Everyone who’s the least bit plugged into the NFL or popular culture, or has spent at least five minutes out of a coma the past few months, knows why the Kansas City broadcast keeps cutting to the Chiefs’ luxury suite. Shots of Taylor Swift cheering for Travis Kelce are now seamlessly part of television coverage. Is it love? Is it a publicity stunt? Why does the media follow their every move so breathlessly—and why is America following along?

Only time might answer the first two questions, but history can help with the third.

Long before there was a Taylor and Travis (or, for that matter, a Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio), actress Helen Dauvray and baseball player John Montgomery Ward were the ones dominating the headlines of their day. The Dauvray-Ward romance and the media coverage it received offer a glimpse into the future of the celebrity power couple, from a time when entertainers and professional athletes were still socially suspect in the minds of the Gilded Age elites who valued the perceived purity of amateur pursuits.

In the late 19th century, the concept of publicity was starting to evolve. Instead of earning fame and media coverage through political or charitable deeds (or misdeeds), Americans started becoming newsworthy just by being well-known, in part due to the development of the celebrity interview, which both responded to and stimulated public interest, thus establishing a self-reinforcing public relations loop.

Helen Dauvray, the headliner of her own theatrical troupe, was a fixture of this loop. So famous was she that a October 12, 1887 New York Times article previewing her impending marriage to Ward identified her as “the well known actress” whose “history is too familiar for detail.” The journalist didn’t bother reprising Dauvray’s rise to fame as 1860s child performer “Little Nell,” and glossed over the actress’ time on the stage as Helen Gibson before she reinvented herself in Paris and changed her name because readers already knew the story; Dauvray had received 66 mentions in 1887 in the Times alone, not counting classified ads.

Her beau, John M. Ward, could not compete with Dauvray’s megawatt stardom. “[T]he man she is to marry is not so well known, although he has made a reputation on the diamond,” that same Times profile noted, providing readers with a thumbnail sketch of Ward’s baseball career so they could catch up: He’d won one championship, received bachelor’s and law degrees from Columbia, and had a role in founding the Brotherhood, the first labor union for major league baseball players. Not mentioned were the facts that Ward had pitched the second perfect game in professional baseball history, moved from pitcher to outfielder and shortstop, and served as player-manager of both the Providence Grays and New York Giants—all after allegedly being kicked out of Penn State for stealing a chicken.

If Times readers required a 101 course in Ward, no such introduction was necessary for enthusiasts (“fans” was just coming into usage) who subscribed to the Sporting Life or the Sporting News, the recently founded weeklies that were the ESPNs of the 1880s.  The front-page story in the October 19 issue of the Sporting Life called the Dauvray-Ward marriage “the sensation of the week” in “base ball,” which still appeared in print as two words.

The first breadcrumb of a Dauvray-Ward relationship appeared in late May 1887, when newspapers announced the actress’s gift of her self-named trophy, the Dauvray Cup, to be presented to the winner of a postseason championship series. On July 20th, her name was linked to Ward obliquely when Sporting Life identified her as a “perfect crank”—19th-century slang to describe an obsessive, unreasonable person—for his team, the New York Giants. Only in September did the first direct connection to Ward surface, when Dauvray mentioned him in a letter to the National League president that Sporting Life quoted from. Dauvray and Ward were not linked romantically until their Times marriage preview on October 12, just one day before they publicly tied the knot.

After the bombshell news dropped, papers were full of speculation about the couple, who were perhaps trying to avoid this very type of rumor-filled attention by keeping their relationship secret up until that point. As MLB historian John Thorn has established, the two had, in fact, first gotten married a month and a half before the Times reporter’s visit, on August 31, 1887. Was Dauvray playing games with the press when she didn’t admit to this on October 11? Doing so might have saved the couple a trip to Philadelphia the next morning to get married a second time.

