When Alexandria writer Michael K. Bohn was researching his last book, 2007’s "Money Golf: 600 Years of Bettin’ on Birdies," he came across a memorable phrase used to described the 1920’s: "The Golden Age of American Sports." It was a decade that featured a constellation of vibrant personalities (most notably Babe Ruth) who enticed crowds to new stadiums, and brought a new breed of journalist to the sports pages. Money poured in, and sports went national.
Bohn’s new book, "Heroes and Ballyhoo," profiles 10 of these colorful athletes, and the marketing, promotional machinery and "ballyhoo" (hype resembling a carnival barker’s pitch) that swirled around them and made them stars. Bohn says the book is "not just about sports heroes, it’s about how life changed in the 1920s."

Why did you focus on this era in American sports?

When I was researching my golf book ["Money Golf: 600 Years of Bettin’ on Birdies"], I came across this phrase, "The Golden Age of American Sports," and I thought, "Wow, that’s neat." So I put it aside and when I finished the golf book I started looking into it and pretty soon I discovered that all the sportswriters during the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s used that term. It was the first period where everything came together: money, publicity, sportswriters, public relations, and advertising. And historians viewed it the same way. I discovered that nobody had put the whole thing together — sports heroes, sports writers, the people, the public, the times, the culture — so it’s really a story of American culture and American life.

Why did the 1920s foster such a sports explosion?

There were three legs on the stool: one was postwar attitude by the people. They were tired of war and wanted excitement, and at the same time American productivity went up to the point where their disposable income increased. They weren’t working 60 hours a week to make rent and food money. They had money to buy stuff with, and they’d buy cars and toasters and hair products and deodorant. And they’d start buying tickets to games, because they wanted excitement and sports gave them all the drama and tension they could deal with. Movies were a close second (they were silent movies until 1927), but sports were bigger.

The second thing, through serendipity or good parenting or what have you, was the right kind of athlete showed up. Colorful athletes who changed their sports. Babe Ruth was predominant; Jack Dempsey brought boxing out of the back alleys, and made it more of a sport than it had been. Boxing had been outlawed in most states until 1920. All these people showed up: Johnny Weismuller … Gertrude Ederle, who crossed the English Channel, Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen.

The third part of it was the development of over-the-top reporting, sports writing and publicity. It was the golden age of purple prose. Newspapers brought virtually all the news to the public. Broadcast radio was just starting the ‘20s, and it became very important very rapidly — it was the first mass medium. But it was also a period where promoters and publicity agents and ballyhoo artists (which stems from carnival barkers; picture a guy standing outside saying, "Step right up, folks!") all came together with advertising and public relations and marketing and sports writing to sell these sports heroes to the public. So it became kind of a circle, a perfect storm; the more ballyhoo, the more public interest, the more interest, the more seats the owner would build in the stadium, more people would show up … it just went around and around and around. It went that way until the stock market crash of 1929. And the end of it was Bobby Jones’ grand slam — in my view, the greatest athletic achievement of the 20th century.

It won’t really happen again because everything’s too big now. There are too many sports shows, and too many cable channels. In those days, it was small pond and so an athlete could make a big splash. Now it’s a huge pond, with thousands of athletes, and most of them aren’t heroes anymore. They’re celebrities, and the book makes a distinction. Was A-Rod a hero? It wasn’t when he threatened to sign with Boston a few years ago but stayed in New York. Was Jordan the last one? Well, to a lot of people he is. But I found out when I was writing my golf book that the two years he played baseball had nothing to do with baseball. It was a time out of sorts for him, but most people don’t know that.

So it won’t happen again. It came close in the ‘60s, when TV came into the picture, and you had a run of really good athletes — Muhammad Ali, Mickey Mantle, [Roger] Maris, the Celtics, [Arnold] Palmer in golf. The Olympics were really big — but still not quite the same. The ‘60s was another period of extraordinary interest in sports.

And that coincides with the book’s argument, that new forms of media promote these spectacles.

