Sports Biblio Digest 3.11.18: A Mid-Winter’s Sports Reader
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also in This Issue: Forthcoming Roger Angell and Babe Ruth Books; The NBA’s First Female Draftee; Best Sports Photographer of 2017; Remembering Roger Bannister and Woody Durham
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. 116, published March 11, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website. To view this newsletter in a browser, click here.
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. You can also follow Sports Biblio on Twitter and hit the “like” button on Facebook.
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I’m starting off this newsletter with one of the favorite components of what I do here at Sports Biblio, “A Few Good Reads,” which is a potpourri of current and recent articles, longer magazine pieces and book excerpts of timely subjects.
The first of these is from Sportianity, where Paul Putz writes about Billy Graham’s influence on professional athletes, and how the recently passed evangelist loosened his opposition to games on the Sabbath.
Graham’s revivals attracted many athletes and even one Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic runner and survivor of a Japanese World War II camp, the subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s acclaimed “Unbroken.”
Kirby Higbe, Bobby Richardson, Felipe Alou and Cleveland Browns lineman Bill Glass are among athletes who wrote books about their Christian experiences, with Graham writing the foreword to Glass’ 1965 memoir, “Get in the Game.”
This was about the time, Putz writes, that Graham and many evangelicals evolved from a pre-World War II sensibility about their faith:
“No longer did evangelical athletes need to sacrifice athletic fame and glory to prove their Christian witness. So long as they were willing to take the stage and share their faith, athletic fame and glory was witness enough. And although Graham did not lead the way in this—he was following popular trends, and then only reluctantly—he nevertheless helped ease evangelicals’ transition into their new Sunday-sports world.”
Putz is a doctoral candidate in history at Baylor University, and his specialty is sports and religion. His homepage includes links to related work, including book reviews, and he contributes to the U.S. Sport History blog as well as his own Sportianity blog.
His dissertation is entitled “God, Country, and Big-Time Sports: The Creation of ‘Sportianity’ and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1920-1980.”
Some Other Good Reads
Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle speaks with Denise Long, a legendary name of Iowa girls high school basketball and who was drafted by the San Francisco Warriors in 1969, the same year as one Lewis Alcindor. Granted, she was a 13th-round pick, and it was a publicity stunt, in the days before organized women’s college basketball. “I really didn’t have any (further basketball) aspirations, because there wasn’t anything. I was a little tired of all the work, and my goal was achieved,” Long, a retired pharmacist, told Ostler, as she was honored by the Warriors this week. She was also included in Shawn Fury’s 2016 book “Rise and Fire,’’ about the evolution of the basketball jump shot;
Here’s one more about Denise Long, from Sports Illustrated in 1969, after her Union-Witten High School won that memorable state championship game before a packed arena in Des Moines, where the six-on-six game lingered well into the 1980s;
At the recent 75th Pictures of the Year International competition, Matthias Hangst was honored for his sports photography. He’s just returned from the Winter Olympics and spoke with The Nikon Blog on his favorite shots from PyeongChang. Only 39, the German-born Hangst became Getty’s chief sports photographer in 2014;
From Slate, how two recent movies about female athletes buck the trend in sports films, in which the actual sports competition looks rather contrived.
Sports Book News
Jane Leavy’s upcoming book project is a familiar subject. “The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created” will be published by HarperCollins in October, right before the 100th anniversary of his triumphant World Series showing for the Red Sox. This comes two years after Glenn Stout’s fine “The Selling of the Babe” (Sports Biblio review here), and is promised as a “definitive biography.” There have been others, including from Robert Creamer (1974) and Leigh Montville (2006);
Leavy’s book is coming in at more than 500 pages, and given her previous biographies of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle, there should be plenty of fresh information to savor. Here’s a Q & A with Leavy on the Baseball Hall of Fame site that gets into her Ruth research, including use of the museum’s scrapbooks donated by Ruth’s widow, some of which recently became digitized;
Not sure if Leavy will delve into this, but Popular Science examined recently how Ruth’s cancer treatment in the years right after World War II came at a critical point in the history of medicine. Chemotherapy and “miracle” drugs extended his life a few years beyond his original prognosis, before throat cancer claimed him in late 1948;
Joe Bonomo, an essayist and author of books about pop music, including Jerry Lee Lewis, AC/DC and the critic Greil Marcus, has announced his next book, “No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell, a Writer’s Life in Baseball,” will be published next spring by the University of Nebraska Press.
New from the SABR Digital Library: “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors,” available in paperback and e-book format, and which includes appearances by baseball players from everything to feature films to commercials as well as those playing themselves on TV programs.
Coming next week: Sports Biblio’s 2018 Baseball Books Preview
Passings
Roger Bannister, 88, was the first man to run the mile in under four minutes. Although he retired from running in 25 and became a neurologist, he remained an important icon of post-World War II Britain. As “Endure” author Alex Hutchinson writes in a remembrance, Bannister “reminds us that sports were a game and a journey of self-knowledge before they were a profession;”
Woody Durham, 76, was the longtime radio voice of the North Carolina Tar Heels, and whose post-retirement life was shattered by a crippling bout with aphasia. His son Wes Durham, an acquaintance of mine, admirably called games this weekend at the ACC Tournament following the news of his father’s death;
Bill Kilpatrick, 92, was a golf writer and author of “Brassies, Mashies, and Bootleg Scotch: Growing Up on America’s First Heroic Golf Course,” tales of growing up the son of a Scottish golf course superintendent.