Its' Tough To Be The Hometown Team In No One's Hometown!

Remember the word smart? Not just smart like bright, but smart like fashionable, and also smart like cocky or fresh. Smart is the best word for Washington, in all those ways. Among the top 20 metropolitan areas of the country, Washington has by far the highest per capita income and level of education. And you could say it is a pretty smart sports town. It is smart to be seen at a Redskin game. The smart guys wait for the NBA playoffs. World tennis is run in Washington by Donald Dell. The National Rifle Association is located in the capital and lobbies smartly there, so that every sportsman in this great nation retains the God-given right to dispatch fellow sportsmen with Saturday Night Specials. Washingtonians are very knowledgeable, very involved in studying sports, even if they rarely bother with actually paying to see a game. They flood the sports pages with letters expressing indignant opinions about minutiae. George Allen, the former Redskin coach, still viewed by many as a Napoleon on Elba, continues to get so much mail from Washington that he has had to hire a temporary secretary to help him reply. Washington radio is filled with all manner of those awful talk shows on which bores and egomaniacs call in to harangue statistics freaks.

On the other hand, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Washington has never possessed any real money. Even today it is still a town of department stores, not of boutiques. The taxis pick up additional passengers along the way, like Mexican jitneys. The most important people in town, the role models, if you please, are politicians, who expect freebies for the best seats. The baseball Senators, under the Griffith family, survived on the concessions and what Cubans they could bring in on green cards to pitch and bunt. George Preston Marshall and his Redskins fled from Boston during the Depression, penny-anted through the War with Sammy Baugh, and then kept the franchise afloat by selling its soul to white Dixie TV viewers, refusing to integrate the roster until 1962.

After Calvin Griffith cut and ran with the Senators to Minnesota, the capital had an expansion club for 11 seasons until the absentee owner, Bob Short, started whining about the dearth of TV revenue, and spirited the team to a Texas interchange. "If the Pirates threatened to move out of Pittsburgh, one of the Mellons would say, 'Hey, Pittsburgh needs a team, take it out of petty cash,' " says Shirley Povich, the retired sports columnist of The Washington Post. "But here there was no one to buy the club from Short." With the Redskins' Marshall dead, the bulk of Washington's football franchise belongs to Jack Kent Cooke, who lives in Los Angeles. The hockey Capitals have had to promise their fans their "money back if not satisfied" in order to scare up season-ticket buyers, and after the Bullets won the NBA last year, they reportedly added only 675 more season tickets, up from a meager 2,875.

Andy Dolich, director of marketing operations for the Washington Diplomats, the town's soccer team (owned by an absentee conglomerate), says, "This is a one-industry town, but the product is paper. You can't sell season tickets to the government. Sure, there are all the trade-association guys, but they don't have to go to games. They have to go to parties. If there is such a thing as a lunch-pail town, then Washington is an hors d'oeuvres town, and the hors d'oeuvres are always free."

The irony of all this is that, although there is a paucity of great wealth, just about everybody in Washington has walking-around money, incomes averaging fully 25% more than the national figure. The noble bureaucracy is more and more considered to be an American mandarin class, benignly ruling a poorer nation of middle-class unfortunates. The Redskins (or the, more familiar, 'Skins) have the highest average ticket price, $12.65, in team sports. Almost everyone is land-rich, job-guaranteed and pension-assured. There is more inclination to speculate than to root. It is not just a coincidence that the sports pages in Washington are glutted with gambling information. The lordly Post ventures into the how-to shallows only on two regular occasions: when it comes to instructing the local body politic in what is fashionable to wear to Redskin games and how to bet on sports with savvy.

If any of the remarks on Washington contained herein appear unduly harsh, it is possible they arise from the author's own early municipal bigotry. In honoring the Supreme Court's dictum that journalists must fess up to what is in the back of their minds, it is only fair to reveal that I hail from Baltimore and possessed certain childhood prejudices against Our Nation's Capital. This was because both the Senators and Redskins then held Baltimore's territorial rights, which forbade my fair city from achieving major league status.

But it is also the truth that as I grew in grace, through the magic of television I came to gain sympathy for the poor denizens of Washington. I watched the 'Skins stumble about the gridiron every Sunday, and while to this day I can repeat Hail to the Redskins as well as I can Ring-Around-a-Rosy and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, that stirring martial air was hardly enough to make up for the accompanying dreadful pigskin antics. The Senators were, God forbid, even more inept, so frightful that they went under an alias: they were known as the Nationals or, worse, the Nats. One of their sponsors was National Bohemian Beer, and one year they had a song that went, "I'm nuts about the Nats. I'm nuts about the Nats. I'm crazy about the Senators, but I'm nuts about the Nats."

In Baltimore we were privileged to watch the Nats on TV. It was a sorry spectacle. The rest of the country saw Washington as this magnificent city of monuments, museums and the White House. We in Baltimore viewed Our Nation's Capital through the prism of the 'Skins and the Nats.

One time, my favorite time, the Nats got a runner to first and, carried away by this aberration, the manager sent in a fleet pinch runner. His name was Julio Becquer, one of the many Cubans who peopled the Nats' roster. Julio found his way to third, but then, unfortunately, the Nats' brain trust desired to conduct some intricate strategy, and they had to remove the pinch runner for a pinch runner because the original speed merchant could not understand English. To me, that sporting episode best symbolizes Washington: a city of pinch listeners, in for pinch runners.

I asked my father once about Washington. He replied, "It's a strange place, son. You can't stand up to take a drink there." It was true, too. Until very recently, no person on his feet in a public establishment could, even for an instant, hold a glass of spirits in Washington, D.C. (This law, I am advised by Duke Ziebert, a preeminent Washington restaurateur, was instituted "to protect the working girl," although why, I cannot imagine, since working girls in Washington can protect themselves, in the same sense that killer bees can.)