SPORTS

American athletics, especially commercial sports, were more heavily damaged by the Great Depression than was the rest of the entertainment industry. Still, American sports survived and managed to rebound after the middle of the 1930s.

THE IMPACT OF THE DEPRESSION ON MAJOR PROFESSIONAL SPORTS

Baseball. Major league baseball attendance dropped from 10.2 million in 1930 to 6.1 million by 1933. The Saint Louis Browns, for example, drew a paltry 88,113 fans in 1933. Major League gate receipts dropped from $17 million in 1929 to $10.8 million in 1933. Total payrolls dropped from $4 million in 1930 to $3 million in 1933, when the average salary was $4,500. Even Babe Ruth's $80,000 salary was cut by half. Professional baseball did not cut ticket prices or initiate rule changes. But low attendance caused Connie Mack, owner of the Philadelphia Athletics, World Series champions from 1929–31, to sell off star players Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane, Lefty Grove, and Jimmy Foxx.

Baseball teams were leery of radio broadcasting, which they felt hurt attendance. New York's teams banned radio from 1934 until 1939. Night baseball was introduced following the model of the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League (NNL), which had started using a portable light system in 1929. In 1930, minor league teams in Des Moines, Iowa, and Wichita, Kansas, began playing night ball to encourage attendance of people who worked during the day. In 1935, the Cincinnati Reds became the first major league team to play night games, but no other team put in lights until 1938. Another Depression-era innovation was the creation of the All-Star Game in 1933. A further promotional effort was the founding in 1936 of the Baseball Hall of Fame, which opened in Coopers-town, New York, in 1939.

The NNL folded in 1931, but was reorganized two years later by Gus Greenlee and other African-American numbers racketeers, who instituted the East-West All-Star Game in Chicago before the first major league all-star game. A rival midwestern and southern association, the Negro American League, was founded in 1937. Top black players barnstormed extensively in the off-season, often playing major league all-star teams. Many players, especially star pitcher Satchel Paige, jumped teams with frequency.

Horse racing. Horse racing was badly damaged by the onset of the Depression. Stakes and purses, at near peak values in 1930, dropped from $13.7 million that year to $8.5 million in 1933, an average decline of $672 per race. The typical stakes event dropped from $8,309 to $4,741. The Belmont Stakes dropped from $66,040 in 1930 to $35,480 in 1935. The average price of yearlings fell from $1,966 in 1930 to $569 in 1932. Earnings did not return to 1930 levels until 1937, but by 1939 they were up to $15.9 million. Despite the sport's financial problems, the number of tracks increased 70 percent to fifty-eight. Ten states authorized pari-mutuel betting in 1933 as a new source of revenue. New tracks built during the 1930s included Sportsman's Park in Cicero, Illinois (the former site of Al Capone's dog track), Tropical Park and a rebuilt Hialeah in Florida, and Santa Anita and Hollywood Park in Los Angeles.

Football. Like horse racing, college football was hurt by the onset of the Depression. Although ticket prices were cut, attendance by the fall of 1932 dropped about 20 percent in the East and 15 percent in the Midwest, and many institutions considered dropping their football programs to save expenses. However, the sport recovered and spectatorship reached its pre-Depression level by 1935. In addition, the economic downturn encouraged several cities in warm climates to organize post-season bowl games to promote tourism: Miami inaugurated the Orange Bowl in 1933, followed by New Orleans with the Sugar Bowl in 1935, El Paso with the Sun Bowl in 1936, and Dallas with the Cotton Bowl in 1937.

By 1932, the National Football League (NFL), a struggling enterprise to begin with, was down to eight teams. By the late 1930s, however, spectatorship was growing. A championship game was initiated in 1933 to promote fan interest, and in 1934, the college football all-star game was established. In 1936, the NFL initiated a draft of college seniors to equalize competition. Pro football became more successful in attracting collegiate stars by helping players secure off-season employment.

Basketball. Basketball became much more popular in the 1930s than ever before. In 1931, Madison Square Garden in New York City staged intercollegiate tripleheaders to raise funds for unemployment relief. This practice encouraged sportswriter Ned Irish to promote intersectional college doubleheaders in 1934. In 1938 the first national tournament, the National Invitational Tournament, was established. The National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament began one year later.

Professional basketball was a minor sport at the time. There were only two professional leagues, the predominantly Jewish American Basketball League, which became defunct in 1931 but was reorganized in 1934, and the mostly industrial Midwestern National Basketball League, founded in 1937. These leagues were mainly weekend organizations, and players held full-time jobs. Eastern basketball teams were often ethnically based, like the renowned SPHAs (South Philadelphia Hebrew All-Stars) and the Irish Brooklyn Visitations. Games were often played before dances at ballrooms. In 1939, the Harlem Globetrotters won the first Chicago World Professional Basketball Tournament.

