Well, except for the POTUS being uncensored and bleating the worst and most uncivil thoughts that flit through the minds of ugly Americans.
Unless you were there, it’s difficult to describe what it was like in 1966 and that assholes like Donald Trump were the norm. This gets close:
Muhammad Ali’s most famous act of social activism — one that would strip him of his best fighting years, cost him millions of dollars, forever alter his image and eventually send him into debt — began with one off-hand quote: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”
…
For the most famous athlete on the planet to openly decry the war was, at the time, blasphemous. When he declared his apathy toward the Viet Cong, public support of the Vietnam War was at its peak — in the first three months of 1966, the war’s approval rating was over 50 percent, according to Gallup. Ali, citing his faith and membership in the Nation of Islam, refused service and said he was a conscientious objector.
…
In a flash, Ali, already controversial for his conversion to Islam and name change from Cassius Clay, became one of the most hated public figures in the country. Nobody close to Ali’s level of fame had resisted the draft, and his seemingly flippant opposition to the war made him a target of ridicule from the public, the government and his sport. He’d spend the next four years battling for his beliefs in court instead of the ring, and after his 1967 arrest for draft dodging, all of his state boxing licenses were stripped. Ali’s boxing career was effectively over.
…
Anyone who immediately came to Ali’s defense put themselves in danger. In A People’s History Of Sports In The United States, writer Jerry Izenberg recalled receiving bomb threats and tons of hate mail because he was willing to hear Ali out in the early days of his service refusal. But in most of the media, nastiness prevailed. Unlike Izenberg, famous sportswriters like Red Smith and Jim Murray were calling Ali a “punk” and “the white man’s burden.”
… [emp added]
Wrote in March about how Trump's vocal obsession w/@Kaepernick7 opens Trump up to be sued for contract interference https:/t.co/H9cPzevPFg https:/t.co/EMy4Bqwawk
— Dave Zirin (@EdgeofSports) September 23, 2017
It was really difficult to do, but last night Trump crossed that NFL/Roger Goodell line in the sand.
New NFL statement pic.twitter.com/XHPgVvPPfH
— Brian McCarthy (@NFLprguy) September 23, 2017
A bit mealy-mouthed from Goodell, but a big step up from his past silence whenever Trump trashed Kaepernick and other NFL players. Will the NBA Commissioner speak out now that Trump has gone after a Stephen Curry? Will other players join LeBron James?
U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!
— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017
What it won’t be like is 1966 when nobody with a public voice and megaphone supported Muhammed Ali. And that’s why today isn’t as bad at then.
The Guardian – NFL players protest during anthem after criticism from Donald Trump – in pictures
Beautiful pictures. Emotionally powerful. (As she wipes her teary eyes.)
Uday or Qusay sticking up for big, bad daddy:
GG responds:
You write:
I hope that you are right, Marie. I really do. Ali’s stand plus the vehement advice of the black soldiers that I met in Vietnam and Bangkok in 1966 during a tour with Buddy Rich…fresh out of Berklee School of Music and open to everything…encouraged me to avoid the Vietnam War at all costs.
Which I did.
However…I am not sure how much weight the current opposition has vs. Trump and the Everlasting War Machine. One single, serious armed confrontation with a powerful enemy to truly be able to threaten the U.S…but of course not powerful enough to be able to do any lasting damage…and the media will do their usual best to gin up the flames of “patriotism” in the culture. All of the kneeling athletes in the world won’t be able to stand up to some real, almost unanimous “Shock and Awe” bullshit 24/7 for a few weeks.
Then what?
Then Trump becomes a national hero is what. And…I am here to tell you that this one…this “Preznit”…will by no means stop there. He aims to make good on Semi-Preznit G.W. Butch’s wishful statement:
Butch was too weak and too stupid to pull it off.
Trump is neither.
Watch.
That end is the final aim of every “crazy’ thing that he has done for almost 3 years now. He has weakened both parties to the point that…in a crisis, when he quotes/paraphrases Al Haig’s “”I am in charge” statement during the Reagan assassination attempt… it will be for real!!! And I believe that the U.S. sheeple…cowed and confused by all of the false news during the prior several years…will allow it.
Watch.
AG
I think the differences from then to now are striking. Doesn’t mean that retrograde Americans have disappeared or that they don’t remain in large numbers. Or that they are any better than they were then.
Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title and banned from boxing. He was reviled by an overwhelming majority of Americans and nobody with the requisite public stature defended him.
Kaepernick chose to become a free agent. And while rightwinger, football fans that highly value simplistic USA symbols of patriotism may revile Kaepernick that opinion hasn’t bled out to a majority of the public and many, including fellow pro-sports athletes, have spoken up in support of Kaepernick.