If you look at cable TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was a similar thing. In the ‘20s, it was radio, and the complete stranglehold that sportswriters had in the newspapers. There was a huge increase in the quality of the sports writing: Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon. [Sports writers] used to be just hacks.

Grantland Rice is a recurring figure throughout the book; what kind of impact did he have?

There were two schools of sports writing: the "Gee Whiz" and the "Aw Nuts" (the cynics were in the ‘Aw Nuts’). He was well-read, educated, could tell a good story, had tremendous access, and could write about anything. He set the table for everybody; he set the standard. It was pretty flowery, purple ink; nobody can match the lead for the ‘Four Horseman’ game, even though nobody could figure out how he could see their shadows from [his vantage point] on the ground! His colleagues really admired him. He was a wonderful man. That’s what set him apart: he wasn’t some ink-stained wretch or drinker; he was genuinely a good guy.

He took sports writing out of the back alley the same way that Jack Dempsey took boxing out of the shadows.

You had good storytellers show up in the sports section, publishers increasing their sports sections dramatically in size, and interesting people. You look at Walter Hagen: he had color, he was a colorful guy. Some of his contemporaries weren’t colorful.

How did the aspect of personality play into the coverage?

That was the beginning of modern sports writing, was to look at the person and get beyond the scores. You remember ‘Up Close and Personal’ during ABC’s Olympic coverage? Same thing. Up until then, they’d never courted the athletes in their post game reports. You go back and look at the New York Times during the early 1920s, and they didn’t have any sound bites from Babe Ruth when he’d hit a home run to win a game; they’d talk to the coach. So the whole idea of an athlete as a personality came to be in the ‘20s, and the sports writers responded by bringing color. There was such a demand for coverage that they began writing the sidebars where they hadn’t before. The only thing they didn’t do was bring up dirty laundry, because their publisher would get a call from the owner of the team, and that reporter would be off the beat. So Babe Ruth’s many appetites were never reported upon.

But the public knew about some of their unsavory aspects — Jack Dempsey was heckled as a ‘slacker’ for dodging the draft, for example — why were they considered heroes despite these questionable traits?

But for Dempsey, it took a long time for the public to come back around to him. It wasn’t until he lost to Tunney twice, particularly after the ‘Long Count,’ that the public viewed him as a hero and Tunney as someone who stole his title. For the bulk of his career, everybody wanted to see him fight, and everybody bet on him, but they didn’t see him as a hero until later on because of the ‘slacker’ thing. He was a mean looking individual. Compare him to Babe Ruth, who didn’t look mean, or Bobby Jones, who looked like a choirboy. Whereas Ruth was the biggest hero, Dempsey was probably the most complex character.

[Dempsey] was a compensatory hero for a lot of people. He represented a wild west that was disappearing. The bank clerk and the dry goods salesman looked to Dempsey as being what the country used to produce, a throwback to that. A lot of people made a big deal out of compensatory heroes — "Doing what I can’t do" — and the promoters took advantage of that and used Dempsey’s qualities to promote fights. When he fought Carpentier, who was blond and slender and looked like Joan of Arc, here was Dempsey with the Dark visage, oily hair, and three-day beard. Ricker used that juxtaposition of images to sell more tickets.

Dempsey was never like that. He was a delightful, nice man, but he admitted to putting on that show.

Was this the first time that athletes started to participate in creating their own characters? To be more showman-like?

Baseball was the only sport before that that had characters, and boxing a little bit with Sullivan. They had people creating images for them. The trouble was it wasn’t on a large scale; it wasn’t national. Baseball was only played north of Washington D.C. and east of St. Louis. But the culture came together in the ‘20s, a more national culture, so you could sell heroes wholesale across the country. There were more practitioners of the art of ballyhoo than there were before. So there were athletes that helped polish their own image, just not on this grand scale.

At one point in the book, when Helen Wills arrives in France, you refer to the hype as the "ballyhoo machine."

