Hunter S. Thompson: Sportswriter

On a winter's night in 1968, in a yellow sedan barreling down a dark New Hampshire highway, Richard M. Nixon talked football with Hunter S. Thompson. Nixon would soon win the state's Republican primary—an important kickoff for his deliberate, disciplined campaign. Thompson was an unlikely choice for an intimate audience with the buttoned-down candidate. The outlaw writer in shabby jeans, a chronicler of hippies and Hell's Angels, cast Nixon as a “foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.”¹

That evening, though, Thompson was the lone football fan in the press corps. A campaign aide arranged the interview on the condition that they discuss only football, so Nixon could relax. Sitting in the backseat, the candidate and the writer chatted for the entire hour's drive. Nixon loosened up, even slapping Thompson on the knee while reliving Max McGee's game-winning touchdown catch in the recent Super Bowl. Nixon, who had a “loser” reputation, conveyed respect for Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, the ultimate “winner.” Thompson marveled that Nixon “is a goddamn stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.” The presidential candidate remembered where a backup receiver on the Oakland Raiders had attended college.²

That football conversation launched an enduring, adversarial dynamic between Nixon and Thompson. During Nixon's ensuing presidency, Thompson sharpened his cynicism about American politics and power. Nixon's plastic persona, militaristic emphasis, and duplicitous methods represented the nation's festering alienation. “The saga of Richard Nixon is the Death of the American Dream,” Thompson reflected. “He was our Gatsby, but the light at the end of his pier was black instead of green.”³

The Nixon years coincided with the most fertile, celebrated phase of Thompson's career. He won a reputation as a fearless, drug-fueled critic of social norms and establishment politics. Writing in first-person, often via his alter ego “Raoul Duke,” he spiced his accounts with satire, mixed facts with fantasy, reveled in misbehavior, and skewered the nation's underbelly of hypocrisy and hatred. As copious biographers and critics have explained, it established his brand of “gonzo” journalism.⁴

In this same era, Thompson kept explaining American life through sports. He birthed gonzo at a sporting event, the Kentucky Derby, and practiced it at the Super Bowl. His writing emphasized how sports surfaced an ooze of greed, excess, and racism. Despite his isolated perch, Thompson joined a larger conversation about the role of sports in the early 1970s. While American politics were polarizing over crises about government power, economic stability, race, and gender, the sports world was similarly dividing over questions of authority and freedom. In his inimitable style, Thompson presented a radical critique of sports and society. Nixon was more than his political muse. The two men surveyed sports from across a cultural chasm.⁵

For Thompson, the early 1970s was a return to sportswriting. “There was a time,” he recalled, “when I could write like Grantland Rice.” Though he resented the “sporty bullshit” of hacks who regurgitated the style of old-time columnists, sportswriting had been his livelihood in the 1950s. “Sports writing was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for,” he stated. While serving at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, he worked as the newspaper's sports editor, annoying superiors by moonlighting for a civilian paper and writing sensational, editorializing articles that defied military protocol. Upon his discharge, he worked as a sports editor in a Pennsylvania mining town, unsuccessfully applied at the big New York papers and Sports Illustrated, and wrote for El Sportivo, a Puerto Rican weekly that billed itself as “The Sports Illustrated of the Caribbean,” but in fact mostly covered bowling.⁶

Then, for most of the 1960s, Thompson stopped writing about sports. He served as a Latin American correspondent for the National Observer. A freelance piece for The Nation led to his breakthrough book, Hell's Angels, a sardonic first-person narrative that captured an emerging fascination with violent outlaws. Yet his earlier experience had shaped his style. He wrote breathlessly, driving sentences with verbs, taking license with language. Sportswriting lent him the freedom to write “lunatic gibberish … just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence.”⁷

One year after his Nixon encounter, Playboy commissioned a profile of skier Jean-Claude Killy. As Killy won three gold medals at the 1968 Olympics, magazine writers admired his daring style and debonair charisma. Thanks to the pioneering agent Mark McCormack, who marketed athletes for prosperous consumers, Killy started endorsing Chevrolet, United, Bristol-Myers, and numerous lines of ski equipment and clothes, while Ladies’ Home Journal published family-oriented articles about the suave Frenchman. At auto shows, Killy compared ski racing to driving Chevys, while surrounded by buxom models.⁸

Thompson's article, “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy,” subverted the conventions of sportswriting and foreshadowed the rise of gonzo. He spent ten days following Killy's advertising tour, but publicists shielded the celebrity from authentic interactions. In their brief encounters, Killy resented the brainless marketing grind, but resolved to exploit it. Adopting a truculent first-person perspective, Thompson conveyed his disgust. “As far as I know, you don't exist,” he told Killy over the phone. “You're a life-size dummy made of plastic foam.”⁹

