Hey, if he hadn't become president, maybe he could have been a famous baseball player, right? Certainly, if you listen to what Donald Trump had to say about his high school baseball "career," he was definitely a truly great one. In fact, in his own words, he was "said to be the best b-ball player in New York State." Or as he's also said, "I was supposed to be a professional baseball player," adding with a Trumpian flourish: "Fortunately, I decided to go into real estate instead."
Now, admittedly, an author at Slate checked out some of his high school (the New York Military Academy, or NYMA) box scores and found this: "His junior year, Trump went 2 for 10 in the three game stories I found in the archives. In Trump's senior season, I couldn't find much of any NYMA baseball coverage in the Evening News. But the Poughkeepsie Journal and Journal News had him hitting 1 for 9 in three games. Combined, the nine box scores I unearthed give Trump a 4 for 29 batting record in his sophomore, junior, and senior seasons, with three runs batted in and a single run scored. Trump's batting average in those nine games: an underwhelming .138." And in his senior year, it seems, in seven games he got one hit in 21 at-bats for a striking .047 batting average.
No wonder former New York Times sportswriter and TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte had the urge to write a piece -- his 51st at this site -- about Donald Trump as a distinctly "top jock" figure, one only recently trying to hit a grand slam in Iran. Tom
Trump As The GOAT
The Greatest of All Time (or So He Believes)
Seventy-five years ago, my father and I gazed down from the stands at Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. I was thrilled by the sight of two heroes of my time, but Dad was not impressed. He had seen Babe Ruth.
I think about that now, in a time desperate for such symbolic representatives of our better selves, which we once derived from sports figures like Mickey, Joe, and the Babe. They distracted us from pain and poverty. They gave us hope. I wonder if the answer to "Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?" -- that line from Simon and Garfunkel's famed song "Mrs. Robinson" -- is the same as to so many other wrenching questions these days: Donald Trump.
Consider the following: Until he wore himself (and his welcome) out with such excess, he was indeed superb at commanding attention and winning ugly. He was, in short, a loud, vulgar, greedy, self-absorbed co*k of the walk who came to epitomize a new gilded age of power and irresponsibility. And yet, he also somehow came to represent citizens who felt oppressed and disdained by the new elite.
No, you've got it wrong. I'm not thinking about Donald Trump (not yet anyway).I'm describing Babe Ruth, the first of the Top Jock role models who captured the spirit of an American age. For the next hundred years, the Babe's spawn strutted through America's arenas until they petered out in basketball star Michael Jordan's commercialism. Jordan was, like the rest of them, the best at what he did, while also embodying the zeitgeist of his time with a "greed is good" mantra exemplified by his notorious "Republicans buy sneakers, too" line (which he may never have said seriously).
From Babe Ruth to Michael Jordan, with the likes of Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Dale Earnhardt, and Tiger Woods (among others) in between, Americans have regularly, if sometimes controversially, used sports figures to represent their aspirations.
Anointing Donald Trump as our current Top Jock figure is neither an attempt to curry favor -- do you think I want to be the Minister of Sport? -- nor an attempt to denigrate the position. It's just an effort to better understand why those apparitional figures from SportsWorld seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness in the age of You Know Who.
Where Did the Top Jocks Go?
This effort of mine started to take shape when I suddenly realized that, for the first time (in my memory) since childhood, America now seems to have no Top Jock, no celebrity athlete whose talent and personality captures our moment. Those who might be considered -- LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Serena Williams -- somehow seem to lack the sort of charisma Donald Trump does indeed have to reach beyond their hardcore fans to the rest of us.
After almost 70 years of following sports and writing about it professionally, I recently realized that I couldn't recall another time when I wouldn't have been able to name an already agreed-upon Top Jock, or at least propose half a dozen candidates. So, what's up? In this fragmented Trumpian moment of ours, is sports finally losing its hold on us? Have we been losing our love for jocks for the first time in my memory? After all, highly accomplished athletes like Pete Rose and Barry Bonds are now being denied Hall of Fame plaques on moral grounds, while high school and college athletes are becoming teenage millionaires thanks to new laws regarding their ownership of their own images.
It seemed like an appropriate moment for summing up.
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