Boxing. Boxing was one sport that benefited from the hard times of the Depression as tough inner-city Jewish, Italian, Irish, and African-American youths tried to escape poverty through prize fighting. There were some eight thousand professional boxers during the 1930s, and competition was fierce in nearly all weight classes. Contenders were commonly controlled by underworld figures, including gangster Frankie Carbo, who established a virtual monopoly over the middleweight division. The greatest fighter of the period was Joe Louis, the first African American to get a shot at the heavyweight title since champion Jack Johnson was defeated in 1915. Louis won the championship in 1937 by knocking out James Braddock. In 1938, Louis fought in a much anticipated rematch with Max Schmeling, a German former world champion who had beaten Louis in 1936. The fight at Yankee Stadium in New York drew over 70,000 spectators. The match had heavy political overtones because it symbolized the conflict between German Nazism and American democracy. Louis represented the hopes of all Americans regardless of race, and his first-round knockout of Schmeling was regarded as a vindication of the American way of life.

THE 1932 AND 1936 OLYMPIC GAMES

The United States hosted the 1932 Olympics. Winter sports were not popular then, but the winter Olympic games in Lake Placid, New York, spurred interest. American speed skaters Jack Shea and Irving Jaffee became stars after each of them won two gold medals. Los Angeles hosted the 1932 summer Olympic games. Organizers feared that the worldwide Depression would cause the games' cancellation, and, in fact, only about 1,400 athletes competed, less than half the number at the 1928 Amsterdam games. Still, the event was a great success, and boasted such innovations as the first Olympic village and many outstanding athletic performances. American athlete Babe Didrikson won two gold medals and one silver medal in women's track and field. The 1932 summer Olympics was also the first to make a profit; the games earned $214,000 for the city and county.

The next Olympic games, held in Berlin in 1936, were almost boycotted by the Americans to protest Nazi oppression of political opponents and ethnic minorities. The United States opted in the end to participate and sent a powerful track-and-field squad, led by Jesse Owens of the Ohio State University, who won an unprecedented four gold medals.

PARTICIPATORY SPORTS

Participation in recreational sports dwindled at the beginning of the Depression due, in part, to rising costs. After 1935 however, the need for diversion, coupled with increased governmental support for recreational activities, significantly improved opportunities for sports in America. The economic downturn did impact the preferred sports of the wealthy. Country club memberships dropped, many clubs closed, golf tournaments were cancelled, and prizes were drastically cut. The United States Golf Association, for example, included 1134 affiliated clubs in 1930; by 1936, there were only 763.

Participation in sports among working-class men and women declined during the early 1930s after one-fourth of company sponsored industrial sports programs were eliminated to save money, with the rest struggling to survive. But interest and participation reemerged later in the decade. Male industrial sports programs stressed bowling, softball, and basketball, while women engaged in bowling, softball, and tennis. Softball, in particular, grew in popularity. It required less skill or space than baseball and was often played at night at lighted parks. In the crowded inner city, neighborhood pool halls and bowling alleys remained important hangouts, but the number of facilities and bowling teams declined at the beginning of the Depression. Bowling rebounded in the late 1930s, as the number of registered teams tripled. Chicago alone had over nine hundred leagues. By 1939, there were 4,600 bowling alleys with receipts of nearly $49 million, and the purse for the American Bowling Congress tournament reached $170,000.

Second-generation immigrants relied on ethnic and religious organizations to facilitate sporting and social events. Ethnic basketball championships in Chicago drew huge crowds. In 1930, Bishop Bernard Sheil founded the Catholic Youth Organization in Chicago to promote sports and to shield young Catholics from Protestant influences.

During the Depression years, the public became increasingly dependent on community recreational facilities, which were heavily financed with $750 million in New Deal money. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) promoted sports by building 770 swimming pools and 5898 athletic fields. The Civilian Conservation Corps built ski runs, camp grounds, and boating facilities. The number of cities sponsoring public recreation programs between 1934 and 1936 doubled to 2,190. Expenditures on recreation programs in the United States rose from $27 to $42 million during those years, and reached $57 million in 1940.

See Also: LEISURE; LOUIS, JOE; OLYMPICS, BERLIN (1936); OWENS, JESSE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Betts, John R. America's Sporting Heritage: 1850–1950. 1974.

Davidson, Judith Anne. "The Federal Government and the Democratization of Public Recreational Sport, New York City, 1933–43." Ph.D diss., University of Massachusetts, 1983.

Noverr, Douglas A., and Lawrence E. Ziewacz. The Games They Played: Sports in American History, 1865–1980. 1983.

Rader, Benjamin G. American Sports: From Folk Games to the Age of Television, 4th edition. 1999.

Riess, Steven A. City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports. 1989.

Steven A. Riess