A mid-winter's sports reader
Sports Biblio Reader 1.17.21
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: The 1948 Cleveland Indians; New and Classic Running Books; The Flyers vs. the Red Army; America’s Last Amateur Basketball Olympic Gold Medalists; The Last Fun Umpire; Rick Telander; Waiting for Cricket in Sri Lanka; The Photographer Who Captured the Hand of God; Escape from Castro’s Cuba; RIP, Inside Sport Magazine?
A Few Good Reads
Thanks to readers who passed along some of the links below. I’ve been a bit under the weather this week, with some knee pain to boot, and haven’t been able to put the newsletter together as I intended. Enjoy!
Coming in late March: Luke Epplin’s debut book, “Our Team,” about Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, former Negro League stars who were the first black players to win a World Series, with the 1948 Cleveland Indians. Review here in Publishers Weekly;
Runner’s World Magazine takes a look at new and classic running books, from how-to and nutrition guides, motivational help, and human interest profiles. I’m not a runner, but an eventual goal is to at least hike some of the Appalachian Trail distance runner extraordinaire Scott Jurek writes about in “North,” with a much more leisurely objective in mind: just to get moving again;
From the Broad Street Hockey blog, a remembrance of the Philadelphia Flyers’ victory over CSKA Moscow, aka the Red Army team, in 1976, the then-Stanley Cup champions energized by an electric crowd at the Spectrum;
In 1984, Bob Knight put together what turned out to be the last amateur U.S. team to win an Olympic basketball gold medal, featuring college stars Chris Mullin and Michael Jordan. Eight years before they returned under NBA auspices, the future Dream Teamers went through grueling tryouts, with another 1992 luminary, Charles Barkley, missing the cut;
From Baseball Prospectus, Roger Cormier writes about Dutch Rennert, the longtime umpire famous for his dramatic, booming calls of balls and strikes behind the plate, but whose generous interpretations of the strike zone weren’t always welcomed in the dugouts;
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the global travel system last March, Englishman Rob Lewis was on a plane to Sri Lanka to watch England’s cricket tour. That was called off, but Lewis has remained there ever since, living on the beach, adopting a dog and vowing to stay until he could watch in person. But the rescheduled tour will not be allowing fans in-person for a two-Test series;
From the Christian Science Monitor, a review of “The Eagles of Heart Mountain,” a soccer team of Japanese-Americans living in an internment camp during World War II;
Sports book author Tim Wendel is publishing a sequel to his 2006 baseball novel “Castro’s Curveball” in March. “Escape from Castro’s Cuba” features a Washington Senators minor league catcher who returns to Havana after the Communist regime has taken over and gets entangled in an effort to bring a Cuban prospect to the majors;
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander has been named the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting, with ESPN’s Elizabeth Merrill the winner of the sportswriter of the year honor for 2019;
At The Defector, an examination of perhaps the most famous soccer photograph of all time, Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup. It’s a timeless image that was shown again many times after Maradona’s recent death, but the man credited with taking the photo—Bob Thomas of Getty Images—wasn’t the one who shot it. That was Alejandro Ojeda Carbajal, a Mexican photojournalist whose work has been all but forgotten;
During what turned out to be the last great era of print, Inside Sport magazine was a titan of Australian sports publishing, and as late as 2000 was honored as the magazine of the year Down Under. But its last print edition was last June, and while there have been recent posts on its website, there’s speculation no more hard copies will be put out. Subscription sales have been suspended since the pandemic, while the print magazine “is on a break.” Matt Cleary, a former contributor, writes about the publication’s prime era:
“The freedom to write and craft and research these great big fat meaty yarns about things you were genuinely interested in. To create and sculpt and paint with words. Thousands of them. You could legitimately tell a story with 3000 words.
“And at Inside Sport you could literally live dreams. Basically, if you thought of something sounded cool to do, you went out and did it.”
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 230, published Jan. 17, 2021.
I’d love to hear what you think about Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.
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