The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [14]
During Joe’s junior year Harvard hired its first professional baseball coach, Dr. Frank Sexton, a former major league baseball player. “Any men who through indolence or carelessness handicap Dr. Sexton in his initial efforts as coach deserve the strongest condemnation,” the Harvard Crimson editorialized. Harvard was tired of losing, especially to Yale. The college was bringing in a whole new breed of highly paid coaches. Sexton was supposed to win. He could hardly afford to indulge in gentlemanly inclusiveness; he cut the squad in two, spending most of his time with the A Division while relegating Joe and the rest of the flotsam to the B Division.
In later years Joe attempted to rationalize the failure of his Harvard baseball career by saying that he had thrown out his arm against Navy, sacrificing his physical well-being for his beloved Crimson nine. This was simply not the case. The four times that Joe did get into a game, he did as well as the regular first baseman.
Joe loved baseball with rare passion, and as painful as it must have been to be so dismissed, he had no choice but to sit on the bench game after game, week after week. Few would remember how rarely he had played, but everyone would know if he quit. Dr. E. H. Nichols, the baseball and football team physician, told the Harvard Crimson: “No year and no season seems to go by that I hear applied to one or more athletes, the term ‘quitter,’ which is quite the most contemptuous and derogatory term that one college boy can apply to another, and which implies a lack of physical courage.”
As Joe watched his teammates out on the playing field, he was observing not simply a game of baseball but all the tensions between the traditional ideals of fair play and sportsmanship and modern competitiveness. It was the tension between the Brahmin world Joe sought to enter and the means he was willing to use to get there, means that helped destroy the very world he thought so enviable.
The ideal Harvard man, in the words of Charles Eliot, the just retired president of Harvard, was a gentleman “carrying in his face his character so plainly to be seen there by the most casual observer, that nobody ever makes to him a dishonorable proposal.” He was a man like Eliot, himself, who believed that pitchers on the baseball diamond should not resort to such despicably low cunning as throwing a curveball. On the football field, Eliot thought, backs should take the ball and charge into the toughest part of the line, never taking the cowardly expedient of attempting an end run. In Eliot’s world, there were no end runs, just charges straight up the middle.
Those of Eliot’s academic generation were appalled by the spectacle of baseball. They despised this game played as much by professional teams as college amateurs, the vulgar masses cheering on the players in raucous discord, the gambling on the games, and the drumbeat of hype in the sooty tabloids. The purists believed that the players should be quiet on the field and stop such sharp practices as chatting up their pitcher or yelling at the batter. As for the spectators, a sportsman should sit quietly, applauding at every example of good play by either team.
The student fans liked to sit together in the bleachers, cheering their cherished Crimson on with organized shouts and songs, a scene that the Harvard Crimson declared “a rather hysterical and often unfair attempt to compel victory, rather than a recognition of good playing.” These noisy, disreputable students appalled the good academics of Harvard. “Baseball is on trial as a game for gentlemen,” Dean D. R. Briggs stated with all the authority of his high Harvard office behind him. “If it is the duty of patriotic students to make all the noise they can while the visiting pitcher is facing their representatives … if baseball must, as the Yale Alumni Weekly puts it, ‘degenerate into vocal competitions on the part of the players, or into efforts to rattle the opposing pitchers on the part of the grandstands,’