Sports Biblio Digest 4.22.18: The NBA’s Global and Cultural Appeal
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also in This Issue: Sixers Renaissance; Arsène Wenger; David Gove; Baseball During the Great War; Keith Hernandez; Race and Aussie Rules; Remembering Hal Greer, Vic Bubas and Earle Bruce
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This is Digest issue No. 121, published April 22, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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Rolling off some of the past week’s best links about sports books, history and culture, and leading off with the NBA’s global and cultural appeal as its lengthy playoff run got underway this week:
At the Dallas Morning News, reviews of two new basketball books, including the “Soul of Basketball,” which illustrates how the sport invented in America (by a Canadian) continues to resonate worldwide. Author Ian Thomsen argues it was Mavericks’ German star Dirk Nowitzki that helped lift the NBA during LeBron James’ tumultuous and much-watched first season in Miami;
With young stars emerging such as Australia’s Ben Simmons (76ers) and Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo (Bucks), basketball as an American cultural export has never been stronger. Says Alex Wolff, editor of the Library of America’srecent basketball anthology and author of a book on the global game:
“You‘re as likely to run into an NBA fan in Mumbai as you are in Baltimore. If you think of America projecting culture, basketball has been a big part of that.”
Antetokounmpo has led the resurgence of the Bucks, who’ve taken an early first-round series lead against the Celtics, drawing praise from Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who’s notoriously difficult to please;
Simmons, the second-year pro and likely NBA rookie of the year, is turning heads for the Sixers, who are about to close out the Heat;
He’s part of an exciting young duo that includes Joel Embiid, a Cameroonian import who like Simmons played a season of college basketball before turning pro;
Embiid’s been playing with a mask, undaunted even though Miami’s Justice Winslow earned a $15,000 fine for stepping on it. On Saturday, Simmons became the first NBA rookie to register a playoff triple-double since Magic Johnson in 1980;
After recent years of misery, and admittedly tanking to get top picks in Simmons, Embiid and others, the Sixers are as good a threat as anyone coming out of the Eastern Conference. They’re tougher and wiser than their youth might indicate;
In the Western Conference, defending champion Golden State and Houston figure to be heading for a clash to reach the NBA finals, but keep an eye on the New Orleans Pelicans, who swept the Blazers;
One of the legendary names in Sixers’ history has passed: Hal Greer, 81, was admired as one of the hardest workers and competitive players to suit up in the NBA. He scored 21,586 points and averaged 19.2 points during his 15-year career in Syracuse and Philadelphia, and is in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame;
From the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in Greer’s home state, a remembrance of a night in West Virginia in 1965, when Greer’s Sixers played the Lakers and Jerry West, a Mountaineers’ and NBA legend, with Wilt Chamberlain and Billy Cunningham playing secondary roles, two years before they'd win Philly's second NBA title;
Noted in the column above was Vic Bubas, another West Virginia basketball legend who died Monday at the age of 91. He’s best-known for coaching Duke to its initial national college hoops glory in the early 1960s, including four ACC titles and three Final Four appearances just as the UCLA dynasty emerged;
Yuta Watanabe of Japan’s one of hundreds of international players competing in college basketball, and he reflects on the end of his days at George Washington University, including his parents’ presence at his final home game on senior night;
A conservative’s appreciation for the game and culture of the NBA, “arguably the most political pro-sports league,” from David French at the National Review:
“It’s a league that’s political, but it’s not defined by politics. Its stars can be controversial, but they’re not defined by controversy. It’s a league that’s learned to put the main thing — the game — front and center while respecting its players’ convictions and individuality. And the players themselves have made different choices, understanding that they can use their immense platforms to advance their causes without deliberately inflaming their audience around the emotional flashpoint of the national anthem. The players speak out, but so far they do not kneel. And that matters.”
A Few More Good Reads
This is a modern-day soccer miracle: Any manager lasting more than a couple decades in the high-pressure English Premier League. Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger is leaving at the end of the current season after 21 years in charge. I know Arsenal fans who think he’s been on the job far too long, but some got a little emotional at hearing the news;
Wenger started in 1996 and accrued more than 700 wins, three Premier League titles, a record seven FA Cup championships and helped modernize English soccer not only with global talent but contemporary approaches to training and diet. Said former Arsenal defender Martin Keown: "He will be seen as a great visionary and that was just a wonderful period when we were all part of a beautiful transformation;”
At The Athletic, Katie Strang has the heartbreaking story of David Gove, a minor league hockey player who died of a drug overdose last year, just as his former youth coach was set to go to trial on charges that he sexually abused him;
The CBS All Access streaming service is developing “8 Fights – The Life of Muhammad Ali,” a limited-event series based on Jonathan Eig’s claimed biography “Ali: A Life.” The executive producers include actor Morgan Freeman;
From Down Under, two documentaries are forthcoming about Adam Goodes, the retired Indigenous Australian Rules Football star and the 2014 Australian of the Year who had to battle racial abuse toward the end of his career;
The Sydney Swans star heard the abuse in the AFL Grand Finals that year at the cavernous Melbourne Cricket Ground, and the year before that, was subjected to a girl in the stands calling him an ape, an incident that was only the beginning of his troubles;
Those episodes came 20 years after Nicky Winmar, an Indigenous star with St. Kilda, pulled up his jersey and pointed to his dark upper torso after fans heaped racial abuse upon him;
Jim Leeke’s “From the Dugout to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War,” was named the winner of the Society for American Baseball Resarch’s Larry Ritter Award, which goes to books published about the deadball era;
A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card has been sold for $2.88 million, second only to the 1912 Honus Wagner T206 card whose sale price of $3.12 million remains a collectors’ record;
Dave George, the longtime sports columnist for the Palm Beach Post, is retiring after a 40-year career. Here’s his farewell column, and a selection of some of his favorite work, topped off by a piece about the Head Ball Coach;
A new memoir by Keith Hernandez that delves frankly into the former New York Mets’ star’s notorious off-field behavior, is “about a time before #MeToo. Also a time before AIDS, the internet and 24-hour media,” but he admits to not being terribly embarrassed by his revelations;
Earle Bruce, 87, had the unenviable task of succeeding Woody Hayes as Ohio State football coach, and proved to be more than worthy on and off the field. He went 81-26-1, won four Big 10 championships and revealed the kind of candor and emotion that were vastly different from the stern Hayes, whose clothesline hit on a Clemson player during the Gator Bowl ended his coaching career in 1978;
Admiration for Bruce was especially keen after his controversial dismissal from the Buckeyes after nine seasons. He later coached at Colorado State, was a popular television analyst and mentored the current Ohio State head coach, Urban Meyer, who said in a statement that “I’ve made it clear many times that, other than my father, Coach Bruce was the most influential man in my life.”
