Locker-room liberty: athletes who helped shape our times and the economic freedom that enabled them.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Namath: A Biography - September Swoon: Richie Allen, the '64 Phillies, and Racial Integration - The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game - Book Review

Namath: A Biography, by Mark Kriegel, New York: Viking, 512 pages, $27.95

September Swoon: Richie Allen, the '64 Phillies, and Racial Integration, by William C. Kashatus, University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 258 pages, $29.95

The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game, by Oscar Robertson, New York: Rodale, 342 pages, $24.95

THE 1970s HAVE experienced a remarkable national rehabilitation. The long-derided Me Decade, which produced such cultural bummers as radical-chic terrorism, The Love Boat, and Raquel Welch disco records, is now routinely celebrated as a creative golden era for film, television, music, literature, and more.

Peter Biskind's 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls cemented the now-conventional wisdom that early-'70s mavericks such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola saved Hollywood with a burst of wild-eyed innovation. Rolling Stone's recent list of the top 500 albums of all time contained a whopping 190 from the decade the magazine once tried to wash its hands of. TV, even while being bitterly satirized in films such as Network, spent the '70s blowing through genre restrictions and political stereotypes with shows such as All in the Family, The Rockford Files, and Soap. A generation's journalistic lions--Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Tom Wolfe, recent suicide Hunter S. Thompson, David Halberstam--produced their best nonfiction work during the era of leisure suits, sideburns, and price controls.

As the arts breached new boundaries and identities, so did society at large, unleashing onto the world an explosion of casual sex, drug use, marginal political movements, and experimental living arrangements. Looking back a quarter of a century later, people have usually chalked up the era's famous restlessness and individualism to external stimuli:Watergate, FM radio, the bloody end to the Vietnam War, a general hangover from the tumultuous 1960s.

But another, less-acknowledged corner of the culture has long deserved more credit for encouraging individual freak flags to fly: the wide and wild world of sports. Operating in a subculture far more socially conservative than those surrounding the professional arts, athletes of the mid-to-late '60s and '70s forced their reluctant and occasionally hostile audiences to confront issues of race, war, and free expression, and we are all better for their efforts.

Muhammad Ali opposed Vietnam and the military draft years before it was cool, while encouraging a generation of kids to give themselves new names and manipulate the formerly all-powerful media. Three decades before metrosexual was a word, New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath shocked male football fans by parading around in mink coats, posing as an "Olivetti Girl" in a sexually charged typewriter ad, and filming commercials for pantyhose. Knuckleball pitcher Jim Bouton ripped the lid off of professional baseball's Ward Cleaver packaging with his pussy-and-pills 1970 memoir Ball Four; two years later Yankee pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich became the most famous wife swappers in the country. Bill Walton convinced the notoriously square UCLA coach John Wooden that smoking dope and attending Grateful Dead shows could be every bit as crucial to the legendary motivator's "Pyramid of Success" as hard work and respecting your teammates (provided you could still shoot 21 for 22 in the NCAA finals). And just about every star of the time had to grapple on a daily basis, in full view of the newly national television audience, with America's combustible conflict between black and white.

In a single generation--between John Kennedy's assassination and the fall of Saigon--the archetype for the pro athlete was transformed from lantern-jawed Midwesterners like Mickey Mantle to pot-gobbling longhairs like Bill "Spaceman" Lee. Earthbound sidemen like Bob Cousy found their game passed over by sky-walking soloists like Dr. J. The era of Johnny Unitas buzz-cuts and Jackie Robinson no-comments was replaced by athletes who looked, played, and spoke however they damn well pleased, injecting creativity and innovation on the field while puncturing mythologies and ditching racist baggage outside the stadium wails.

A key and under-credited reason for this social deregulation of sports had to do with the economics of the games. In 1960 professional athletes in the three major sports (Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Football League) were literally owned by their teams, like race horses, for as long as and on whatever terms the teams wanted. This was known in baseball as the "reserve clause" (and in the other two sports as the "option clause"), and for generations owners had successfully convinced Congress that the clause's competition-suppressing impact should not be considered an antitrust violation, because sports weren't businesses (despite the teams' often vast profits). As a result, if players didn't like their contracts, all they could do was complain to the press or quit, and in the latter case no other team could hire them away.

This system came under sustained attack from the players of all three sports in the mid-1960s, coinciding almost perfectly with their newfound willingness to speak and act out. By 1976, after long and bloody fights, athletes had finally won the right to become free agents, able to sign new contracts with any team after their current deals expired. Combined with the explosion of live satellite television and the short-lived presence of competing professional leagues in basketball and football, the fight for free agency jacked up salaries more than tenfold and put more swagger in the players' steps.

The direct link between economic freedom and unfettered self-expression is the unarticulated subtext of the many biographies of stars from this era. Mark Kriegel's widely praised Namath and William Kashatus' September Swoon: Richie Allen, the '64 Phillies and Racial Integration dig up example after example of contractual bargaining power enabling truly free speech, which in turn thrilled, challenged, and outraged the public and the press. This theme is even more explicit when the athletes tell their own tales, as in basketball Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson's The Big O.

Without his record-breaking $400,000 contract--made possible only by the brief, competitive presence of the American Football League--Joe Namath might never have bent genders, hosted his own weirdo talk show (in which a typical episode included Truman Capote and boxer Rocky Graziano...