Sports Biblio Digest, 11.3.19: A Fall Sports Reading Potpourri
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: How Baseball Cards Got Weird; Bill James; South Africa’s First Black Rugby Captain; India’s Most Powerful Woman; Chile’s World Cup; Pro Hoops in Europe; Filipino Boxing in L.A.; A Surfing Novel; A College Basketball Poem; Evonne Goolagong and Ash Barty; The Science of Athletic Recovery; Remembering Ron Fairly
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A Few Good Reads
He may not have thought it would ever happen, but Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post is finally able to write about his hometown baseball team winning a World Series, with the Nationals ending a 95-year drought;
Which baseball team defined the 2010s? Depends on who you ask;
One of those candidates, with four titles in the new century (and millennium), is the Boston Red Sox, who for the last 17 years have employed sabermetrician supreme Bill James as a consultant. He recently he announced he was stepping away from those duties, but his 2020 handbook is available. Now begins speculation about whether he’ll be inducted in the Hall of Fame;
Baseball writers at WAR, or how the grandson of Murray Chass, a noted anti-analytics curmudgeon, has gone totally sabermetric;
Baseball card trading in the digital age has become challenging for those set in analog ways; also from The Atlantic, from 2014, a cultural history of the baseball card;
Siya Kolisi, who has led South Africa’s Rugby World Cup team into Saturday’s final against England, is the first black captain for the Springboks, an extension of the legacy of the 1995 champions embraced Nelson Mandela. The Springboks cruised in Yokohama to a 32-12 win to take their third title, and in a town near Port Elizabeth, fans celebrated wildly in the same tavern where Kolisi watched South Africa’s 2007 final;
It’s been 45 years since the Rumble in the Jungle bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Media scholar Michael Socolow (author of “Six Minutes in Berlin”) notes that came as televised boxing on American airwaves began to fade, as did regular newspaper coverage. Since then, the sport “has largely vanished from popular culture and public consciousness.” The same brutality that was on display, he thinks, could figure into the future of the NFL on the tube. It’s an interesting theory, but the biggest prize bouts were never on network TV, while the Super Bowl is the biggest television—and not just sporting—event we have. Missing from Socolow’s piece is any mention of MMA/UFC, which is exploding in popularity and to me is more barbaric than what transpires on the gridiron;
From the excellent film site The Criterion Collection, a story of nearly 40 hours of footage shot by Leon Gast for the making of “When We Were Kings” that focused solely on Ali, and that almost went unseen before the documentary film was completed decades later, and earned an Oscar;
From Courtney Walsh in The Sunday Australian magazine, the friendship between seven-time Grand Slam winner Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Ash Barty, the reigning French Open, goes far beyond tennis, and includes their shared Australian indigenous roots. Next weekend Barty leads an Australian team trying to capture its first Fed Cup since 1974, during the height of Goolagong’s career;
The Flint City Bucks compete in obscurity in the low-level United Soccer League, but they’ve got a small and devoted fan base called the River Rats who’ve found a sporting respite in a Michigan city that’s still reeling from a crippling drinking water crisis;
On Saturday, FC Union Berlin faced Hertha Berlin in the first Bundesliga match pitting teams from either side of the once-divided German capital. The fandom behind Union Berlin, from a scrappy East Berlin neighborhood, has been the stuff of legend, and the BBC checks in on the spirit of rebellion that remains strong for many supporting Union, which is already struggling in the relegation zone;
Also on Saturday, the University of Vermont retired the jerseys of basketball players Taylor Coppenrath and TJ Sorrentine, who led the Catamounts to an upset of Syracuse in the 2005 NCAA Tournament. Writer Jon Hart (“Man Versus Ball”) has penned a poem, “Sorrentine From the Parking Lot,” in honor of the latter's iconic 3-pointer in overtime, taken from well beyond the arc
Luther Wright was a college hoops star for Seton Hall in the early 1990s, but his life as an adult has been filled with addiction and other issues brought on largely by bipolar disease. He’s still getting paid the last increments of a 25-year salary arrangement by the Utah Jazz, but at 48, it’s hard to say he’s enjoying any of it;
This is from 2016, but I just saw it this week, and it’s well worth the read: the history of Filipino boxing in Los Angeles, written in the wake of the Manny Pacquiao–Floyd Mayweather Jr. bout;
In 1962, Chile was the host of the soccer World Cup, an event that helped modernize what had been a poor South American nation. At Breaking the Lines, a three-part series examines the historical and cultural transformation of the nation and the sport, as well as the tournament: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3;
At the San Jose Museum of Art, an exhibition opened on Friday called “With Drawn Arms,” a collaboration between Tommie Smith, 1968 Mexico City Olympic protestor, and artist Glenn Kaino. The exhibit, which runs through April 5, 2020, includes sculpture, print projects and memorabilia from Smith’s personal collection. Critic Dan Adler has this review at Vanity Fair;
Rich Irvine, a freelance sports writer in New Zealand, has begun Sport Review, a newsletter rounding up weekly links from sports in that nation, and plenty more. This week, there’s plenty fallout about the All Blacks’ loss to England in the Rugby World Cup semifinals;
Former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander recalls his heyday at the magazine, in the mid-1990s, at the birth of the digital age, which neither he nor many of his colleagues thought much about at the time:
“I guess what I’m saying is that lamenting the demise of SI — it already has gone from weekly issues to biweekly, without lowering its price — is like lamenting the end of charcoal grills for gas ones. The market chooses.”
Sports Book News
Irish writer Emmet Ryan has been been tromping around Europe watching pro basketball, and has just self-published a new book, “I Like It Loud,” and he does a Q & A here with Talk Basket;
What are the most effective ways for athletes to recover from exertion and injury? Christine Aschwanden, science writer at FiveThirtyEight, does this Q & A with Runner’s World; she's the author of “Good To Go,” published earlier this year;
An interview at Inertia with A.J. Dungo, author of “In Waves,” a graphic novel that’s about much more than surfing;
Released last week by Diversion Press, “Roaring Back,” by golf writer Curt Sampson, chronicling Tiger Woods’ recovery to win the 2019 Masters, his first major title in 11 years. Excerpt here from Golfweek.
Now Hear This
This coming week Bill Simmons is launching a podcast, the Book of Basketball 2.0, riffing off his popular book from a dozen or so years ago;
Before they headed out the door at Deadspin (more about that next week), staffers Lauren Thiesen, David Roth and Drew Magary recorded one final Deadcast (on Halloween, natch), talking about the implosion of their site, and newly benched Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton.
Passings
Ron Fairly, 81, had a long career in baseball, playing on three World Series titles with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and later in the broadcast booth, most recently for the Seattle Mariners. He was a likeable and masterful storyteller, which gave him a rich second career, and he put down a half-century’s worth of tales in his 2018 memoir, “Fairly At Bat,” while he was enduring a long battle with cancer that ultimately claimed him. “My worst day in a baseball uniform,” he once observed, “was better than the best day I could have had in any other career.”
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 184, published Nov. 3, 2019.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.