Word: contraction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world's premier player (and the world's highest-paid athlete). Although the N.A.S.L. was founded nine years ago, soccer as an American spectator sport was really born in 1975 when the Cosmos persuaded Pelé to come out of retirement with a $4.75 million, three-year contract to evangelize Americans for soccer. His arrival brought instant respectability to American soccer and helped lure to the U.S. such international stars as Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer of the Cosmos and George Best of the Los Angeles Aztecs. Attendance figures soared wherever Pelé and the Cosmos played...
...avarice in perfect laissez-faire. A promoter named Mike Jacobs sent Joe Louis forth to fight an opponent each month. Years later, when all the checks were deposited, Jacobs retired. Louis had to beg the IRS for mercy. As president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey wrote himself a contract that included a percentage of receipts from the sale of players developed on 20 Dodger farm teams. Rickey spent his final years calculating compound interest. Some players whom he sold for $150,000 are now unemployed. Historically, you did not make millions playing ball. You made millions by owning...
...daily press covers the new economics voraciously and impetuously. Details of Catfish Hunter's contract with the Yankees made staid front pages. Sports sections ring with the dull strife of labor negotiations. A hundred newspapers run performance summaries of what they call baseball's Millionaires' Club. The paycheck appears to have become more important than the batting average. The fans read. The fans respond. Alms for the owners...
...competitive, in fact, that the syndicate industry is one of few in America that have not been able to form a trade association. It is also a business so fluid and freewheeling that the typical feature contract between newspaper and syndicate allows either side to cancel without cause upon giving only 30 days' notice. Thus was the New York News last May able to grab Peanuts away from the New York Post, where it had appeared for a decade. Syndicates raid each other's rosters as well. In one of the most spectacular snatches in syndicate annals...
...censorship, however, can boomerang. The New York News last week quietly dropped six Doonesburys that poked fun at the paper for its breathless Son of Sam coverage. To be sure that the twitting of its rival be made public, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which has no contract with Doonesbury, ran two of the offending strips anyway...