Sports Biblio Digest 6.24.18: 2018 Summer Books Preview
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: A World Cup Literary Lineup; Moe Berg Biopic; Bobby Czyz; Summer Nights at a Carolina Ballpark; Baseball in World War I; The Glory Days of New York Baseball; Remembering Dutch Rennert, Peter Thomson, Hubert Green, John Ward and Walter Bahr
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 129, published June 24, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
PLEASE NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week. The next issue will be published on July 8.
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. You can also follow Sports Biblio on Twitter and hit the “like” button on Facebook.
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Before I take a bit of a summer break (or mid-winter, for my readers in the southern Hemisphere), I wanted to roll out some forthcoming sports book titles of note that are set to be published by the end of August.
The Sports Biblio Fall Sports Book preview comes out in early September, and when the newsletter returns on July 8 I’ll delve into some books that have been piling on my bookshelf for a while, waiting to be written about.
There will be a month-long series of posts on classic creators like Red Smith and Robert Riger, as well as an examination of the work of Mark Kram and Mark Kram Jr., and the world of high school and Southern football in the States.
I hope you enjoy these selections, and happy reading!
June 26
Unbeaten: Rocky Marciano’s Fight for Perfection in a Perfect World, by Mike Stanton (Henry Holt). The latest biography of the heavyweight champion against the backdrop of mid-century America as his undefeated career reached a climax.
July 3
A Franchise on the Rise: The First Twenty Years of the New York Yankees, by Dom Amore (Skyhorse). The Bronx Bombers are back with a vengeance this year, but their early history is quite a bit more humbling.
July 10
Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, by Ben Reiter (Crown Archetype). The author, who predicted in 2014 the reigning World Series champions were destined for that kind of greatness, describes how the hard-hitting club was assembled.
July 17
The Wind at My Back: A Cycling Life, by Paul Maunder (Bloomsbury Sport). A memoir of a lone cyclist who pedals in big cities, back roads and everywhere in between and ruminates about how it's sparked his creative impulses.
Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians: The On and Off the Field Story of Cricket in India and Beyond, by Boria Majumdar (S&s India). The prominent Indian journalist looks at the most popular sport in the world’s biggest democracy and chronicles the highs and lows of the state of the game.
Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of the Samoans to the NFL, by Rob Ruck (New Press). How players like the late Junior Seau and young Titans QB star Marcus Mariota came to the States, and conquered a game that in their Pacific island is fraught with complex connections to America.
July 24
Proud: My Fight for an Unlikely American Dream, by Ibtihaj Muhammad (Hachette). The first female Muslim U.S. Olympian recounts her battle to wear the hajib while she fenced and growing up in an American community where she was often singled out for her differences.
July 30
Revolt of the Black Athlete, by Harry Edwards (University of Illinois). A special updated paperback version to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Mexico City Olympic protests of John Carlos and Tommie Smith
Aug. 1
Not for Long: The Life and Career of the NFL Athlete, by Robert W. Turner II (Oxford). A former pro football player peels back from the glamor to elaborate on the short careers and post-playing struggles of many in his former profession.
Aug. 7
In the Name of the Father: Family, Football and the Manning Dynasty, by Mark Ribowsky (Liveright). How the professional and personal struggles of Archie Manning manifested into a different course for his Super Bowl-winning sons, and created the game’s biggest familial name brand.
Aug. 14
An October to Remember: The Cardinals-Tigers World Series as Told by the Men Who Played in It, by Brendan Donley (Sports Publishing). An oral history of one of more memorable Fall Classics on its 50th anniversary, modeled on the Lawrence Ritter classic “The Glory of Their Times.”
Aug. 21
BoomTown: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its Chaotic Founding... its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis, by Sam Anderson (Crown). How a city craving for respectability via its first major league sports franchise was able to pry the SuperSonics from Seattle.
Arthur Ashe: A Biography, by Raymond Arsenault (Simon & Schuster). A full-scale appraisal of the late tennis and civil-rights icon 25 years after his death.
Aug. 28
September 1918: War, Plague and the World Series, by Skip Desjardin (Regnery History). The last month of World War I witnessed the emergence of Babe Ruth as a Boston Red Sox pitcher, a terrible outbreak of influenza and a final round of carnage on the battlefields of France.
