Sports Biblio Digest, 5.3.20: The Sportswriting Of Hunter S. Thompson
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Comfort Of Old-Time Baseball Broadcasts; Three Days At The Ballpark; Jim Bouton; Minor League Baseball Books; The Legend Of Martin Dihigo; Sailing Lessons For A Pandemic; The Origins Of The Tour De Trump; Mary Carillo; Stephon Marbury; Remembering The LaSalle Screamer
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The Kentucky Derby was to have been run Saturday, but instead has been rescheduled to the fall due to COVID-19. NBC staged a “virtual” showdown between Secretariat and Citation that Mark Whicker explored here for the Orange County Register ahead of time. Here’s how it played out.
Saturday also marked the 50th anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s infamous trip to Churchill Downs, with illustrator Ralph Steadman riding shotgun, that yielded a masterpiece of equal notoriety for the long-departed Scanlan’s magazine. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” catapulted the career and legend of the architect of “Gonzo journalism,” and contained the seeds of his tragic demise. At Quillette, this excellent longform retrospective explores every facet of Thompson's life, work and legacy.
Sports pieces served as bookends for Thompson’s career, which plummeted in particular in a pathetic drugs-and-booze episode in Zaire where he was covering the Ali-Foreman fight. At The Athletic, Bill Shea delves deeper into Gonzo’s sports journalism, which included a Page 2 feature in on ESPN.com. Shea spoke to Thompson’s son and quotes Douglas Brinkley, the historian and Gonzo’s literary executor, who called his Kentucky Derby piece a transforming one for sports journalism.
A Few Good Reads
Newsday’s Neil Best writes shortly before the 50th anniversary of the New York Knicks winning their first NBA title, noting that only a few fans in the Gotham area could watch the 1970 NBA Finals on local television, in the years right before the cable explosion;
The New Yorker talks to Stephon Marbury, whose pro hoops career after the NBA included time in China, and who is the subject of a new documentary, “A Kid from Coney Island;”
The name of David Rudenstein, a Philadelphia defense attorney, wasn't as well known by the public as his zany alter ego. By night—at least cold winter nights during college basketball season—he morphed into The LaSalle Screamer, an alumnus of the tiny Catholic college whose rooting histrionics for his beloved Explorers prompted plenty of return fire from fans of other Big 5 schools. He saved particular venom for Villanova coach Rollie Massimino, acknowledging he needed a release from his work representing high-profile clients. As Mike Jensen noted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “In some ways, the Screamer represented a bygone era, where fans were part of the show, before piped-in music and blaring announcements became standard at every play stoppage;"
Tim Wendel, author of three sports books and another coming next year about Castro and baseball in Cuba, writes this week about how his father taught him and his other siblings the basics of sailing on Lake Ontario. As he ruminates now, Wendel draws some subtle and useful life lessons: “No dumdum doldrums or epic storms last forever. Not even in the time of Covid-19;”
The NFL Network is taking an unusual turn in its search for programming following the draft, and without much else to look forward to for the moment. On Sunday and Monday, the league’s cable outlet will unveil the Women’s Empowerment Draft project, featuring icons of the American women’s movement, whose images will appear on jerseys highlighted in official team colors. They include Susan B. Anthony (Buffalo Bills), Helen Keller (New England Patriots) and Shirley Chisholm (New York Jets) and Alfred University students have been heavily involved in the project;
The HBO program “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel” is marking its 25th anniversary, and regular contributor Mary Carillo, the former tennis pro and television commentator, has been around for a good portion of that time. She talks to Awful Announcing about her incurable passion for storytelling;
How old is Don Mattingly? Sam Miller of ESPN.com tries to crack the mystery, from a pack of 1987 Topps baseball cards;
Ronald Blum, a baseball writer at The Associated Press, serves up this piece about “Field of Dreams” as part of the wire service’s look at sports movies. A Yankees-White Sox game is scheduled for Aug. 13 at the field in Dyersburg, Iowa, that’s part of the movie set and is generating plenty of visitors with the season on hiatus;
The prospects of any kind of a minor league baseball season seem rather dire for now, and many small-town summer economies that depend on those games are in serious trouble with continuing lockdowns;
The minor league website has rounded up book collections here and here about a level of the game that is eternally romanticized, but is close to disappearing for good in many places that have always embraced it;
As the Negro Leagues continues its 100th anniversary celebration, Bijan Bayne profiled one of its greatest players, Martin Dihigo, for The Undefeated. The Cuban-born star belongs to five different baseball halls of fame, including Cooperstown, and later was a manager. He forever bristled at the Jim Crow laws that kept him out of the Major Leagues;
Justin Verlander’s 3000th strikeout victim last fall was one of those rare creatures who reached first base on a wild pitch, a twist to one of baseball’s odd rules, the dropped third strike, that has an equally uneven history.
