Perhaps without even realizing it, the president had engaged in an age-old tradition of playing the dozens, the term for an African American game involving the exchange of insults before an audience. Or did he just think he’s playing the politics of distraction-as-usual, and playing to his base?

Whether he knew it or not, the bully, Trump, went after one group that has spent their lives beating bullies: black male athletes. And, in this new-age mix of politics and sports, these men also possess a pulpit as powerful as the president’s and a combined Twitter following that far exceeds his. Had he met his match?

It remains an open question whether Trump understood the game he had started to play. For one thing, his tone was off. On playgrounds you rarely hear as circuitous an insult as “son of a bitch,” the phrase Trump used when urging NFL owners to fire players who protested during the national anthem.

No, the dozens are more direct.

“Your mother is a bitch” is what a truly street-hardened president would have said to the players, as he anticipated the return blow and stood ready to dish out more. But Trump has clearly stumbled into this unfamiliar territory. He was just using the so-called genuine language that has brought him political success.

Meanwhile, the athletes’ response to Trump on social media was massive and direct. None that I saw took the traditional path of going after his mama, but sometimes that phase is skipped, in favor of going straight to the source spewing the dozens, delivering a punch in the face. In that vein, Buffalo Bills running back LeSean McCoy just tweeted the unambiguous: “asshole.” LeBron James of the NBA’s “u bum” tweet at Trump was viewed by more people than any single tweet by the president himself.

President Trump greets the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Among the many ironies of this exchange is the unity it has brought, if only momentarily, between professional players and team owners, between player unions and the leagues. The moment goes beyond football. Basketball players have been brought together by Trump’s decision to rescind his invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors to visit the White House. Baseball players have joined the protests, and golfers, tennis players (including the icon Billie Jean King), and even the NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. have tweeted in favor of the right for peaceful protest.

Although it’s new for a president to engage (consciously or not) in the dozens, athletes are also facing new expectations and responsibilities. We are witnessing many of our athletes coming of age to fulfill a new requirement of contemplation and intellectualism. They need an opinion, whether they choose to express it or not. They need to know what they are going to do or not do.

LeBron James has been the leader in this new era; he spoke out during the Trayvon Martin homicide back in 2012. But today, the political decisions facing athletes are more complicated, and the expectations for fast and meaningful responses have been raised.

The difficulties of navigating this athletic-political minefield were exemplified by two players on the same team. When the Pittsburgh Steelers decided to stay in the locker room during the national anthem last Sunday, an offensive lineman and former Army Ranger, Alejandro Villanueva, chose to come out alone and salute the flag. Ben Roethlisberger, the team’s star quarterback, stayed in the locker room with the team. They both later expressed regret for making their decisions separately, which suggested a lack of unity. Politics, like football, is a team sport.

Political pressure also falls on the team owners, who were the other group targeted in the Alabama speech, as the president told them how to run their businesses. This is the rich person’s equivalent of the dozens, and no doubt the thought bubbles arising from this group of football billionaires and millionaires said, “This guy was one of us, and not even as rich as me, and he’s getting in our business?”

The New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, who befriended Trump and backed his campaign, said he was “deeply disappointed” at Trump’s comments, and clearly by his lack of reciprocity. He wasn’t the only owner who experienced presidential betrayal.

Trump’s attacks were news, and not just because Trump is always news. Most of the time, sports are about the games themselves. Political protest has been a lesser concern, usually a one-off when it touches sports—a boycott, an arm band, or a political punch added to a Hall of Fame speech. When sport has been invoked in politics it’s rarely been about whether athletes are pulling the nation apart, but instead it’s generally been related to the need for national healing. (An exception is the fist-extended protests of John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics).

One of the most understudied exchanges between sports and politics took place between then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Commissioner of Baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1942. In what has come to be known as the “green light” letter, Roosevelt advised Landis that the games should be played during World War II. The president’s logic was that in time of war, the American workers “ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before.” Landis followed the presidential advice, and Major League Baseball was played throughout the war.

In a similar spirit, the NFL decided to play their Sunday games two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, although the NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, would call it one of his biggest regrets. (In retrospect, he might have listened to one owner, who sought a court order to stop play).