By 1926, when she arrived to play Suzanne Lenglen, there was a ballyhoo machine, and it was cranked by sports writers, owners, and so on, just like we have today. It was like a public relations machine. I used it as a metaphor for something like cranking out sausage. Rice was good at it. And the point was: she brought something new to the sports hero. She brought good looks and sex, which was a big deal in the ‘20s; everybody obsessed about sex, it was all over the newspapers and true confession magazines and movies. They posed the girl swimmers with lots of flesh showing. The New York Daily News thrived on it. So here was this pretty young Californian ingénue, coming over to play tennis against this grand diva of France, and it was perfect. Everything was there: glamour, sports, color, personalities, publicity, and the wonderful heat in the south of France. It probably ranked up there with the Dempsey-Tunney fight as far as being a perfect event. That’s what I meant by the phrase; all those factors went in the top of the machine, and the ballyhoo came out the other end.

And another female star, Gertrude Ederle, couldn’t provide the same sex appeal.

She had kind of a cute button nose, a little sister sort of thing, and maybe that’s one reason it didn’t endure. She was a flash in the pan. She did a lot for women and a lot for swimming, but didn’t have the color or personality to endure, and didn’t have the sport to endure.

Weissmuller had his big deal in the ’24 and ’28 Olympics, but he endured because of the movies. Babe endured until he died because he was such a larger-than-life character. Dempsey made himself one — when he retired he was a hero, and he became a wonderful raconteur at his restaurant. Hagen kept on playing. Jones quit, but he was such a legend and his golf course and his tournament were so famous that he endured.

They capitalized on their notoriety in a way that Ederle didn’t. It was a blown opportunity.

Yes, and she was awkward around people. But, during her 15 minutes, she was equal to anything else during the ‘20s. She was equal to Lindbergh …. but this was typical: fads were huge in the ‘20s. Something would explode — marathon dancing, the cross-country [running] race — and then they were gone. She was kind of typical of that.

You also mention that Babe Ruth’s promoter, Christy Walsh, was the first sports marketer. What did he bring to the table?

Advertisers had long sought athletes and celebrities to endorse their products. Walsh figured out how to maximize that and leverage it and get more money out of it. Ruth was getting $5 for a story about a game with local sports writers. Walsh figured out he could syndicate Ruth’s account (which was ghost-written) to hundreds of newspapers, and totally magnify the income stream and the impact. Then he learned he could book him on a barnstorming tour during the off-season, and generate income for Babe and himself — his 10 percent. It’s just what IMG or any other sports marketer does today. They’re using that model that Christy created, of selling words or appearances to the public, advertisers, or marketers for golf balls or running shoes. He created the paradigm of "Selling the Brand." It started out as first-person accounts of the game, and it got bigger, as Ruth endorsed cigarettes and cars. Knute Rockne was a big salesman for Studebaker Motors, and they had him on the lecture circuit. It’s no different than what we see today, but it was uncommon in those days. It was sort of a new science, because public relations and advertising came of age in the ‘20s, and that’s what made it viable.

It’s a very familiar sports world in a lot of ways, compared to what we see today. What were sports like before the 1920s?

There were very few rules-driven events. Football was a club sport, coached by the athletes themselves or maybe by a former player. No paid coaches. It had a long history but it wasn’t organized and they played on sandlots and small fields. Once the ‘20s came along, the universities started building huge concrete stadiums because the interest increased so dramatically. Rockne set the paradigm of the good coach recruiting, publicity, taking his team on the road to play anybody. Gate receipts funded everything, and he built this reputation for putting on a good show. Other coaches — Fielding Yost at Michigan, Amos Alonzo Stagg at Chicago, Pop Warner at Stanford — they were all good coaches, but they didn’t view it as the business that we see it as today. The NCAA is the only one that doesn’t view it as a business today. Rockne viewed it as a way to make money for the university, build a better stadium and recruit more players, then generate enough cash flow to build a College of Medicine building, and the engineering building.

