Sports Biblio Digest, 6.14.20: Drew Brees and NFL Contrition Rites
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: 1980 Ghost Olympians; Dick Allen; Ken Anderson; A Grandmother's Baseball Scorebooks; A Million-Dollar Mike Trout Card; A Painter of Thoroughbreds; Sculptor to the Sports Stars; A Vendor for the Ages; Remembering Eddie Sutton, Pat Dye, Johnny Majors & Lonnie Wheeler
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In February, Miles McPherson, a black minister in San Diego and a former Chargers defensive back, published a book that blended his Christian faith with a hopeful belief it could address persisting problems of racial strife in America.
New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who previously played for the Chargers, penned a brief foreword for McPherson’s “The Third Option” and linked the selflessness and discipline in a team sport with the difficult work of enacting social progress:
“Healing the racial divide will not be easy, but what great accomplishment is?”
Brees could hardly have known that less than three months later he’d be caught up in the storm of the sports world’s reaction to racial violence and protests.
When many players in the NBA and other sports were pointing toward Colin Kaepernick's protests as a told-ya-so moment, Brees said he never could endorse kneeling for the national anthem at games, because he thought it was disrespectful to those who served in the U.S. military.
To say that hellfire rained down on Brees from peers, other athletes (no less than LeBron James) and the ever-woke sports media would be putting it mildly. Like so many who’ve run afoul of saying something even slightly offensive (or not) about race over the last couple of weeks, Brees apologized, more than once.
He says now that he believes players who kneeled weren’t disrespecting the flag, but a good number of Americans agree with his original position.
Like so many of these apologies (especially that of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell), a skeptical citizen is left to wonder about the authenticity of it all.
Unlike some who’ve been shoved into the social media grinder over wrongthink, at least Brees still has his job. He also has the backing of former Saints wide receiver Joe Horn, a black man who gave the strongest testament to Brees’ good character and service to his community:
“Until you have walked beside him and gotten to know him, his wife and family, you definitely have to give him a pass on this one and allow Drew a chance to think about what he said and come back and make this right. And I know he will.”
There’s a suggestion there that Brees has done something wrong simply by voicing his opinion, and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes slightly hinted at something similar.
In the brotherhood of the NFL, Brees has built up tons of credibility. But even for the best of men, that’s not enough in these overheated times, which also included Brees being flogged in the increasingly unforgiving gauntlet of a sporting press restless and haggard from not having real games to cover.
A writer at a New Orleans newspaper was presumptuous enough to demand (in second person!) that Brees just shut up and listen, echoing a common refrain that’s being issued to whites who aren't up to snuff with Black Lives Matter argot.
Brees is being admonished to hear something different, to be sure, but his perspective is somehow out of bounds for any conversation going forward.
Is that any way to have a heartfelt public dialogue that can foster understanding? Do Brees’ critics not realize he wasn’t against players protesting, just the form of protest?
Among the many things written about all this, there’s this telling observation: “We’re demanding a lot of everyone right now.”
Indeed. Too much, I think.
Back in San Diego, McPherson watched all this unfold, and offered up not just basic Christian redemption for those struggling to understand, but what’s also earned through the rituals of football.
He admitted he’s cried “every day” since he saw the video of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer. While not directly addressing Brees’ comments, McPherson said that change in American society will never come about unless white people “use their power to enlist change." Fair enough.
“We need to build bridges and not walls."
About how to do that—as a surreal spring of virus-related lockdowns without ball games of any kind morphs into a roiling summer of racial unrest—few seem to have an answer.
