Halberstam's concern is not economics but passion, true madness. Perhaps in our society the true madness in the search for excellence is left for the amateur." One could understand the son of a ghetto family playing in the schoolyard for six hours a day hoping that basketball was a ticket out of the slum it was hard to understand the son of Beacon Hill spending so much time and subjecting himself to so much pain to attain an honor that no one even understood. Yet the athletes were almost always the children of the upper middle class, privileged, affluent, a group that in this society did not readily seek hardship. Yet there was no overt financial reward at the end, nor indeed was there even any covert financial reward, a brokerage house wanting and giving special privilege to the famed amateur.
"Those who competed at this level did so with demonic passion. Halberstam, a former oarsman himself, is transfixed by the sport's fierce grip. But rowing, virtually spectator-proof, never got the word it survives, even thrives, supported only by its own addicted competitors. One seat is available four exceptional but generally unknown athletes, simon-pure amateurs, are competing for it.Īmateurism, invented by the British to avoid the mingling of sweat among social classes, has been a dead issue since the first stadium seat was rented for cash. Halberstam's subjects compete at the very highest level in rowing, "an anomaly, an encapsulated nineteenth-century world in the hyped-up twentieth-century world of commercialized sports." The battle is for the right to represent the United States in men's single sculls in the 1984 Olympics. In The Amateurs he moves to the other end of the scale, examining what passes in America for gentleman-athletes. IN The Breaks of the Game David Halberstam investigated the gritty, ghetto- based world of professional basketball, the jazziest athletic enterprise we've yet developed. By John Jerome John Jerome is the author of "The Sweet Spot in Time." June 30, 1985
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