Future Isn’t Now

Sports predictions are treacherous fare, dangerous things, which may explain why Nostradamus didn’t make many.

From his vantage point in the mid-1500s, Nostradamus kept to the safe track when putting to paper his forecasts for the millennium--famine, pestilence, war, Armageddon. But, in perhaps the first recorded instance of a scribe being stuck for a column on deadline, the famed French seer broke down and broke out some stick-and-ball prophecies for the year 2000.

He hit a few too. If you read him closely enough, Nostradamus was the first to crack the story of corruption within the International Olympic Committee: In the sacred temples scandals will be committed. They will be thought of as honors and praiseworthy. Of one of whom they engrave on silver, gold and medals. The end will be a very strange torment.

And he was the first to foresee Dennis Rodman’s return to the NBA this season:

After a great misery for mankind an even greater approaches when the great cycle of the centuries is renewed.

He even pegged the Ken Griffey Jr. trade rumors in Seattle:

The great city of the maritime ocean, surrounded by a swamp of crystal: In the winter solstice and the spring will be tried by a terrible wind.

But then he got a little too cocky:

There will be omens in the spring, and extraordinary changes thereafter . . . And there shall be in the month of October a great movement of the Globe, and it will be such that one will think the Earth has lost its natural gravitational movement and that it will be plunged into the abyss of perpetual darkness.

The Cubs win the World Series?

At that point, Nostradamus’ editors advised him to stick with what he knows.

Similarly, nearly four centuries later, a track coach named Brutus Hamilton tried his hand at predicting the future of athletics, laying out in 1935 his table of “The Ultimate of Human Effort”--times, heights and distances that represented the “ultimate limit” for track competitors.

“Can the mile be run in 4 minutes flat? Not quite,” Hamilton wrote. “Is it possible for a man to . . . high jump 7 feet? No.”

The fastest 100-meter time humanly possible? Hamilton put it at 10.06 seconds. The longest long jump? Hamilton cut it off at 27 feet 4 3/4 inches.

Most of Hamilton’s “ultimates” were obliterated by the early 1960s, prompting the author to sheepishly write the following message to Ted Smits of the Associated Press in 1962:

“My table of ultimates returns to haunt me. [Gelett] Burgess must have had similar feelings when he wrote the sequel to his ‘Purple Cow’ some 40 years after publishing the original quatrain.

“ ‘Yes I wrote the “Purple Cow”

“ ‘I’m sorry now I wrote it.

“ ‘But I can tell you anyhow

“ ‘I’ll kill you if you quote it.’ ”

Still, that hasn’t stopped legions of sportswriters and observers from going boldly and blindly into the great unknown and attaching their names to predictions as to the state of futuresports, target date 2000. For decades, it has been our irrational pastime: Envisioning what athletes and games and stadiums and equipment might look like at the cusp of the 21st century, transfixed by those mind-bending numbers out of pulp science fiction.

2-0-0-0.

Well, here we are--Month 01, Year 2000--and if Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had been sports fans, just climbing out of their fantastical time machines today, you would have to assume they’d be grandly disappointed.

No wide receivers wearing jet packs.

No outfielders in space suits.

No ballparks on the moon, no basketball arenas with 18-foot-high baskets, no women starting at quarterback in the NFL, no robot referees, no “Rollerball,” no “Death Race 2000,” no glowing baseballs, no Teflon playing fields, no bionic midfielders, no intergalactic War of the Worlds Series.

And still no practical way to make a hockey puck easier to follow on TV.

Future shock?

For all those wide-eyed neuromanticists of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, here’s one:

The future of sports turned out to be a dud.

Baseball in 2000 is still played with essentially the same rules as in 1900, unless you count the designated hitter--and the National League doesn’t. Major leaguers still swing bats made of wood, smacking baseballs still wrapped in horsehide.

Football is still four downs and 100 yards--unless it’s played in Canada. Basketball rims are still 10 feet high. Soccer goals are still eight feet high, eight yards wide. Androids are still ineligible to compete in the Olympics.

Buck Rogers? Didn’t he used to manage the Angels?

Flash Gordon? Relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, right?

The Jetsons? Those are the kids you see, from time to time, bouncing on daddy’s knee in the New York Jet locker room.

In truth, the future looked more like the future 25 years ago, when AstroTurf and domed stadiums were still novelty items and everybody had to have them. Oakland A’s owner Charles Finley produced an orange baseball, declaring it would be the major-league norm by 1998, and aluminum bats began showing up at Little League games.