When the Gulf War began, 10 days before the 25th anniversary Super Bowl in Tampa in 1991, it made for a memorable juxtaposition of football and military display. That created a charged atmosphere for Whitney Houston’s famously stirring rendition of the national anthem, which concluded with a flyover by four F-16 fighter jets.

But sometimes sports gives way. After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the NFL postponed the games that were scheduled to be played on the following Sunday. For a brief period all planes were still grounded in the United States and the players, like all other Americans, had mixed feelings about travel even when flights resumed.

Even after real tragedies, moments of national unity are short-lived. Today’s Donald Trump-inspired unity won’t last long. The athletes and the owners will soon head back to their respective corners, at least until another unifying “your mama” moment brings them together again.

Maybe it will be Trump, the distractor in chief, who provides that new moment, as he blasts away at others to take our attention away from the racism and political problems that surround him. As LeBron James observed recently, the president doesn’t seem to recognize how he might bring people together, if he so chooses. “He doesn’t understand the power that he has for being the leader of this beautiful country,” tweeted James. “He doesn’t understand how many kids, no matter their race, look up to the President …”

In this upside-down world of politics and sports, maybe Trump will own up to his own productive divisiveness. He could channel the great basketball player Charles Barkley, who famously declared in a TV commercial, “I am not a role model.”

The post To Black Athletes, Donald Trump Is Playing the Dozens appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The very idea behind O’Reilly’s book was ironic, even farcical. He was the most respected Irishman in Boston, one who dined with the Brahmins; he embodied Irish-American gentility and social aspirations. Yet his choice of subject—boxing—played into all of the worst fears about the Irish in his day, who were thought to be intemperate, uncouth, corrupt, and violent.

Boxing’s most prominent champion, the great John L. Sullivan, earned and squandered several fortunes, drank champagne by the bucket, left his wife in order to live openly with a chorus girl, and generally served as a walking affront to Victorian morality. That such a man could be the subject of several chapters in O’Reilly’s book displays a deep conflict in the Irish-American experience at the time—the emergent “lace curtain Irish” succeeding the so called “shanty Irish.” Stereotypes aside, the clashing identities were, for millions of Irish Americans, a very real struggle for redefinition.

John L. Sullivan, heavyweight boxer and unrepentant tough guy, in an undated photo. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

Fifty years earlier, the Great Famine had spurred a massive out-migration of emigrants from Ireland, a wave so large it would be comparable to 13 million indigent newcomers arriving in the U.S. today. Most were dirty, unskilled, illiterate, and subject to exploitations we can barely imagine. But by century’s end, the Irish had taken over urban politics, turned the Roman Catholic Church into the nation’s largest denomination, and begun sending their sons and daughters to college.

It’s an old American story: The outsider becomes the insider, the country bumpkin becomes a sophisticate. For the Irish, the story often played out in the world of professional sports. Then as now, celebrities used autobiographies (sometimes clearly ghost-written) to polish and to reinforce their image; it was one of the perks of showmanship. Three such books by Irish athletes open a window on this transitional era and the push for respectability: John L. Sullivan, the last bareknuckle boxing champion; boxer James J. Corbett, widely known as “Gentleman Jim,” who straddled both sides of the social gulf; and baseball’s Connie Mack (real name Cornelius McGillicuddy), who raised respectability to an art form. All three, through carefully constructed public personae, promoted a virtual cult of respectability. Its cornerstones were sobriety, pious Catholicism, a home life focusing on idealized motherhood, and a preoccupation with good appearances.

Most professional athletes of the day fell well short of the cult’s standards, not least Sullivan, whose signature saloon entry involved striking the bar and bellowing, “My name is John L. Sullivan and I can lick any sonofabitch in the house!” It was a telling slur. To call someone an SOB is to slander their origins. Though he may have had a funny way of showing it, Sullivan, like any upwardly mobile Irishman of his day, cared about his breeding and his good reputation.

Boxer James Corbett, photographed in the 1890s, championed “scientific boxing,” a departure from the bare-knuckled brawls of the past, and attended the opera. His mother, who he revered, had hoped he would become a priest. Photo courtesy of Associated Press.