Trump’s core support is no more than 30%. The remainder of his minority support is soft and most of those people voted against HRC and not for Trump.
I repeat…Hitler’s “support”was also somewhere around 30%. Look at what he managed to do.
There is a a common truism in martial arts studies.
A person with a weapon…almost any weapon, a stick, a knife, a baseball bat… is worth at least two without weapons, no matter how martially educated or proficient the various combatants may be.
Armed to the teeth?
Guns, etc?
The favorable ratio increases exponentially.
Now…please tell me…what do you suppose is the ratio of well-armed to totally unarmed amongst the supporters of Trump versus his many enemies?
UH oh!!!
30%?
Multiplied by even twice?
60%
Add in the guns?
Add in the military?
UH OH!!!
Shit about to hit the fan, and the unarmed are going to be the shitted upon.
Just as it’s always been.
Watch.
AG
Let’s not blow up this symbolic protest way out of proportion. Trump was reeling after Charlottesville and his intemperance on this one has already received a rebuke from Goodell. Nobody — not even Trump — are pulling out any lethal weapons over this. Cheap patriotism from football fans is just them shooting off their mouths like Trump does. Push comes to shove, they aren’t about to deprive themselves of watching football and soon enough will tire of watching Trump becoming more unhinged over this.
Let us pray that you are right, Marie.
I’m not buying it, myself.
Not yet…
We shall see…soon enough.
Let’s see what happens over the rough months.
Through the winter and .into the early spring.
Trump’s first year in real power.
So far?
He’s still here; still trying to break the system.
We shall see…soon enough.
My bet?
He breaks the neo-centrist Congress into little bits of mutually antagonistic pieces.
Then he foments a war.
Mid-spring or a little later.
Then?
My crystal ball is a little cloudy.
We either survive as a nation, or…
Ot what, exactly !!!???
Damned if I know.
Stay tuned…more info as it clears the media curtain.
Watch.
Later…
AG
I’ll mention that I had recently been working on a follow-up to my Aug 2016 diary I’m with Kaepernick As the focus of that diary and the draft of an update was different from this one, I didn’t review either before quickly putting this one together.
Didn’t get much of any support from the Pond community for Kaepernick with that 2016 diary. From Booman’s FP piece and the thread, support here has barely moved to wobbly AFTER their arch-enemy Trump attacked Kaepernick. Pathetic.
One historical note that I regret not including in this diary (added it in a comment in the last one and didn’t overlook in my update draft) is Mexico City 1968. The outrage when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised a black gloved fist.
but not several of mine from earlier this year:
The Reuters article then goes on to dismiss the Melenchon protest rally.
In a companion article also published Sep 23 Macron’s popularity improving: poll
Interestingly enough Macron’s IFOP polling isn’t so bad — ALL-TIME LOW: Macron’s approval ratings hit rock bottom as France REJECTS reforms
Looks like Micron is on his way to becoming a one-termer. If he continues to go after workers and unions, that’s almost certain.
Meanwhile Merkel will get her 4th term, though not by the margin her party hoped for (33% voted for her CDU party), while the far-right/anti-immigrant AfD won their first seats in the Bundestag.
Of the big 3-M leaders in Europe — Micron, Merkel and May — I find Merkel’s governing the most objectionable, primarily her calamitous decision to allow far too many immigrants in during 2015. That was just a few years after she had publicly declared that multiculturalism in her country had failed, or words to that effect. She seems like a rather confused woman. I would expect her 4th term to be her last.
Will Merkel survive her fourth term? Macon (working towards Micron), Merkel, and May are just more of TPTB consensus that has been with us for a very long time. As with any unchanging consensus, the longer they go on, the more cracks appear that leave openings for authoritarian/racist/fascists to emerge. The left hobbles along with weak leaders/voices but hasn’t been a factor except only very recently and so far incompletely in the US and UK. (Perhaps should include the Greens in Austria, but the split was exceedingly narrow.) Corbyn breaking through and becoming PM would signal a major change.
GG response tweet:
There was a lot of money (much US based) behind the AfD electioneering. (Oh, how the Putin/Russia folks would love to find anything as similarly overt with big bucks from Putin/Russia during our ’16 election.)
Open borders is a major EU principle. (The better to facilitate low wages through worker migration.) But workers are supposed to leave their cultures behind and adapt to the prevailing cultures in the employer business and the host country.
Of course, and as usual, predicting the future is hard. Too many known variables that can go too many different ways to factor in. Then there are the “black swans.”