A Few Good Reads
At the LA Review of Books, Dan Friedman compiles his list of favorite soccer-related writings by literary figures and other writers with the World Cup continuing in Russia;
At Garden & Gun, novelist Wiley Cash writes about summer nights spent at the minor league ballpark in his hometown of Gastonia, N.C., and the non-baseball memory as a teenager of attending a religious revival there with his father: “I was perched at the top of the stands—the girl’s sweaty hand in mine—my heart raced, and my mind waged war between puberty and salvation. From there, I could see the back of my father’s head. Hellfire and damnation were being preached, but I knew he wasn’t thinking about those things, because my father was not one to worry about his place in eternity. No, I feel certain that, alone in the stands, he was thinking about baseball;”
Great longform stuff from Steve Politi at the Star-Ledger in New Jersey on boxer Bobby Czyz’ second career, as a grocery bagger;
A new biopic of Moe Berg stars Paul Rudd and is named after and based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 biography “The Catcher Was a Spy.” It’s getting some mixed early reviews (NYT, National Review, San Francisco Chronicle and Wash Post) and some really cheesy headlines. Most of the thumbs-down are aimed at director Ben Lewin for making an espionage thriller seem dull: “Berg led two lives, and the movie doesn't do justice to either.”
Now Hear This
The latest episode of New Books in Sports is with Gregory Snyder, a Baruch College sociology professor and author of “Skateboarding LA,” about the professional circuit there that he spent eight years chronicling and that he says is largely misunderstood and more profitable than you might think;
Some female fans of the Australian Football League found themselves alienated by the culture of the sport and decided to start a podcast along those lines. The Outer Sanctum, which debuted in 2016, “has carved out a space for footy fans that didn’t really exist,” says one of the hosts, and they’ve already partnered up with ABC and The Age;
From Cycling Europe, a new podcast with the same name, that’s mostly about travel and adventure.
Sports History Files
More from baseball historian John Thorn on the upcoming Baseball Americana exhibit at the Library of Congress, where he’ll give a talk on July 14 focusing on the post-war years of New York baseball. It’s a personal tale that shaped his young boyhood, and his lifetime embrace of the game:
“Those were the days when I learned about America, and baseball, and came to love each, separately and together. I had come to this country in 1949 at age two and a half, the son of Holocaust survivors, from a displaced persons camp in Occupied Germany. Yearning to understand my new home, to feel at home, baseball — in particular, baseball cards — seemed to hold the answer.”
Sports Book News
At the Society for American Baseball Research conference this week in Pittsburgh, Jim Leeke’s “From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War,” was named the recipient of the 2018 Larry Ritter Book Award.
It’s for books written about the Deadball era, and Leeke delves into how organized baseball climbed aboard the bandwagon of American patriotism as the U.S. entered the war in 1917. Here are the previous winners.
Passings
Dutch Rennert, 88, who spent nearly two decades as a Major League Baseball umpire, was best known for his demonstrative, dramatic calls—especially on strike three—and admitted “I think I got carried away” after being urged to be distinctive. He worked three World Series and nearly 2,700 games in the bigs;
Peter Thomson, 88, was a five-time winner of the British Open between 1952 and 1965 and arguably is regarded as Australia’s greatest golfer. He later wrote about the sport for The Age and confessed that “I don’t work hard. It’s brain work, really. I’ve never done manual work. Golf’s always been a sport, a game, a recreation, leisure for me;”
Hubert Green, 71, a World Golf Hall of Famer, won the 1977 U.S. Open despite receiving a death threat on the final round. That was the only major crown of 19 PGA Tour wins for Green, who also played on three U.S. Ryder Cup teams;
John Ward, 88, was the longtime radio voice of University of Tennessee sports, uttering his famous greeting “It’s Football Time in Tennessee!” right before kickoff. When the Vols scored a touchdown, he’d call out “Give Him Six” in an emphatic, but rarely hysterical manner. “He wasn’t a yeller and a screamer. He had the great control of his voice and his emotions. . . He understood what Tennessee fans wanted, and he gave it to them in a pretty simple form,” said his successor, Bob Kesling;
Walter Bahr, 91, was the last surviving member of the 1950 U.S. World Cup team that shocked England 1-0. That was the last time the Americans would play in the World Cup until 1990, and his death comes as his home nation is sidelined for the first time since 1986. Bahr was the longtime soccer coach at Penn State, where he coached his sons, Matt and Chris, both of whom became two-time Super Bowl-winning placekickers.