“My father and mother were Irish,” he would write in his 1892 autobiography, Life and Reminiscences of a 19th-Century Gladiator, “and I always aim at upholding the honor of the Irish people, who are a brave race.” His memoir was an attempt to disown his raffish side. He intended to show, he wrote, that he was “conscious of being something more than a pugilist.” He insisted that he could “give an intelligent opinion on almost any subject, and conduct myself as a gentleman in any company.” Sullivan proudly quoted a sportswriter who had remarked that, “He was a very well-read man, and preferred any time to discuss Shakespeare, Gladstone or Parnell to talking fight.”

Skepticism can be forgiven. In fact, when a publisher spotted his Life and Reminiscences in the public domain and reissued it, the memoir was retitled I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House—a celebration of loutishness. That the same book could appear under two titles, one evoking classic courage and the other hooliganism is, in a way, the point: Sullivan knew that certain behaviors were unacceptable, but he also delighted in his own transgressiveness. His public delighted in it, too.

Sullivan was a ruffian who could pretend sophistication. But boxing has long tried to meld coarseness with refinement (as ringside fans and announcers in tuxedoes show), and it was “Gentleman Jim” Corbett who tipped the balance. Only eight years younger than John L., he truly was a polished young man. He read widely and attended the opera. As the literary critic John V. Kelleher said, Corbett “was a prophetic figure: slim, deft, witty, looking like a proto-Ivy Leaguer with his pompadour, his fresh intelligent face, his well-cut young man’s clothes. He was, as it were, the paradigm of all those young Irish Americans about to make the grade.”

Corbett was still a boxer, of course, but his 1925 memoir The Roar of the Crowd emphasized “scientific” boxing as a pointed renunciation of the old lumbering brawn of Sullivan’s generation. His memoir also took direct aim at Sullivan’s behavior outside the ring, recounting a time when Corbett witnessed the older boxer’s brash barroom insults first hand. In this telling, Corbett, a teetotaler, stepped up to give Sullivan a stern lesson in manners, telling him that profanity-laced namecalling was “hardly courteous, and I don’t want you to make that remark in my presence again!’” The rough-edged champ, we are told, “listens to reason.”

John L. Sullivan and James Corbett squared off in the ring in 1892. Corbett won, signaling the rise of a new, more respectable Irish American athletic icon. Image courtesy of Associated Press.

The Roar of the Crowd repeatedly asserts Corbett’s lifelong dedication to his parents. As champion, he pays off their mortgage, and late in the book he delights in taking his mother back to Ireland. Corbett’s account presents his father as deeply divided when it came to boxing, simultaneously ill-at-ease with it and proud of his son’s success. It should surprise no one that Corbett’s mother’s dream was for him to become a priest.

Corbett’s relative wholesomeness marked a symbolic step, yet when he wrested the boxing title from Sullivan in 1892, the Irish American community felt a pang of remorse for the old raffishness. It would be up to a baseball player to mark the decorous end of the shanty Irish world.

Though early baseball is not generally considered the Irish specialty that prizefighting was, at the end of the 19th century around 40 percent of professional baseball players were the sons of Irish immigrants, and the national game shared many of the concerns, and aspirations, of the American Irish. Ballplayers were known for gambling, liquor, brawling, and venereal disease, and baseball grew desperate to cast off its unsavory reputation. The American League was founded in 1901 as a conscious attempt to present a more sanitized and socially acceptable pastime. A founding paragon of its new respectability was another Irish athlete: Connie Mack.

The ever-formal Connie Mack hung up his hat and coat in the dugout at Yankee Stadium on August 10, 1950. Photo by Murray Becker/Associated Press.

He bore no traces of the hardscrabble mill town in which he’d grown up. Corbett may have been a gentleman, but Mack was a young man of exceptionally clean habits. When he got his first offer to play professionally, in the Connecticut State League, he did what any good Irish boy would do—he asked his mother for advice. Here is their reported exchange, from Mack’s 1950 memoir, My Sixty-Six Years in the Big Leagues: “‘Promise me one thing,’ she said. ‘Promise me that you won’t let them get you into bad habits. I’ve brought you up to be a good boy. Promise me that you won’t drink.’ I promised her, and that promise I shall keep to the end of my life.”

