When Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match, Gloria Steinem was watching probably the only sports event she had ever seen in a Manhattan apartment on West 57th Street shared by writer Jimmy Breslin and his wife, city councilwoman Ronnie Eldridge. That is the kind of detail reported in the new book, “The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America” by Michael McCambridge.
The cover shows six of the figures who played big roles in making the 1970s such an important decade in sports – King, Hank Aaron, Jack Nicklaus, Joe Greene, Julius Erving, and Ali-Frazier. But as the anecdote about Steinem watching the match shows, it is not simply explaining what happened in that decade, but includes a lot of original reporting.
It is a decade I am very familiar with because I started my sports writing career in the 1960s and covered many of the events chronicled in the book including the first Ali-Frazier fight and Greene and the Steelers of the 1970s. Also covered tennis at Forest Hills before the current stadium was built and covered Bill Bradley’s first game at Madison Square Garden and later interviewed him when he wrote his first book. And covered Immaculata College playing at Madison Square Garden at the dawning of the age of women’s basketball.
For anyone over 55, this book will bring back a lot of great memories of the decade when everything changed. For the younger fans, it is a good history of how sports changed.
You have to remember how different sports were before the 1970s. Baseball, college football, boxing and horse racing were in the dominant sports. The NHL had only six teams, now called the Original Six, until the 1967-68 season when it doubled to 12 teams and wasn’t really a national sport in the U.S. The NBA only had nine teams in the mid 1960s. Both sports weren’t money makers for the arenas like the circus and the Ice Capades and teams had to go on the road when the circus came to town.
The NFL had a team actually fold in Dallas in 1952 and finish the season in Hershey as a road team before becoming the Baltimore Colts. In 1958, the NFL took its first big step forward when the Colts beat the Giants in the first overtime title game as Johnny Unitas became a household name when he led a game tying drive in regulation and the game winning drive in overtime.
But the NFL founding fathers who barely survived the depression and World War II and saw the collapse of the team in Dallas in 1952 were cautious. As Art Rooney, the Steeler founder, once said, “The biggest thrill wasn’t winning on Sunday, but meeting the payroll on Monday.” So when Lamar Hunt applied for an expansion franchise, he was turned down so he started the AFL, which led to the merger in 1970 that played a major role as the NFL becoming the dominant sport.
And television had yet to become a big factor in sports. Although the number of households with TV sets had grown from 8000 in 1946 to 45.7 million in 1960 to 60.6 million in 1970 when virtually every household had one, the idea of sports in prime time did not interest the networks. After Pete Rozelle was elected as a compromise candidate to become commissioner in 1963, he tried to dip the league’s toe into prime time in 1966 by pitting the Baltimore Colts vs. the Green Bay Packers on a Saturday night season opener. The game had plenty of star power with Lombardi and Shula as the coaches and Unitas and Starr as the quarterbacks, but the game lost in the ratings to the Miss America Pageant.
Nobody could imagine that happening today.
So when Rozelle decided to try a Monday Night package, CBS and NBC said no. ABC was a struggling network and agreed to do it when Rozelle threatened to put together an independent group of stations and the network feared some of their affiliates would dump their viewing. And Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports, made the master stroke of pairing Howard Cosell and Don Meredith together in the booth with Frank Gifford joining the second year and it became a must view TV. And most households only had the three networks because cable TV was in its infancy and ESPN didn’t start until 1979.
Of course so much has changed since the decade of the 1970s that set the table for what today’s sports world is and the book is a sweeping panorama how everything changed from free agency to the rise of women’s sports fueled by the passage of Title 9.
The only time I think the author missed the mark was his description of how Joe Gilliam became the starting quarterback for the Steelers in 1974. In a discussion of how black quarterbacks struggled to get their due, the author said “it was clear” that Gilliam outplayed Terry Bradshaw in camp, it was a bit more complicated than that. As a young player, Gilliam crossed the picket line when the veterans struck and played in rookie games throwing to rookies named Lynn Swann and John Stallworth against rookie corners. And they lit up the scoreboard in those wins.
The author is right that coach Chuck Noll was colorblind and gave Gilliam a chance to start the season, but he was benched after six games despite going 4-1-1 although he was blanked in a 17-0 ;loss to the Raiders . Gilliam never started another game for the Steelers after being benced and his career didn’t survive a drug problem. Bradshaw took over, won two games, and was benched for a game after a loss to Cincinnati for Terry Hanratty, who played poorly in a loss in Cleveland. Bradshaw took over again and the Steelers went on to win four Super Bowls in a six year span to become the team of the decade. They became a big part of the sports scene of the 1970s and built a national following that they still have today even though they have won only two Super Bowls since 1979. The Steelers front four made the cover of Time, Bradshaw shared Sportsmen of the Year honors with Willie Stargell in 1979 and Joe Greene made an iconic Coke commercial that is still remembered today.
We take for granted what sprts is like today but to understand how it happened, it helps to understand the decade of the 1970s. This book captures what was the beginning of the modern era in sports.