Sports Biblio Digest, 4.5.20: Making Up for a Cancelled Olympics
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Denied On the Doorstep of the Final Four; The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson; Spring Fever; FanGraphs In Peril; Baseball’s GOAT Statistician; The Milwaukee Brewers at 50; Astros Apologetics; Top 100 Sports Films; Robert Coover’s Fantasy Baseball Novel; Sidd Finch at 35
********
On only three occasions have the Olympic games been cancelled, all due to world war.
When this summer’s Tokyo Olympics were delayed to 2021 because of the Coronavirus crisis, it was the first time such a postponement had been ordered.
The year after the end of World War I, a mini-Olympics of a sort were contested, in part to make up for the loss of the 1916 Games, slated for Berlin, because of military conflict.
Another reason for the staging of the 1919 Inter-Allied Games in Paris was to serve as a recovery following the Spanish flu pandemic.
A generation of young men had been killed, wounded and ravaged by illness. An American, Elwood Stanley Brown, had served in France as athletic director of the Young Men’s Christian Association and thought an Olympics for soldiers to celebrate the end of the war would be a proper healing gesture.
He was careful not to call it an Olympics, as former military personnel from 19 victorious Entente Powers nations gathered at a new outdoor recreation facility, named after U.S. Army General John Pershing.
The physical and mental re-energizing event also offered a glimpse of a few athletic stars of the coming years.
Future world champion Gene Tunney won a gold medal in boxing, and a multi-sport standout, American Solomon Butler, won the long jump.
Later Butler would play in the National Football League, before bigotry drove him from the game, and he later had a brief baseball career with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues (He also merited attention in Arthur Ashe's magisterial multi-volume history of African-American athletes).
Americans dominated the events, which included hand grenade throwing (a bayonet competition was considered, but ultimately rejected, as was cricket).
Charley Paddock, an American who won both sprinting events, claimed the 100-meter gold medal in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.
Norman Ross, an American swimmer who won five events at the Inter-Allied Games, took home three golds in Antwerp.
While the Antwerp Games restored some of the old order under the International Olympic Committee, then-IOC boss Stanley Roush initially wasn’t so sure about reviving the Olympics so soon after the end of the war.
He said the Inter-Allied Games were “extremely useful and showed that muscular value and sporting enthusiasm were not on the decline.”
It’s hard to imagine now such a sentiment being expressed, and there’s not been anything like the Inter-Allied Games since then.
World War II cancelled the 1940 and 1944 Olympics (as well as the World Cup in 1942 and 1946). By the time they resumed in 1948, in St. Moritz and London, another generation of manhood had been sacrificed in global conflict. The eagerness to stage a global spectacle of sports and healing had never been stronger.
In those post-war years, global sports gained an even larger, more lucrative global stage, with the Cold War, television and corporate sponsorships and doping scandals contributing to its challenges.
The Coronavirus outbreak has presented unprecedented circumstances to dramatically alter not just the logistics required to stage the Olympics, but possibly even the Olympic ideal.
The return of live sports can’t come soon enough for fans hunkered down at home until further notice, watching “classic”sporting events, whipping up fantasy scenarios and indulging in old arguments about who’s the “greatest.”
Whenever games resume, and the Olympics are finally staged, the energizing effects could be just as important as when those 1,500 former soldiers got together in Paris, and found new life after one of the modern world’s darkest chapters.