Sadly, I think it might be too late — too many people allowed in, most not adequately screened, so likely a number of bad types in that large bunch. Many/most young single men under-30 as I understand. And while the native population has a very low birth rate, just the opposite obtains for the immigrant groups. And with inadequate screening comes the increased likelihood of increased terror attacks in addition to increased crime. The latter seems to be an ongoing problem in the UK and Sweden in particular, with the msm there very reluctant to adequately report it in real time, nor adequately describe the alleged perpetrators lest they come under attack for racism/Islamophobia.
As for Blair, seems we need to find an arrangement whereby ethically-dubious, shopworn pols well past their expiration date but who refuse to leave the stage can be safely kept apart from society for their own good, and ours. I have something like Devil’s Island in mind — if that doesn’t seem too harsh — where they can be sent — Blair and his wife, Hillary and her husband to name a few; probably a few annoying, fact-free media types too; and some big bankers who avoided prison under Obama. We could drop them off with a handy camping starter kit of supplies, a few tents and tools, instructions on preparing water to drink, info on local edible plants and animals. An occasional air drop of further food and supplies would be a nice humanitarian touch. Just a thought.
Perhaps stop saying Islamophobic things if you’d like it to not be called Islamophobic? You are making explicit arguments that we should not take in people who are fleeing war because they are Muslim in one breath, and talking about birth rates and ethnic make-up of the country in the next.
At the same time you have called for increased militarization of the fight against ISIS — killing scores of civilians — and whitewash dictators and their foreign backers who sold them the weapons; the ones who are responsible for the refugee crisis in the first place. Curious, aren’t you one of the ones on here who’s demanding we stop focusing so much on identity politics and the PC-people?
Jacobin had a good article in response to this reactionary bullshit:
Why Wagenknecht Will Fail
More reflexive liberal PCness run amok. On the birth rate, and the native one in the immigrant’s new country, the facts are clear.
On the matter of fleeing war, I’d suggest first those people, most of whom are single young men, stay and fight for what they believe, and second, suggest we stop creating the situations which cause the war. The US has a large responsibility for what has happened in Syria. Our ally Israel too. I very much doubt the alleged uprising there in 2011 was entirely organic. But thanks to Russian intervention there — the US had obviously spent the previous years, mostly under Obama admin, just pretending to fight ISIS — suddenly ISIS/AQ was actually being attacked and finally ISIS/AQ was put on the defensive.
Very curious US attitude. Could it just be that we were more interested in ousting Assad than in destroying ISIS/AQ? The facts on the ground clearly point in that direction. But you apparently only get your news from acceptable US MSM sources, so your view will be warped and wholly uninformed.
My attitude towards ISIS/AQ hasn’t changed: it won’t be fully dealt with whether in Syria, Iraq, Afghan or elsewhere until enough military forces are mustered to fully deal with the issue. A sufficient force, but not led by the US.
As for dictators, we’ve been over this before. Assad is about as good as can be hoped for to hold Syria together, and recent elections tend to support the fact of his popularity. Of course, for those determined to undertake yet another ME regime change operation, he remains an evil cartoon 2D character who must be destroyed. How has that plan worked in the recent past?
As for AfD, look to Merkel and her disastrous immigrant policy for the increased popularity of anti-immigrant political parties. There’s a rather short and direct causal connection. May I suggest that Euro leaders stop with allowing massive immigration, especially of the wrong nature kind, and stop supporting US-led wars of regime change, and begin acting in their own countries’ interests again.
The Hill – Dem [Donna Edwards] calls for all NFL players to kneel during national anthem
Speaking of fmr Rep Donna Edwards, sure didn’t hear the DP head honchos claiming that those not supporting Edwards in her Senate race primary were racist misogynists. They reserve such allegations when people reject the elite Dem choice (neoliberal/neocons) who happen also to be non-white and/or women.
to the old scowling woman with her pre-printed “the silent majority STANDS WITH TRUMP” sign (in The Guardian photo montage), you haven’t been “silent” in forty years and you are NOT the majority as any fifth grader that passes math can tell you.
When to a sports bar Sunday and there was a sudden quiet when the anthem was played. All eyes were scanning the screens to see what was going to happen. Well, there were no negative comments and no one left. From that point on everything was normal…cheering, drinking beer, and eating fried food. The politics that the donald is trying to interject into sports is for his base. This is him trying to get that approval rating back up to 40%.
Thanks for your report. As I would have guessed, football for most fans trumps mandatory displays of ritualized patriotism.
How the hell did these forced, ostensibly patriotic rituals rise in the USA with the defeat of two nations where such forced rituals were mandatory?
(Note: NFL Teams didn’t stand for the National Anthem until 2009 The SuperBowl that only began in 1967 included national anthem (once switched out for America the Beautiful) as part of the show (and some early shows also included a recitation of the Pledge of Allegience), but before and a long time after, it wasn’t part of regular season games. No handy-dandy, quick and dirty reference for when it migrated to regular games.)