The mystery around their coupling deepens when you consider an October 17 Detroit Tribune report that Thorn surfaced, which observed that the “newlyweds” appeared to be anything but happy: “[Ward and Dauvray] haven’t been married a week, but they didn’t seem particularly affectionate,” the Tribune correspondent wrote. “Ward shouted for the Detroits and Mrs. Ward applauded for the Browns … They occupied opposite ends of the box, and hardly spoke to each other during the contest.”

Reading between the lines more than 100 years later, such coverage raises the question of whether they were leveraging their relationship for attention, or if they were genuinely attempting to avoid feeding the rumor mill of 19th-century journalism. If they were seeking publicity, it’s worth asking for what end. Of the two, Dauvray would have benefitted the most from an image boost at that moment; the news of their relationship may have helped her recapture headlines after she canceled her fall season in early September following reports of a serious illness. Ward’s exploits on the field (he led the league with 111 steals that year) and the contract negotiations between the Brotherhood and the National League already kept him at the forefront of the sporting press.

After the hoopla surrounding the marriage subsided, the couple assumed a lower profile. Initially, they may have tried to stay out of the news after Dauvray’s brother was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a servant (the charges were later dropped). But minimal details were also given about their westward honeymoon travels in November, except that Dauvray intended to appear on stage during a charity event in San Francisco. This last detail seems to indicate that Dauvray, despite having announced her retirement from the stage following their marriage, was not ready to leave the limelight. Such speculation is supported by the pattern that developed over the next two years in the press: Dauvray’s name perennially appeared in the theater gossip column of the New York Times, where her return to the stage would be promised, only for those plans to be scuttled by some difficulty or illness.

Ward’s name, meanwhile, was in front of the sporting public regularly due to the mounting labor struggle between the Brotherhood Union and the National League. When that struggle came to a head in 1890, Dauvray and Ward received increased media attention again. As the leader of the Brotherhood, Ward was the face of the union’s labor war with the National League. In the reports of Ella Black, a Pittsburgh correspondent for the Sporting Life, Dauvray was credited as being perhaps both the inspiration for and the cause of the new major league formed by Ward.

That same year, in 1890, the Cosmopolitan published perhaps the most telling piece of media around the Dauvray-Ward romance: a satirical short story that was part roman à clef melodrama and part Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Ward was recognizable as Algernon de Witt Caramel, the “Champion Short-Stop of America.” Dauvray appears as Miss Violet Veronica Van Sittart, “our hero’s peerlessly beautiful fiancée.” The story ended with the young couple, living off the millions Caramel made as a shortstop, “doing very nicely indeed.”

Given that John Ward’s salary was $3,000 in 1887, the idea that a baseball player would ever earn millions of dollars for playing a child’s game hints at the key to the story’s satire. Because magazines like the Cosmopolitan were written for an upper-class audience, the editor likely chose the story not because it painted the couple in a positive light, but rather because it encouraged an elite audience to laugh at the efforts of professional actresses and ballplayers to rise above their stations.

In real life, Dauvray and Ward’s union was short-lived; 1890 was also the year that newspapers quietly announced the couple’s separation. Though it was not public knowledge at the time, Ward had also been seeing actress Jessie McDermott, according to Ward’s biographer, Brian Di Salvatore. Equally small notices chronicled their divorce three years later.

From its supernova start, the dissolution of Dauvray and Ward’s marriage is most notable for its understated silence. Nonetheless, for a brief, shining moment in the late 1800s, enthusiasts of the lime-lit dramatic boards and dusty ball diamonds could thrill at this uniquely American aristocratic union that served as a trial run for Marilyn and Joltin‘ Joe 60 years later, and now again with Taylor and Travis in this century—when the millions in question have become a matter of billions.

The post Before Taylor and Travis, There Was Helen and John appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shell-adorned bikini tops. Fishtail skirts. Starfish accessories. Seafoam green eyeshadow. Expect to see all of this and more riding the waves of Disney’s latest live-action blockbuster, The Little Mermaid.

In other words, “mermaidcore”—the personification of aquatic glamor and physical beauty—is back.

