Sports Biblio Digest, 5.29.16: America's 'Summer of Soccer'
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Humorous Soccer Books; The Trailblazing C.M. Newton; America’s Best Sportswriter; 100 Runnings of the Indianapolis 500; New Sports Books
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This is Digest issue No. 41, published May 29, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To view this newsletter in a browser, please click here.
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Here we go again.
The Memorial Day holiday weekend in the United States is the start of the summer season, and Sports Illustrated took a departure from its usual cover topics to portray Lionel Messi under the headline: “Summer of Soccer.”
The Barcelona star is spending his off-season with the Argentine national at the Copa America, which kicks off Friday in the United States for the very first time.
The Euro 2016 tournament also takes place in France in June, hence the SI treatment, which included 12 preview pages.
While the summers are high holy days for soccer fans in America—professional leagues are in full swing and European club teams conduct their pre-season tours here—all of this was too much for famed New York radio host Mike Francesa.
His eight-minute rant this week is standard fare for an American sports media type that used to predominate, but that has gradually eroded with the rise of soccer as a viable spectator sport in North America.
While it wouldn’t be quite correct to call Francesa’s segment outright soccer-bashing, his bewilderment at all the fuss over a player he’s never heard of and a sport he cares little about comes from a familiar playbook.
When Pelé arrived in the mid-1970s to play for the Cosmos, famed New York sportswriter Dick Young was aghast to witness the crowd at a Mets game give the Brazilian legend a standing ovation. Young wasn’t familiar with Pelé, but all-American, hot dog-eating baseball fans were.
Even during the World Cup played in the U.S. here in 1994, there was plenty of grousing from mainstream sportswriters about a sport that they thought may have been suitable for suburban kids to play, but not for American adults to watch.
What is different now is the pushback Francesa got—not that he cares—from the likes of Deadspin and Vice, sports verticals whose younger male audiences are the core of the burgeoning American soccer fan demographic.
Indeed, many mainstream media outlets, and not just SI, which employs “The Beckham Experiment” author Grant Wahl as its chief soccer writer, provide much more ample coverage of the sport than when I wrote about soccer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Plenty of American sportswriters have gotten the soccer bug, including an acquaintance, Chuck Culpepper, who wrote an hysterical book about a decade ago about trying to understand the world of English soccer.
“Bloody Confused!” is one of the books I discussed this week on the Sports Biblio Podcast, and while they weren’t all as humorous as Chuck’s, many of them did make me laugh.
It’s doubtful Francesa is even aware that the key figure in the ongoing FIFA corruption probe is a former youth soccer dad from Queens, the kind of guy who might have listened to “Mike and the Mad Dog,” was eventually nabbed by the FBI and turned whistleblower in the graft.
As I wrote earlier this week, Chuck Blazer might be the unlikeliest person to bring down the solons of global soccer, who were thought to be beyond the reach of law enforcement.
Soccer is a healthy niche sport on these shores, and while it’s not going to overtake the popularity of the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball, most American soccer fans I know aren’t concerned about that.
They’re grousing instead about a lack of progress by the U.S. men's national team under Jürgen Klinsmann and that may prove to have a short run in the Copa America, which the Yanks will get started in Friday’s opener against Colombia in Santa Clara, Calif.
As for Messi, he may have suffered something of an SI jinx before the tournament, hurting his back in a friendly against Honduras, not long after Francesa apparently first learned of his existence on the planet.
A Few Good Reads
Andrew Maraniss is the author of the acclaimed “Strong Inside,” about Perry Wallace, the first black basketball player in the Southeastern Conference and who was an unheralded student civil rights activist on the Vanderbilt campus in the late 1960s. This week at The Undefeated, Maraniss writes about C.M. Newton, who broke even more racial barriers in the SEC as the basketball coach at Alabama. Later, Newton hired Tubby Smith, an African-American who won an NCAA title at Kentucky, where Adolph Rupp coached virtually all-white teams until the early 1970s;
Sunday is the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500, and it’s a sellout, with an estimated 250,000 at the Brickyard. At the Indianapolis Star, Zac Keefer writes about how the Indy 500 became more than a race;
Laurie Bell, was a promising British centre-back who played in his home nation’s youth scheme for 14 years before making his pro soccer debut at 22 for the Tulsa Roughnecks: “This wasn’t English football. This hadn’t been the plan;”
At the pro hoops blog Pick and Popovich, Sam Quinn writes about Sihugo Green, who was drafted by the Cincinnati Royals in 1956, ahead of Bill Russell. Quinn argues that the selection that may have destroyed the franchise now known as the Sacramento Kings. Although the Royals drafted Oscar Robertson the following year, he won his only NBA championship with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971. The only title for the Royals/Kings was in 1951;
Donations via Kickstarter are being accepted by the creators of Game Point, a new quarterly print basketball magazine started by Andrew McNeill, who covered the San Antonio Spurs for ESPN’s True Hoop. He’s envisioning the site along the lines of the American soccer “zine” Howler;
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban employs an astrophysicist who wants to change how we watch sports;
At Slate, Josh Levin argues that Zach Lowe, a former Grantland staffer who writes about the NBA for ESPN, is the best sportswriter in America. Obviously that’s a very subjective statement, but I do agree Lowe is excellent at what he does. I have enjoyed his podcast, The Lowe Post, very much, and it’s a great example of what I have called the coming podcast evolution;
Earlier this year I wrote about how “The Inner Game of Tennis” helped spawn the then-new field of sports psychology in the 1970s and whose adherents include Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. At SI, Chris Ballard writes about how Steve Kerr has found the book helpful as coach of the Golden State Warriors.
New Sports Book News
Here’s what’s being published in the coming week:
Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game, by David Sumpter (Bloomsbury Sigma, Tuesday)——The pure geometry of soccer is explored by a British-born mathematician at Sweden's Uppsala University;
The Great Bike Race: The Classic, Acclaimed Book that Introduced a Nation to the Tour de France, by Geoffrey Nicholson (Velodrome, Tuesday)—The 40th anniversary of the publication of one of the landmark books about cycling is being observed with this new edition;
Tendulkar in Wisden: An Anthology, edited by Anjali Doshi (Wisden, Tuesday)—A collection of writings about the legendary Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar published in Wisden's various cricketing publications dating back to the early 1990s;
Terror in the City of Champions: Murder, Baseball, and the Secret Society that Shocked Depression-era Detroit, by Tom Stanton (Lyons, Wednesday)—Mickey Cochrane's arrival in The Motor City in 1934 coincides with the rise of the Tigers, Lions, Red Wings and Joe Louis, and a criminal gang known as the Black Legion, which mysteriously leaves bodies all over town in its wake.
Check out more new and forthcoming titles in Sports Biblio’s guide to spring 2016 sports books. Our summer list, from July-September, will be posted soon!
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