A Few Good Reads
There’s not much left to write about the baseball career of Jackie Robinson, but a new book about his 1944 court-martial—mentioned in the Ken Burns “Baseball” film—was published in February by Stackpole Books. Here’s a Q & A with author Michael Lee Lanning on the Foreward Reviews site;
For current members of the Philadelphia Phillies, the franchise’s replacement team 25 years ago strikes a familiar note;
The overseers of Baseball Digest are unlocking their archives for free, via a deal with eBay and eMagazines, through July 15, and they’ll want your registration information before you can browse. But at 78 years old and with more than 800 issues to date, what a treasure trove that archive is. Still wish I had kept my copies from when I was a kid;
A treasure trove of baseball statistics were compiled by Bill Weiss, who spent 60 years mailing minor league teams biographical surveys of the players they had on board during those years. In 2001, MiLB had him put together a listing of the top 100 all-time minor league teams and at the top are some real oldies before the farm system devised by Branch Rickey was in place;
A contemporary leader of the baseball stats revolution is in financial straits without live games. FanGraphs has made staff and salary cuts, shuttered The Hardball Times, a longform site, and is asking for public support, as sports media entities will continue to reel for quite a while;
Trees and plants are blooming and bees are buzzing as I write this on my balcony on a 70-degree day. Spring is all about, and the urge to get out these days doesn’t venture far beyond this vantage point due to shelter-in-place. For those of us with spring fever, especially as it relates to baseball, memories of bygone times resonate even more powerfully these days;
A 30-year-old high school baseball coach in New Jersey is one of the youngest victims of the Coronavirus in his area, and those who knew him are stunned because he personified fine health;
An excerpt from a newly published book about the birth of the Milwaukee Brewers, who were the Seattle Pilots for only a year before relocating to the town the Braves had left behind just a few years before;
Evan Gattis, the now-retired catcher for the Astros’ 2017 World Series title team, admits the team cheated vis-a-vis sign-stealing, and said that “fans feel duped. I feel bad for fans;”
Little sympathy is being mustered for the architects of that betrayal, especially former Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, who’s the symbol of what one old-school writer describes as being from an analytics generation that “sought to extirpate the sacrifice bunt, the stolen base and tears and joy from the American game;"
Former Major Leaguer Billy Ripken discusses his new book, “State of Play: An Old-School Guide to New-School Baseball,” at Baltimore magazine;
Staffers at The Athletic compiled their favorite sports films to produce their 100 greatest, but this really jumped out at me: The only flick made before the 1970s is “Pride of the Yankees,” and it was right at 100. Ya gotta be kiddin’ me ya kids! Not sure reading Richard Sandomir’s 2018 book about the making of the movie would have made a difference, but placing it at the bottom just feels like a token gesture;
With no live sports for the foreseeable future, ESPN is moving up its long-awaited documentary series on Michael Jordan, “The Last Dance,” for an April 19 debut;
The 2020 Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame induction class was announced Saturday with few surprises, and includes the late Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Rudy Tomjanovich, Eddie Sutton, Kim Mulkey and Tamika Catchings, the first former Tennessee Lady Vol player to join coach Pat Summitt in Springfield;
Denise Rife, who as Denise Long once scored 111 points in an Iowa high school basketball game, was the first female player drafted by an NBA team. At age 69, the retired pharmacist is having to postpone hip-replacement surgery because hospital workers don’t have enough personal protective gear for elective operations due to Coronavirus concerns;
It’s been 10 years since Dee Dee Jernigan missed two layups in the final seconds as Xavier was aiming to wrap up a Women’s Final Four berth. Instead, Stanford pulled out the Elite 8 win, and Jernigan’s life has taken some rough turns ever since, little having anything to do with those painful memories on the court;
This was to have been the weekend for college basketball’s Final Four, and just after the publication of his latest book, “The Back Roads to March,” John Feinstein talked to Mike DeCourcy of The Sporting News about the absence of madness.
The Sports Retro Files
From The Paris Review in 2017, an examination of Robert Coover’s “Universal Baseball Association,” originally published in 1971, at the dawn of the fantasy sports age, and whose protagonist embodies baseball fantasy far beyond the concocted world of numbers obsessives;
On April 1, 1985, Sports Illustrated published pure fiction and served it up as a brilliant April Fool’s surprise. “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” who didn’t exist, was penned by George Plimpton, a sports fantasist extraordinaire in his own right and founder of the aforementioned The Paris Review.
Passings
Carl Tacy, 87, was known as “Gentleman Carl” in the Atlantic Coast Conference and throughout college basketball as the head coach of Wake Forest, attracting the likes of Danny Young and Muggsy Bogues and posting a 222-149 record leading the Demon Deacons;
Ed Farmer, 70, played briefly for the Chicago White Sox and then spent 30 years as a member of the South Side team’s radio announcing crew in his hometown.
* * * * * * * *
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. 200, published April 5, 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.