I’ve watched way too much pro football over the years, and was not aware of that Anthem fact. Of course, I usually arrange to skip all the pre-game stuff and so my viewing doesn’t start until the game is underway. While I missed that fact, it was not hard to miss all the huge American flags displayed on the field in recent years (the latest instance in Chicago for the Bears game this weekend) as well as the odd displays of aerial military might, usually at the Super Bowl.
I think it was comedian George Carlin who years ago noted the many similarities between the military and war, and football terminology and displays of physical brutality. So in a narrow, warped sense, the Pentagon linking up with the NFL seems fitting.
Still a delight:
In case you overlooked it, the Pentagon was funding those displays of militant patriotism at NFL games. Was busted and fined.
This is factually wrong.
I was a STH for the Bucs, and went to Giants games before that.
The order was always the same:
Home team offensive or defensive unit take fields (and starters are announced).
Rest of team takes field.
National Anthem (and in Tampa a flyover)
Kickoff
This is factually wrong.
I was a STH for the Bucs, and went to Giants games before that.
The order was always the same:
Home team offensive or defensive unit take field (and starters are announced).
Rest of team takes field.
National Anthem (and in Tampa a flyover)
Kickoff
Take that up with all the reporters that you’re disputing. The point they’re making is that before 2009, there was no NFL requirement for players to stand at attention when the anthem played. Whatever the Bucs and Giants did before then was local option and/or tradition.
I couldn’t find when NFL regular games included the National Anthem. SuperBowl from the beginning. But at that time, it seemed to be limited to the season opener for national baseball games (and of course the World Series that had been featuring it before it was even the national anthem).
The point IMO is that many are acting as if this forced patriotism at NFL games is an ancient tradition and not younger than a hula hoop.
The reporters are wrong about this. The dailysnark article flatly says “until 2009, no NFL player stood for the national anthem”. This is simply not true, and if they’d actually read all of the Slate article they link to they’d have seen the correction.
your second paragraph seems to question whether they even played the anthem at baseball and football games, I don’t think that should be in doubt. But I can’t remember how common it was for the teams to be out on the field visible.
Snopes which is decent source for this sort of thing (this isn’t some obscure question that wasn’t visible on camera or in records):
I tried and couldn’t find out when the anthem first began to be a regular feature of NFL regular games. That suggests to me that it creeped in slowly. Maybe starting with the first game of the season for one team that was later adopted by others and later still adoped for all games. Players are there to work and not to pay much mind to whatever else is included in the show.
However, that there was a change beginning no later than 2011 is not open to question. As the report didn’t cover 2009, anecdotal reports from that date may be correct. Teams were paid by the USG to include patriotic displays at regular season games. (Apparently up until then not important enough to the owners to use assets for this without compensation.)
>>I tried and couldn’t find out when the anthem first began to be a regular feature of NFL regular games. That suggests to me that it creeped in slowly.
this is the best article I found, though the history here is specifically major league baseball.
A different article noted that by this time ballparks would have gotten amplified public address systems so they could just play a record and not have to hire musicians.
My guess is that if it was universal in major league baseball in the ’40s the NFL was doing it too. The poorly documented “creep in slowly” phase was in the 20s and 30s. In American colleges, football and military-style marching bands were together almost from the start, so I’d bet the anthem was frequently played at college football games by the time the NFL’s precursor was founded in 1920, and those founders would certainly have looked at how football games were run at Yale or Michigan.
Found plenty of reports on baseball. That record up to a point is clear enough. Football? Not so much. All of the reports I pulled up and scanned began with the semi-ancient history of the anthem (before it was the anthem) at baseball games. World Series, yes, from very early on. Regular season games not so regular, and note was made that some baseball teams in the ’50s dispensed with it entirely. So, it’s not entirely clear to me when it became de rigueur for all teams and all games. Then the articles skip to the first SuperBowl — yes. Then on regular season games, they all fast forward to today — yes.
There’s a really long article or a book on the anthem waiting for someone to research and nail down all the facts and pull it together in a narrative for football, baseball, and other sports.
Why would the articles carefully note that it featured at the first SuperBowl game (and all but one thereafter) if it had been SOP for NFL games before then? Or if it were adopted by all teams for all games after the first SuperBowl? And yet make no claim about the pre-existing or post-existing SOP? And if it’s been standard for some time — like say the past twenty-five years or more — why haven’t long-term sports journalists jumped in and confirmed that?
>>if it’s been standard for some time — like say the past twenty-five years or more — why haven’t long-term sports journalists jumped in and confirmed that?
I’m going to assert that it’s been standard for more than 25 years and probably more than 50, and that few sports journalists younger than Vin Scully have ever attended a game where the anthem wasn’t played and therefore wouldn’t see any reason to mention it.