Indeed, in later years Mack, by then the venerable manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, unfailingly presented the game in terms of personal conduct, advising rookies that they must “have good moral habits and self-control. You can have everything else that’s needed to make the grade, but if you don’t have good moral character you are not for the big leagues.” Wilfrid Sheed once quipped that not swearing counts as the “pinnacle of virtue in baseball.” Mack’s disdain for rough language was famous. For a baseball man, he was heroically circumspect, rarely arguing a call. As a manager, he always wore a suit and starched collar, which kept him off the field and out of the public eye.

Personal reserve, and humility—concepts foreign to Sullivan and Corbett, who thrived on their superstar status —were cherished aspects of his public face. So unobtrusive was Mack that when a holiday was declared in Philadelphia after the 1910 World Series, he reportedly rode a public streetcar to the mayor’s office and went unrecognized. Mack’s formal persona would eventually eclipse, or even excuse, his baseball. He came to be honored for his rectitude rather than his team’s achievements. By the time of Mack’s eventual retirement in 1950, the old rough-and-tumble Irish America that had produced these athletes was all but forgotten. In another decade, the Harvard-educated Kennedys would be playing touch football on the White House lawn.

The post How Irish American Athletes Slugged Their Way to Respectability appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I recall watching the ‘boys play, in the 1970s, I was knee high to him, paying more attention to the gun case where he kept his Purple Heart and the loot he’d collected from dead Nazis. As the men in blue and white jerseys and silver helmets with those big blue lone stars on the side would line up on gameday, they reminded me of the helmeted protagonists from the old war movies I’d watch with my grandfather—Dallas quarterback Roger Staubach ever the hero as he launched missile after missile into the end zone. His famous arm led his team to four Super Bowl appearances (winning two), helping the Cowboys earn the moniker “America’s Team.”

And I was in good company. As the nickname suggests, much of the country began rooting for the Cowboys with me that decade. Spectators across America filled stands and fixated on their TV screens, in awe of Staubach, the team’s clean-cut Navy veteran QB, the always-stoic head coach Tom Landry in his fedora and, of course, the Cowboys cheerleaders.

Dallas managed to exude both class and swagger, not to mention exquisite timing: The Cowboys won their first championship in January of 1972, the same year a Gallup survey first crowned pro football America’s most popular sport. The team’s icons became emblematic of the sensation the game was to become, a sensation filling Texas Stadium with fans in blue and white last Sunday afternoon as the Cowboys faced off against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC division playoffs.

Watching the Cowboys with my family felt like going to church on Sunday morning. Prayer always followed third down, or whenever the ref made a bad call. It was a family tradition to follow the Cowboys religiously. Though our fandom rarely was reflected in our dress, like other Cowboys fans, there was no doubt which team we cheered whenever game day arrived.

The Cowboys cheerleaders fascinated me as a teenager in the ‘80s. They looked like Charlie’s Angels in cowboy hats, always smiling and, to my amazement, doing flips like warriors from the American Ninja movie series I obsessively watched on VHS. They were the brainchildren of Texas Earnest “Tex” Schramm. A former sportswriter for the Austin American-Statesman, he served as general manager of the Cowboys from 1960, when they first became an NFL franchise, until their purchase by owner Jerry Jones in 1989. Schramm pioneered several league innovations over the 29 years he served as general manager: the use of instant replay in the officiating of the game, referees’ microphones, shortening the play clock, and developing the wild-card playoff system. He also helped to coordinate the 1970 merger of the National Football League and the American Football League.

That the Cowboys gained such a loyal following wasn’t just about Lone Star pride, it was about Texas showmanship. Schramm understood that professional football was more than just a sport, and transformed the Cowboys cheerleaders into a squad of professional dancers, with the help of Texie Waterman, one of the top dancers in America at the time.

When the NFL decided to offer a second game on Thanksgiving in the mid-1960s, Schramm jumped at the opportunity to host the holiday games that many NFL teams at the time wanted to avoid. He knew the Cowboys playing on a holiday when many around the country gather to celebrate would increase the team’s national exposure and help cement its All-American image.

