A Midsummer's Sports Reader
Baseball at the break; NBA Finals; new books; and more
Sports Biblio Reader 7.11.21
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: Picturing America’s Pastime; The Forgotten Latino All-Star Game; Meeting Sixto Lezcano; Vancouver’s Baseball Ballerinas; 1969 NBA Finals; The Baron of Wimbledon; Wrigleyville 1984; Kurt Warner; The Rock Island Independents; Wisden Goes Woke; The Poet Who Was A Shooting Guard; Thomas Boswell; Remembering The National
A Few Good Reads
From MLB.com, a remembrance of an all-Latino All-Star Game played at Yankee Stadium in 1963, one week after the World Series, that raised money for retired Hispanic players;
The Baseball Hall of Fame hits a homerun with “Picturing America’s Pastime,” a new book of historic photos;
From Sports Collector Daily, the Hall of Fame has started a 13-part YouTube series featuring museum artifacts that’s free for streaming;
From The Spectator, “The All-American Pleasure of Minor League Baseball;” in this instance from York, Pa.;
On display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Baseball Cards from the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick,” through Nov. 22;
From 1980s Baseball, “That Time I Met Sixto Lezcano;”
From Monte Cristo, a lifestyle magazine in British Columbia, some 1950s promotional photos of members of the Vancouver Mounties posing with local ballerinas that “capture the athletic nature of ballet and the artistic side of baseball;”
From Sports Stories, “The Baron of Wimbledon,” gay 1930s German tennis star Gottfried von Cramm, who was dishonorably discharged from the Wehrmacht for conspiring against Hitler;
From The Wall Street Journal, a review of Leigh Montville’s latest book, “Tall Men, Short Shorts,” a history/memoir of the 1969 NBA Finals between the Lakers and Celtics, when he was a young beat writer;
From The Washington Post, “The Joy of Sports,” Thomas Boswell’s farewell column;
From The Athletic, an excerpt from Sports Illustrated senior writer Jon Wertheim’s new book “Glory Days,” about the 1984 sports season in the U.S. that featured an NBA title for the Chicago Bulls but that also included some compelling nearby drama at Wrigley Field;
From Awful Announcing, a summary of Kurt Warner’s biopic that’s being released in November;
From The Athletic, a history of the Rock Island Independents, who in the early years of the NFL were a fierce rival of the Chicago Bears;
From The Critic, a dim view of this year’s Wisden Cricket Almanack that includes commentary on the sport’s racial history, “a barely-suppressed anger arising from the Black Lives Matter protests, which seriously impairs the tone of this book of record;”
From the UK edition of Wired, data hounds are taking Twenty20 cricket to “Moneyball” dimensions;
From Deadspin, a retrospective 30 years after the demise of The National, which had a brief, if memorable shelf life as America’s only all-sports daily newspaper;
George Vecsey remembers Stephen Dunn, who before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet was a sharp-shooting guard for the Hofstral University basketball team. Included among his 21 collections is an essay, “Basketball and Poetry: The Two Richies,” that summed up his dual passions.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe hereand search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 244, published July 11, 2021.
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