So the main thing is there was no organized national sport before this, except baseball before this. College football was sort of a yawner. Professional baseball was big — there were hundreds of minor leagues — but it wasn’t very organized and it wasn’t very coherent nationally, and it didn’t get a whole lot of attention. There was no basketball to speak of; tennis and golf were viewed as country club sports. Golf didn’t start in the United States until 1988; tennis had been around a little longer than that, but not anything to speak of. Tennis didn’t take off until they moved the national championships out of Newport and down to New York City, where people could get to them on the subway, and more diverse people could get there. Then the West Side Tennis Club started building big stadiums to house the crowds.

It was less exclusive, and more populist.

… because of the influences of the Golden Age. People wanted more sports: "Football is over, well what do we do now? We’ve got baseball. Baseball’s over, what do we do now?" As children of the age, they responded to spectator sports. There was no automobile racing, or NASCAR; soccer wasn’t anything. All of a sudden, the public had the capacity to absorb more sports than just baseball. Baseball had a dirty image at the time — remember the Black Sox scandal really set it back — and Ruth is generally credited with reviving it. What’s so fascinating is, he hit 54 [homeruns] in 1920, 29 in 1919, and 11 in 1918. It happened in just three years, that he went from 11 homeruns to 54. Part of it was they started bringing in new baseballs more often during the game, and they outlawed the trick pitches. Used to be that baseballs were used for the whole game and they’d be loaded up with spit and dirt and crud, and they were squishy and you couldn’t hit them out of there.

They changed the sports in order to entertain the people more.

It evolved in that respect. I don’t think Commissioner Landis thought, "We’ve got to change the ball for a more lively one." It was just Ruth. Ty Cobb was still playing, and he was the greatest manifestation of ‘small ball,’ but he was overshadowed.

The public loved anything associated with ‘A Million Dollars’ — the million-dollar purse. Golf took a while to generate enough to do that, and so did tennis, and college football didn’t have any money associated with it, except for that generated for the university. And that was a huge deal. It allowed Notre Dame to flourish; it allowed Midwestern colleges to compete with those in the east.

Seven of the 10 stars you follow in the book are involved in individual sports — a couple each from swimming, golf and tennis, Dempsey in boxing — and only three from team sports. Do you think there was a particular appeal brought by the individual athlete? Was it that team sports were less developed?

Baseball was always about the coach, so was football. It wasn’t until Grange came along that individuals started to gain attention. It was always the coach: Miller Huggins, or Connie Mack, or whomever in baseball. Same thing in college football. But I think it was more the public’s obsession with sports that made the sports writers turn to individual sports because baseball and football couldn’t satisfy the demand. I think that’s part of it.

Second, there were some colorful people that showed up at the right time. Hagen was quite a showman. Jones was the universal American Hero. People just flocked to him. He just looked like somebody you could root for. There was an interest in women all of a sudden. I think it was mostly demand and colorful figures. If you look at it, it was probably the beginning of a trend that we have today. We don’t glorify [University of] Southern California football as much as we glorify the tailbacks that come out of there. The NBA certainly doesn’t foster team images. They’re official party line is: individuals, beating the man to the basket. I think it came out of the culture of the time.

There are other analogues to that during the ‘20s: Lindbergh as the ‘lone eagle’ flying over by himself. There’s a whole school of thought among sociologists and anthropologists, that America lost its individualism during the 1920s. They became factory workers instead of a farm owner; they became a cog in the machinery. And they looked to sports as compensation for that. The American ideal up that point was that you could go out on the frontier, get your section of land, farm it, and do it all on your own. Your success could come from your own hard work. Whereas the increase of urbanization and the increase in industrialization of the country cause you to become part of a factory, part of a company, instead of an individual fighting bears on the great untamed West. I mentioned Dempsey representing that, so there was a little of it there. But I think the public, according to these experts, was envious, and they were putting themselves in these individual stars’ shoes. Bill Tilden did everything by himself; no one is there to help him. Same way for golf and swimming.