Sports teams dressed the part as well: the Houston Astros and their neon rainbow stripes, the Chicago White Sox and their short pants, the Washington Bullets and their front-to-back Mobius strip, the World Football League and its color-coded pants (purple for offensive linemen, yellow for defensive backs).

Today, the future is out and retro is in. Across the map, artificial turf is being ripped out of football and baseball stadiums and replaced with cow food. (And still no practical way to sustain a grass field indoors.) Domed stadiums are being demolished in favor of “Ballpark Classics”--nouveau re-creations of 1940s-era stadiums stocked with all the amenities (ATMs, sushi bars, $8 beers) of today.

Uniforms have gone old-school, returning to the pinstripes and cursive script of our grandparents’ youth. A popular cable television channel is devoted, 24 hours a day, to broadcasts of decades-old sporting events and that 1970s game-show staple, “Sports Challenge.”

The New York Yankees continue to dominate baseball. The Lakers are again the best team in basketball. Shades of ‘79, the Rams and the Buccaneers are playing for the NFC championship.

Look around. One hundred years of radical technological advances throughout science and society, and what does sports have to show for it?

Longer basketball shorts.

Fact . . . or Science Fiction?

This isn’t the future our fathers and their fathers envisioned for us. Not even close.

Twice in the 1970s, in 1974 and again in 1979, Sports Illustrated polled sports figures and inventors of the time as to what the face of sports might look like in the year 2000. The predictions were heavily laced with optimism and sci-fi tinged imagination--and, by and large, were as far from the mark as a Billy Joe Tolliver wobbler.

Prediction for 2000: Women will be playing in the major leagues and starting at quarterback around the NFL--because, according to one forecaster, “they have a higher threshold for pain.”

Reality: Ila Borders did pitch professionally in the 1990s, but Class A was as high as she got. June Jones did spend four years in the NFL as a quarterback, but June Jones is a man.

Prediction: Drugs will be sold as concessions, just like hot dogs and popcorn, at professional sporting events.

Reality: No marijuana stands sighted anywhere, although there must be a reason fans continue to show up for Clipper games.

Prediction: Hockey will be played on immense slabs of Teflon instead of ice.

Reality: Go Teflon movement halted by powerful Zamboni lobby.

Prediction: Ski boots will be equipped with sensors that will automatically detach the bindings if too much stress on the leg bone is detected.

Reality: Picabo Street wishes.

Prediction: Boxing will be judged electronically, with sensors placed inside the gloves and boxers covered in a sensitized powder, enabling each punch to be recorded, graded for impact and totaled for all to see on an overhead scoreboard.

Reality: Lennox Lewis wishes.

Prediction: Non-contact sports will be played in the nude.

Reality: Figure skating? Nope, too cold. Track and field? Sorry, Nike and Adidas need their advertising space. Women’s beach volleyball? That’s as close as it gets.

Prediction: Because of better conditioning and advances in medicine, professional athletes will have careers lasting 25 years and more.

Reality: Nolan Ryan finally retired.

Prediction: Scouting in professional football will be completely computerized, making mistakes on draft day impossible.

Reality: Lawrence Phillips, Dimitrius Underwood, Ryan Leaf.

Prediction: Every poor-weather team in the NFL will play its home games inside a domed stadium.

Reality: Buffalo, Green Bay, Cleveland, Chicago.

Prediction: Electronic sensors will be placed around home plate, along the base lines and inside the bases, rendering umpires obsolete.

Reality: Richie Phillips did what he could, but some big-league umpires remain employed.

Prediction: Quarterbacks’ helmets will be equipped with calculators and Lexan visors, upon which the play most probable to succeed in a given situation will appear before his eyes. Quarterbacks will also wear biomechanical devices on their backs, enabling them to throw a football 150 yards, because fields will be much bigger in 2000.

Reality: Trent Dilfer could have used the help.

Prediction: Wide receivers will wear a contraption enabling them to jump three feet higher to catch these 150-yard bombs and running backs will strap power packs around their thighs, helping them to plow through lines of 7 1/2-foot tall, 400-pound defensive tackles.

Reality: Wide receivers and running backs left to their own devices.

Prediction: City allegiances to professional sports teams will crumble, according to an Institute for the Future researcher named Mike Palmer, because “no one has loyalty to a city in these days of suburbs and transiency. I wouldn’t be surprised if owners began to organize teams based on ethnic or ideological loyalties to regenerate enthusiasm--games featuring the Steelworkers vs. the Executives, the Hippies vs. the Straights, Hunters vs. Animal Lovers.”

Reality: Nothing of this sort widespread yet, although annual Freeway Series now pits Fox vs. Disney.

