 The Obsession with Records
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Babe Ruth and Red Grange
The darlings of the American public were the legendary baseball player Babe Ruth in 1920's.
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Society had been the pioneer in the promotion of sports. We have seen that in the middle of the century the more wealthy had been almost the only people with the leisure and means to enjoy them. As the opportunity to play games became available for a wider public in the 1890's, the world of fashion tended more and more to favor those activities of which the expense definitely excluded the common man.
The same impulse that motivated the rivalry over elaborate entertainment and opera boxes was responsible for an attitude toward sport in which conspicuous waste rather than simple enjoyment became the general rule. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., determined to win the position in society denied his father, made sport his means of entrée into that exclusive world. He sailed yachts and fought his way to the proud post of commodore of the New York Yacht Club; he took up coaching and drove his four-in-hand in the Newport parade; he introduced polo and founded the Westchester Polo Club.
In the United States there was particular fascination with records. Two uniquely American games, baseball and football, lent themselves to detailed quantification and established a framework for other sports. Baseball had become the national game because so many people played it as well as watched it. Football was destined from the first to be primarily a spectator sport.
Interest was mobilized by the press, but radio broadcasting transformed it into a new home-based entertainment. Matches and results were analyzed and players' techniques discussed long before the press could report on them.
Outdoor recreation was to develop into a much more marked feature of American life as new opportunities opened up for ever larger numbers of people to play games. The democracy was to take over sport to an extent which its limited leisure and lack of resources still made impossible in these decades after the Civil War. But the path had been cleared. America had discovered a new world. Through this process sports personalities emerged, their identities developed and embellished by the media, the celebration of their accomplishments part of the entertainment industry's invention of celebrity.
Heroic figures in the culture of industrial capitalism, sportsmen and women were recognized as maxirnizers of performance and output.In the 1920s the names of Babe Ruth and Red Grange became familiar because of their prowess in baseball and American football respectively. Football aroused spectator interest from the start, and the Big Three of the eastern colleges -- Harvard, Yale and Princeton -- at first completely overshadowed all other teams. It was long before comparable elevens were in the field.
Babe Ruth was the first modem athlete to be "packaged" and "sold" to the American people, not only for his sporting prowess but alsa for his character. He became a national celebrity who helped to make professional baseball America's number one pastime. The great crowds attracted by football-totaling thirty and forty thousand -- were naturally not entirely made up of those in the higher social brackets.
The game had a wider appeal, as the tremendous publicity given it clearly proves. Red Grange has been regarded as one of the greatest college football players of all time. His evasive running eamed him the title of "The Galloping Ghost" and when he signed for the Chicago Bears in 1925 not only did he secure a contract worth $3,000 per game but also, in the eyes of many, conferred respectabiIity on professional football itself.
From this time on, it was clear that money could be made in the game by college graduates. Few adults found themselves able or willing to play football. Although teams made up of former college players were for a time quite active, the game was primarily for boys. But many were glad to watch so exciting a sport. Its dependence upon brute force satisfied atavistic instincts as could no other modern spectacle except the prize-fight. Baseball had become the national game because so many people played it as well as watched it. Football was destined from the first to be primarily a spectator sport.
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