Sports Biblio Digest, 2.9.20: In Remembrance of Roger Kahn
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Bob Knight; Pete Rose; Pro Football’s Tokyo Rose; How Sports Shaped the World; Extraordinary Sports Stories; Queens College Baseball Art Exhibit; Boston’s Luxury Tax Blues; Revisiting A Greek Soccer Tragedy; Universal Pictures Hoop Stars; A Statue For Yuvraj Singh
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Most of Roger Kahn’s 21 books were about baseball, but even those were broader examinations of American life, culture and family stories in the middle of the 20th century, and appealed across the generations.
That’s why Kahn’s work endured decades after the events that marked his childhood and young adult years had faded from public consciousness.
Kahn, who died this week at the age of 92, will be remembered above all for his 1972 book, “The Boys of Summer,” which chronicled the glory years of the Brooklyn Dodgers teams he covered in the 1950s for the New York Herald-Tribune and other publications.
Like much of his longform work, “The Boys of Summer” went far beyond harvesting nostalgia, in this case for a once-bumbling baseball franchise that had broken the game’s color line and finally—finally!—won a World Series.
That the Dodgers were doing this as their years in Brooklyn were coming to an end added to the book's cultural power. In 1957, two years after “Next Year” had arrived, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley abandoned Ebbets Field for California.
The borough would never be the same, and neither would America, which was booming in the West and eventually the Deep South. The game of baseball changed along with the times, and it was as Kahn entered middle age, and a more reflective period in his life, that he turned back to recapture those immediate postwar times.
“The Boys of Summer” was also about the love Kahn and his father shared for the Dodgers. In 2012, to mark the book’s 40th anniversary, Alex Belth wrote of his relationship with his father and baseball, including the writings of Kahn and Roger Angell, whose “The Summer Game” also was published in 1972.
In “The two Rogers,” Belth notes Kahn’s bitterness about Angell, whom he accused (along with George Plimpton) of trying to sabotage his own book, and bristled about reviews in The New York Times.
As it turned out, the books of both Rogers would be important volumes in a golden age of sports books, especially on the baseball front, that emerged in the 1970s.
Those books captured the imagination of a younger Baby Boom generation (mine!) about sports from another time, while deepening the memories of the generation that lived through them.
Likewise, another well-received Kahn book, “A Flame of Pure Fire,” was a biography of Jack Dempsey against the cultural backdrop of the 1920s, illustrating the power of a key sports figure to reflect the evolution of his society.
Kahn’s 2004 memoir, “Memories of Summer,” is a treasure for writers, packed with insight about covering baseball in those early years. For those of us born after the 1950s, he recalls an era as astutely as listening to one’s parents (although mine weren't as wistful as Kahn).
(Last fall, the producer Anant Singh purchased rights to develop “The Boys of Summer” as a limited television series, intrigued by an “era when family values and the spirit of community mattered most. This is so needed, especially in our society today.”)
Perhaps that’s also why some of Kahn's books about baseball in more contemporary times weren’t as memorable, or were regarded in unflattering ways. Kahn ghosted Pete Rose’s 1989 memoir, just as he was to be banished from baseball, and Kahn later came to regret being involved in the project.
“He will always be much more a boy of summer than a biographer of Pete Rose,” Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times wrote about Kahn in 2007. For Kahn, that meant a legacy of being a chronicler of the underdog.
As Kahn wrote in one of the more memorable passages in “The Boys of Summer:”
“You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.”
While Kahn expanded his literary range to include novels, and his non-sports projects to include a meditation on Jewish life in America, and the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, “The Boys of Summer” still towers above a vibrant body of work.
As Joe Posnanski wrote in a remembrance this week at The Athletic:
“It was simply unlike any other sports book that had ever been written and, I would argue, unlike any sports book written since.”
As the critic Peter Prescott noted in a review for Newsweek when “The Boys of Summer” was first published:
“It is not just another book about baseball, but a book about pain and defeat and endurance, about how men, anywhere, must live.”