Since antiquity, mermaids have embodied our fantasies of the briny deep. Inscrutable, various, and generally scantily clad, these half-fish, half-woman mythological creatures are shapeshifting female figures known the world over, from the sirens of the Aegean, to the jiaoxiao of the South China Sea, to Africa’s Mami Wata, often traced to the coast of Guinea. Historical accounts of mermaid sightings continued to flourish on through the 1800s. While none ever produced a real mermaid, hoaxes like P.T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid”—a Frankenstein-ed monkey head sewn onto a fish’s tail—were plentiful, capturing the public’s attention and coin.

But as the industrial revolution’s rising tide traded wonder for rationality, “real” reports from the ocean began to quiet. Rather than disappear into myth, mermaids performed their next act of transformation: moving from the water to the stage and silent screen. The early 1900s productions that resulted popularized what I’d argue to be the first mermaidcore. And the skimpier and transgressive fashions inspired by them played a tangible role in helping girls and women traverse societal barriers in style and sport.

Of all the early mermaid tales, it was Neptune’s Daughter that might have captured the public imagination the most. Staged in the Hippodrome, the famed New York theater that boasted a stage 12 times larger than its Broadway counterparts, the show was an instant hit when it debuted in late 1906. Audiences flocked to see the actresses playing mermaids dive into an 8,000-gallon clear tank filled with water. People were astounded by how they were able to stay underwater for so long. While the “day of miracles and the belief in miracles is past,” as one reporter commented, the theatrical effect in Neptune’s Daughter kept the illusion intact. To maintain the fantasy, rehearsals were conducted with utmost secrecy, with management threatening to fire anyone who gave away the gimmick (submarine chambers) that allowed actresses to linger below the surface. Such precautions paid off. “No spectacular invention or innovation of recent years has aroused such popular interest or awakened such widespread curiosity as the mermaid scene,” observed the New York Times.

A silent film production of Neptune’s Daughter followed in 1914, shot on location in Bermuda, and starring champion swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman, “the Australian Mermaid.”

Swimming, long considered a “masculine domain,” had opened up to women relatively early in Kellerman’s home nation. Around the 1830s, middle-class women swam recreationally, and by the time a young Kellerman entered the pool at 9 years old, a burgeoning competitive scene had started up. Because Kellerman was bowlegged, her parents had put her in swimming lessons as a form of physical therapy. While she was weak on land, in the water, she found she was athletic and graceful. She began winning swimming and diving titles against girls and boys. By the time she made her way to the U.S., in 1906, she had already attempted to swim across the English Channel and was well on her way to achieving international fame.

But when Kellerman arrived in America, she found women’s swimming culture was stuck in Victorian times. Because there was no long-distance swimming to be had, she first made money doing water stunts in vaudeville performances. She also began campaigning to change American swimwear. As she reasoned, if women wanted to enter the pool, they first needed the freedom to abandon the cumbersome bathing costume of wool skirts, blouses, stockings, and swim shoes that was literally weighing them down.

The best costume is the cheap, ordinary stockinette suit, which clings close to the figure, and the closer the better. It should be sleeveless and there should be no skirts. Skirts carry water and retard the swimmer. They are very pretty and appropriate for the seaside, but not for the swimming pool. Stockings may be worn if they fit tightly, but under no circumstances should shoes be used.

That excerpt comes from the 1907 article “Swimming Hints,” one of many editorials Kellerman authored to encourage more women and girls to lose their bulky swim costumes and adopt a modern one-piece swimsuit.

But perhaps nothing did more to change the conversation than her mermaid motion pictures.

Kellerman made her U.S. film debut in 1911, starring in two Vitagraph shorts, The Mermaid and Siren of the Sea, which catapulted her to stardom. Because the fantasy scenes she starred in filtered her form-fitting swimwear “through a fictional layer,” as author Christine Schmidt put it in her 2013 book The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk, Kellerman was able to transcend the norms of the day. Through her mermaid persona, the star could help neutralize “any suggestion of indecency” that her outfits might have otherwise engendered had she appeared in them on screen.

