeated opponents sometimes threatened as they left our little bandbox, but I noticed that when they did get us on their own court we were apt to be so much better trained and so determined that we defeated them there too.
 
As a result of this roofer’s concern for boys, a constant supply of young fellows like me was provided the local high school, which also produced championship teams, even though it consistently competed against schools that were markedly bigger. But now my life fell under the control of a much different man, who, in a very real sense, determined my future.
 
J. Allen Gardy was a tall, moderately gifted athlete who had played basketball for nearby Lehigh University. He was a printer by profession, a publisher of a hunting magazine by avocation, and an amateur coach of high school basketball out of the goodness of his heart. At the precise time in my life when I required strong guidance, he threw me a basketball and said, “Let’s see if you can make a lay-up.”
 
He was a simplistic man to whom everything was either good or bad, and he knew the difference. Fried foods were bad, and alcohol, and cigarettes, and fooling around with girls, and talking back to teachers, and staying up late before an important game, and anything that was ungentlemanly or unsportsmanlike. He subscribed to the highest possible standards, and observed them himself. You could go to him with any problem and get an immediate, clear-cut decision.
 
J. Allen Gardy knew, and his knowledge covered the universe. Like most coaches, he considered Democrats bad, and labor union people, and troublemakers, and college professors, and radicals, and anyone not wholeheartedly in support of the good society as he experienced it.
 
But most of all, he knew how to encourage young boys to develop themselves to their fullest, to compete ruggedly, to observe the basic rules of sportsmanship. He held us to rigorous performance, made us run more practice laps than any other coach in the region, and drilled us incessantly on fundamentals.
 
As a consequence of Coach Gardy’s attention, we went several years without losing a home game and won the vast majority of our away games, even though we consistently played teams from larger towns and cities. Our high school court was a spacious one, and we simply ran the other teams ragged, but when we were thrown into little jewel boxes, as at Lansdale and Perkasie, our previous training on Uncle George’s tiny court stood us in good stead. All of us could climb the back wall and dunk the basketball. All of us could ricochet shots off low ceilings, and we customarily won just as easily on small courts as on large.
 
Looking back on those hectic and triumphant years, I am not sure that we gave our competitors a fair shake. We were unfair for a reason not of our making. A few years before I entered high school a Doylestown boy had been killed playing football—killed right on the playing field. The ensuing revulsion was so great that football was banned during my years at school.
 
As a consequence, we spent our fall term getting ready for basketball, and by the time the season opened we were so advanced in our training that we were almost professionals. Year after year we were something like 12–0 or 14–1 in game standings before the opposition was really ready to play. In the later stages of the season, when the opposing teams were beginning to settle down, they sometimes drubbed us, but by then we were so far ahead in the standings, we could not be overtaken.
 
We played each Tuesday and Friday, a brutal schedule, and often totaled as many as twenty-seven or thirty games a season. It was our whole life, and our constant guide was Coach Gardy, that quiet, resolute man who could answer any question. At a time when my personal life was chaotic and required a firm hand, he was there, a surrogate father, a stern counselor, a man who never doubted that good things lay ahead for me.
 
If there was ever an American boy who was saved by sports, it was I. Gardy was helpful in getting me an athletic scholarship to Swarthmore, so that even my future education depended upon sports. He encouraged me to play baseball—good field, fair hit—and gave me a tennis racket, which I could otherwise never have afforded, thus introducing me to the game which has been my constant companion and chief delight.
 
But there was something more. In Uncle George’s small gym and Coach Gardy’s larger court we won championships and I came to regard myself as a champion. I carried myself a little taller, worked a little harder in school, built a confidence that was crucial. I drew away from the boys who were headed for reform school and patterned myself after those who were headed for college.
 
I was a heavy scorer in days when a game that ended 23–17 in our favor was reported as “another runaway,” and I garnered more praise than I deserved, but I can never forget those wintry Saturday mornings, after some sterling victory, when I would saunter into the middle of town, and everyone would know how many goals I had scored the night before. I remember particularly the Saturday in 1924 when we came home with the championship. In the last moments of the game on Friday night I had thrown the ball a disgraceful distance with no hope of scoring, and somehow the ball had dropped into the net and we had won, 16–14. That Saturday I had to explain to the men of our town how I had made that last, unbelievable shot, and the men said, “The whole town is proud of you.”