Sports: '30S Relief From Depression

The grim story of 1930s America was the story of lines - soup lines, worry lines and a psychological lifeline that eased a generation's long wait for deliverance from unfathomable darkness.

The nation never had greater need this century for the saving grace of its sports heroes than during the Great Depression.

Out of nowhere, the American dream had shattered like a precious vase dropped on a stone-cold floor. Manifest destiny had become manifest misery.

The country was at peace during the early 1930s. Yet for too many, peace of mind was as hard to come by as food, a job and money.

The familiar, chilling image from a time as tragic as any during the 20th century was that of haggard men and women huddled in long lines outside soup kitchens and defaulting banks.

One-third of the country was broke and hungry during the Depression. Many among the other two-thirds feared they might be next on the soup line.

Sports heroes became an unlikely coping mechanism during the financial storm of the century.

Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Babe Didrikson delivered light into an otherwise-dark world.

"The sports heroes of the 1930s provided relief from the depression of the Depression," said Marty Glickman, a 1936 Olympic teammate of Owens and a longtime broadcaster. "It was a tough time. There was a lot of unemployment and hunger, a lot of people on line for food. Listening to sports on the radio was one of the few enjoyments of the time."

Sports heroes symbolized something strong and something lost - the successful self-made men and women others once had been.

"Sports heroes provided our daily emotional bread; for 60 minutes or three hours, the world was right again," University of Cincinnati sports historian Kevin Grace said. "Even though two-thirds of America was getting by, it was a time of great fear.

"People needed a way to balance out that fear."

The nation had been riding the false high of the 1920s boom only to crash with the stock market in October 1929.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Americans in his March 4, 1933, inaugural address that they had nothing to fear but fear itself. But with more than 15 million Americans out of work, a lot of people had plenty to fear.

So they wrapped themselves in the security blanket of one of their few remaining sources of wealth.

"We didn't want our sports heroes during the 1930s to be human beings, we wanted them to be gods," Grace said.

"Sports heroes were larger than life back then. And we as a country wanted it that way, because we were grubbing for a living."

Even a future sports legend was forced to grub.

Golf great Arnold Palmer, born in 1929, recalled being so poor during the Depression that he and his father hunted rabbits, pheasants and squirrel for food on the Latrobe (Pa.) Country Club golf course where his father worked as greenskeeper and pro.

Economic despair spread like a great plague. The agent of financial ruin was the stock-market crash, in which nearly $30 billion was lost in a matter of days. Mortgages went unpaid. Farm foreclosures rose dramatically. By 1933, 1,300 banks had closed. Rich and poor watched their businesses, farms, homes, jobs and hopes disappear with their savings.

"It was mental therapy to watch a Jesse Owens or a Babe Ruth perform in person," said John Lucas, Penn State's 72-year-old Olympic historian emeritus. "Jesse Owens' career spanned from 1932 to 1937, the darkest years of the Depression, which was especially difficult on African-Americans.

"To see Jesse Owens run in Michigan, Chicago or St. Louis during the Depression was better than medicine. It didn't put money in your wallet. It didn't help you get a job.

"But seeing another human being perform at an almost metaphysical level uplifted the human spirit. If only for the briefest time, people were inspired and forgot their problems."

Major League Baseball, the most popular sport of the decade, set an attendance record of 10 million in 1930. But attendance dipped to 8.2 million in 1931, beginning a three-year decline.

"The economic circumstances of the time prevented people from spending on entertainment such as baseball," said Bruce Markuson, senior researcher for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. "Declining attendance was in direct correlation to the Depression. By 1933, attendance was 6.1 million, lowest since the war-interrupted 1919 season. But it climbed back by decade's end."

Two African-Americans emerged as the Depression's most influential sports figures. Jesse Owens and Joe Louis were both born in the Jim Crow South. Both rose above racial injustices to symbolize the virtue of the American way against German strongmen.

The worst of times for the nation was among the best for sports celebrities.

It was a time before the prying eyes of television and investigative journalism.

No one seemed to mind that Ruth was a flabby, flawed caricature of the excess of the Roaring '20s on his way to 1936 retirement.

"It was never written about Babe Ruth that he'd eaten four hot dogs or that he was a drinker and carouser who was out all night before a game," sports historian Bud Greenspan said. "The better sports figures of that day were portrayed as heroes.

"It was all about idolatry. All we read and heard about was what great inspirations these people were. Yet those guys weren't any better or worse than the sports figures of today."