As this is a very new dispute — it’s best to give it a few more days for them and players to speak. I still find it curious that those who have written recent articles on the history of the anthem at sporting events for the MSM made no mention that it has been SOP for decades. Odd that none of them considered it relevant enough to include in their articles. Looks to me more like a “dog that didn’t bark” instead of something that was so taken for granted that no mention was required.
My old man was a vendor at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in the 40’s. They played it then.
Honestly this is just lazy ass reporting.
My first NFL game was in the mid 70’s – and they played it then. Hell we played at high school games.
I’ve never been to a professional sporting event where it was not played.
Time just weighed in and agrees with you. But it doesn’t mention that it wasn’t universal for all MLB games after WWII. So, I’ll wait for more reporting.
(I’ve never been to an NFL game and don’t possess the perfect recall from high school football games and MLB games to state whether or not it was played.)
I’m a musician, and in one of the bands I’m in that regularly plays the anthem, it’s a standard joke that the last line is “Play Ball!”
My first NFL game wasn’t until 1989 (when i was in a band that performed the anthem), but since the early 70s I’ve been playing at high school and college games and I can’t imagine that we were playing the anthem and the NFL wasn’t.
An interesting sidenote:
JR seems to have drifted slightly leftward in his last years. Earlier he’d been a backer, iirc, of Nixon in 60 and of course had a jaundiced view of Ali. But I think he backed Hubert in 68. Not sure who he favored in 72 or if he had other things on his mind. Again iirc, he passed away that year.
Other famous black athletes like Jim Brown (who had some serious personal life issues), Bill Russell, Kareem A-J and a few others of the time were a little more consistent in taking bold public stands and supporting others like Ali.
Neglected to include at the end of my comment —
Does it really matter that some people exaggerated when claiming that prior to 2009 players didn’t stand together on the field as the anthem was played? Or may not have been on the field at all as it was played?
The point is that it was ritualized and viewed as mandatory within the past few years. Apparently without the need for an official decree from owners to the players; so, either the coaches were in on it or the culture did it’s work. And the owners pocketed the extra cash.
you’re usually a stickler for accuracy. But here you’re saying “exaggerated” when something is flatly false.
yes it does matter to those of us who actually attend football games and know what we’ve seen.
Because sometimes exaggerations, unintentionally misleading or not fully known claims aren’t of critical importance.
Did Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton speak the truth in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks? No. Did they have all the facts in order? No. Could they have had all the facts at that time? No. Were they attempting to shape the narrative to minimize damage to themselves and Obama. Yes. Was what they said ultimately important? No. Not important because who can say that they never, at one time or another, got ahead of the facts and erred in doing so? The key is 1) were unalterable actions or any actions at all taken based on that error and 2) as more solid facts emerged, did they subsequently correct their initial claims. That would be a no to #1 and a yes to #2.
Does it matter to the current issue — a kneel as the anthem is played at NFL games to protest the unequal treatment of minorities in the US — if players have been standing in honor of the anthem before every NFL game since its inception or only since 2009? No. How long this has been going on without a protest is no more than idle curiosity. In general NFL players have relatively short professional careers; so protests are a heightened risk to them. (Ali lost several of what would have been his peak professional years.) Plus football doesn’t have the same nice guy veneer as baseball.
Oh yeah, I get it. accuracy matters when you say it does, not when I say.
This weekend’s issues have gotten a lot of people talking about the NFL who don’t watch football.
Jimmy Buffett sang “Don’t try to describe the scenery if you’ve never seen it”. Please consider his advice next time you want to tell football fans about what happens at games.
A side note to my first response from twelve hours ago:
NFL national anthem flap sees Steelers coach Mike Tomlin rap Alejandro Villanueva, while his jersey sales soar
Three hours ago:
Alejandro Villanueva: I threw Steelers teammates under bus unintentionally by standing for national anthem
Whatever will all those football fans that rushed to purchase Villanueva jerseys do with them now that Alejandro has corrected their misinterpretation of his act? No way to trash Villanueva’s patriotism. Takes a big person who personally benefited from a misinterpretation to correct the record. He apparently cares far more about being respected by his colleagues than being praised by yahoo football fans.
Sorry Marie they are goddam wrong about this.
I PERSONALLY HAVE SEEN THIS FOR DECADES AT NFL GAMES.
CNN disputes your experience wrt players during the anthem:
Will wait for other reports.
True except for Howard Cosell at ABC Sports, who early on backed Ali both with his name change and conversion to Islam, and then when he refused induction into the military. No one else in broadcast tv supported Ali, and I can’t think of a single major print reporter who did. Back then, print sports reporters were dominant in the field, and most were old guard traditionalist types, nearly all white men, many late middle age and older. They preferred the quiet, non-uppity star black athletes, starting with Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier etc.
