“Where are the flying cars we were promised?”
–Sign at Cooper Tires on Broadway at I-25
Every month I’m faced with the challenge of coming up with a topic for my piece in Mile High Sports Magazine. Some months the subject comes easy, like writing about my father in the June “Fathers” Issue. Some topics smack me in the face, like the death of my best friend Polaris. Some months, I wonder if a topic will ever come or, if it does, whether I’ll be able to do it justice.
When the well of ideas seems to be dry, I am reminded of a comment Dante Bichette once made that could have been as much about writing as hitting. He said, “Every day I go to the ballpark wondering if this is the day I can no longer hit major league pitching.”
I was driving back from the ballpark on the night of June 23. I had just dropped off my editor with whom I had watched the Rockies beat the Diamondbacks in yet another rain-delayed game. It wasn’t just late at night, it was also late in the month to be without a topic. My deadline is the first of every month and I take some pride in the fact that I haven’t missed a deadline in 13 years of writing for MHSM. Sometimes, Coors Field will provide some inspiration; sometimes the editor will throw a topic my way. But ironically on this soggy June night my well was dry.
Heading south on Broadway and getting ready to turn left onto the southbound Valley Highway (for nostalgia sake), a sign peering out of the southwest corner just past the cave-like underpass caught my attention.
Where are the flying cars we were promised?
Sinatra was on Cruisin’ Oldies 950 AM, somehow prevailing over the Swedish tin speakers in my 19-year-old Volvo:
When I was seventeen, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for small town girls
And soft summer nights…
For some reason, the image of George Jetson flew into my mind and one more Pencils Robinson semi-literate and certainly not major league topic was born.
Back in 1962, ABC aired a Hanna-Barbera animated weekly cartoon called “The Jetsons.” George Jetson and his hip family (perky wife Jane, promiscuous teen-age daughter Judy, precocious son Elroy, slobbering dog Astro and live-in robot maid Rosie) lived in Orbit City, a futuristic utopia set sometime between the year 2000 and 2062.
George commuted from the Skypad Apartments to his one-hour-a-day, two-days-a-week job at Spacely Space Sprockets in a zippy flying saucer car featuring a transparent bubble top and no apparent source of power.
Americans of that era had their gaze firmly affixed on the future. In the same year, Seattle hosted the Century 21 Exposition world’s fair that featured themes of space, science and the future, and produced the Space Needle and the Alweg monorail.
Anything was possible in this nation which had defeated the Axis and had boomed with post-war prosperity. Sports were a huge part of the national landscape but no one seemed to be demanding or even expecting sports to modernize. Americans drove cars that looked like rocket ships but they were satisfied with homespun athletic heroes.
Baseball remained the National Pastime and was—as it still is—the American game most wedded to (mired in?) the past through its vast statistical base and its 100-plus years of history and folklore. The Yankees continued business as usual, winning the 1962 Series, 4-2 over the San Francisco Giants for their 20th world championship.
But the increasingly voracious appetite of America’s mass hypnotist, television, for year-round sports greatly enhanced the popularity of many sports. Pro football, still four years away from an AFL-NFL merger was becoming more and more popular and both the AFL championship (a Dallas Texan 20-17 double overtime win over the Houston Oilers) and the NFL championship (the Green Bay Packers 16-7 victory over the N.Y. Giants) helped cement pro football’s place in the American sports scene. The NFL final was played at Yankee Stadium and blacked out for a 75-mile radius.
College football had been thriving in America since the turn of the century and the 1962 Sugar Bowl saw Bear Bryant’s Alabama Crimson Tide win the first of his six championships with a 10-3 win over Arkansas before 83,000 fans and a captive New Year’s Day television audience.
Basketball hadn’t quite arrived, at least in comparison to football and baseball. The Celtics beat the L.A. Lakers 4-3 to win their third of nine NBA titles in the decade but the game hadn’t really captured the nation’s imagination outside of Boston. Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game occurred in 1962 but because it was played in Hershey, Pennsylvania before 4,124 fans and was not televised it sometimes feels like it happened in a dream rather than in an NBA regular season. There is also no cinematic record of Wilt’s achievement, which included a career .511 free throw shooter making 28 of 32 from the line.
In college basketball, Cincinnati beat Ohio State for the NCAA title but the game was televised on tape delay. It would be a dozen years before Brent Musburger used the term “March Madness” to refer to the college hoops tournament.
Boxing, like college football, had a large and faithful following from the turn of the century and became almost a national obsession with Colorado’s Jack Dempsey holding the heavyweight crown from 1919 to 1926, followed by Joe Louis monopolizing the top pugilistic class from 1937 to 1949. The “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” televised boxing, including such legends as Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Archie Moore, Rocky Graziano, and Willie Pep, continuously from 1946 to 1960.
But Gillette didn’t sponsor the 1962 heavyweight title bout between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. That debacle, which saw Liston, arrested 20 times and one of his father’s 25 children, knock out the defending champ in 2:06 of the first round, was viewed only on closed circuit TV. After he won the title and was snubbed by self-righteous Philadelphians on his return to the city, Liston relocated to Denver permanently, saying (according to Wikipedia), “I’d rather be a lamppost in Denver than the mayor of Philadelphia.”
Golf was also getting some love from the sporting public, as the television camera loved the rugged blue-collar looks of 32-year-old Arnold Palmer who won the Masters and the British Open in 1962 en route to earning $81,448 in prize money on that year’s PGA Tour. Upstart 22-year-old Jack Nicklaus won the ’62 U.S. Open, while the other member of the Big Three, Gary Player, six years younger than Palmer, won the PGA Championship.