The public watched with fascination. Kellerman was heralded by the press at the time as being “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.” And an audience hungry to be just like her followed her every move, eager to copy everything about her, including, in time, the trademark “Annette Kellerman suit.”

By 1914, the very same year Kellerman starred in Neptune’s Daughter, America’s premier amateur sporting league, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), officially permitted “mermaids,” as they called competitive female swimmers, to participate in sanctioned competitions. And by the time Kellerman’s film career wound down a decade later, most women were starting to wear the same one-piece “Kellerman suits” the star first championed at the turn of the century.

Mermaidcore, of course, wasn’t alone in opening up the waters for women, but it undeniably lent its sparkle to the cause, paving the way for them to transform their reality on land.

Today, this glamor can continue to offer us a way to shapeshift through fantasy. After all, as Kellerman herself once put it, to become a mermaid is to simply “see a woman make a fish out of herself.”

The post Welcome Back, Mermaidcore appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The event, streamed online over multiple platforms and titled “Can We Build A Better Summer Olympics?” featured four accomplished athletes, two of them Olympic medalists, who have gone on to varied roles that touch on the Games—a sports historian, the leader of a major women’s group for equity and sports, and advocates for LGBTQ people and anti-doping reform.

The hour-long discussion encompassed an Olympic-sized array of the Games’ challenges and failures—including militarization and state violence at the Games, policing abuses, the use of Games by dictators and authoritarians, their high costs for host cities, doping, displacement of people for the Games and Olympic facilities, lack of access to the Games, and deficiencies of the International Olympic Committee and other governing bodies.

Much of the discussion focused on ideas for changing the Games; the event also included nine short videos submitted by current and former Olympians offering their suggestions for the Olympics—ranging from changing the judging of boxing to leaving behind more useful transportation infrastructure after the Games.

The event’s moderator, New York Times sportswriter Kurt Streeter, started the discussion by recalling his time covering the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where he reported on the favelas, or slums, in the hills above venue for the Games. Those neighborhoods were full of security people with large guns, he said.

“It was interesting to see the level of policing,” in the favelas, Streeter recalled. “The crackdown was immense. The people I spoke to were fearful… They also felt completely cut off from the Games,” which in some cases were less than a half-mile away from where they lived.

In response, sports historian Victoria Jackson, of Arizona State University, noted that the origins of the Games, more than a century ago, were rooted in white supremacy. And the militarization that Streeter observed is a phenomenon dating to the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City, which occurred during a summer of demonstrations against Mexico’s ruling party. Shortly before those Games, government forces—police and military—opened fire on a protest in the capital’s Tlatelolco area, leaving a death toll that is still in dispute. Some accounts estimate that hundreds were killed and thousands beaten and jailed.

Jackson suggested that after 1968, the Summer Games in 1972 and 1976 created a militarization and security around the Games that has become entrenched. She also argued that the Olympics themselves have resisted change—in part by limiting the voice and rights of Olympic athletes, who are young and people who would be most likely to improve the Games.

Another panelist, the Olympic diving gold medalist Greg Louganis, suggested that more care and deliberation should be taken in the location of the Games. Instead of opening up the Games to bids, he suggested that the Olympics establish a few home sites—maybe two for the Summer Games, and two for the Winter Games—and alternate between them.

That would reduce the costs, displacement, and the environmental and climate impacts that come with the extensive new construction every host city must take on. Instead, Olympic facilities could be used for multiple games and for training and research between Games, he said.

Louganis also said that establishing home sites would allow the Olympics to avoid chasing dollars and accepting bids from countries with authoritarian governments and poor human rights records. He recalled traveling to Russia around the time of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, where an anti-LGBTQ law put athletes and attendees at risk.

“Why are we going to back to a lot of these countries with abysmal human rights practices?” he said. “I’d like to see three or four Olympics venues, so you don’t have the bidding.”