Interesting to read that a judge appointed by the Justice Dept, considering the legitimacy of Ali’s stated conscientious objector status, found it to be valid, yet the US DOJ in 1967 –wasn’t Ramsey Clark the AG then? — denied the ruling and submitted the case for prosecution.
Cosell most definitely “got it” very early on. Back before the general public had accepted Jackie Robinson and later held Robinson’s public style up as how AA athletes should behave (a lot of PR went into creating and promulgating that style). Further cemented by Robinson’s harsh criticism of M. Ali. While flawed, I nevertheless appreciated 42
However, you’re overstating the reach of Cosell’s megaphone in the mid-sixties. ABC network radio didn’t reach nearly as far and wide as ABC Monday Night Football in 1970. Not being much of a spectator sports fan and living on the west coast, it would have been 1970 when I became familiar with Cosell. Also note that he supported Tommie Smith and John Carlos in ’68, but I wouldn’t have known that at the time. (…Robert Lipsyte with the New York Times, and syndicated columnist Larry Merchant were among others that supp.
Rapid change in public opinion was a feature of the ’65-74 decade. But it was ugly at the beginning (this article is also more comprehensive on Ali’s legal battles).
Robert Lipsyte with the New York Times, and syndicated columnist Larry Merchant, and others supported Ali, but most were fully in line withe Sports Illustrated.
The narrative is further complicated by the fact that Susman argued for leniency in the sentencing of Ali. The federal judge was Joe McDonald Ingraham, appointed by DDE and elevated to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by Nixon (confirmed by the majority controlled Democratic Senate with Mike Mansfield as the leader).
Ramsey Clark was AG at that time (acting 11/66 to 3/67 and officially 3/67 to 1/69). However, district level US Attorneys have a degree of autonomy from the AG. Otherwise, with his guy Sessions as AG, Trump wouldn’t have found it necessary to fire Preet Bharara.
Ali formally refused to be drafted on April 28, 1967 and was convicted on June 20, 1967. (Has “justice” through the courts ever been swifter than this?) Clark and Thurgood Marshall as Solicitor General didn’t distinguish themselves during that short period of time. For LBJ, and possibly Clark and Marshall, it was more about CO status and the draft than Ali. Draft boards were becoming inundated with CO applications (most of which were false). And avoiding the draft by any means possible (as GWB, Quayle, Clinton, and Trump did) was on the rise. Please don’t take that as a defense of LBJ, etc. or criticism of those resisting the draft. Everybody, except for strong supporters of the war and the draft, was in a pickle and it’s much too easy and simplistic to point a finger at and declare that one person or another was the devil. And it’s not possible to identify if anyone was actually driving the boss to convict and incarcerate Ali.
A comment on Cosell.
No, you must be unaware that he was by at least 1965 on ABC tv nationwide covering major fights, including especially Ali’s many title defense bouts, along with regular other duties. Back then ABC Sports had introduced this nifty Sat afternoon one-hour sports show, ABC’s Wide World of Sports (remember, this is well before cable and ESPN), a weekly roundup of notable and unusual sporting matters from around the world that otherwise Americans would not have noticed.
This is the show that introduced most Americans to exotic foreign sports, like ski jumping from Norway, that sport where a clay jug is nudged along the ice, and jai alai from Florida. Lots of track and field competition that wasn’t televised in the US (back then, t&f began to be big in the US, especially when Eastern Bloc countries were competing against the US athletes).
But the biggest claim to fame for the program was the frequent in-studio interviews Cosell had with Ali, unscripted and definitely lively. This was where most Americans saw Cosell explain how Ali was entitled to be called by the name he chose, should be respected for his religious choice even if not popular with most here, and it gave Cosell and Ali further opportunity to comment upon Ali’s indictment.
That show was the reason Cosell got his MNF slot. Cosell had become famous nationwide from WWoS, known for his unorthodox and controversial take on events — “Tell it like it is” Howard. A bold stroke of programming by Roone Arledge not only to introduce the public to night-time/prime-time NFL football, but to put an intelligent, non-jock in the broadcast booth, someone who Arledge knew would generate headlines and water fountain discussion the next day.
As for LBJ behind the scenes, doesn’t surprise me. He was extremely paranoid about antiwar types, though it was usually the young longhair college types and older coastal elitists he worried about, not black athletes. As I recall, he was constantly pressuring his buddy J Edgar Hoover to go after the antiwar groups (Lyndon thought they were Moscow-influenced and driven — shades of today’s Russia hysteria among Dems) and also enlisted the CIA, and military intel, to investigate them. Like today, no evidence was ever produced of Kremlin fingerprints in the antiwar movement.
