[On September 28th,
1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919
World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black
Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other
sports scandals, past and present!]
On three
different ways to interpret what remains one of sport’s most stunning scandals.
When a group of
players on the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to “fix” (or rather,
from the players’ perspective, throw) the 1919 World
Series, a story that unfolded over the following two years and culminated
in the 1921 “Black
Sox trial,” the scandal seemed to exemplify ideas of lost innocence and
purity (which were already in the air in that post-World War I, “lost
generation” moment). Nothing summed up those ideas better than the mythic but enduring image of a
young boy confronting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson outside the courthouse with the
words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” And in Eight
Men Out (1963), his seminal book on the scandal, Eliot Asinof
helped reiterate and enshrine those images of the scandal’s corrupting effects
and meanings on America’s national pastime and perspective.
There was
another side to Asinof’s portrayal of the scandal, however—one that didn’t
necessarily take hold of the popular consciousness in his era, but on which John Sayles’ 1988 film
adaptation of the book focuses at length. This interpretation focuses less
on the effects of the scandal and more on one of its key causes: the striking
yet representative greed and selfishness of Charles
Comiskey, the White Sox owner, in an era when professional athletes had
(compared to their employers, at least) no power or say in their careers and
fates. Sayles, for whom
labor history is one of the defining American issues and stories, pulls no
punches in his portrayal of Comiskey specifically and the era’s labor dynamics
more broadly—he likes to say that he tries to push beyond black and white in
his films and engage with the grey areas in between, and I believe he
has done so to great success on many occasions, but to my mind his Eight Men Out is at its heart a clear
and ringing indictment not of corrupt baseball players, but of a corrupt capitalist
system that uses and then scapegoats them.
There’s another
way to characterize that system, though: to focus on how much, to quote Denzel
Washington’s character in Glory, “We
all covered up in it, too. Ain’t nobody clean.” To see, that is, the Black Sox
as emblematic of unifying American goals and desires, however much we might
like to locate them outside of us instead. It’s to that end, I would argue,
that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Jay Gatsby’s closest New York associate the
mysterious Meyer Wolfshiem, a fictional version of Arnold
Rothstein, “the man who fixed the World’s Series” (as Gatsby puts it). One
could of course argue that Gatsby’s association with Wolfshiem reveals his
shadier and more shameful side, the kinds of gangster connections that Tom
Buchanan scornfully critiques. But to my mind, Gatsby ultimately embodies
nothing less than the American Dream—there’s a reason Fitzgerald nearly changed his title to Under
the Red, White, and Blue—and so too, in its own dark and twisted way,
does making a fortune by fixing the nation’s most significant sporting event and
spectacle.
Next
ScandalStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?
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