In the online chatroom on the YouTube stream, some audience members expressed opposition to holding the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, without a public referendum to confirm support. They expressed outrage at potential impacts of those Olympics, from displacement of people for Olympic-related projects to the danger to immigrants from the planned security presence of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which handles mass deportation and other immigration enforcement. Some questioned how profits from the 1984 Olympics, held in L.A., have been spent.

Olympic hurdler Lashinda Demus, who was only a year old during the 1984 Olympics, recalled that when she was growing up, the Games felt distant to her—even though she learned to ride her bicycle in the parking lot of the Coliseum, which hosted the Games in 1932 and 1984.

She said the Olympics need to do more to support athletes—and free up athletes to find sponsors so more of them can support themselves. While she said that the Games are one of the few spaces where there is equality among athletes, Demus, who is African American, recalled having difficult experiences while traveling to international events because of her race, and that, as a woman, finding sponsors to make an Olympic career possible was difficult.

“Being a good athlete is never enough when you’re a woman. You have to have this great story,” said Demus, noting that she got some attention and support because she is the mother of twins.

Panelist Donna Lopiano, a softball star who became CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, backed up Demus’ sense of having less opportunity as a woman with statistics. The Olympics fall far short of gender parity by all kinds of measures, she said—from the number of medals and sports offered, to the number of female officials.

Lopiano said the International Olympic Committee is still “mostly guys, mostly rich guys” who too often “are forgetting about civil rights, gender rights, racial equity.” This lack of diversity in leadership, she said, explains why the Games don’t treat athletes, local communities, or democracy well.

“The Games are given to autocratic leaders because they are so expensive,” she said. “It’s not a democratic choice to spend all this money on the Olympics. And who is ill-served? It’s the poorest people in those countries.”

Jackson, the historian, suggested three changes in the Games. First, she would eliminate Rule 40 of Olympic Charter, which limits the ability of athletes to market themselves and mention sponsors who are not Games sponsors. Second, Rule 50, which prohibits political, religious, or racial expression by athletes, should be repealed. Third, there should be rules requiring male-female equity; if a country doesn’t support a women’s team in one sport, she said, its men shouldn’t be able to compete in that sport.

With economic and political freedom, Jackson said, athletes could advocate powerfully to make the Games better, not just for themselves but for the communities they impact. The existing restrictions on expression and athlete freedom are “inhibiting the potential of the Games.”

In response to questions from audience members, who watched on YouTube and Vimeo, the panelists discussed whether the Games are simply too big, how Black Lives Matter might impact the games, and why doping remains such a problem. Demus noted that a Russian athlete, who won the 400-meter hurdles in the 2012 Games when she took the silver, now faces an arbitration hearing on doping, adding that the Olympics need to figure out what to do for competitors who are victims of doping.

Despite the daunting problems facing the Olympics, the panelists closed the evening on an optimistic note. They said that the recent global protests against racism and police violence had seen prominent athletes, who once shunned political participation, speaking out for change.

“I don’t think we can do anything until the athletes get in power,” said Lopiano, who then added that protests suggest that moment of power is approaching. “We’re seeing this flower open up in front of us.”

The post Love the Games or Loathe Them, the Olympics Need to Do Better by Competitors and Local Communities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Two-Time Olympic Hurdler and Anti-Doping Educator Lashinda Demus appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The answer lies in the untold story of Ruth’s challenge to the authorities ruling baseball—a story that defies deeply held American myths about upward mobility and classless democracy.

Today, Ruth is most remembered as the benchmark for excellence. To be known as “the Babe Ruth of…” is to say that you are the dominant figure in some enterprise.

It also connotes popularity. As a baseball player, Ruth personified dominance and celebrity. Leading the New York Yankees between 1920 and 1934, he generated hysterical excitement among fans young and old, and drove the popularity of baseball and modern sports into a new era of commercialization and profitability.