Though Schramm’s marketing prowess and Landry’s brilliant coaching drew a national following, it was NFL Films that officially anointed the Cowboys “America’s Team.” During the 1978 season, the television studio’s camera crews noticed that the Cowboys could always count on an unusually large contingent of fans on the road. When Bob Ryan, who produced and edited every Cowboys highlight video for the NFL, wrote the opening to the season recap voiced by legendary baritone voice of John Facenda, he penned what amounts to Cowboys marketing scripture:

“No matter where they play, their fans are there to greet them. Their faces are recognized by fans all across this country. The sum total of their stars are a galaxy. They are the Dallas Cowboys … America’s Team.”

The Cowboys not only became a beloved franchise as the NFL was coming into its own, but also as the city of Dallas was in sore need of a boost. A decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Texas metropolis was still best known to many Americans as the “City of Hate.” Schramm himself was mindful of the need to associate the city with something other than the tragedy, having once told the Chicago Tribune that he was well aware that in the aftermath of ’63, Dallas had become a “bad word” across the nation.

The Cowboys helped rebrand the city in the eyes of the nation, and gave our ever-sprawling metropolis a much-needed sense of being on the same team, a shared story and rooting interest. It would be wrong to dismiss a professional football team as just that—more than 40 years after my grandfather introduced me to the Cowboys, I am struck as a journalist working in Dallas by how much the team, and all its ups and downs, helps bind our community together. A narrative thread linking Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett to Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith now reappears in the impressive rookie duet of Dak Prescott and Zeke Elliott.

The past two decades have been disappointing to Cowboys fans, and the division playoff loss to the Packers would seem only more disheartening. But the story of last Sunday’s defeat, with the two leading rookies bringing the ‘boys back from a 15-point deficit to tie the game with only minutes left on the play clock, only then to lose to a last-second field goal, will become part of the lore that gets handed down from one generation to another. And that’s especially true if, as I suspect, this generation’s team is on the verge of becoming another dominant dynasty deserving to be called “America’s Team.”

The post When I Say “Dallas” … You Think “Cowboys!” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Saturday, August 31, 1991. It was Labor Day weekend, the very definition of a sleepy, late-summer day in that simple, pre-digital world. H.W. Bush was president, the Gulf War was five months gone. The biggest news was that Kyrgyzstan had declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Precisely nothing was happening.

Well, not quite nothing.

In the gently swelling cornfields of southeastern Iowa bordering the Norman Rockwell-brushed town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa Wesleyan College, a 500-student school that had been a showcase of football incompetence for most of the preceding 100 years, was opening its season at home. Its opponent was Northeast Missouri State University, a NCAA Division II gridiron dynamo with 9,000 students, nationally ranked and favored by 25 points. Many people expected a blowout. From all appearances, IWC was going to get the snot beaten out of it.

What the fans saw, instead, was something unprecedented in the sport’s 122-year history. What they saw was tiny Iowa Wesleyan playing a stripped-down, wide-open, high-speed, pass-crazy version of the old game that amounted to a wholesale reinvention of American offensive football. Iowa Wesleyan won, 34-31, but the game was not that close. The IWC Tigers piled up 537 yards of total offense to NEM’s 322. They completed 41 of 54 passes for 454 yards and five touchdowns. They were unstoppable.

No one—no reporter, fan, or coach—understood this at the time, but August 31, 1991 was the day football changed forever. The sweeping and dramatic transformation of offensive football it inspired would not take place immediately. In the world of American sports culture, Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, was a few compass points off the middle of nowhere. It would take the better part of two decades for the changes to work themselves from the upper Midwest’s picture-perfect, brick-and-ivy campuses and into football’s sinew and guts, to revolutionize it, to transform it into the wide-open, high-speed, pass-crazy game we watch on our televisions today.

The father of this innovation—the substance of which we’ll get to in a moment—was a coach named Hal Mumme, who came from Texas to this small Midwestern town in 1989 and spun up a full-scale fantasy of a winning football team.

