Sports Biblio Digest, 6.30.19: Tragedy and Crisis at Santa Anita
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Baseball Encyclopedia at 50; Bob Ley; Megan Rapinoe; Wrigley Field; Cricket Out of Time; Omaha’s Golden Generation of Athletes; Mickey Mantle Card Fraud; Roadside Baseball; A Crimson Tide Centenarian; Renee Richards; Off the Sporting Green
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The Breeders’ Cup is staying at the Santa Anita race track this November, but those in charge of the famous Southern California horse-racing grounds are coming under greater fire after a rash of equine deaths that has done more than damage the financial bottom line.
The rest of the season has been cancelled after the 30th horse death in the last six months, and a ban was imposed on legendary trainer Jerry Hollendorfer. State lawmakers are getting involved and the California Horse Racing Board is launching an investigation.
But the problem isn’t just limited to Santa Anita. Bill Christine, former racing writer at the LA Times, tells me Santa Anita is a victim of over-use, horses are over-medicated and running on a worn-out track and other issues are factors.
It’s been much busier since Hollywood Park went out of business in 2013, and California’s left with only two other “bonafide” tracks: Del Mar, near San Diego, and Golden Gates Fields near San Francisco.
He says that “economically, horsemen need all the racing dates to stay in business. Horses eat every day, even if they're not racing, and the expense is sizable. Unlike tracks in the Midwest and on the East Coast, there are no racing alternatives for California horsemen to ship their horses elsewhere. The closest tracks are in Arizona, and that's minor-league racing. California racing, in other words, is a virtual island unto itself.”
Santa Anita officials say they’ve undertaken reforms that have cut down on the number of deaths after a staggering rate earlier this winter, but that hasn’t stopped the criticism of the family-run business many think has mismanaged the track in tragic fashion.
A Few Good Reads
Bob Ley announced his retirement this week after nearly 40 years at ESPN, and with an impeccable reputation for high standards and fairness in journalism. He held many roles since starting out in the early days of the sports cable giant in 1979, culminating as the long-standing anchor of “Outside the Lines.” He had taken a six-month sabbatical, and the program will be hosted by Jeremy Schapp. Many pieces devoted to Ley this week were of the “in depth” variety, speculating on his future as well as ESPN’s;
U.S. women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe’s social activism is as well known as her deft right foot, so it wasn’t a surprise she’d be asked about a potential White House visit should the Americans prevail in the Women’s World Cup. Mainstream and left-leaning media have been lapping up her profanity-laced comments about President Donald Trump, and they were absolutely fawning after her two-goal performance lifted the U.S. over the hosts from France in the quarterfinals. Amid the noise of a phony controversy ginned up by the media is this sobering piece by Gwendolyn Oxenham, author of a 2017 book about women’s soccer, detailing the story of Rapinoe’s older brother, who’s finally able to watch his sister play as a free man after many years in prison. The semifinals are USA-England and Sweden-Holland Tuesday and Wednesday;
Photographer Alana Patterson is featuring her shots of junior girl hockey players in a women’s sports project that’s aiming to give greater visibility for female athletes and to inspire other young girls;
With transgender athletes moving into a brighter spotlight, Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated talks to Renee Richards, now 84, who these days prefers to keep to herself;
Baseball card collectors are crying fraud about a 1952 Mickey Mantle card, the latest example plaguing an industry that’s dealing with plenty of other allegations of doctoring that a couple decades ago even got the FBI involved. More from Rich Mueller at Sports Collectors Daily about the Mantle card flap and other recent discoveries of altered cards;
Someday I do want to attend the annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research, and really wish I could be at this week’s event, and not just because it’s in San Diego. Among the key presentations is a panel discussing the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the Encyclopedia of Baseball. That’s the first sports book I can recall ever obsessing over, to the extent that I repeatedly checked it out of my public library (you could take home reference books then!). These days Baseball-Reference.com has become an incredible replacement, but I do miss flipping through the pages and writing out on lined paper season starting lineups for each team, making my own statistical charts and copying standings, all-star teams and post-season winners, and organizing them in a customized loose leaf notebook. It was my mini-encyclopedia, and I guess you could still do that with the online data today. The tactile joy of writing out names and numbers by hand helped create a sports devotion for me that has been redirected into books and history. The SABR site has more about “Total Baseball” and other projects inspired by the encyclopedia, which also set off the analytics revolution;
With Major League Baseball on another sizzling homerun pace, Jay Jaffe, now of FanGraphs Baseball, breaks down the numbers and the reasons this may be happening, including much that's been written in recent months about the lacing and leather of the baseball itself;
The Seattle Mariners are already laboring through what appears to be another lost season. But the city’s baseball past is resonant with memorable radio voices going back to the late 1920s, when the medium was in its infancy;
The oldest living former University of Alabama football player just turned 100 years old. In 1995, Don Salls, who earned a doctorate in physical education and nutrition, wrote “Live and Love to Be 100.” He played for the Crimson Tide from 1940-42, earned a Purple Heart during World War II, was the head coach at Jacksonville State and is a member of the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame;
With the Cricket World Cup culminating on July 14, a rumination about how the sport “may seem like it is at war with time, and in a way it has always been . . . built upon Victorian scales” that seem increasingly antiquated in today’s fast-paced world that’s rapidly embracing T20 and other quick cricket fixes;
The Omaha World-Herald is chronicling the city’s “greatest generation” of athletes who came up as the Civil Rights movement was emerging. “24th and Glory” features Bob Gibson, Gale Sayers, Marlin Briscoe, Johnny Rodgers and others in a series that continues into mid-July and includes a book to be published in August. Local newspapers continue to fall on very hard times (so long New Orleans Times-Picayune and Youngstown Vindicator), so it’s encouraging to see this kind of project one hopes readers will appreciate.