Sports Book News
At Cycling News, an excerpt from the forthcoming “Hearts of Lions” explains how the Tour de Trump road race came to be in 1989, after a certain New York real estate mogul was pitched the idea by college basketball commentator Billy Packer, of all people;
At U.S. Sport History, Bob D’Angelo reviews author Mitchell Nathanson’s biography of Jim Bouton that was published this week;
The U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division took on formidable odds in fighting a crack German counterpart in Italy during World War II. As a 2019 history of that unit points out, and that was reviewed recently, some of the young Americans chosen for such grueling duty were already masters of the slopes. A few of those veterans returned home and built resorts in Aspen and Vail, among other top skiing destinations.
Now Hear This
From the Fangraphs “Effectively Wild” podcast: Examinations of three classic books about going to baseball games, including Arnold Hano’s venerable “A Day in the Bleachers,” rife with boyhood memories of seeing Babe Ruth, Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell at New York's Polo Grounds;
Here’s a new podcast: the “Negro Baseball League,” which includes interviews with former stars and other figures previously unheard.
Retro Sports Files
Television outlets in the U.S. have been dipping into their archives and dusting off “classics” to show the baseball-starved masses. That’s fine with me, since my local Braves affiliate has been showing the 1995 World Series in its entirety. As The Economist notes, it’s something like comfort food;
Along those same lines, Kevin Draper of The New York Times wrote this week that nearly every sports channel has become ESPN Classic. It wasn't meant to be a compliment. I understand the primacy of live sports and its centrality to lucrative sports rights and television companies. But when he claims that “nobody wants to watch sports when they already know the outcome,” that's not what I'm seeing, judging from the admittedly anecdotal evidence of my social media feeds. As I write this, by the way, I am gleefully savoring Tom Glavine’s Game 6 masterpiece against the Indians in the above-referenced Fall Classic. Draper ignores the reconnections many sports fans have been making with memories from their younger years. Like rereading a good book or poring through family photo albums, these old games reinforce the emotional bonds that are the lifeblood for diehard fans;
Another contribution from the archives of former Chicago Tribune Olympics writer Phil Hersh, this one from 2004 about Uzbek gymnast Oksana Chusovitina, who’s turning 45 in June and is eyeing a shot at Tokyo in 2021;
It’s been five years since the ballyhooed Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquaio fight in Las Vegas that was considered a letdown. Brin-Jonathan Butler and Mickey Duzyj didn’t disappoint with this longform gem about that event, “The Poison Oasis,” published at SB Nation.
Media Lodge Notes
Michael Weinreb, a former Grantland contributor and author of a 2015 book about the history of college football, has launched a newsletter about sports history and culture. He’s calling it Throwbacks, and says it’s a work in progess for now. Some of the material will be “tied to specific anniversaries; some of it will be tied to what’s in the news. Some of it may emerge from my fascination with certain dusty corners of the Internet.” His most recent entry is about Barry Bonds, and like other entries, book suggestions are included;
Also hitting the independent trail is Don Markus, who spent decades at the Baltimore Sun, and continues writing about University of Maryland football and basketball;
Derek Goold, baseball writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has found a novel way to refresh his writing: He sends out hundreds of post cards to friends, family members and others, an exercise in keeping his words conversational and short;
Diane Shah, pioneering sports columnist for the late Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, discusses her experiences at the ball park and as a celebrity profiler, material that makes up much of “A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jock Straps,” her new memoir.
Support Local Indie Bookstores
Some of the referral links to book titles in this newsletter are different than what I normally link to. That’s because IndieBound, the affiliate program I’ve been a part of for the last three years or so, is ending that program. It’s teaming up with Bookshop, a relatively new online book browsing and ordering platform that works like Amazon, but wants to be very different. Its mission is to financially support independent bookstores, and the proprietor of my local shop can vouch for this.
Bookshop puts 10 percent of sales into a pool that’s distributed to the indies, and you can check its locations tab to see which store near you is taking part.
In the coming weeks I’ll be switching over all my affiliate partnership links to BookShop, which is stepping in at an acute time as the moms and pops are like many small businesses and individuals: Trying to make an already trying proposition last in a time of economic calamity.
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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. 203, published May 3, 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.