Also in This Issue: The Man Who Might Have Been Jackie Robinson; Philosophy, Art and Sport in a Time of Crisis; Steph Curry and Wilt Chamberlain; The Endurance of Des Linden; The Nancy Lieberman Experience; The National Women’s Football League; Pitching for Ahmedabad; British Football’s Greatest Grounds; Remembering Leroy Keyes
Do sports boycotts work?
I’ve long been a skeptic, but I suppose it depends on what one stands to gain, or lose, from such an action.
To the American athletes who never got to compete in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, clearly not, as they ultimately paid the price for Jimmy Carter’s decision to punish the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan.
Some of my fellow Georgia citizens who learned suddenly last week that the Major League Baseball All-Star Game was being relocated out of state due to a new elections law have felt the same way.
This was a state that voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in Joe Biden for the first time since Carter, a native son of Georgia, and dislodged two Republican U.S. Senators to give Democrats de facto control of the upper chamber of Congress.
And for many living in Cobb County, where the Atlanta Braves’ stadium Truist Park is located, the quick decision is still reverberating. It’s also where I live, in a longtime Republican stronghold that is now led by a black Democratic majority on an all-female board of county commissioners.
Those three African-American women pleaded with the powers-that-be at Major League Baseball to reconsider, and to use the All-Star Game event in mid-July as a chance to illustrate the political and representational changes that have been made.
The festivities were to have included a tribute to Henry Aaron, who died in January and remained with the Braves organization for the rest of his life while pushing for racial progress in his own way.
“It’s an opportunity lost,” my county commissioner told me of the All-Star decision. She’s part of that black Democratic female majority, a bright, articulate and ambitious woman, all of 32 years old. Like her colleagues, she’s not enamored with some of the changes in the new elections law, but saw the game as a chance to boost economic and civic pride.
When she was born, I had a county commissioner who sponsored an anti-gay resolution and a Congressman in Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. Today, I have representatives embodying so much of the political and cultural change taking place all around me.
My Congresswoman is also a black Democrat, another first-time office holder moved to run to combat gun violence after losing her teenage son to such an act.
But the Georgia legislature remains strongly in Republican hands, and after charges of voter fraud last year, GOP lawmakers set about making changes that would make it more difficult for Democratic voters to cast ballots.
As someone who’s mostly apolitical, there’s no question in my mind about those motives. They were rank and ugly. Atlanta’s leading corporate citizens, including the Coca-Cola Co. and Delta Air Lines, spoke out against the new law.
Yet it’s true that voter access on certain levels is expanding—we actually will have more early voting in Georgia than New York state—and absentee voting remains.
An earlier version of the bill would have scotched no-excuse mail-in balloting. My Republican state senator wouldn’t vote to eliminate this provision, noting that it’s been state law for 15 years.
The local complications of that legislation were of no concern to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, of course. The day after my county commission chairwoman spoke to MLB Players Association head Tony Clark, who first suggested a boycott, Manfred announced the move.
Once Biden called the new law “Jim Crow on steroids,” this became a national media story, and there was no way MLB could stay in Atlanta. Amped up ever-more on the brutal hardball of partisan politics, our establishment national media was venting its collective spleen about the Georgia law.
There was to be no reconsideration, no dialogue, no opportunity to illustrate the vastly altered political and cultural landscape in one of the country’s most racially diverse and dynamic metropolitan areas.
Manfred may have been trying to avoid player protests that have been seen in the NFL and NBA. But like many other mainstream institutions in American life, MLB has made a public show of its support for Black Lives Matter initiatives.
No business, sports league or cultural institution wants to look like it isn’t fully on board with the “anti-racism” mantra of BLM and like-minded groups.
At the same time, the NCAA announced it’s threatening to pull championship events from states that pass laws limiting the participation of transgender athletes.
The NCAA is no stranger to these tactics, having withdrawn championships in states whose college teams had Indian nicknames, and more recently, in South Carolina, which flew the Confederate flag atop its state capitol.
Yet there are 31 states that have had transgender bills introduced this year, and the provisions are all over the map. Some don’t allow for transgender sports competition anywhere, which is harsh. Most are trying to address the problem of biological males who identify as females participating in women’s sports.
Like everything else, this too is partisan, with Republicans favoring more restrictions, and Democrats staunchly opposed.
For an organization that’s coming under fire for its lack of support for women’s sports, protecting the integrity of sports for women ought to be a no-brainer. In our surreal world of woke politics, the NCAA also wants to be seen on the side of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
The argot of contemporary social-justice activism is being used to drive an even harder bargain, all in the name of tolerance. Our zero sum politics don’t allow for any compromise, any nuance, any finding of common ground.
Obviously I have some local biases at work as I write this. MLB should have listened to and worked with local leaders in Atlanta to stage a socially-conscious All-Star Game. It could have been done without a hitch in a city that’s the cradle of the Civil Rights movement.
The NCAA should support bills that protect the sex-based rights of female athletes while allowing transgender athletes to participate in sports in other ways.