Ruth had the type of American story that embodied the country’s democratic promise. He rose from abject poverty in Baltimore, essentially abandoned by his parents, to become a player of unsurpassed power and confidence—while maintaining personal warmth and generosity off the field that endeared him to fans. His moon face, barrel chest, and spindly legs made him an instantly recognizable, beloved figure. Ruth managed to bridge many of the chasms dividing America in the early 20th century. His appeal crossed regional, class, and even racial boundaries. His record-setting achievements—in a sport and a country given to empiricism—endured for generations.

But, in its darker moments, Ruth’s career also embodied a very American conflict—turning into a clash between a headstrong, independent-minded player and a powerful baseball establishment that wanted, or needed, to control him.

Ruth’s ascent to superstardom came at a propitious time for Major League Baseball. Gambling, violence, and labor strife had dogged professional baseball from its beginnings. The years surrounding World War I saw those forces grow to the point of jeopardizing the future of the game. A players’ union pushed back against dictatorial owners who maintained tight control over their labor force through mechanisms such as the reserve clause, which tethered players to their teams. Violence on the field and in the stands mounted, and revelations that gamblers had influenced the outcome of the 1919 World Series, too, imperiled the national pastime.

Then “Along Came Ruth,” to borrow from a popular Irving Berlin song that sportswriters often associated with the player. The Babe—a pitcher with the Boston Red Sox before he was traded to the Yankees in 1920—offered diversion and entertainment galore. He changed the game from a low-scoring affair based on strategy to one in which power-hitting—home runs in particular—ruled. Ruth’s home runs were frequent, epic, towering events. Fans loved the new game. Attendance soared throughout baseball in the 1920s, largely because of Ruth’s feats. Suddenly, a brighter future for the game showed through the dark clouds.

But Ruth also posed a problem for baseball. He was assertive, outspoken, sympathetic to player rights, and occasionally temperamental. While appreciative of his commercial potential, owners and league officials moved to rein in their superstar. None among the game’s elites wanted another Mike “King” Kelly or Ty Cobb—baseball heroes whose grave personal vices at times overshadowed their brilliant play.

Ruth’s popularity also posed a competitive threat. Major League Baseball had narrowly survived several recent challenges from rival leagues. If a competitor league could lure Ruth away, it would have instant credibility. Ruth’s lucrative offseason barnstorming tours suggested his potential. Accompanied by other star players, the Babe would play exhibition games across the country, going as far as California on occasion. The wildly popular tours underscored Ruth’s appeal, and the threat he posed to the league. He was becoming bigger than the game.

In response, baseball undertook a major campaign to contain and control its marquee player—to force him into line. Before the 1922 season, newly-appointed baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis launched the official pursuit of Ruth. Citing the Babe’s failure to ask permission before launching a barnstorming tour, Landis slapped on Ruth a lengthy suspension of one month starting at the beginning of the 1922 season. The issue, huffed the commissioner, came down to “Who is Bigger: Base-ball or the Individual Ruth?” Landis was correct: this was an existential clash.

The Babe initially bitterly protested his sentence, but threats from the league and his lucrative new contract with the Yankees kept him in line. The 1922 season proved a disaster for Ruth. A batting slump lasted into June, and more suspensions, for fighting with umpires and clashing with hecklers, followed.

The media piled on, portraying the Babe as an enfant terrible. Sportswriters had emerged as invaluable allies for baseball owners and officials, who heavily subsidized their work. Teams covered reporters’ travel expenses to spring training, and road trips during the regular season. Writers enjoyed first-class accommodations in luxury hotels, traveled on Pullman cars, and ate at the best restaurants. In return, they largely parroted the official line of team owners and league officials.

So press accounts, while celebrating Ruth’s power at bat and skills in the field, also infantilized him. Ruth was portrayed as an overgrown boy, or an unruly adolescent in need of adult supervision. His profligate spending and penchant for a good time became favorite storylines of sportswriters. They often mocked his earthy personality and limited vocabulary. And, at their worst moments, writers played on shadowy rumors about Ruth’s racial makeup, mocking him as the “big baboon” or a “gorilla glanded baby.” Ruth chafed at the depictions, but he had little recourse against a system stacked against him.