The LPGA was in its 13th season in 1962 and despite the heroics of Mickey Wright, who won 10 of the 29 ladies pro golf events that year along with a whopping $21,641 in prize money, was not a part of the sporting discussion of the day.
The National Hockey League, in its 45th season in 1962, was anything but national with Montreal and Toronto joining Boston, New York, Detroit and Chicago in the six-team league that, despite the purity of the game, did not resonate with the average sports fan of the era. Major network coverage of the Stanley Cup playoffs didn’t begin until 1966.
Tennis in 1962 was a game for ladies and gentlemen, amateur ladies and gentleman whose achievements occasionally were mentioned in passing on page 12 of the sports section. Which was unfortunate because two of the greatest tennis players, both Aussies, were dominating the sport in 1962 with Rod Laver becoming the second man to win the Grand Slam and Margaret Court claiming the women’s Australian, French and U.S. Opens. An American you never heard of named Karen Susman won the 1962 Wimbledon women’s singles title. In 1970, two years after the beginning of the Open Era (pros and amateurs competing together), Court won the Grand Slam. She amassed the most wins (24) in Grand Slam events of any tennis player. Serena Williams, one of the few names recognized by the casual American sports fan, is third on the all-time Grand Slam singles list with 20 wins, two behind retired German Steffi Graf. Court, not to be confused with the U.S. Supreme Court, became a Pentacostal minister in Perth and in 1991 blamed lesbianism for ruining women’s tennis.
My high school had a boys soccer team but I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the World Cup for which the U.S. did not qualify in 1962. In fact, the best-ever American finish in World Cup occurred in the first one, hosted by Uruguay in 1930. After a 10th place finish in 1950, the U.S. failed to qualify for the next nine Cups.
As with all sports at the time, women’s soccer didn’t even exist in most high schools. The Americans would win the first distaff World Cup in 1991 in China and then again when we hosted it in 1999, but not even the Jetsons were prescient enough in 1962 to predict women playing anything but roller derby on television.
Thanks for indulging me through this maudlin memoire of a year in my adolescence, but the question remains: “Where are the flying cars we were promised?”
Has sport in America significantly improved in the 53 years that have passed since 1962? Do Jumbotrons upon which endless replays flash and billion dollar stadiums named after billion dollar corporations constitute delivery on the promise of flying cars?
Is the wealth (or glut) of sporting events on television—college football and basketball games on every day and night of the week—a huge improvement over the “Gillette Cavalcade of Sports” and “Friday Night Fights”? Is ESPN the equivalent of a flying car?
Was Mayweather-Pacquiao an improvement over Liston-Patterson?
Are sports better because the average salary in the NBA is $4.58 million and Jordan Spieth won $3.6 million in eight days at the Masters and U.S. Open, about half of Arnold Palmer’s four-decade career earnings?
And how about all those subtle and not so subtle changes in sports? The 3-point line (thanks American Basketball Association); the designated hitter, the closer and interleague play in MLB; the yellow tennis ball and the Open Era; the College Football Playoff system and the expanded NCAA basketball tournament.
Or how about the elimination of the U groove in favor of the V groove on golf clubs to discourage the “bomb and gouge” strategy of attacking the greens in the PGA? Wow!
Is the NFL more interesting since the fullback has become a pass blocker and the defense has been emasculated so that quarterbacks and receivers have become the game’s focus?
Because I am just as qualified in 2015 to predict the future as Hanna-Barbera and the Jetsons were in 1962, I’m going to make some predictions on how the sports landscape will look in the year 2060:
• 3D virtual personal panoramavision means minimal attendance, smaller venues.
• Ticket and concession prices will come down as owners and organizers battle to get fans away from their personal viewing/listening devices and into their sports arenas.
• On-site pari-mutuel betting will be a last gasp effort to draw folks and their money to the game.
• College athletics could disappear altogether unless institutions of higher learning figure out how to stem soaring tuition prices which are making college attendance a poor economic decision. Who will those professional/college athletes perform for if the only ones who can afford to go to school are those on scholarship?
• If college athletics finds a way to exist, you can say goodbye to any semblance of traditional rivalries and conferences; they’ll be replaced by super national conferences and pro-type playoffs (except for a 351-team NCAA Division I basketball bracket).
• As much as we love officials (and I’m not saying that tongue-in-cheek), nanobots, lasers and advanced GPS systems will be making all the calls with tedious accuracy.
• More mixed gender teams will compete; openly gay competitors won’t draw a comment.
• Tattoos will replace uniforms.
• World Cup Soccer and Olympics will be staged every two years, doubling your money, doubling your fun.
• Golf will inhibit club technology and carry on as it always has.
• Tennis will be replaced by Pickle Ball; small traditional tennis circuit will continue in Europe and Asia with minimal American participation.
• These sports will be added to the endangered species list: Motor sports (silent, self-driving electric cars); boxing (mixed martial arts take over); horse racing (not many kings left); whiffleball (kids will have no capacity to create and organize their own games); and football-rugby-ice hockey-lacrosse (mama, don’t let your babies grow up with concussions).
• These sports will see meteoric rises in popularity: Cricket (2-3 billion fans love the best features of bowling and baseball); volleyball (the sport best suited to women’s abilities); and table tennis and badminton (cheap equipment and space efficient).
The problem with predicting change in sports is that part of what we love about them is their history and their comforting consistency. We grudgingly accept technological innovation in sports but we’re wary of any changes to the basics of the games we love. Owners and organizers of our sports rarely introduce changes unless they benefit their bottom line. Change in sports is glacial compared to changes in other parts of our society.
And that’s probably why we sports fans will still be waiting for that flying car in 2060.
This story originally appeared in Mile High Sports Magazine