Playboy refused to print any version of Thompson's rambling 110-page submission. The magazine was a vehicle of aspirational consumerism, courting blue-chip corporations such as Chevrolet. The article ran instead in the inaugural issue of Scanlan's Monthly, whose co-founder Warren Hinckle had edited the crusading, leftist magazine Ramparts. Thompson's anti-establishment sportswriting set the tone for Scanlan's, which, in its brief, debt-ridden history, invited the scorn of major corporations and the Nixon administration.¹⁰

Thompson next turned to the Kentucky Derby. Sportswriters loved the event, which provided material about colorful jockeys, affluent owners, earthy trainers, rampant gambling, mint juleps, and sentimental renditions of “My Old Kentucky Home.” In 1970, conventional accounts narrated the victory of longshot Dust Commander. The unconventional Thompson, however, was returning to his hometown of Louisville, bearing the class resentments of his youth. In 1963, moreover, he had investigated the Black community's rankling discontent, challenging Louisville's progressive reputation. Thompson told Hinckle that instead of writing about the actual race, he would describe “the vicious-drunk Southern bourbon horseshit mentality that surrounds the Derby.”¹¹

His story, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” was a chronicle of gross excess, a comic descent into madness, and a portrait of a fracturing America. Again writing in first person, Thompson played the role, in Tom Wolfe's phrase, of a “frantic loser.” He thrashed in a pool of blowhards and racists and greasy spoon restaurants. With his companion, the oddball Welsh illustrator Ralph Steadman, they weaved down highways in a bright-red convertible, beer buckets and booze bottles rattling at their feet. They wandered through the sun-blasted, blubbering masses at Churchill Downs. They wangled into the press box, fooling aghast elites about impending guerrilla protests from the Black Panthers. In the final paragraph, Thompson described rolling up to the airport curb and depositing Steadman, who was covered in beer and vomit and Mace. Meanwhile, the radio brought the latest news on the Cambodia invasion and Kent State massacre.¹²

The homecoming left Thompson in a state of “crazed angst, far gone in a pill-stupor and barely able to think, much less write.” After three days in a New York hotel, cajoled by editors and besieged by copyboys, he surrendered some sprawling half-formed notes. To his surprise, Hinckle loved them. Enhanced by Steadman's grotesque sketches, the Scanlan's article was a sensation. A friend described it as “pure Gonzo.”¹³

Thompson's sabotage of sportswriting had borne a literary genre. He next envisioned a series of gonzo assaults where he and Steadman disrupted institutions of American mass culture: New Year's Eve in Times Square, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and hyped-up sporting events such as the Masters and Super Bowl. They first crashed the 1970 America's Cup in Newport, Rhode Island, the ultimate sporting bastion of the upper crust. They wore absurd outfits, played bongos into the night, and dumped orange dye into the water. Bored by sailing and addled by mescaline, they hopped onto a rowboat at 4:00 am, planning to spray-paint “FUCK THE POPE” on a multimillion-dollar yacht, only to be foiled by the clattering paint canister. Thompson never actually wrote about the America's Cup, but the episode affirmed how sporting events could promulgate characteristics that Thompson reviled, from highbrow snobbery to mass conformity. Gonzo journalism thus embroidered sports into its larger critique of American indulgence.¹⁴

Thompson's signature book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, began as an assignment for Sports Illustrated. During the 1960s, the magazine had established itself as the gold standard for sportswriting, embracing literary approaches to the craft. It hired Thompson to write captions for a photo spread about an off-road motorcycle race called the Mint 400. He brought along attorney Oscar Acosta, extravagantly exploited his expense allowance, and wrote “a much longer & dirtier thing than they wanted.” SI editor Pat Ryan insisted that he resubmit a concise description, which she then nixed. By then, the degenerate duo had returned to Las Vegas to crash a conference of district attorneys, continuing Thompson's drug-propelled, fact-and-fiction romp through a city built on hype and overkill—a rumination on the lost ideals of the 1960s. Thompson wrote as his alter ego, Raoul Duke, “the absolute cream of the sporting press.”¹⁵

The Las Vegas story first appeared in Rolling Stone, which editor Jann Wenner was transforming from a rock magazine into the pre-eminent outlet for provocative first-person journalism. His paradoxical mass-marketing of radical politics and the counterculture depended on Thompson, whose “Fear and Loathing” articles scrutinized the fissures and hypocrisies of the Nixon era. The masthead listed him as “Sports Editor.” Articles filed under Raoul Duke were titled “Memo from the Sports Desk.”¹⁶

Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, on the “Freak Power” ticket, theatrically opposing the paranoid, conservative incumbent. In the aftermath, he pitched a “king-hill Sport Story” to Robert Lipsyte, the progressive “Sports of the Times” columnist for the New York Times, about unionizing ski patrollers opposed by merchants who “hunker down in a brain-swamp of Nazi Agnew platitudes.” His bodyguards in Aspen included Dave Meggysey, the former pro linebacker whose memoir Out of Their League charted his slow alienation from football. Mentored by sports activist Jack Scott, Meggysey decried how coaches commodified players, demanded conformity, and discouraged intellectual pursuits. In this leftist narrative, football glorified militarism and coerced hyperpatriotism.¹⁷

Meggysey joined a burgeoning chorus of anti-establishment voices in sports. Foreshadowed by the “Revolt of the Black Athlete” in the late 1960s, when Black activists protested that sports reflected society's racism, the “Athletic Revolution” of the early 1970s interpreted sports as fundamentally exploitative. Like Meggysey, pro football players George Sauer and Chip Oliver retired prematurely, citing the sport's dehumanization. Gary Shaw's memoir Meat on the Hoof detailed how University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal ousted underperforming and nonconforming players. That sense of alienation also appeared on newspapers’ sports pages, where younger and more liberal columnists supported players’ calls for labor rights and personal freedom. Sports Illustrated ran articles such as “The Desperate Coach,” which highlighted the divides between authoritarian coaches and rebellious student-athletes. The sportswriters Leonard Shecter, Jerry Izenberg, Larry Merchant, Glenn Dickey, and Robert Lipsyte all penned books that cynically assessed the sports landscape from the Left.¹⁸

By contrast, conservatives celebrated sports for instilling values such as discipline, character, and patriotism. Richard Nixon embraced these ideas. He sometimes stated that if he lived another life, he would have been a sportswriter. As president, Nixon employed sports in his efforts to reposition the Republican Party. For instance, attending the 1969 college football game between top-ranked Texas and number-two Arkansas reinforced his “Southern Strategy.” Pro football lent him the highest platform. The 1966 NFL–AFL merger, the 1970 introduction of ABC's Monday Night Football, and the rise of the Super Bowl attested that football had replaced baseball as the national sport. The NFL conveyed modernity, masculinity, and militarism in an appealing package. By placing a football on his Oval Office desk, or by sketching plays for Washington coach George Allen, Nixon cast himself as leader of the “Silent Majority.”¹⁹

Thompson's own football obsession, like his political odyssey, revolved around a quest for authenticity. His book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 sprinkled in sports references and analogies. Just as he embraced the idealistic George McGovern (Figure 1), he admired the rare Dallas Cowboys who resisted autocratic coach Tom Landry. He skewered the phony rituals and half-truths of political campaigns engineered by “greedy little hustlers” like Nixon.²⁰

Figure 1. Hunter S. Thompson on the 1972 campaign trail with Democratic nominee George McGovern. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz, June 1972, Public Domain.

Thompson's campaign book ended with the 1973 Super Bowl. Criticizing Nixon's sporting values, Thompson wrote, “There is a dangerous kind of simple-minded Power/Precision worship at the root of the massive fascination with pro football in this country.” Sportswriters were a “rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks.” He mocked the notion that football represented “everything Good and True and Right in the American Spirit.” And he turned against the Washington Redskins, because “when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from the start.”²¹

The next year, Thompson wrote a rambling, gonzo version of “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl.” Originally, he had planned to follow the Oakland Raiders throughout the 1973 season, but after he supplied players with cocaine while watching game film, the team banished him. His Super Bowl piece for Rolling Stone echoed his earlier critiques of dullard sportswriters and craven administrators. Thompson had once toted beer coolers and hash-stuffed pipes to San Francisco 49ers games at Kezar Stadium, but the NFL had grown too corporate and consumerist. It marketed itself in the mold of the deceased, discipline-obsessed Vince Lombardi—“And it is worth remembering that Richard Nixon spent many Sundays, during all those long and lonely autumns between 1962 and ’68, shuffling around on the field with Vince Lombardi at Green Bay Packers games.” Nixon's co-optation of football, and his reign over American politics, had since gone hand-in-hand.²²

As the Watergate scandal closed a political era, it also marked the decline of Thompson's unique brand of sportswriting. His reporting on Nixon's resignation and pardon had exhausted him, deepening his cynicism. In a 1974 Playboy article, “The Great Shark Hunt”—a gonzo takedown of the ostentatious “sportsmen” at a fishing tournament in Mexico—he wrote that “my feeling for national politics is about the same as my feeling for deep-sea fishing, buying land in Cozumel or anything else where the losers end up thrashing around in the water on a barbed hook.” Nixon's staid hypocrisy had driven him to write with wild and funny fervor, whether he was at the White House or the Super Bowl. Now Nixon was gone. In later years, damaged by drug abuse, Thompson rarely wrote as powerfully about sports, politics, or anything else. He had hit his peak in the early 1970s, when his foil was the president—the man he called his “football buddy.”²³