Sports Biblio Digest, 2.7.16
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: The Super Bowl Turns 50; David Halberstam; Football and Concussions; NBA Greatness, from Kareem to Curry to the home of the Jayhawks
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 27, published Feb. 7, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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Super Bowl 50 takes place today between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos in Santa Clara, Calif., and my posts on the Sports Biblio site this week have focused on the National Football League and the contentious debate over concussions.
On Monday, I posted about media anxieties over the culture of football that go far beyond the subject of brain trauma, and extend as far back as the 1960s. As I was preparing this post, I was contacted by a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to talk about these matters with Steve Almond, author of “Against Football,” one of the strongest screeds against the sport I’ve ever come across.
That segment aired on Friday, and it turned out to be more confrontational than I wanted. Almond is adamant that watching the sport is “immoral,” to which I took strong exception. I’m not enamored with how I sounded on this program, and it’s not because I took a position that some may find hard to defend. It’s hard to counter self-righteous people who want to shame you for liking something they don’t. I wish I would have responded better than I did.
Concussions are not unique to football. They extend even to soccer, which suburban parents have steered their sons to play instead. German player Christoph Kramer staggered around in a daze for nearly 15 minutes of the finals of the 2014 World Cup, the biggest sporting event on the planet, far bigger than the Super Bowl. It was absolutely frightening to watch, and he still doesn't remember playing in that game. FIFA's concussion protocols are far worse than the NFL, but this didn't register much comparative criticism.
I also pointed out that the science and medical research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is still in the early stages, and that safety reform measures are most critical below the NFL level.
We don’t have this hysteria about concussions in other sports, and we love it when badass females kick each other in the head in an MMA ring.
While there’s reason to be concerned about what’s happening to football players, the reaction is also a bit of selective outrage. The moral panic that’s been renewed before the Super Bowl in recent years doesn’t help anyone’s understanding of the issue. Almond’s a hardcore absolutist who prefers denunciation over dialogue, and he is far from alone.
On Friday I posted my review of “The Game’s Not Over,” a rare book defending the sport of football while strongly critical of NFL on certain topics. While author Gregg Easterbrook oversimplified some of these issues, and would have done well to ditch the haikus he penned for each team, he understands that the sport isn’t popular just because of the bloodlust of violence.
In my part of the country, where whole towns virtually shut down on Friday nights for high school games and college football is a religion, it’s about the bonds of community, state, region, alma maters and a way of life that’s always been easy for East Coast media tastemakers to vilify.
David Halberstam lived in New York most of his life, except for a few years in the South in the early 1960s, and he approached his writing about football very differently. I posted on Wednesday about of his football writing, which deserves more consideration. He was working on a book on the 1958 NFL title game when he was killed in a car accident in 2007.
He loved that period of the NFL the most, before it became the big-money, TV-saturated product it is today. Halberstam’s only football book, about Bill Belichick, was just as much about Belichick’s father, longtime U.S. Naval Academy football assistant Steve Belichick.
More than 20 years ago, Halberstam asked then NFL-commissioner Paul Tagliabue about concussions, got a dodgy response and referenced it to some of the lies he was told about Vietnam, invoking the name of Robert McNamara.
If he were still around today, I don’t doubt Halberstam would be thundering against the NFL about concussions. But I’d like to think he’d be more measured and devastating with his prose, as he was in a story about George Preston Marshall, the bigoted owner of the Washington Redskins and the last in the NFL to keep his roster all-white:
"The Redskins won only one game last year and finished last in their division."
More on NFL Legends, Concussions and the Super Bowl
John Branch of The New York Times writes about Kenny Stabler, the latest NFL player to be diagnosed with CTE. “Snake” lived as hard as he played, drinking and smoking to excess, and his official cause of death at 69 was Stage 4 colon cancer. William Browning writes at SB Nation Longform how Stabler may have exemplified the rough-and-tumble Oakland Raiders as well as anyone—and that’s saying something.
Stabler, Brett Favre, Tony Dungy, Marvin Harrison, Kevin Greene, Orlando Pace, Dick Stanfel and former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr. were announced Saturday as Class of 2016 inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Omissions: Terrell Owens, NFL career scoring leader Morten Andersen.
At Vice Sports, Peter Richmond also writes about Stabler, and wonders if we as a society can reconcile the violence in football now, after dozens of CTE diagnoses.
The family of former NFL quarterback Earl Morrall says he had late-term CTE; Hall of Famer Willie Wood, now in an assisted living facility, has no recollection of playing in Super Bowl I.
ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” published a report this week about some researchers who believe that NFL-funded brain research grants are used to reward league-friendly doctors, punish skeptics and unfairly influence the process. The authors of the story wrote the “League of Denial” book and consulted on the PBS Frontline program of the same name, and from which ESPN withdrew in controversy shortly before it aired in 2013.
At Sports Illustrated, Tom Taylor delves into how the NFL can seriously address brain trauma if it wants to have a long-term future.
Longtime NFL writer Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report, author of the recently published “Two Minute Warning,” suggests that we’re ignoring the real costs of the game.
Former Minnesota Vikings coach Bud Grant never won a Super Bowl in four tries, but in his early 90s insists that winning and losing never has defined him.
Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star visits with a son of Hank Stram in this tribute to the late Chiefs’ Hall of Fame coach.
Super Bowl XXXIV was one of the best ever, especially the final agonizing seconds. Remember when the Rams and Titans met in the Super Bowl? No, really, they did, and here’s an oral history from those who were a part of it.
Oh, and about those Roman numerals? There’s a reason this is not Super Bowl L, since those designations have been discontinued, as John Walters laments at Newsweek.
Famed Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr., who’s shot every Super Bowl, talks about the very first one with Ted Keith on the fine SI Vault podcast.
The day before the Super Bowl, Sam Spence died. He was 88, and if you don’t know his name, you've surely heard his music. He was the composer and conductor for much of the music that accompanied NFL Films highlights, and it’s marvelous work in its own right.
In addition to the iconic “Autumn Wind,” Spence’s best-known compositions for NFL Films include “The Magnificent Run” and “The Over the Hill Gang.”
Instead of a halftime show of Coldplay, Beyoncé and Bruno Mars (really?), a Spence tribute ought to be in order.
Heavenly Hoops Hash, From Kareem to Steph to The Phog
Here’s a fantastic interview with economist Tyler Cowen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about many, many fascinating things: politics, economics, race, jazz, fighting Bruce Lee and so much more. Kareem's the closest thing the American sports scene has to a renaissance man and philosopher king, if you will. I don't always agree with him, but he's compelling to hear out.
At The New Yorker, Nicholas Dawidoff writes how the Golden State Warriors and Stephen Curry are making the NBA beautiful again; Bethlehem Shoals (aka Free Darko) counters that the defending championss’ inevitability of repeating is not a good thing.
Shawn Fury, author of a forthcoming book about the evolution of the jump shot in basketball, updates his argument to include Curry’s dazzling exploits.
After seeing retired big men Moses Malone, Darryl Dawkins and others die early deaths, Larry Bird wonders, at 59, how long he’s got to live. He wasn’t a post player, but had an enlarged heart that’s the focus of some very rudimentary medical research.
The magic of 61-year-old Allen Field House was on display last Saturday for first-time visitor Matt Norlander of CBSSports.com, who got to see a dandy between the homestanding Kansas Jayhawks and the Kentucky Wildcats.
Sports Media News
The Big Lead talked to some who’ve recently left CBSSports.com, including baseball writer Jon Heyman, with complaints that the all-sports site is stressing aggregation over original reporting. Baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra of HardballTalk.com replies, and I think he makes some valuable points.
The newsletter you’re reading is an aggregated product, meant to be helpful for those interested in the topics stated at the very top of this e-mail every week. There’s a big difference between grabbing and pasting someone else’s work into your own template and aggregation that includes attribution and direct links.
Former Grantland baseball writer and podcaster Jonah Keri is taking his talents to Sports Illustrated and the MLB Network. He also will be writing non-sports pieces at GQ and Rolling Stone.
A new affinity site led by Yahoo! Sports NBA maven Adrian Wojnarowski has launched, and would you believe it’s called The Vertical? A podcast with L.A. Clippers guard J.J. Redick launched in the run-up.
ESPN analyst and ex-NBA coach Jeff Van Gundy, who’s never been a fan of the practice of using unattributed quotes a la Wojnarowski and others, lashes out at what he calls the “quid pro quo” at work in pro basketball media.
Longtime NFL TV sideline reporter Lesley Visser, now 62, is still going strong. She got her start in sports media in the 1970s as a reporter at The Boston Globe, which has profiled the newest rising female star in the sports talk business, Katie Nolan of “Garbage Time” on Fox Sports 1.
One’s a classy, dignified example of how hard it’s been for women to succeed this business; the other is pictured spitting out a tepid brand of light beer, befitting her snarky on-air persona. Times, and tastes, clearly have changed, and not necessarily for the better.
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