As your excerpt indicates, Johnson very likely was calling all the shots, while Clark and Marshall would have been unlikely to have gone against that DoJ-picked judge’s CO finding unless they had orders from above.
It takes a long time after a person is a TV announcer/analyst of any sport to develop a voice of import outside the confines of the particular sport. I could only find that Cosell was hired in ’61 by WABC-NY was a boxing analyst. Sometime between then and ’70 he was hired by Wild World of Sports in the same capacity. But WWS segments back then were short and the announcers didn’t stray from covering the sport.
The voices of Bud Collins (tennis) and Dick Button (ice skating) were very different in the 1960s compared to what they later became. Many announcers/analysts were hired from those that had covered Olympics events and/or were retired from the sport. It was their coverage of the actual sports that gave them credibility. Many may have respected Cosell’s analysis and respect for Ali as a boxer, but that hardly meant his voice carried into the screaming headlines and general public outrage over Ali becoming a Muslim and changing his name and refusing to be drafted. Cosell was all the way with Ali, but it was years later before his voice on this issue became accepted by the general public (and for many boxing fans it never was).
However, I do think that Cosell and a few other sports analysts/reporters had an enormous impact on the subsequent generation of professionals and to a lesser extent their peers. Many of the later most liberal journalists cut their teeth in sports journalism – Olberman, Taibbi, and Zirin to name three but it has been far wider and deeper than that.
wrt – Ali’s federal charges, I’m not going to speculate as to what and where any of those in positions of authority might have thought or done. There’s no decent evidence that most of them figured into it at all. Marshall recused himself from the SCOTUS appeal but appears to have done so for having been SG when Ali was convicted and may not have known anything not in the media and in any way participated in any of it. (Recusal standards were very high back then. Another way that officials and institutions have eroded public trust.) It’s difficult enough to sort out what current politicians, etc. might be thinking/doing today and in the past few years. And at least trying to sort that out holds the possibility of changing what comes next.
No, not a long time when you’re covering Ali the way Cosell was — live interviews on a frequent basis (as Ali fought a lot in the 64-67 period, there were a number of televised interviews), unscripted, lively and controversial, covering the latest news Ali was making, inside the ring and out. A long time when covering Ali? Try a year or two tops. By the end of ’67 Cosell was a major force in national sports broadcasting, solely because of his Ali interviews.
Hired likely closer to ’65 on WWoS, and a search of YT would likely confirm this (I’m too lazy to dig anything up myself, but trust my instincts on this one as I firmly recall watching Cosell interview Ali on that show in the mid-60s). Definitely not hired closer to ’70. But a glance at a few wiki entries shows they are uneven and incomplete, so of limited help.
Short segments? Depends on how u mean short. His Ali interviews were definitely not of the modern 3-4 minute sound bite variety, but likely closer to 15-20 minutes. Ali brought in ratings — why would they make them short quickie interviews? As for the other announcers, other than studio host Jim McKay, who was solid, the reporters in the field besides Cosell were rather run of the mill typical sportscasters of the time, rather on the dull side, which probably helped Cosell stand out.
Are you recalling what you experienced in the mid-sixties or what you’re guessing older people experienced then?
My comment about the WWoS would date from 1970 and a few years after that.
How about you find and post those long, aired TV interviews that Cosell did with Ali in the early years. I’m sure I’m not the only one here that never saw any of them.
Here’s one example, from 1966, which as you look at the background, identifies the network program, WWoS, and the interview/review of fight, is from 1966, establishing that Cosell was interviewing Ali at least by that date.
Here’s another example from 1964-5, Cosell covering Ali. The 1964 fight he covered, though it’s not clear if it was just for ABC Radio or also WWoS. By 1965 he was clearing covering Ali’s second fight with Sonny Liston for television, presumably ABC and WWoS.
That’s two tries at YT, two positive results establishing Cosell’s television career at ABC had started well before he went on MNF in 1970.
Unfortunately I don’t have access to Cosell’s or Roone Arledge’s memoirs to confirm his start date at WWoS, and the online info I’ve seen so far is just sketchy, but looks like from the above video it could have been as early as 1964.
Only had time to watch the first few minutes of this long Ali-Cosell doc, but it’s from ESPN/ABC, and confirms around the 2:00 mark or so that Cosell was with ABC’s WWoS from 1964-85.
Hope this is enough. Cosell just didn’t go from radio to suddenly making his tv debut on something as big as MNF. And actually his 1960s interviews on WWoS are rather famous. Again, great as he was on radio, it was tv that mattered more in the 60s, and it was through his tv interviews w/Ali that Cosell became a major name nationwide. Well before 1970 as I’ve established.