A Few Good Reads
Nearly 20 years after his unceremonious firing at Indiana University, Bob Knight returned to Assembly Hall Saturday. His rousing halftime appearance, along with members of some of his former national championship basketball teams, wasn’t enough to lift the current Hoosiers over Purdue. But it was a testament to the generosity of a fan base that never held a grudge against the former coach, now 79, who finally let go of the resentment he’d long held, after moving back to Bloomington last year;
While John Feinstein’s “A Season on the Brink” launched his book-writing fame (and perpetually angered Knight), Frank Deford’s 1981 Sports Illustrated story about Knight, “The Rabbit Hunter,” is a longform masterpiece in itself;
Speaking of grudges, Pete Rose is asking Major League Baseball to reconsider his banishment from the Baseball Hall of Fame, given the Astros sign-stealing scandal. Also chiming in on Charlie Hustle’s behalf was Donald J. Trump, during a week in which he was acquitted on impeachment, delivered a State of the Union speech that Speaker Nancy Pelosi dramatically tore up behind him after the fact and offered rather unreligious remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast;
On the week of Babe Ruth’s birthday, the Boston Red Sox were ready to peddle former MVP Mookie Betts, one of the prized young players in baseball, and pitcher David Price to the Dodgers in a move designed mainly to avoid the onerous luxury tax. The three-way trade that also involves the Twins appears to have hit a major snag as the suspense figures to continue into the early spring training arrival period this week;
I didn’t see this until after the Super Bowl, but the New York Public Library rounded up some American football books the curators are certain non-fans will enjoy reading, including a few novels;
In the days before women were allowed in NFL press boxes and along the sidelines, Elinor Kaine defied the restrictions. She was dubbed “pro football’s Tokyo Rose” by some skeptics, but persisted and in the early 1960s started the “Line Back,” a newsletter with betting information, published a book, “Pro Football Broadside,” and became the subject of substantive media interest;
Dean Allen, who’s taught sports history and sociology at universities in South Africa, Australia, Northern Ireland and England, is offering a multi-part online course, “How Sport Shaped the World,” starting this month. He’s the author of “Empire, War and Cricket in South Africa” and the course cost of £99 includes a copy of the book;
From Feb. 18-March 20, the Queens College Art Center in New York will feature an exhibit called “Home Base” that includes the baseball art work of Todd Radom and Craig Kreindler, who will do a live painting there on Feb. 28;
Kreindler’s work also will be featuring at another exhibit starting Thursday in Kansas City, “Black Baseball in Living Color,” at the Negro Leagues Museum. It’s part of a season-long celebration in 2020 marking the centennial of the birth of the Negro Leagues;
On March 21, the authors of three sports books will appear together during the Virginia Festival of the Book for a discussion called “The Capacity of Sports: Extraordinary Stories.” They're Amy Bass (“One Goal”), Major Taylor (“The World’s Fastest Man”) and Michael Powell (“Canyon Dreams”);
Another gruesome round of newspaper reductions in the United States has claimed a few more outstanding sports bylines: Don Markus of The Baltimore Sun, who opted for a roundup of his favorite columns he’s linked to on his Twitter feed; and David Teel of the Daily Press in Virginia, who penned a marvelously graceful farewell. I hope they'll be writing soon elsewhere;
I haven’t plugged Ringside Seat magazine simply because I haven’t seen it; but subscribers can download a PDF “e-magazine” within a couple of days. A recent issue includes a feature on the boxing paintings of Thomas Eakins and a roundup of acclaimed boxing films;
The amateurs who made up the first U.S. Olympic basketball team in 1936 weren’t all college players: Some starred for a team sponsored by Universal Pictures, in the days when company teams across many industries were among the best in the country;
In 1981, 21 fans who witnessed the Olympiacos-AEK Athens soccer derby at Karaiskakis Stadium in the Greek capital perished in what’s known as the Gate 7 tragedy. Some were trapped by closed exit doors on the way out, and a formal investigation didn’t lay the finger of blame anywhere;
In Ferozepur, in the Punjab region of India, a new statue has been unveiled in honor of Yuvraj Singh, an Indian all-rounder in cricket who excelled in the One Day Internationals and T20 formats. He retired last year, after staving off a battle with cancer.
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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. 193, published Feb. 9, 2020.
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.