Sports Biblio Digest 5.13.18: Canada’s 25-Year Stanley Cup Drought
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: Celtics Revival; Jim Palmer; Relegation for Hamburg; Women’s Sports in Australia; The Olympics of Birdwatching; Ted Williams’ Mystery Woman; Mental Toughness and Running; The Dark Side of the Sports Biz; Remembering Art Shay and Russell McPhedran
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This is Digest issue No. 124, published May 13, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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Canadian hockey fans starving for a Stanley Cup championship will be turning their hungry eyes toward Winnipeg for the next few days.
Yes, that Winnipeg. As in Manitoba. Home of the Jets, or the reincarnated version of a franchise with the same name that absconded for the desert in the mid-1990s to become the Phoenix Coyotes.
These Jets have reached the Western Conference finals against an especially unlikely team, the first-year Vegas Golden Knights. These Jets were the Atlanta Thrashers until 2011, which happened to be the last year a team from Canada played in the Stanley Cup finals.
That year, the Vancouver Canucks lost to the Boston Bruins. The Ottawa Senators got that far in 2007, before falling to the Anaheim Ducks. Edmonton and Calgary did the same, succumbing to Carolina (2006) and Tampa Bay (2005), respectively.
You’ve got to go back 25 years, to 1993, when the storied Montreal Canadiens won the last of their record 24 Stanley Cups, to see a Canadian team hoist that immaculate trophy.
Occasionally, there are stories in the Canadian media about the drought, including last season. The promises and the hopes had been waning, but the revival of the Oilers and the Maple Leafs have been encouraging.
Assigning blame for this parched state of affairs has been just as elusive as the results on the ice. Surely, one of the eight franchises in Canada should have been able to break through by now.
But the Jets? They were mostly awful as the Thrashers and left for dead by indifferent owners in Atlanta. Now, replenished by high draft picks and riding a hot goalie (always a must in the Stanley Cup finals), they’ve got a good bit of their nation behind them, playing in the smallest market in the NHL.
It’s been 40 years since the original Winnipeg Jets (with Bobby Hull) won the World Hockey Association title, in the days before the merger with the NHL. Like their predecessors, these Jets have a fan base that’s on the verge of exploding, and the club’s had to put a cap on outdoor street parties in downtown Winnipeg during games.
While I can appreciate the euphoria their passionate fans are feeling these days, those of us in the town the current Jets left behind aren’t quite feeling the love.
It’s probably nothing to compare to those souls in Canada who’d like to see the Stanley Cup raised and stored on their side of the border for the first time in a quarter-century. However, there’s some Jets trivia to brush up on before jumping on the bandwagon.
More Sports History Files
Ted Williams had a secret flame known as Louise Kauffman, a longtime “Mystery Woman” whose story is included in the first volume of a trilogy of the Splendid Splinter, “Ted the Kid,” by John B. Holway, first published in 2005, and to be re-issued in August by Summer Game Books;
The only club that’s played every season in the German Bundesliga is going down. Hamburger SV won its season finale on Saturday, but it wasn’t enough to prevent relegation to the “zwei” liga after a 55-year run at the top. Some fans disrupted the final minutes at the Volksparkstadion with a fiery, smoky barrage of sparklers and fireworks on the field and in the stands;
Hamburg’s demise has long been in the making, as the club has been dodging relegation regularly in recent years, with some pronouncements that such a fate may be the best thing to prompt a proper overhaul. Still, it’s a bitter fate for a proud club formed in the 1880s as SC Germania, and with an international appeal that included visits to United States in the years after World War II.