Prediction: Hockey and football will be more violent in the year 2000, according to an Atlanta Omni executive named Lee Walburn, because “we may be such a sedentary society that we need some release for our emotions. It’ll be a matter of psychological therapy to have violent sport. We may not see men fighting to the death, but we could have animals killing each other--cockfights, pit bulldogs, maybe even piranhas eating each other to death on television.”

Reality: The World Wrestling Federation.

Prediction: Sports will become cerebral pursuits, with a game of football eventually consisting of no more than four plays, to be replayed again and again, analyzed from a variety of slow-motion angles and judged for its closeness to perfection, like gymnastics or figure skating. The winning team will be the one that performs its four plays closest to a perfect 10.0.

Reality: As Howard Cosell aptly put it when a Sports Illustrated writer raised this possibility in 1974, “That’s an absurd extreme.”

John Madden, not Dick Button, remains the highest paid football analyst on television. And Mozart has yet to be used as intro music to “NFL PrimeTime.”

Oh-for-2000

Sports in 2000--other famous last words:

* Frederick Rand Rogers, in his 1929 book, “The Future of Interscholastic Athletics,” predicted a short boom period of popularity for collegiate sports in America, with a sharp decline in public interest near the end of the century.

This reduction of interest, Rogers wrote, “will be balanced by greater interest in semi-professional sports, municipal golf and tennis tournaments, and private club athletics. Coaches who prefer to remain in the coaching field more than a few years (it is seldom that scholastic sports coaches continue this mode of occupation throughout life) will find opportunities to do so in these other adult activities.”

* New York Times sports columnist Leonard Koppett, 1975: “The easy-money, apparently endless expansion era is over and the major league scene, which has doubled in size during the last 15 years, is now headed for contraction.”

* Anatoli Korobkov, head of the Russian Physical Culture Institute in Moscow, writing in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness in 1972: “Since life in space and both underground and underwater will have passed over into the common place by 2000, sport is offered as a means of preparing the physically unfit for these new conditions.”

* The Futurist magazine, predicting in 1979 the development of sports in space by the turn of the century: “If space colonies and orbiting factories in space are actually built, one side benefit will be the emergence of a whole new range of sports that depend on free-fall or low-gravity environments.” Along with space-station swimming competitions, The Futurist imagined that “other space colony sports might include human-powered flight, space hot-rodding in alcohol-fueled extra-colony ‘vans,’ and, not least of all, sex in zero-g. As futurist Arthur C. Clarke puts it: ‘Weightlessness will bring new forms of erotica. And about time, too.’ ”

* The Physician and Sportsmedicine magazine, 1976: “Will we stop running or playing tennis altogether, preferring to sit passively in massive amphitheaters and smirk at superathletes brutalizing each other? Or will we become a nation of joggers and players, turning away from the professional arenas? Will the government make us exercise?”

* Darold A. Treffert, director of the Winnebago (Wis.) Mental Health Institute, 1976: “I see us returning to some simpler kinds of virtues and pursuits . . . There might be more interest in a family baseball game than in the World Series.”

(Actually, Treffert was right, once, in 1994, the year a labor impasse wiped out the World Series. Family baseball games were big in October ’94.)

* Dan Canham, athletic director, University of Michigan, 1974: “If you’re talking about 25 years, I think that by then--in fact, in a lot less time--we’ll have nothing but a coast-to-coast super conference in football. No school will stay in the game except the super powers--maybe 20 teams, maybe 25. Everyone else will be in club sports.”

* Sports Illustrated writer William O. Johnson, 1974: “Assuming proper controls, which would be little different from the controls now in effect to keep illegal gambling from influencing game results, sport could be run almost entirely from gambling proceeds. Indeed, stadium seats now going for as much as $10 might be as cheap as general admission to racetracks, now averaging $1.50, or even be free.”

Free football by 2000, of course, was little more than wishful thinking. There was a lot of that going around among the prognosticators of the last 40 years, although the gold medal in that event has to go to John Lucas, author of the 1992 book, “The Future of the Olympics.”

Looking ahead to the 21st century, Lucas wrote:

“It is my hope that sometime between the end of the 1996 Olympic Games and the beginning of the year 2001, the IOC will have accumulated enough money and invested it so wisely that it can then devote all of its considerable energy and intellect to other even more important enterprises.”