I think if you looked at it today, people are probably more enamored with individuals rather than teams, except for some pockets of rabid nonsense like Green Bay, Wisconsin [laughs]. You pick up the New York Times sports section, and there are more articles about individual players than there are about the team. Part of it was demand and part of it was the fascination the public had with individuals.

There’s some irony there, that the public could indulge fantasies about the individual and the past era of the frontiersman, while these heroes were being brought to them via a machine-like process — a national process to a national audience.

That a system brought them an individual hero, cranked out like sausage out of a machine, there is an irony there. It probably continues, when you think about today’s news media/sports conglomerate (and it’s all intertwined), I think it’s consistent with what was birthed in the 1920s.

In baseball, to pursue the metaphor a little bit further, it had been a team game that prized team defense and pitching and coaching. Sure, some players put up some gaudy stats, but when the disciples talked about a good game it was because somebody drew a walk, then stole second. Somebody hit to right field on a fielder’s choice and it was a sacrifice fly and the team scored. They win, and the coach is lauded for having a good strategy. Ruth came along and said, "Step back, boys." There were some instances where someone would say, "We’re going to miss the train if we don’t get this game over with," and he’d say, "Well, why didn’t you tell me?" And go out and hit a homerun.

And that’s verified? That’s not a myth, like the ‘called shot’? The ‘called shot’ was one sports writer’s doing, and none of the participants ever verified it.

Charles Root, the pitcher, said if that had been true he’d have hit him!

How does our current sporting age compare to the ‘20s? Is it a direct outgrowth?

I’m a little cynical about that in some respects, since it’s so big today that you can lose sight of individuals, except for your little soda straw of fandom. The individuals have become a little bit selfish because the media makes them that way. The media treats them like celebrities, so they act like celebrities. There doesn’t seem to be any team loyalty, it’s all about free agency and making the next buck. But I’m not saying we should go back the old way of doing business, I’m just saying that’s the big difference. There are a hundred times more sports than there were, many more media outlets. It’s become diluted. Most importantly, and this is probably the key, is there’s no mystery anymore, and you need mystery to have heroes. Ruth was mysterious because they didn’t know everything about him, so was Dempsey (he just looked mysterious). There’s no mystery anymore because everybody knows everything, all the time, as soon as possible, warts and all. Now the emphasis is finding fault instead of finding virtue or finding success. "How often do you beat your wife?" is the question. As a consequence, one person can’t make a ripple anymore.

There are little individual spurts: the glare is on somebody like [Yankee] Matsui, or Tiger Woods, and then it’s over to the next one. The appetite of the sports fan and the machinery that supplies his food is so big that it doesn’t have as much mystique anymore. I wouldn’t want to say it’s worse, it’s just different.

Is that why there can’t be another "Golden Age"?

That was my point. There are too many cable TV shows, too many blogs, to have a mystery. The only mystery now is that somebody comes out of nowhere to accomplish something.

Like the golfer who pushed Tiger to the limit when Tiger was working on a bad knee ….

Rocco Mediate. That was fun. And I don’t mean to criticize today’s environment, I’m just saying it’s just dramatically different. Plus, it’s all per capita; the buzz per capita is greater than it is today because it was so focused on such a small group of people. Today it’s so diluted, and for such brief periods of time. You can’t afford to be a colorful character anymore. Dennis Rodman was one, and his brand suffered a lot because of his indiscretions.

I’ll put the figures of the ‘20s up against anyone today, in terms of color and what they’d done for their sports …. Tiger Woods being an exception to that. He might compete with them in terms of what he did to the sport. But he’s not colorful at all. He’s only colorful when he let’s an F-bomb go, or spits up a loogey on camera. I’ve been in a zillion press conferences with him and he’s not colorful. He’s very disciplined — he doesn’t do anything. He’s very on message. But [John] Daly was a colorful character, and he may have been Ruthian in that respect. Self-destructive behavior, Ruthian shots …. there are a lot of parallels.