Ruth returned to form in 1923 with a comeback sparked by a towering home run on Opening Day for the mammoth brand new Yankee Stadium (also known as “The House That Ruth Built”). In 1925, however, the Babe’s troubles returned. During the preseason, Ruth issued a stinging public indictment of Yankee manager Miller Huggins and offered himself as the ideal replacement, once again landing in hot water with the league. Later, during a spring training exhibition tour, Ruth fell ill—most likely a victim of a virulent strain of the flu then sweeping the country—but continued to push himself to avoid disappointing fans who flocked to exhibition games. On April 7, 1925, he completely collapsed and was rushed back to New York for medical attention. False media reports of his death generated headlines around the world.

In New York, Ruth began recovering, but the Yankees slumped in his absence, and team officials moved to shift blame for the collapse onto the Babe. He had overindulged his appetite, went the story—consuming too many hot dogs. One Yankee official even peddled an unfounded story to reporters that Ruth’s true ailment was syphilis. By midseason, Ruth rejoined the team, but he was weakened and the Yankees still struggled. In late August, Huggins, now managing a seventh-place team and battling rumors he soon would be replaced, mounted a surprise attack on Ruth, slapping an indefinite suspension on the Babe for violating team rules. Furious, Ruth protested that the suspension amounted to a sorry effort to deflect blame for the Yankee collapse. He threatened to quit baseball, and a firestorm of negative press followed. Newspapers went as far as printing photographs of Ruth’s live-in girlfriend, under salacious headlines. (Ruth’s first marriage had collapsed, but he had resisted divorce.)

Ruth received major league baseball’s message loud and clear. After 1925, he focused on conditioning and controlling his weight, cooperating with Huggins and exemplifying good baseball citizenship. During the 1926 World Series, Ruth caused a media sensation when he promised to hit a home run for a seriously ill boy and socked three homers in the next game, supposedly sparking a miraculous recovery in the boy. Still, while he became a “reformed” man in his public dealings, at contract negotiation time Ruth could never resist taking shots at the unfair reserve clause system that then bound players to teams with no free agency. The only way to gain leverage was to threaten to quit baseball, but when Ruth made such threats, he faced the usual verbal assault from team owners and sportswriters.

He would never escape their ire. Despite the battle between Ruth and baseball, or maybe in part because of it, baseball by the late 1920s had become a much more stable and profitable game. Instances of violence, gambling, and labor strife seemed consigned to the past. In his final years as a player in the early 1930s, Ruth remained a fan favorite. But Yankee management still itched to free itself of the outspoken and expensive Ruth.

For his part, Babe made it clear that he hoped someday to manage a major league team, preferably the Yankees. This dream set the stage for the sad final act of Ruth’s career. In 1935, Yankee officials arranged a deal whereby they would release Ruth, who would then be signed by the struggling Boston Braves as a player/“assistant manager.” Ruth viewed the deal, which was brokered by Yankee management, as a shot at staying in the game and maybe, one day, managing. But over the course of the opening weeks of the season, Ruth came to realize his days as a player were done, and that the Braves had no intention of using him in a managerial role. In anger, Ruth quit the Braves, ending his playing career. He still wanted to be a manager, but Major League Baseball had a long memory, and he never got his chance. The belief that Ruth somehow presented a threat, that he was too independent to be trusted in inside circles, persisted until his death from cancer in 1948.

For all his wealth and popularity, Ruth remained an outsider, even in the sport he popularized. In this, he demonstrated the chasm between America’s stated ideals and its nastier realities. His poor background did not win him respect; instead, it made him suspect among baseball elites, who wanted less volatile stars who would mold the game into a middle-class institution. They had no use for the actual Babe Ruth—not for the young man who railed against baseball’s lopsided power structure, and not for the older Ruth who grew wary of the forces arrayed against him. In the end, baseball won its battle with Ruth—it exploited an icon for its own purposes while maintaining near absolute control over the game and its players.

The post Why Major League Baseball Tried to Rein in Babe Ruth appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.