This is nothing more than scorched-earth, to-the-death politics, with no concern for those who really will be affected by the consequences. These moves are all about punishing opposing political forces, who rarely pay the price for any boycott, sports or otherwise.
The greater fallout will be further damage to the role sports play in our society as unifying forces.
Like so much else in American culture, they’ve become engulfed by political virtue-signaling. In a performative society bordering on the extreme, it’s hard to see how this changes anytime soon.
A Few Good Reads
In 1905, William Clarence Martin nearly became the player who would have broken Major League Baseball’s all-white barrier with the Boston Nationals. The former Harvard star shortstop attracted plenty of attention as a result in a city with nine daily newspapers. But as Anthony Castrovince writes in this longform piece at MLB.com, the backlash to his presence in the big leagues was fierce, even after Matthews had proven his worth during a stint in the minors. Matthews went to Harvard Law School and became a lawyer, political activist and assistant U.S. attorney general. Like Jackie Robinson, who broke through 42 years later, Matthews died at the age of 53. Here’s more from a Matthews biographer about a player called the “The Black Matty;”
Reader Howard Rosenberg’s latest column, in conjunction with Jackie Robinson observations this week, is about the Baseball Writers Association of America’s decision to rename one of its primary awards, which had been named after J.G. Taylor Spink of The Sporting News. Spink’s racial views, including his assessment of Robinson, were known for some time, but became the subject of discussion within the BBWAA last year, during a renewed focus on racial issues;
This takes a while to get the point and meanders through quite a bit of esoteric matter, but Texas philosophy professor Craig Clifford sets aside the contemporary commercialized celebration of sports to argue that “sport as sport is actually in the same family as art and philosophy. What is it about sports that is so compelling when we first become attracted to them, as an athlete or as a fan? It’s something hard to articulate because, like art, there is something beautifully out of the ordinary about sports.” Too bad those sentences didn’t come near the start, instead of at the end, of his Quillette essay, because they are compelling questions he didn’t give himself much room to answer;
Earlier this week Steph Curry became the all-time leading scorer in the history of the Philadelphia-San Francisco-Golden State Warriors franchise, and longtime Bay Area sportswriter Art Spander traces the inevitable comparisons to Wilt Chamberlain, the man Curry eclipsed;
Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman has traversed many levels of the game, from her time as an All-American at Old Dominion to her coaching escapades in the developmental levels of the men’s pro game. At Sports Stories, Eric Nusbaum recalls the journey of a street-tough Jewish girl from Far Rockaway, who tells him that “There's something very special about every level of this game. The purity of it. I have a lot of gratitude. I don't have any complaints about the game. The game has blessed me, changed my life, took me from a poor kid and gave me things that I never thought I'd have in my life;”
American marathoner Des Linden became the first woman on record to run the 50,000 meter race in less than three hours, doing so by six seconds during a specially-constructed solo run to achieve that threshold earlier this week near Eugene, Ore. Linden, who missed qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics earlier this year, ran the 31-mile course by averaging 5:47 minutes a mile. Here’s what it was like to pace her for that distance;
From The Telegraph in India, an examination of cricket governance wrangling in that nation that invariably settles on scheduling major competitions for the new Motera stadium in Ahmedabad. It’s boasted as the largest cricket venue in the world (132,000) and which will play host to several World Cup Cricket matches later this year.
Sports Book News
Coming in November, from Bold Type Books, “Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women's Football League,” by Lyndsey D'Arcangelo and Britni de la Cretaz. They recount the little-known story of a Harlem Globetrotterish women’s traveling gridiron team that played from 1974-1986. More about the book from WIVB in Buffalo, where D'Arcangelo, a women’s sports writer for The Athletic, is based;
This hits my sports and stadium architecture sweet spot: In December photographer Mike Bayly, a self-described “football grounds enthusiast,” published “Britain’s Greatest Football Grounds” (Stanchion Books), after seven years of travel throughout England, Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland. Here’s more from The Sportsman about Bayly’s passion project; his most recent contribution from the always-vital fanzine When Saturday Comes, from last summer, was about how mining clubs in South Yorkshire are fighting to retain their spirit of collectivism;
Sports book author David Davis, a friend of this newsletter, is the recipient of a Christopher Award for his most recent book, “Wheels of Courage,” about wounded World War II veterans who began wheelchair basketball leagues and set off a wave of disabled sports. The awards from the non-profit The Christophers, founded by a Catholic priest in 1945, go to “authors, illustrators, writers, producers and directors whose work “affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” From last October, here’s David on the New Books in Sports podcast.
Errata
David checked in after last week’s issue to point out that the Walt Frazier memoir I noted, “Rockin Steady,” was first published in the early 1970s, and not the 2013 reprint I referenced. Ever the sports photography ace, he also pointed out the Walter Iooss Jr. pics.
Passings
Leroy Keyes, 74, was the only two-time consensus All-American football player in Purdue University history, and as a two-way player was a Heisman Trophy finalist in the late 1960s. His NFL career was shortened due to injuries, and in 1990 he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. Keyes was an ambassador for the Purdue athletics program until his retirement a decade ago, and recently had been battling cancer and congestive heart failure.
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. 240, published April 18, 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.