EMPERORS AND CLOWNS

By Roger Kahn

BYPLAY/ROGER KAHN

EMPERORS AND CLOWNS

Back in the days when children could spell neither conglomerate nor Nielsen, we thought of sport as courage, competition and manliness. (We couldn't spell macho then either.) Show business was Jack Benny bellowing "Rochester!" and Mickey Rooney groping toward Ann Rutherford, while Judge Hardy, secretly a dirty old man, fantasized from back of camera three.

Now comes Super Bowl XI, eleven in the Vulgate, and the distinctions between sports and show business approach invisibility. The networks underwrite both on the same artistic basis. How do they draw? What is the cost per 1,000 to the advertisers? Athletes and actors are interchangeable on commercials. O.J. Simpson earns $1 million for telling us what car to rent; Rex Harrison earns $ 1 million for telling us what car to buy. Our old preoccupation with what Clark Gable was paid at Metro has been replaced by speculation on Francis Tarkenton's net worth. Most significant, where the athlete once was an individual, scratching and drinking across a brevity of fame, the successful athlete today is both a person and a property. He moves not only in locker rooms, but with lawyers, agents and accountants, even as Steve McQueen.

It is true that sport proceeds without a script. My hunch is that Oakland will defeat Minnesota, but that is a hunch and nothing more. (Bet at your own risk.) It is true that the athlete, unlike the movie star, takes real risks. When his knee ligaments tear, his scream is agony, not acting. But our perception of such things is increasingly reduced to a 19-in. picture tube. With its illimitable superficiality, television forever mingles illusion and reality. So our new perception of sport, and our children's basic perception of sport, suggests that a game is one more TV drama, trying to be real, among the artificial people of commercials, who are also trying to be real. Illusion and reality, a fascination of Eliot and Camus, seemed a bit heavy to lay on Pete Rozelle the other day under the rosewood walls of his Park Avenue office. So I asked this most successful of sports commissioners if the National Football League was show business.

"Sure," Rozelle said, "but we prefer the word entertainment." The answer made me blink. The old lords of sport insisted that their occupation was clean, godly and unique. "Entertainment is all we are," Rozelle said easily. "Until Rhett and Scarlett, our Super Bowl last year had the highest rating ever. Eighty million viewers. What we do object to is constant psychoanalysis. Football is warlike. Football is violent." The smooth features showed annoyance. "The game has nothing to do with war. Our league provides action entertainment, nothing less and nothing more." Pierre Cossette, an ebullient Hollywood operative, is producing Super Night at the Super Bowl, which CBS will telecast live on Jan. 8. Cossette bills stars from sports and show business with alphabetical impartiality: Johnny Bench, Lynda Carter, O.J. Simpson, John Wayne. "Talent is the common denominator," Cossette says. Eighty blocks south of Rozelle's rosewood, Cossette sat with Andy Williams, the host for Super Night II, at Windows On The World, an eyrie of a restaurant 107 floors above Manhattan. "I was playing golf with Jack Nicklaus and the Governor of Ohio," Williams said, "and thinking I'm with a Governor and a great athlete. Some people came round for my autograph. Now Nicklaus was thinking that he was playing with a name from show business and the Governor. The Governor was thinking that he was golfing with a famous star and a great athlete. What a threesome. Nicklaus played the best golf."

Riding down in an elevator, Williams broke into a soft-shoe routine, with lines from Buck 'n' Bubbles:

Cossette: Do you know Lincoln's Gettysburg address?

Williams: I didn't know he'd moved.

The only other passenger was a delegate to a New York beekeepers' convention. He burped and tried to book Williams for a brunch the following day. I thought, an entertainer can work in a closet. An athlete needs a fairway, a diamond, a field. I thought, when this beekeeper gets back to Elmira and tells his wife he saw Andy Williams do a soft shoe in an elevator, she will forbid him to drink again in the big city.

Talk with a lawyer purged the euphoria. Robert Woolf, the successful sports attorney, used to find a purity in sport, which is not to say he was naive. "If you tell enough people in a press box your client played a great game," he told me once, "some will write it, whether he did or not."

Between this gentle hustle of 1972 and today, Woolf sees a disturbing trend. "The purity is gone," he said, "with all the emphasis on endorsements and crazy contracts and contract jumping. As the athletes get bigger and richer, I worry. Are they going to dominate sports with their own companies? Will they want to be the promoters?"

That is something one might consider while watching Super Night II and Super Bowl XI. Sports stars are young, sometimes heady with fame and often terrified lest it vanish. Jimmy Connors won half a dozen tennis classics invented by his agent. But after we came to know Connors well on television, he was no longer much of a hero. He and his agent then split. The trend toward the athlete as superhero may work for a few, but carried too far it will selfdestruct. The stars themselves, not Louis B. Mayer, killed the star system in Hollywood.

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