Before that game, Mumme, a laid-back, irreverent Jimmy Buffett fan with a fondness for Civil War history, had little to recommend him. In 13 years as an assistant or head coach at various high schools and colleges, he had managed only two winning seasons. He had been fired twice. He had had his home egged and his car repossessed. But he had spent much of that time experimenting with the forward pass, making pilgrimages to visit great passing gurus like LaVell Edwards at Brigham Young University, Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers, and Mouse Davis, the pioneer of the offensive system known as the Run and Shoot. By the time he got to Iowa Wesleyan he had—unbeknownst to everyone—invented a new way to play football.

To everyone’s astonishment except his own, Mumme fulfilled all of his promises. When he arrived, the team’s record was 0-10. By the time he left, three years later, Iowa Wesleyan led the nation in most passing categories. That year, Mumme’s quarterback Dustin Dewald became one of the leading passers in the history of the game. In one game alone, he attempted 86 passes and completed 61 of them, both national records.

The unprecedented quantity of passes was the product of much deeper changes. At Iowa Wesleyan Mumme redefined the fundamental principles of the game, its goals and objectives, even the way teams measured success. His offense was so far outside the normal rules and conventions that his players were actually playing an entirely different game than their opponents.

For example: His opponents played a game in which the offensive team ran 60-65 plays per game. That was what everybody did. Except Mumme. In the Northeast Missouri State game, his team became the first in the modern era to run a two-minute, no huddle drill for the entire game. He ran 82 plays. In a subsequent game that season he would run 100—as many as another team would run in a 5- or 6-quarter game. This relativistic scale applied to the concept of downs, too. The opposition believed it had three downs to get a first down, or be forced to punt. Hal’s team, which seldom punted, played a 4-down game, giving them an extra chance. And Hal’s team usually converted the extra chance—his quarterbacks completed 70 percent of their passes, something that had not been done before—the product of his ultra-simple system of field-decoding.

Mumme altered concepts of space as well as time. While the opposition preferred to play a game where the players were jammed together in a tight scrum at the middle of the field, Hal and his assistant coach Mike Leach—who would go on to fame in his own right as the coach of Texas Tech and Washington State—created wildly porous formations, putting 4 to 6 feet between his offensive linemen. He often emptied his backfield, sending five receivers streaking to all corners of the field. His teams forced their opponents to defend a much larger area than they ever had before.

Mumme turned other football traditions on their heads, too. Conventional wisdom dictated that the single most important statistic other than the score itself was the time of possession, which signified ball control. Hal thought the statistic was utterly meaningless. He was happy to hold the ball for merely 20 percent of a game and win by 50 points. In a world where the size and complexity of a coach’s playbook was considered to be a measure of talent and ability, Mumme’s offense was ultra-simple. He had no playbook at all and just a handful of plays. But he had designed his few plays to look complex, meaning that his players played a dead simple game while the overly complex defense believed it was seeing dozens of angry hornets buzzing at them.

All of these heresies exploded on the football world in 1997, when Mumme became head coach of University of Kentucky and took his explosive offense to the supposedly pass-proof, lockdown defenses of the SEC. When he beat Alabama and Louisiana State University, the entire football world was suddenly paying attention. After Kentucky’s game with Alabama, a steady stream of coaches and players showed up in Lexington, wanting to learn the magic. The coaches included rising stars like Urban Meyer, then an assistant coach at Notre Dame (and later a national championship-winning coach at University of Florida and Ohio State), and Sean Payton, then an assistant with the Philadelphia Eagles (and later the Super Bowl-winning head coach of the New Orleans Saints). The following summer, 6,000 high school players and many of their coaches attended three continuous weeks of Air Raid camps at the University of Kentucky. Requests poured in from all over the NFL and college football for Kentucky game films.

Since then, football at all levels in America has been transformed into something that looks a lot like the Iowa Wesleyan-Northeast Missouri game: an up-tempo, spread-the-field, pass-all-the time sport. The shift has been massive. In 1991, when that game was played, only five NCAA Division I quarterbacks had thrown for more than 10,000 yards in their careers. By 2016, 90 more had done it. Of the 92 college NCAA D1 quarterbacks who have thrown for more than 4,000 yards in a season, 78 have done it since the year 2000.

Mumme was not the only one to unleash this change, but you could argue that, in the second decade of the 21st century, it has been his radical, innovative ideas that have changed the game more than anyone else.

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