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

Marshall created this illusion. A shrewd promoter, creator of the season-ticket concept, he sized up his audience and went heavy on the pageantry. (It is revealing that those who speak fondly of the departed Senators invariably start off by saying what a glorious spectacle were the Presidential Opening Days.) For the 'Skins, Marshall created the first marching band in pro sports and commissioned the fight song, which is a dandy. After victories, George Allen used to go over to Ziebert's and lead choruses of it a cappella. Marshall was also way ahead of his time in attracting women to the Sunday show.

Not that love for the team was eternal. In 1946 Marshall sold 31,000 season tickets; by 1952 the figure was down to 13,000, and mass Sunday euphoria did not become evident until 1971, when the inscrutable George Allen came onto the premises.

For a long time the team's special problem was Marshall 's racial myopia. To him, it was said, NAACP meant Never at Anytime Any Colored Players. His prejudice must be considered in the light of time and place. Washington has always had a Southern exposure (it even had slave markets), and as late as 1925 the Ku Klux Klan marched downtown without upsetting local white sensibilities. Segregation remained the way of life until well after World War II, and uneasiness about race was a main reason why Calvin Griffith took the original Senators to Minnesota in 1961. As soon as a black neighborhood was picked as the site for the new municipal stadium, Griffith started packing.

The District itself is about three-quarters black, although more whites are moving back, house-speculating, but the whole area has about an average metropolitan racial mix and average attitudes on racial matters. Says Jean Fugett, the Redskins ' tight end, who works as a metropolitan reporter for the Post off-season, "You can conjure up all sorts of excuses, but when people like Larry Brown and Charley Taylor didn't get good endorsements here, you can only rationally conclude what is obvious, that this is still a Southern town in many more respects than it likes to admit."

The failure of the champion Bullets—who are predominantly black—to capture Washington 's hearts is also widely presumed to be on account of race. A Post survey disclosed that basketball was the second-most-popular sport in town—15.6% to football's 44.7%—but one gets the feeling that the hoops are on their way to becoming a cult sport, rather like their winter colleague, hockey. The hockey Capitals draw from a small pool of well-educated suburban fanatics, and basketball in Washington seems to be reducing itself to the same sort of monomania—180 degrees away from the mass appeal that has been the salvation of the Redskins . The basketball fans are dilettantes, specialists. Last March, 19,035 banged out the Capital Centre—where both the Bullets and Caps play—to watch a high school all-star basketball game. It wasn't like a game; it was more like an experiment in a laboratory. The spectators were cold-hearted basketball mavens, and they booed the poor adolescents who didn't live up to their press notices and dared to take a bad shot now arid again.

They also booed Lefty Driesell , the University of Maryland basketball coach, merely for showing his face. With his extraordinary aptitude for recruiting, Driesell has raised the neighboring Terrapins to an exalted position in town, perhaps second in interest only to the chic 'Skins, but too long has Lefty promised and failed, and now the wrath of high expectations defeated is falling down upon him. Too, the capital has never been especially keen on college sports; the big bowls, for example, want nothing to do with the Maryland football team because they know that area fans will not travel to support it.

And much of Maryland 's basketball popularity is attributable not so much to the Terps themselves as to the corporate mystique of the Atlantic Coast Conference . ACC games flood Washington television, to the detriment of the Bullets and the NBA . It seems that every Southerner in the government has a rooting interest in one of the ACC teams, and, next to the Boston Red Sox , the North Carolina Tar Heels are probably the most popular out-of-town team in the capital. The Red Sox are a special favorite because such an inordinate number of federal types either come from Harvard or seek to give that impression—and how better to do it than boast Bosox allegiance? (Perhaps it is not fair to point out that there are no two more accomplished also-rans in all the land than the Sox and the 'Heels; mightn't we have been better off at SALT talks with a government full of Yankee baseball and Alabama football rooters?)

But never mind: to the dismay of all other athletic enterprises, nobody gets the attention the 'Skins do. In 1972, the year the team reached the Super Bowl, the Post dispatched a staff of 13 to cover the event—twice as many as covered the first moonwalk and 11 more than it took to topple a President. Both the Post and its rival daily, the Star, have excellent sports sections, but they go berserk as soon as the 'Skins suit up. Radio and TV are worse; they ignore every other sports experience, except possibly the exactas at Laurel.

This is not to suggest that the press goes easy on the 'Skins. The battles with Allen—" Richard Nixon with a whistle," he was called—were regular and rancorous. No, it is just the sheer mass and scope of the coverage, made all the more significant by the fact that Washington has such a media mania. People follow the papers there, much as normal fans follow teams. The way the sports press in Washington covers its beats exactly parallels the way the national press covers the government.

The Redskins are the presidency; you can tell right away because both get heavy coverage, day in, day out, whether or not anything is happening to them. CARTER RELAXES AT CAMP DAVID. 'SKINS SCAN WAIVER LIST. For years the season was treated as a campaign, with the two contending quarterbacks the candidates. Even now, the first pre-training-camp stories—identical to pre- New Hampshire primary stories—are appearing.