Sports Biblio Digest 10.21.18: The Fine Art of Babe Ruth Biography
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Kip Keino; The Fosbury Flop at 50; Sports and Eggheads; From Actress to NBA Owner; New Irish Sportswriting Collection; Women’s Signature Basketball Shoes; Food and Football in the South; Johnny Miller; Remembering Paul Allen
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As a noted biographer of complicated baseball men, Jane Leavy applied her considerable skills to unearthing the personal travails of the biggest baseball man of them all.
Unlike her previous portraits of mid-century figures Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, however, Leavy faced a different challenge in exploring what made Babe Ruth tick, underneath his bluster, fame and charisma.
In “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created,” her new biography (Harper), she settled on the Bambino as a celebrity, one of the first athletes to transcend his sport.
That isn’t entirely unchartered territory, either, given the Golden Age of Sports treatment of Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange and others in the 1920s. But “The Big Fella,” published as the World Series begins Tuesday at Fenway Park in Boston, is meant to flesh out and refresh Ruth’s legacy nearly a century later.
NPR’s Scott Detrow noted how Leavy tried to mine the inner world of Ruth’s early years in a troubled family in Baltimore and living in a Catholic school:
“Leavy doesn't write about how these terrible moments shaped Ruth's personality and life, because it's simply unknown. Ruth never really told anyone, and the hagiographic sports reporting of his era never delved into it. That makes it hard to write a thorough biography like Leavy's last book, The Last Boy, which was centered on moments of Mickey Mantle's flawed humanity and vulnerability.”
“Leavy responds by doing the next best thing: painstakingly re-creating the mythical, larger-than-life role Ruth played in American culture at the height of his fame.”
For The Washington Post, reviewer Aram Goudsouzian, co-author of a book examining Bill Russell’s influence on basketball, finds that in the Ruth book, as “she did with Koufax and Mantle, Leavy muses upon our tangled relationships with baseball heroes.”
She’s following estimable Ruth biographies penned by Leigh Montville (2006) and Robert Creamer (1974), among others. In focusing on a 1927 barnstorming tour featuring Ruth and Lou Gehrig, she offers a fresh perspective on the Babe’s mammoth popularity.
That tour, undertaken after the famous “Murderer’s Row” season, was the idea of Christy Walsh, Ruth’s business manager. From an SI excerpt here, on Walsh’s multi-layered role, including media ghostwriter:
“Walsh was selling a kind of fool's gold, whose value peaked as the 1920s grew into the golden age of sports and celebrity: bright, shiny words with little mettle that generated lots of cold, hard cash for author, subject and the syndicate man, casting a gauzy glow over the putative authors while offering readers the illusion of being in the know. In an era before radio delivered pregame, postgame, and in-game interviews, Walsh's fables were as close as baseball fans could get to hearing voices of faraway stars. No one knew what they sounded like anyway. So what if reading them required a willing suspension of disbelief?”
Readers interested in the business behind Ruth also would do well to consult “The Selling of the Babe,” Glenn Stout’s 2016 book on his move from the Red Sox to the Yankees, and what that portended for the sport.
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Leavy told how she was covering baseball in the 1970s and 1980s and encountered the discomfort of being a woman in a locker room, with a player running a hand down her side. It was an incident she didn't report:
“I saw it as a test to see whether I had the—I don’t want to say balls, but whether I had the whatever to deal with them,” she said. Soon after, a coach began masturbating in front of her before a player came to her aid. Some Oakland Athletics players once pressured her into sipping a beer that turned out to be drugged. The next day, the team’s manager, Billy Martin, asked her, “Sleep well, Jane?” She concluded, “All of this is why nothing about the Babe phases me.”
In 2012, she wrote for Grantland about Julia Ruth Stevens, then 95, on what it was like to be Ruth’s daughter. It gave Leavy the impetus to explore the Babe’s elusive youth, including his parents’ separation, as she explained to WFAN radio host Mike Francesa:
"That was the one thing that became the key to unlocking the missing story of Babe Ruth, which is his childhood. If you look at all the other books . . . there's no childhood. It's as if he sprang fully fledged from St. Mary's when he went off to the Baltimore Orioles at age 19. And I knew if there was anything new to be added to understanding this guy . . . I was going to have to find the little boy that his family called 'Little George' in order to make sense of the big fella."
