In the year after the 1929 Wall Street crash, Babe Ruth negotiated an $80,000 salary with the New York Yankees.
According to contemporary reports, the nation’s greatest baseball player was asked why he should be paid $5,000 more than President Herbert Hoover. “Why not?” said Ruth. “I had a better year than he did.”
Three years later, Ruth’s salary had been slashed to less than half as the Great Depression gripped the western world and U.S. professional sport, in particular, suffered.
Ruth’s prodigious appetite for home runs and the good things of life mirrored the heady extravagances of the 1920s, a decade highlighted by the 1927 world heavyweight rematch between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney.
Tunney retained his title and pocketed a million dollars for half an hour’s work.
Five years the bubble had burst. Thirteen million Americans, more than a quarter of the work force, were out of work, boxing was in a slump and baseball and football attendances had plummeted precipitously.
Under Connie Mack, the Philadelphia Athletics won the World Series in 1929 and 1930 but with large salaries to pay and falling gates, Mack was forced to sell his best players and his team were never a force again before World War Two.
Yet, largely through necessity, the 1930s was the decade when sport became both mass entertainment and recreation in the United States, Europe and the British Empire.
Sport was an inexpensive hobby and soccer, swimming, athletics, boating and camping became popular. The nordic countries practised winter sports, the French cycled and the Germans specialised in gymnastics.
SALARY CAP
European professionals had not enjoyed the giddy salaries paid to their American counterparts who, not for the last time, measured their worth by the sums commanded by their Hollywood contemporaries.
English soccer players taking part in the continent’s most popular sport had their wages capped at eight pounds a week throughout the decade. Tickets remained affordable and grounds were packed.
“The Saturday match became more than mere diversion from the daily grind because there was often no work to be relieved,” wrote Arthur Hopcraft in his 1968 classic “The Football Man”.
“The footballer as representative had become the true working class hero. He came from these streets where the spectators lived.”
Englishman Stanley Matthews was one such working class hero, starting a career at Stoke City in 1932 which was to stretch 33 years.
Another was Australia’s Don Bradman, a self-taught cricketer from the country who became the finest batsman of all time and gave a new country a sense of pride as he led them to victory over their imperial masters.
NEW DEAL
Hoover had declined to open the 1930 Lake Placid Winter Olympics and in his absence his Democratic presidential opponent Franklin Roosevelt grasped the opportunity.
Hollywood helped promote the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics through Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow and Marlene Dietrich.
Sixty-nine Brazilians set off in a cargo ship laden with coffee to sell on the way, but in a time of surplus managed to offload enough only to fund 24 of their athletes.
After his election in the same year, Roosevelt’s New Deal helped to spread sport throughout the community.
Organised games and sports were encouraged with gymnasiums, swimming pools, tennis courts and golf courses built as well as dams, bridges, highways and public buildings.
Government and private enterprise combined in 1932 to build the Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Its 80,000 capacity was easily the biggest in the United States.
Britain and France established colleges to train physical education teachers and Portugal introduced compulsory physical education in schools.
Fascist Italy and Germany also encouraged sport, with explicitly militaristic goals, and the Soviet Union All-Union Physical Culture Council was set up to promote mass participation sport.
Two remarkable Americans furthered the cause of black athletes in the face of prejudice at home and abroad as the world emerged from depression and lurched towards war.
Joe Louis fought his way out of Detroit via the Golden Gloves amateur tournaments to become world heavyweight champion.
Jesse Owens, a grandson of slaves, outraged the Nazi propagandists who sneered at the United States for selecting “black auxiliaries” by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
In the Sprint Race, as the cars came in formation towards the rolling start, an incident involving USA, Brazil and India brought out the red flag.