Now Hear This
Two new episodes of the New Books in Sports podcast are out this week: “Futbolera,” about women’s soccer in Latin America, and a new history of the friendly confines, entitled “Wrigley Field,” fittingly;
The third edition of “Roadside Baseball” is out, and author Chris Epting, a prolific chronicler of the travel impulse, has put his thoughts in audio form with a podcast bearing the same title. More on Epting and the book at Road Trip America.
Off the Sporting Green
Wrapping up this edition is a collection of non-sports links that I like to share when there’s a 5th Sunday of the month. There won’t be a newsletter next week as I’m taking a break, with the U.S. Independence Day holiday next week and a mid-summer’s need to recharge. I'll return July 14. Happy Reading!
On the bicentennial of his birth, and as America celebrates Independence Day next week a new book of Walt Whitman’s writings and how he “helped forge the American spirit, and it abides today” (see more on Whitman at the Post Script below);
From the Sydney Review of Books, here's a remembrance of Les Murray, a poet, critic, anthologist and giant of Australian letters. After his death, countryman Clive James wrote why Murray should have won the Nobel Prize;
From The American Scholar, Bard College professor Joseph Luzzi expounds on the futile quest for the summer read—something I can identify with—although Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which I finished the other night, is a very good start;
From Outside magazine, a quest to protect the world’s last silent places. I'll soon be in search of a few close to home;
The silent film star Lillian Gish starred in D.W. Griffith’s notorious “Birth of a Nation” more than 100 years ago, and as a result her name has been removed from a college theatre. What’s dubbed cancellation culture is ramping up, despite the protestations of Helen Mirren, James Earl Jones and other actors;
Lorne Michaels, the longtime executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” thinks the live comedy show he created, and that still exists, wouldn’t be made the same way today, but for economic than creative reasons;
The owner of New York’s famous Strand bookstore fears that the city’s onerous landmarking process may shutter one of the great independent bookstores still remaining;
From The New Statesman, “simplism” is on the rise because we think we understand more about complicated topics than we really do;
At MIT Technology Review, a philosopher argues that artificial intelligence cannot ever be regarded as an artist;
From The New Yorker, the terrifying potential of the 5G network, especially as it pertains to cyberattacks and surveillance;
From the Los Angeles Review of Books, a review of “Digital Minimalism,” anti-social media advocate Cal Newport’s latest book;
Digital platforms have made it possible for us to be informed about anything at anytime. That the news took over reality does not make for better citizens, and this extends far beyond Trump obsessiveness;
Cass Sunstein, author of “Conformity: The Power of Social Influences,” expands on his thesis about the perils of group polarization;
Author and literary critic Adam Kirsch says there's no need to worry about the death of the humanities because declining college enrollments in those subject areas “hardly represent the death of the things that humanists cherish: free thought and free expression, the quest for beauty and truth.” There are many times lately I think those values are in peril, and chipped away at from within the free societies that Sunstein writes about;
With the 50th anniversary of the Stonewell riots observed this week, two pieces trace the start of the modern history of gay-rights advocacy to earlier events in the 1960s: A protest by a fired U.S. government civil servant, and a British Member of Parliament who discreetly guided passage of a vote that decriminalized homosexuality;
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” was published 50 years ago, and its message resonates as strongly now as it did at the time;
If you’re of a certain age, be aware that your professional decline is coming sooner than you think, if not already;
Robert Caro, author of magisterial biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, has published a book about his own life’s work that some see as too predisposed to the great man theory of history. But he does excel at profiling such men, and we are richer for it. Now 83, Caro is working on the fifth and final installment of his LBJ masterpiece, focusing on the tragic end of what had been a promising presidency (podcast interview here with David Remnick of The New Yorker);
Michael Kazin remembers Alan Brinkley, a historian of power and its discontents. He was the son of TV newsman David Brinkley and “embodied the best of the liberal intellectual tradition;”
A couple in Santa Fe decided to refurbish the El Rey Court motel, a former roadside classic along Route 66, to showcase its midcentury appeal. If I had to do it all over again, I could envision a career in midcentury modern architecture and design. For one thing, I'm the daughter of a homebuilder, and as a kid loved looking through my dad's draftsman magazines (although I recently found a photo of him drawing a triangle on a chalkboard as I, then an apparently disinterested toddler, looked instead at the camera). As a writer, I've also regretted not cultivating many visual or hands-on skills. For many the 1950s exuded suburban boredom, but the midcentury modern style is enjoying a very healthy renaissance, and the art, music, literature and culture of the time are vastly underrated too;
My former Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleague Jim Auchmutey’s new book, “Smokelore: A Short History of Barbecue in America,” is a savory reading treat. It’s also going to make it harder for me to start a Mediterranean diet I’ve been thinking about, right in the middle of summer barbecue season;
Former Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein, author of “The Sports Gene,” has just published “Range,” and it definitely appeals to the perpetual dilettante in me. In this Q & A at Outside, he states his case for being a generalist, athlete or otherwise.
Post Script from The Bard
Walt Whitman called “America” his greatest poem because "he was centrally concerned with the American experiment in democracy and its power to produce 'out of many, one,' even at as great a cost as the Civil War and the faltering Reconstruction.”
Many of his works reflected that theme, but the final lines of his six-line gem really drive home his settling, communal aspirations:
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.
In his preface to “Leaves of Grass,” Whitman explains the strength of that sentiment in prose:
“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors…but always most in the common people.”
As Karen Swallow Prior wrote shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Whitman “links the essence of poetry, which is unity-within-diversity, to the essence of democracy. Within the epic poem that is America, a president is but one figure.”
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 172, published June 30, 2019.
NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week. The Digest will return on July 14.
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