And: “Although it asks a great deal more of the Olympic leadership than of the larger world’s leadership, I suggest that they always take the ‘moral high ground’ on every difficult issue, never compromise, act with everlasting integrity and avoid wrong answers and (even worse) ‘cheap answers.’ Olympic leadership must be led by the dictum of Abraham Lincoln that we must ‘cultivate the moral world within us as assiduously and prodigiously as we have cultivated the physical world around us, that we may endure.’ ”

And: “With all the passion that I can muster, I urge all IOC members to adorn themselves in a Joseph’s-coat of wisdom and, in 1993 or 1997, select a new president even wiser than Juan Antonio Samaranch.”

And finally: “Over the next generation, most athletes’ drug problems will be markedly reduced. I have that much faith in most of these young men and women, all over the world.”

Four out of five doctors, however, advise against holding one’s breath.

On to 2100

So it is mid-January 2000 and no one anywhere is confusing ESPN with the Sci-Fi Channel. Were the prognosticators of yesteryear really round the bend . . . or has sport simply been slow in answering the bell?

“I think technology will move us closer to those predictions over the next 10 years,” predicts Keith Kreiter, president of the Edge Sports International athlete agency. “We will move closer to those predictions within the next 10 years than in the previous 50. I see the next 10 years just absolutely going through the roof.”

For instance?

“The fan experience is going to change completely,” Kreiter says. “I see instant access taking place even while you’re at the stadium. I see miniature PCs on your seat in which you would be able to download information and sign on to the Internet during the game.

“It’s just going to be amazing. With broad-band [cable] taking place, you’re going to be able to watch a game on your cable and at the same time be able to surf the Net and get updated scores all over the country and have 500 channels and it’s going to be ridiculous.”

Brian Murphy, editor of the Sports Marketing Letter, has the same vision.

“We are to the year 2050 what the year 1900 is to today in terms of the development of new communications media,” Murphy says. “The media that will prevail 50 years from now are probably things of which we have only the vaguest notion, if at all.

“But what we can count on is that the general trend of making sports more accessible in the home will continue. New media may offer all different kinds of sports alternatives.

“Picture if you will, for example, an ability to change the outcome of a game. Suppose you could have a medium which would allow people to see what would have happened if. If he had made the catch. If Bill Buckner hadn’t let it go through his legs. Then, what would’ve happened? It may be possible to accurately re-create it.”

Yes, Angel fans, there is hope for the future.

Other trends forecast for the next 100 years:

* Women breaking the gender barrier and playing their way onto men’s professional teams.

“If gene technology continues at the present pace,” Murphy says, “one will be able to design your own female football players. They’ll look like the girls who used to be on American Gladiator. There’s no reason why, with a little genetic tweaking, you can’t create an embryo which eventually grows up into a 350-pound, very fast-moving, very very strong woman linebacker.”

Soccer would seem a logical sport for the first female breakthrough--you don’t think Mia Hamm starting at right forward for the Major League Soccer MetroStars would bolster attendance (to say nothing of the MetroStars themselves) right now?

Murphy, however, believes the female revolution will begin with major league baseball.

“She’ll be a pitcher,” Murphy says. “I say this because of the tradition of women’s fast-pitch softball, and that there’s already a lot of data to show that there’s absolutely no difference in how fast the women can get the ball over the plate.

“So that’ll be the first and easiest thing to spot. And not only that, she’ll be an American League pitcher.

“You want to know why? She doesn’t have to hit.”

* Corporate takeover of professional team nicknames.

Marquee matchup in the not-too-distant future: The Mitsubishi Lakers against the Amazon.com Knicks in Game 7 of the Nike/Microsoft NBA finals at Staples Center. Kreiter: “I would be foolish to say that would never happen. The actual franchise value is getting way too expensive for an individual investor to be able to purchase these clubs.”

Murphy: “You’ll see the Golden State Walkmen against the Los Angeles Gameboys. The teams are going to be named after the products made by the corporation. The Mighty Ducks. That one already has happened.”

* Global professional leagues.

The NFL already has its European league. NBA games are already televised in more than 100 countries. Once supersonic travel becomes commonplace, predictions are that Laker trips to South America and true “World Series” showdowns between the Yankees and the Tokyo Giants will be standard fare.

Kreiter: “There are already predictions the NBA might have a division or two abroad. There would kind of be an NBA Europe. The league already has offices all over the world. Basketball has quickly become the second most popular sport in the world . . .

“I could possibly see baseball developing something similar to the McDonald’s Cup, in which the champions of Europe play the NBA champions. I think the McDonald’s Cup will grow in stature and I think it’ll be huge eventually. I’ve already heard rumblings that there is talk within baseball of doing something like that.”

And, finally, a longshot:

Los Angeles will get an NFL team.

(We have 100 years, right?)

“Los Angeles will get a pro football team,” Murphy predicts, on one condition:

“If they find someone who would buy a ticket.”