Professional Sports Has Changed.
By Greg Dempson
To say the game of football or any professional sport has drastically changed throughout the years would be an understatement. Today’s athletes are bigger, faster and stronger; fortunately though the game’s still played by humans, but how human are the athletes of today?
Systems, charts or statistical data on teams cannot predict the human element of the game, even in this high tech society we all embrace today. Back when I was a kid there was one television channel. A remote wasn’t something we clicked when I was growing up, remote was where our family, and many families lived. No satellites, cell phones or CNN up to the minute news. Change came quickly, from telegraph, to telex, then fax, and e-mail.
In the early 1970’s, I worked in radio, ripping and reading teletype stories. Frazier Vs Ali, and Three Dog Night was a group not an underdog baseball parlay. That was when my record keeping journey began.
The past 5 months I have been able to condense and revisit my archives or gambling roots, so to speak! It’s amazing what I saved. Notebooks full of quotes, yellowed old copies of newspapers, some pertaining to important headlines from that point in time as well as numerous sports clippings, some dating back 30 or more years have jogged my memory. While revisiting articles from the past and not so distant past that was collected over the years, I chanced upon a tarnished clipping on Bobby Richardson, second baseman for the New York Yankees. His pre-1964 tenure with the Yanks was earlier than my recollection of his baseball attributes. He played for the Yankees well before 1964 but that year was the one, which paralleled the arrival of the Beatles to North America. That wasn’t why I saved the article. And I wasn’t a Yankee fan; I’ll expand on that in part two of this article. This clipping was saved for an entirely different reason.
To keep this in proper context for the post baby boomers, the ‘60’s was a different time, a different era. An agent was James Bond, 007, not someone that negotiated contracts for professional athletes. And computers were oversized reel to reel tape recorders in those same secret agent movies! High tech in that Bond era was "Q" who had more preparation than "H." Okay, back to the clipping on Bobby Richardson?
He was offered a contract for $ 60,000.00 before the 1965 season started. After discussing the matter with his wife, they agreed the amount was too generous. He was willing to play for $ 15,000 less than the Yankees offered. He suggested that said money could be donated or perhaps the Yankees would consider him for another position in the organization when he retired. Why would anyone work for less than what was offered? To this day I don’t know what Richardson was paid the previous year and that’s not significant. What’s important to me is - not why Richardson didn’t accept the raise but why I kept the article. At an early age in life I learned that it’s not always about the money. Here was an individual whom was offered an increase in salary and graciously declined. How often does that happen in professional sports today? The only player that comes to mind would be Kurt Warner. It’s not the same scenario, but when Warner became the starting quarterback for St. Louis when Green went down with a season ending injury, the more games the Rams won the more various media outlets talked about how little Warner was being paid. He never went to management and asked them to rewrite his contract. Sport is still a 5-letter word but most humans that play the game spell the word differently today, 5-letters spelled G-R-E-E-D!
Part two, The Yankees Vs the Braves
Will be posted at a later date.
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