This is a problem with debate thread arguments. I’d already conceded that Cosell was 1) a boxing analyst/presenter on WWoS in the mid-sixties (in between his earlier radio stint and being signed for MNF in 1970 (claiming that I hadn’t and proving the concession is a straw man)) and 2) Cosell had followed Ali’s career and supported him before his first heavyweight bout in ’64 (which may have predated his time with WWoS, not that it matters).
The May ’65 WWoS piece is about seven minutes in length and the interview with Ali takes up just over three minutes of that seven minutes. Neither were long by the standards at that time and consistent with the WWoS formate. Both focused entirely on the upcoming bout — another point that I made about the WWoS.
Debatable is the reach of WWoS with boxing fans and the general public. No need to argue that on WWoS Cosell had a larger general public audience than he had during his radio days. Debatable is if it expanded his boxing fan audience, but how important is that point? Do you dispute that Cosell’s national voice/status didn’t increase over his WWoS days during his MNF stint? That would be a ludicrous claim. MNF 1970:
Oct 1970 – Ali v. Quarry
Dec 1970 – Ali v. Bonavena
Mar 1971 – Ali v. Frazier
What you can’t seem to address is that if Cosell was such a big cheese with boxing fans (and boxing industry professionals) and the general public, why the overwhelming majority of both disdained Ali within days of him winning the heavyweight championship in ’64 and continued to disdain him over the subsequent five years. No matches for Ali from 2/67 to 10/70 (and this one was before the SCOTUS decision).
(Should also note that Liston hadn’t been treated that well a few years earlier. The NAACP, JFK, and Jack Dempsey all urged Patterson not to fight the contender Liston because Liston was deemed unsavory. And he was booed after knocking out Patterson.)
Facts and evidence don’t always tell the whole story. Your narrative of that period (’64-’69) on this subject is incorrect. That’s not an error that someone old enough to have had minimal awareness of spectator sports and boxing by ’64 would make.
Well if you were nitpicking about interview length (?!?!), it should be obvious that most YT posts from network shows do not include the entire shows or even entire segments. Probably some copyright issues there, also a desire to keep it short and leave out the dull parts.
So what we see on YT is just a glimpse of what was originally broadcast. This is true even when the network itself produces a long show or documentary from its own archives — they use snippets of previous shows, and stitch the whole thing together, as with the last YT cite I gave. Were you really under the impression that with all 3 cites you were given the entire interview segment?
Note here too: Heavyweight championship fights involving Ali were a big deal back then, but were not broadcast live on US tv. One function of WWoS was to show the fight, or substantial segments of it, the following week. Ali would usually be interviewed by Cosell about the fight. One of my cites, from 1966, shows this. I submit that WWoS and Cosell and Ali could not have adequately covered any of his fights in the brief period of time you suggest they were restricted to. That holds even for the famous 2d Liston fight, which lasted only 1 round — Cosell and Ali would have needed 10 minutes alone just to discuss the controversial punch, or series of punches, that caused the knockdown.
On Cosell’s public reach: obviously Ali brought in viewers, not just boxing fans and officials, but a public that probably would only be casually interested in it. Ali was colorful, entertaining, controversial — he was news in and out of the ring. And WWoS offered the only way these fans (the ones who didn’t bother to pay to see it closed-circuit at a local theater) could see a major recent Ali fight.
This is what propelled Cosell into major league broadcasting status, which preceded by years his MNF stint. No argument was made by me that Cosell’s views influenced the conservative types running the sport. Where did u get that straw man? I already noted that they and most of the sports media establishment preferred their blacks quiet and respectful and thankful, not uppity. It took those cranky traditionalist types a few years and more to warm up to Ali — probably some due to the fact that Ali was bringing in business for them.
As for Cosell moving public opinion with his interviews w/Ali, who knows, who cares. Likely he softened them up a bit towards Ali. Many probably tuned in to see some fight footage and to see the entertainment of the interview segment, not to be persuaded about Ali.
My narrative of that period 64-69 stands unrebutted — Cosell’s tv exposure w/Ali greatly elevated him to national stature. His segments w/Ali were not mere 3-4 minute blips, though since YT is limited in what can be legally shown, and ABC has yet to my knowledge to release the full interview segments, we are left to figure out what we can a/o work from memory. Obviously having their memoirs on hand, which I don’t, would be helpful, where wiki and other sites omit much information; segment lengths, ratings — these are minutiae that might be mentioned in memoirs, particularly Arledge’s.
In the meantime, this exchange is getting silly and tiresome. And already taking too much of my time.
Worth reading from Frank Serpico: Kap, Cops and Confederate Statues: a Better World Without Double Standards