Hippies were not a sporting movement
The hippie movement was not a sporting movement. Its centre was in music, art, drugs, communal living and protest, and its best-known places were the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and, later, college towns and festivals. Most of the people who took part in the Summer of Love were not athletes, and many were openly sceptical of competition, discipline and the team loyalty that organised sport depends on. Organised sport, in turn, was often associated with the conformity the counterculture rejected.
That does not mean the two worlds never touched. In the late 1960s the broader mood of questioning authority, loosening dress codes and valuing personal expression reached professional and amateur sport in several ways. This article looks at those points of contact, without implying that any of the athletes involved were hippies themselves. Most were not.
Joe Namath and the new image of the star
The best-known crossover figure was the quarterback Joe Namath. He signed with the New York Jets in 1965 on a contract reported at around $400,000, which was a very large sum for the time, and he arrived in New York as a young man who dressed well, wore his hair longer than most players and enjoyed his nightlife. He was brash in interviews and cultivated an image of confidence that differed from the quiet professionalism that coaches and fans expected.
By modern standards his hair was not especially long, and he was never a hippie. But set against the crew-cut norm of professional football, it was enough to mark him. He also backed the style with performance. In 1967 he became the first professional quarterback to pass for more than 4,000 yards in a season. In January 1969 he publicly guaranteed that the Jets would win Super Bowl III against the heavily favoured Baltimore Colts, and they did, 16-7.
Namath mattered because he showed that a player could be a celebrity beyond the sport, with the style, the confidence and the media attention that belonged more to music stars. The idea that an athlete could behave like a rock star was one of the more lasting results of the decade.
Hair, dress and the coaches
Hair was the most visible battleground. For much of the post-war period, professional teams and high school coaches expected short hair, clean-shaven faces and neat dress, and a haircut was treated as a sign of discipline. As longer hair became common among young men in the 1960s, many coaches treated it as a sign of rebellion against that discipline.
In schools, disputes over hair codes produced court cases in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with differing results. Some athletes were dropped from teams for refusing to cut their hair. Those cases were about authority more than about hippies, and the players involved had many different motives. Some simply followed fashion.
In professional sport the pressure was usually informal. Teams could fine players, and many used appearance as a test of whether a player would accept the rules. The tension is often dated to the end of the decade, so it falls more into 1968 to 1970 than into 1967 itself.
Flamboyance and colour in baseball
Baseball had its own version. The Red Sox outfielder Ken Harrelson, nicknamed “Hawk”, became known in 1967 for mod clothes, reportedly including Nehru jackets, and for a flamboyant style. He joined Boston that summer after a public dispute with the Kansas City Athletics’ owner, Charlie Finley, and became popular in the team’s pennant run.
Finley himself pushed the sport toward colour and showmanship, with bright uniforms and other experiments, and the Oakland teams of the early 1970s wore moustaches and long hair, which broke with older ideas of how a ballplayer should look. That style remains a separate story, but it belongs to the same change in mood.
From style to politics
For some athletes the shift went beyond style. The refusal of Muhammad Ali to accept induction into the army in April 1967 is the clearest case: the Ali draft refusal turned a sporting champion into a symbol of resistance to the Vietnam War, and it made many Americans choose a side. The Selective Service draft was a daily concern for young men, athletes included.
A few athletes wrote openly about the world they worked in. In 1970, the former football player Dave Meggyesy published a critical memoir about professional football, and the pitcher Jim Bouton published Ball Four, a candid diary of a baseball season. Both books questioned the game’s authority, and both belong to the period right after 1967.
Black athletes also took stands. At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the medal stand, a protest that grew from the wider civil rights movement and not from the hippie scene. The Black Power movement, rather than the counterculture, drove most of the political activity in sport.
Why the gap was real
Part of the distance between the two worlds was practical. Professional athletes in the 1960s were usually paid on short contracts, could be cut or traded at a club’s wish, and depended on a coach’s goodwill to stay on the field. Challenging that system carried real costs. Many players who held political views kept them quiet, and those who spoke up, as the cases of Ali and others show, often paid for it.
There was also a difference in what the two groups valued. Sport is built on rules, rankings and winning, while much of the counterculture questioned all three. When the two overlapped, as in college towns where student protest and campus teams shared the same grounds, the result was usually friction rather than alliance. Coaches who saw long hair as a threat to team unity were not necessarily opposed to change in general, but they did tend to see the locker room as a place where one set of standards had to apply to everyone.
How to read the connection
The most accurate way to see the connection is as shared timing. The athlete’s world and the counterculture both felt the same pressure: younger people wanted more freedom of expression and distrusted institutions. But hippies were mostly outside sport, and sport was mostly outside the hippie world. The athletes who stood out, such as Namath, Harrelson and Ali, did so for different reasons.