Baseball author and book blogger extraordinaire Ron Kaplan thinks Leavy succeeds on many levels, to the point that not even Creamer’s biography “comes close to ‘The Big Fella.’ “
A Few Good Reads
Tyler Cowen writes at Bloomberg View about the NBA’s analytical advances, in response to a fellow economist’s panning of sports interest: “Nor do I see sports as an inferior form of culture. I enjoy the theater, but is the real drama of a live competitive event—when you come armed with a proper knowledge of context—any worse or less elevated than a staged tale?”
Saw this rummaging around for something else, and it’s along similar lines from another time, from the late social critic Christopher Lasch. It's 1977 piece “The Corruption of Sports,” published in the New York Review of Books, and set off an egghead-fest in those lofty pages. Like much of Lasch’s books about political elites and the decline of civic and community life, what he wrote about sports then rings prophetically true today;
Here’s a continuing meme: The NBA, whose new season began this week, is way cooler and hipper than the NFL, with Will Leitch tossing in the usual nods to the former’s supposedly more enlightened position on social issues;
At Only A Game, a segment on the disappearance of women’s signature basketball shoes, 25 years after the advent of the first one, the Air Swoopes;
On the 50th anniversary of his gold medal win in Mexico City, Kip Keino turned himself in to authorities this week as a scandal over alleged corruption tied to the Rio Games widens. Now 78 and the former head of the Kenyan Olympic body, Keino is pressing for the charges to be dropped, and he’s pleading for his innocence, though his legacy could be tarnished either way;
It’s also been a half-century since Dick Fosbury patented the record-setting high-jumping technique that’s used the world over. On Saturday, the inventor of “The Fosbury Flop” was honored with a statue at Oregon State University, his alma mater. More on Fosbury from NPR;
ESPN’s baseball playoff coverage included a “statcast broadcast” crew on one of its outlets, and Joe Posnanski is still singing the praises of that concept and how viewers need more than “the same batch of clichés, gut reactions and in-my-day stories that we’ve been getting forever;”
In the Hollywood Reporter, how Jami Gertz went from being an actress to part of the Atlanta Hawks ownership group;
From Gene Sapakoff at the Post and Courier in Charleston, Jackie Bradley Jr., Tom Yawkey, racism and a South Carolina spin on Red Sox history;
Was wondering when somebody would make this connection as the basis for an exploration I’ve always found fascinating: Southern college football and the region’s culinary and cultural expressions. Now it’s happening on the SEC Network, as ESPN’s Wright Thompson and John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, are hosts for the new “TrueSouth” program. Edge, who like Thompson graduated from Ole Miss and still lives in Oxford, says this is about a lot more than tailgating fare: "People want to portray the South as a simple place, and even a simplistic place, but it’s not. It’s complicated, and that’s where the beauty comes from;”
At the Los Angeles Times, Nathan Fenno examines how Kevin Ellison, a talented former safety at USC, ended up getting killed by a car after wandering in traffic on a freeway.
Sports Book News
For the second year in a row, “Behind the Lines,” a collection of stories appearing on the Irish sports site The42, has been published. The pieces include a look back at Liam Whelan, one of the “Busby Babes” killed in the Manchester United air disaster in 1958.
Coming soon: The Sports Biblio Fall Books Preview.
Media Lodge Notes
Johnny Miller is retiring as a golf announcer after 29 years, and his second career was just as memorable as his years on the PGA Tour;
Linda Kay, a pioneering sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune and later a journalism instructor, has died at the age of 66.
Passings
Dick Modzelewski, 87, followed a successful playing career in the NFL with a long second career as a coach. He was short and light for a defensive lineman compared today’s standards, and earned the adulation of Gay Talese, who wrote that Modzelewski was a gentle soul away from the game. “But when he is playing football he is thoroughly bellicose. He wants to win more than any man since Machiavelli, Dillinger or Leo Durocher.”
Paul Allen, 65, was a co-founder of Microsoft who later purchased the Seattle Seahawks, likely keeping them from leaving town, as well as the Portland TrailBlazers. The sports world reacted in shock to his passing from cancer, which returned, prompting recent treatment.
Allen was considered Seattle’s “sports dreamer” by columnist Art Thiel, developing a vision of a vibrant sports town at a time when few did. Now, Seattle enjoys not only championship NFL, MLS and WNBA franchises, but also the rejuvenated Mariners, and could become an NHL market soon.
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This is Digest issue No. 140, published Oct. 21, 2018.
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