A Few Good Reads
He didn’t get a single vote as NBA coach of the year (which went to since-fired Dwane Casey of the Raptors), but Brad Stevens of the Celtics has the venerable franchise in the Eastern Conference finals, summoning up much of the narrative about his miracle-worker ways. Gordon Hayward’s been out since a gruesome injury on opening night and Kyrie Irving is missing the rest of the playoffs, so few are giving Boston a chance against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Whether you think they’re better than they should be because of Stevens, there’s little question the Celtics’ revival has been accelerated;
In a league in which individual talent on the court (especially James) often is accompanied by hyberbolic praise, what’s being written now about Stevens, the former Butler University wunderkind, is becoming the stuff of legend, and it’s having an irritating effect in some corners. It’s not as though there isn’t talent, with veteran Al Horford and youngsters Jaylen Brown and Jason Tatum, and well as Marcus Smart capably running the show in lieu of Irving. Those who keep insisting that “this wasn’t supposed to happen” have let themselves forget the Butler story;
Baltimore Orioles great Jim Palmer was adopted as a boy, and now in his early 70s, has satisfied his curiosity about his biological roots, since the surname “Kennedy” appeared on his birth certificate;
Former NFL offensive lineman Joe Hawley has sold most of his possessions, bought a touring van and adopted a shelter dog as he travels the country, seeking a new perspective on life;
A high school sports star in a tough neighborhood in Baltimore was shot and killed last week, right before he was set to compete in the city lacrosse championship;
From Atlas Obscura, an international birdwatching competition in Colombia has revealed that despite the country having 20 percent of the world’s bird species, several of them are threatened with extinction;
A tour of uniforms and other artifacts at the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame, which has a special section devoted to Dizzy Dean;
ESPN is doing away with its public editor, following The New York Times and The Washington Post’s similar decisions, with a company official employing a similar cop-out explanation. The role “outlived its usefulness, largely because of the rise of real-time feedback of all kinds.” That would be social media, of course, whose often anonymous denizens don’t have the ability to do reporting from the inside like appointed public editors. The last man to hold ESPN’s job is Jim Brady (an acquaintance), who said it’s an unfortunate development, given the critical issues facing the giant sportscaster as it’s come under scrutiny for the political leanings of its employees and as it faces serious business challenges.
Sports Book News
Publishing on Tuesday, “Upon Further Review,” by Mike Pesca, of Slate. He asks a host of sports writers and historians to speculate on such questions as what if Bucky Dent hadn’t homered over the Green Monster, if Billie Jean King hadn’t beaten Bobby Riggs, and if the Dodgers hadn’t left Brooklyn. The contributors include Leigh Montville, Bob Ryan, Jon Wertheim and Stefan Fatsis;
Published last month, by Nathan Kalman-Lamb, “Game Misconduct: Injury, Fandom and the Business of Sport,” takes issue with fans who “dehumanize” athletes (excerpt here) by living vicariously through them, including enjoyment of performance through pain. Here’s more on the book and author at Sonahr, the site of the Society of North American Historians and Researchers. Kalman-Lamb, a lecturing fellow at Duke University, also posted this about how fans “over invest” in college athletics;
At the Sport in American History blog, a review of the newly released “National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball,” by Martin Babicz and Thomas Zeiler;
The British Sports Book Awards short list selections are out, and we’ll have more about this closer to the winners being named;
From Runners World, recommendations for some mostly new books to sharpen your mental edge;
A new anthology of writing about women’s sports in Australia has just been published. “Balancing Acts: Women in Sport,” is a collection of more than 20 non-fiction pieces by female contributors, many of them sports writers and women’s sports advocates. Excerpt here in The Guardian by Danielle Warby about elite sportswomen who’ve come out.
Passings
Art Shay, 96, took photos of the famous and anonymous, in his hometown of Chicago and beyond, for nearly eight decades. When it comes to his sports photography, Muhammad Ali in the Locker Room, taken in 1961 when the young fighter was still known as Cassius Clay, stands out. His work has been displayed often, most recently last year at the American Writers Museum in Chicago. In a 2015 profile of Shay in the Chicago Reader, documentarian Ken Hanson said of the Ali photograph: “In terms of particulars, this photo is as perfect as it gets;”
Russell McPhedran, 82, had enjoyed a strong reputation as a photojournalist in his native Australia and around the world before shooting one of the most iconographic sports (and otherwise) photos of the 20th century: A hooded Palestinian terrorist on the balcony of the Munich Olympic Village where Israeli athletes were being held hostage, and later killed. A German photographer, Kurt Strumpf, was better-known for having taken nearly the exact same photo. McPhedran admitted he didn’t have state-of-the-art equipment compared to those around him, and said he was “shaking like a leaf” when the captor stepped out long enough to allow him and others to snap what remains an unforgettable image. “We never knew what we had until we went into the darkroom,” McPhedran said years later.
