Socking It to Bad Guys of Sports

“Whatever happened to heroes? Where did the guys in the white hats go? Whatever became of John Wayne? I had four television sets going over the weekend, together with pictures-in-pictures. I watched everything from hockey to playoff baseball to football to tennis. All I saw were fights, quarreling, cheating. Never once did I hear the word sportsmanship or fair play . All I heard was ‘Win! Just win!’ The most polite, least violent things I saw were prizefights.”

You would probably expect those words would emanate from the pinched mouth of a blue-nosed Cotton Mather type from Salem or a spoilsport NFL official or some self-appointed guardian of public morals, some Republican hatchet-man from Carolina.

It comes, in fact, from a man who was an icon of the liberated left, the man who broke the mold of network television and brought the outrageous, the devilish, the tweak-the-noses-of-the-Establishment humor to the television tube.

For those of you too young to remember, “Laugh-In” was a spoof of just about everything, a takeoff on mankind’s morals never before seen in mass entertainment. To give you an idea, “Saturday Night Live” is merely a spinoff on “Laugh-In,” a rank copycat.

“Laugh-In” made society laugh at itself. It was as spontaneous as a belch. It gave the world Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Lily Tomlin, Arte Johnson, Judy Carne and Henry Gibson, as well as the headliners, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. It was a series of blackout skits that shocked and rocked the audience with punchlines never before heard outside a Minsky burlesque house, and it made household phrases out of “Sock it to me!” (always accompanied by a pail of water in the face) and “V-e-e-r-r-y interesting!” and no subject was too sacred for its lampooning.

America loved it. It was the idea and creation of producer George Schlatter, and it was so revolutionary it took Schlatter four years to break down network barriers. They put it on finally only as a sacrificial lamb opposite the runaway ratings champion, Lucille Ball. Chuckles Schlatter: “They didn’t think anybody would be watching. They said America wouldn’t get it. I told them, ‘You laughed, didn’t you? And America is smarter than you!’ ”

So, when George Schlatter-- that George Schlatter, of all people, TV’s resident anarchist--is concerned with the endemic nose-thumbing at conventional behavior in sports, it behooves you to listen.

Schlatter is the last guy to deplore end zone dances, celebratory spikes or victory jubilation. It’s the glorification of violence that disturbs him.

“We make entertainment out of violence,” he says. “We salute it. We re-run it. We breathe it in with our air. We admire the guys we define as ‘hitters.’

“We are now faced with a society devoted to non-heroes. We deify the guys who would have been the bad guys years ago. You’d root for the rustlers in the movies today.

“We’ve destroyed our myths. Now, it’s Christopher Columbus’ turn in the barrel. We’ve cut down Babe Ruth. This country was not built on anti-heroes, but we’re asked to subsist on them.

“We cheer a guy we know is on steroids. We idolize the rule-breaker. We used to be a nation of rules but we say rules are for losers.”

Schlatter’s own sports career was checkered. A one-time pulling guard for Missouri Valley College, he got an early eye-opening look at the way sports operate in this country. “We had a student enrollment of 600, and 135 of them were football players,” he admits. “They were all ex-Marines mustered out of the war. We didn’t have helmets or jerseys that matched or shoes that fit, but we won 42 straight games--often by 60-0.”

For Schlatter, the lesson was not lost: You don’t get football teams out of classrooms, you get them out of barracks. Or cells.

His own career took a show business turn. A stint at the St. Louis Municipal Opera (he was a baritone) gave him a taste for footlights, and a transfer to Pepperdine College (then) and a position as an agent and nightclub booker brought him into the Hollywood circle.

He produced Dinah Shore shows--he tipped his flair for the lunatic once by having Dinah ride into the camera on a cow. The idea for “Laugh-In” germinated from burlesque house skits he watched in St. Louis as a student. “And they stemmed from my own minimal attention span and basic anarchistic approach to life,” he says.

Schlatter, who will be producing a two-hour NBC special on Muhammad Ali’s 50th birthday in February, admits he is an unlikely spokesman for a status quo in sports. Or anything else. “But we were careful to give both sides,” he says. “You have to recognize there is no victimless humor. But we victimized both sides. We pricked pomposity, but in a way where we had a Richard Nixon, Billy Graham, Martha Mitchell and Lee Iacocca to come on our show.”

He sees fairness lacking in today’s No. 1 TV entertainment, sports. “We have to have heroes,” he says. “The consequences to society will be great if we keep sending a message that violence is good. Violence means winning is the message they’re giving out today. The consequences are street violence, violence as an acceptable alternative, violence as manhood, heroic. We pay because a large part of society derives its accepted norms of behavior from what they see on television. We have to get turned around. Weed out the thugs. I say don’t kick a guy out of one game for fighting, kick him out of two. Or three.

“This country needs heroes. Desperately. You know my favorite parts of football telecasts? The United Way commercials. The athlete as the good guy. The hero, not the thug. The game as a game. Not a war.”

With Schlatter, you wait for the punchline. Or to get hit with the bucket full of water.

There wasn’t any. For the creator and producer of “Laugh-In,” this was no laughing matter.