A Few Good Reads
Player activism is sprouting in many places, including college campuses, and few are bigger in the sports-industrial complex than the University of Texas at Austin. Football players are petitioning a list of demands that includes a $1 million "donation" to black organizations and the removal of “The Eyes of Texas” spirit song, whose roots in the early 1900s include being performed at minstrel shows;
The U.S. Soccer Federation has dropped its requirement that national team players stand for the national anthem, and president Cindy Parlow Cone, a former women’s team star, apologized to current captain Megan Rapinoe, whose kneeling in solidarity with Kaepernick led to the policy;
Paul Gardner, the dean of America’s soccer writers, just turned 90, and the British emigre, who’s penned a column at Soccer America magazine for years and is the author of several soccer books, is just as curmudgeonly as ever;
Minnie Lee Olges started the first of many scorebooks of her beloved Cincinnati Reds in 1973 on the back of an envelope, and didn’t miss many more games for another 18 years, as the radio voices of Marty Brennaman and Joe Nuxhall served as her constant companions. Olges died in 1996 at the age of 90, and her grandson went through her notebooks, lovingly producing four copies of a handbound book entitled “Game Day Through the Eyes of Marty & Joe and the Ears of Minnie Lee” and gave them to family members;
Thomas Boswell recounts Game 7 of the 1924 World Series, considered one of the greatest games in baseball history, in which the Washington Senators claimed their only championship as Walter Johnson closed down the Giants;
Dick Allen was moody with the press during his baseball playing days and doesn’t want to talk today about why he’s not in Cooperstown, but it’s a subject that’s been lingering for 50 years as the Hall of Fame’s Golden Era committee mulls over his career;
Another glaring Hall of Fame omission, of the Pro Football variety, is former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Ken Anderson, who’s taken to Twitter (to promote his foundation for developmentally disabled adults) and has noted he’s been snubbed 30 times by the canons of Canton, but keeping his perspective;
A two-part series from Yahoo! Sports on the legacy of the 1980 Moscow Olympics boycott, as told by chastened U.S. athletes whose lives were forever altered; extra cuts about Olympians robbed of medals in Moscow, and the only American to bring home hardware from the Soviet Union, albeit competing for a different nation;
The story of Bill Griffin, a longtime vendor at Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field who started in the early 1950s, worked the winter circus circuit and whose life took many twists and turns before his death last month at the age of 88 due to COVID-19;
While they wait to see if there’s actual baseball to cover, MLB.com writers were asked to list their favorite baseball books, and it contains a lot of the usual suspects, classic and more recent. A new one on me is “If I Never Get Back,” a 2007 novel by Darryl Brock about a present-day reporter who’s taken back in time to join the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, professional baseball’s first team, in a story evoking the years shortly after the American Civil War;
Joe Thompson, a teaching assistant at the University of Houston who wrote his master’s thesis on baseball’s drugs issue, recently compared “Eight Men Out,” the Eliot Asinof book, with the John Sayles film upon which it is based;
Daniel Roberts explores why baseball card and memorabilia sales are booming during the pandemic, including a rookie Mike Trout card that was sold for $922,000, a modern-day record.
Sports and Art
Polish-born painter Andre Pater settled in Lexington, Ky., in the late 1980s, and became renowned for his portraits of thoroughbreds of the Bluegrass State. The current issue of Garden & Gun profiles an unlikely star in his field; an exhibition of Pater’s works was featured in 2017 at the National Sporting Life Library and Museum in Middleburg, Va.;
Wood sculptor extraordinaire Armand LaMontagne has molded memorable likenesses of Boston sporting legends Ted Williams, Bobby Orr, Larry Bird and others, as well as another of Babe Ruth that was unveiled in Cooperstown in 1984. Now 81, LaMontagne enjoys sharing memories of some of his more famous subjects, whom he typically depicts after they’ve retired.
Media Lodge Notes
After dizzying growth that extended to coverage of England’s Premier League and other European sports, The Athletic announced it was laying off 46 writers and editors, or 8 percent of its staff, and reduced salaries for many others still there. None of the star bylines were impacted, but subscriber growth is off 20-30 percent and podcasting advertising is down with no live sports. Facing truncated or rearranged sports seasons over the next few months, the subscription-based service is eyeing possible partnerships that include online betting services;
Tara Sullivan of The Boston Globe writes about being a displaced sportswriter, working from home, away from the frenzied crowds and deadlines that have provided a reassuring rhythm;
Chris Dufresne, 62, a sportswriter at the Los Angeles Times for 35 years, primarily covering college football, died in late May after being treated for melanoma. A few weeks before, he wrote forbiddingly about COVID-19, given his health history. A sports journalism scholarship has been started in his honor at Cal State Fullerton, his alma mater;
Lonnie Wheeler, 68, was a longtime baseball writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer and the author of a dozen sports books, including memoirs with Bob Gibson, Henry Aaron and Reggie Jackson. Wheeler was finishing a biography of Negro Leagues star Cool Papa Bell, to be published next February, when he died last week.
Passings
A month after being elected to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, college basketball coach Eddie Sutton passed away at the age of 84. He won more than 800 games at several schools in a 50-year coaching career that included scandal at Kentucky and redemption at Oklahoma State;
Johnny Majors, 85, was an All-American football player at the University of Tennessee who returned to his alma mater years later to serve as head coach, where he won 116 games, after winning a national championship at Pittsburgh;
Pat Dye, 80, played football at Georgia and brought Auburn back to SEC and national prominence in the 1980s with Bo Jackson. A former assistant at Alabama under Bear Bryant, Dye won 99 games in 12 seasons, third-best in school history, and his legacy includes helping bring the “Iron Bowl,” the annual Alabama-Auburn rivalry game, to the schools’ campuses and away from its traditional venue at Birmingham’s Legion Field. The first Iron Bowl at Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium was a Dye-led win by the Tigers in 1989.
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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. 206, published June 14, 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.