An unheralded 1960s black student activist, remembering a rugby legend, boxing on the big screen
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This week on the blog I wrote about “Strong Inside,” the splendid Andrew Maraniss biography of Perry Wallace, who broke the Southeastern Conference basketball color line in the late 1960s, and whose student activism at Vanderbilt wasn’t accompanied by demands for “safe spaces,” as is often heard on college campuses today.
The student protests at the University of Missouri that included football players continued to prompt sports media speculation about NCAA reform efforts. Taylor Branch and Joe Nocera, two of the leading non-sports journalists highly critical of the college athletic establishment, were among those proclaiming this to be a landmark event.
But whether that translates into action that can truly upset the college sports powers-that-be remains unclear. The football players whose boycott threat prompted the Missouri president to resign weren’t protesting their amateur athletic status; the recent gains that have taken place have come via litigation directly attacking the NCAA-imposed system.
(A report in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week puts the tab for subsidizing the “arms race” of college sports at $10 billion, with nearly 10 percent being financed through student fees. That might be worthy of a healthy protest or two.)
Also this week, I reviewed two books about boxing in Cuba by Brin-Jonathan Butler, who writes deeply and humanely of a people and a culture during the twilight of the Castro years.
Notable sports reads of the week
A terrorist involved in last week’s deadly attacks in Paris was turned away by security agents at the Stade de France before a France-Germany friendly soccer match, an act that saved countless lives. The tragedy raised concerns about next summer’s European championships in France. UEFA says the show will go on as planned;
Soccer author and Financial Times writer Simon Kuper, inside the stadium when the explosions took place, collected some “notes from a wounded city,” where he’s raising his family: “Although we’ll always have Paris — we may still be fighting jihadi terrorism;”
Just a couple of weeks after New Zealand defeated Australia in the Rugby World Cup final, one of the legendary members of the All-Blacks died from kidney disease. Jonah Lomu, dubbed “a freight train in ballet shoes,” was only 40. Despite the rivalry with the Wallabies, he was deeply admired in the Land of Oz and the global rugby community;
More on why writers like to run (present company exempted, as always) by Nick Ripatrizone for The Atlantic;
In the wake of anti-doping crackdowns in track and field and other Olympic sports, questions abound about the continued dominance of Kenyan long-distance runners;
Chancellor Lee Adams turned 16 this week, and his life is no small miracle. He’s the son of former Carolina Panthers defensive back Rae Carruth, who’s in prison for murdering the boy’s mother, Cherica Adams. She refused to have an abortion at Carruth's insistence after Chancellor was conceived;
GQ’s 2015 Man of the Year is President Barack Obama, who was interviewed for the magazine by Bill Simmons. The most telling comment from the commander-in-chief was his incredulity that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell earns a $44 million annual salary;
The Culinary Institute of America campus in Hyde Park, N.Y., fields college sports teams. Just a guess, but I would imagine they sling hash a lot better than hoops.
Emile Griffith biopic in the works
The troubled life of boxer Emile Griffith is coming to the screen. Griffith was fighting Benny Paret in 1962 when he punched out his opponent in the ring; Paret later died.
The film is based on the recently published Donald McRae biography “A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith.” Griffith, a bisexual who was severely beaten by baseball bat-wielding teenagers after leaving a Manhattan gay bar later in life, died in 2013.
At The Paris Review, Dante Ciampaglia offers up this appreciation of John Huston’s 1972 film “Fat City,” which he claims is the best boxing movie ever.
New sports books potpourri
Released: Roger Angell’s latest collection “This Old Man: All in Pieces,” which goes far beyond his baseball writings. More from NPR, the Nieman Storyboard and Chicago Tribune and Maureen Corrigan’s review for “Fresh Air;”
Reviewed: The latest from Keith Dunnavant is “Montana: The Biography of Football’s Joe Cool.” Bob D’Angelo likes it a lot, especially the detail given to Montana’s early years in western Pennsylvania, before the legend was forged at Notre Dame and with the 49ers;
Reviewed: “Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball,” Charles Fountain’s new history; the book also is the subject of the latest New Books in Sports podcast;
Reviewed: Julie Des Jardins' biography, “Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man,” by Ian Crouch for The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog;
Excerpt: SB Nation Longform featured “Five Last Rounds in Louisville,” from Davis Miller’s “Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts,” to be published Monday;
Podcast: The excellent Men in Blazers interview Raphael Honigstein, author of “Das Reboot,” about the German soccer renaissance.
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