Sports Biblio Reader, 4.11.21
Also in This Issue: John Madden at 85; The Changing Face of Sports Fandom; Rugby Victims of Argentina’s Dirty War; Female Athletes in UFC; The Eternal Coolness of Clyde Frazier; Pro Basketball’s Invisible Revolution; Field Hockey’s Religious Foundations; A New History of Tennis; Is Horse Racing Too Big To Fail?; Remembering Bill Lumpkin
A Few Good Reads
As John Madden turns 85, a retrospective at ESPN.com about the former Oakland Raiders coach who became a legendary voice of the NFL in the booth but who is awaiting a Pro Football Hall of Fame call;
Walt “Clyde” Frazier is 76, and hasn’t lost a bit of his trademark ‘70s cool he embodied while helping the Knicks win their only NBA championships, including somehow making pink pants stylish, at least among the non-shuffleboard set. For further reading: “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool,” Frazier’s 2010 memoir with Ira Berkow published by Triumph Books;
From Audible, there’s a new podcast about professional basketball in the 1970s, Death at the Wing. The latest episode, “The Invisible Revolution,” takes a deeper dive at the sporting and cultural trends that would evolve into the present-day NBA;
In honor of a new baseball season, Esquire Classic compiles a cornucopia of links along the “Why Time Begins on Opening Day” theme, with pieces from the magazine’s archive and beyond. Bylines range from Charlie Pierce to Tom Wicker to baseball fiction from Philip Roth and John Updike;
The only current Major League Baseball franchise without a no-hitter in its history ended that 52-year, 8,206-game drought this week, as San Diego-area native Joe Musgrove allowed only a hit batter to reach base as the Padres downed the Rangers in Arlington;
At The Guardian, Sean Ingle examines “The Silenced,” a novel by Claudio Fava and newly published in English, about the fate of La Plata, a leading rugby club team whose members were “disappeared” during Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s. Ingle concludes that “anyone who still believes the dastardly deceit that sport and politics shouldn’t mix should read it – and hastily repent;”
From the British site Playing Pasts, the first of a series of posts on the religious foundations of field hockey, a sport with roots in the Anglican clergy that became popular in suburbanizing areas in the much of the English-speaking world in the 1880s;
Variety magazine looks at the changing face of sports fandom, with a focus on who’s watching on the telly;
From the Sport in American History blog, a review of “Fighting Visibility,” a look at the struggles of women in the Ultimate Fighting Championship world to get media attention and develop their corner of an increasingly popular sport;
With the Kentucky Derby a few weeks away, the Defector looks at the plight of horse racing, even with more public subsidies and other efforts undertaken to prop up what was once famously dubbed the Sport of Kings;
At the Richmond Times-Dispatch, David Teel assesses the odysseys of newly crowned NCAA Division I college basketball champions Baylor (men) and Stanford (women), the final survivors of a surreal season that ended with compelling drama at their respective Final Four venues;
Coming in July, “Tennis: A History from American Amateurs to Global Professionals,” by Greg Ruth, and published by the University of Illinois Press, a look at how the sport evolved into the professionalized ranks with the Open Era in the late 1960s;
Bill Lumpkin, who died this week at the age of 92, was regarded as the “man with a human touch” during his long career as a sports writer and columnist in Alabama. He was the sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald for 35 years and covered college football, Super Bowls, NASCAR and The Masters, among other plum assignments.
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. 239, published April 11, 2021.
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Sports Biblio is an affiliate of Bookshop, an online book retailer, and receives a small commission for books sold via this newsletter. Bookshop donates some its proceeds to independent bookstores across the U.S., so when you shop here you’re supporting a small business in your community.