Sports Biblio Digest, 7.12.20: The Missing Rituals and Rhythms of Sports
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Athletic’s Sports Books Extravaganza; Rod Carew; Jack Johnson; Olympics Reading List; The Hero of Goodall Park; Wheelchair Athlete Pioneers; Don DeLillo’s Forgotten Screenplay; Golf’s Holy War; Ida Schnall; "No Game Today" Revisited; Remembering Jack Charlton
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Are you ready for some live sports? There are some here and there, in Europe and elsewhere that seemingly have contained the spread of COVID-19.
In the United States, we’re in full-panic mode (again) with a sharp rise in the number of confirmed cases, while death rates continue to drop.
Younger, healthier people are testing positive for a virus that has a 99 percent recovery rate, but pressure is growing to impose new lockdowns, or at least make public mask-wearing compulsory.
Public health honcho Dr. Anthony Fauci is warning that we shouldn’t be encouraged, and even thinks that we are “living in the perfect storm.”
At the same time, a number of professional sports leagues are trying to get restarted, or started late, and some of the leading names in their games have decided to “opt out,” or are considering it.
Los Angeles Angels’ star Mike Trout is among them (his mother Tweeted this week to implore mask use); Atlanta Braves’ slugger Freddie Freeman is recovering after testing positive.
What looked to be a manageable 60-game season is in jeopardy because of players who can’t play, even before the shortened slate is set to begin, or because of those who are leery.
Even in a quarantined atmosphere, the social contagion may be as fearsome as the biological contagion.
Mid-July is also the time when college football season starts getting into motion, at least with media sessions.
Those were called off weeks ago, and this week the bombshells rocked the sport: First the Big Ten, then the ACC, then the Pac 12 and Big 12 announced their teams would be playing conference games only.
No cupcake dates with multi-directional whipping boys from the lower ranks in the early going, but also no late-season rivalry games either, beyond the likes of Ohio State-Michigan and Auburn-Alabama.
If there’s a season at all. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey summoned all of his athletics directors to league headquarters, instead of the usual Zoom sessions, and later admitted the hopes are fading that there will be any games at all.
If so, that would be an even bigger blow for college athletic programs that have been busily shedding teams due to dropping financial fortunes.
At well-heeled Stanford University, 11 of 36 varsity teams were cut this week. While sailing, squash and men’s volleyball aren’t the biggest draws, they’re a symbol of further bloodletting to come.
Alternatives include suggestions that college football be pushed back to the spring. Former Florida and Ohio State coach Urban Meyer thinks there’s “no chance” of that happening.
I have no way of gauging any of this, nor do many of us. All I know is that the possible rearranging of seasons, placing whole teams and leagues into “bubbles” for training and truncated competitions and barring fans from attending just isn’t right.
The absence of the natural rhythms and rituals of sports that would be so consoling during these jittery times is just as painful as shutting down restaurants and concert halls, closing church doors and figuring out how to teach young children online from home.
Our social world has come unraveled to such a large extent that I don’t know how much of it can be recovered. Sports is a big part of that equation.
There are sports experiences that we may never know again, or the way we once did. Healthy people, and especially healthy athletes, are being treated as if they were not, and there's no way this is good for our society in the long run.
I apologize for being pessimistic but this is such a surreal, unnatural time that I didn't think would have gone on as long as it has. These last four months have seemed like four years. Every single aspect of daily life has been devastated, if not destroyed.
The sports business has been crushed badly as have so many others after extensive lockdowns, so I understand the need to salvage something out of these months.
But even the escape sensation of sports has been dashed too.
As much as I want to hear the crack of bats, even in empty stadiums with piped-in crowd music, and take in the spectacle of college football in a few weeks’ time, I’d rather they hold off altogether if concerns about the virus can’t be overcome soon.
I don’t want to watch baseball in the late fall and early winter, or college football in the spring. I’m not sure who besides hardcore fans would watch the resumption of the NBA and NHL, given the proximity of their upcoming seasons.
I don’t blame any athlete, coach or team for pulling out now and waiting until the virus is better contained, and we’ve got a better idea how widespread it’s become.
While the joy of a few sporting events would have offered some welcome balm, if nothing comes about for a while longer, then that might be for the best. As Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle said this week:
“We haven’t done any of the things that other countries have done to bring sports back. Sports are like the reward of a functional society, and we’re trying to just bring it back, even though we’ve taken none of the steps to flatten the curve, whatever you want to say.”
Summertime and the Reading Is Easy
While waiting for live sports to begin, The Athletic undertook another massive project, their writers’ favorite sports books, and rolled that out this week.
The lists include books about each of the major men’s professional team sports, college football and men’s college basketball, and some special topics, including action-adventure sports novels, how a sports book is made (by staffers who’ve written them) and a terrific oral history of one of the great oral history sports books of all time, Terry Pluto’s “Loose Balls.”
The author and luminaries of the American Basketball Association were included, among them Julius Erving and Dan Issel as well as Bob Costas, announcer for the Spirits of St. Louis, who featured perhaps the most ABA-ish player of all—Marvin Barnes.
There’s so much to choose from from among all these lists, but a tip of my cap goes to Rob Biertempfel, The Athletic’s Pittsburgh Pirates beat writer, for plugging former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall’s “Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball,” a terrific look at an enigmatic pitcher during an equally quirky time in American life.
Here’s hoping Biertempfel and his colleagues won’t have to wait too much longer to write about actual ball games.
A Few Good Reads
Rod Carew talks with Ira Berkow about Calvin Griffith, the longtime Minnesota Twins owner with a racist past and the latest sports figure to have a statue removed. Carew, 74, a heart transplant recipient who recently published a memoir, said despite his struggles with Griffith, his old boss was the first person he called when he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame: “While we cannot change history, perhaps we can learn from it;”
When Tom Junod gets his hands on a compelling true-crime tale, set aside a good bit of time for immersion. His latest at ESPN.com, “The Hero of Goodall Park” is about a 50-year secret that unraveled after a deadly hit-and-run accident at a baseball park in Maine in 2018;
A deep look at a foundation begun by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder to benefit Native American peoples reveals that it has not lived up to its mission;
Eddie Shack, a four-time Stanley Cup winner and well-liked “glue player” for the Toronto Maple Leafs dynasty of the 1960s, is in palliative care due to a long bout with cancer. It's been hard for others to visit, including his former teammates, due to COVID-19 restrictions;
Kyle Whelliston of The Mid-Majority explains well how the first few Olympic basketball tournaments paved the way for the NCAA Tournament—then overshadowed by the National Invitation Tournament—and anticipated monumental social change as gradual integration came to college basketball;
The Tokyo Olympics were to have started later this month, and LitHub has served up an eclectic reading list of Olympic subjects to ease the absence, including a new novel about female athletes at the 1936 Berlin Games;
From John X. Miller at The Undefeated, how a self-published novel about a basketball player attending the historically-black Howard University prefigured reality, with the announcement this week that prized recruit Makur Maker will playing for the Washington, D.C., school next season;
John Thorn tells the tale of Ida Schnall, who had been barred from swimming in the 1912 Olympics and who organized the Female New York Giants, a traveling baseball team that played exhibition games in 1913. Before Babe Didrikson, Schnall stood out in a bevy of sports and later starred in Hollywood after a career in vaudeville.
Sports Book News
The above-noted Ira Berkow will have his 26th book published in August, “How Life Imitates Sports” (Sports Publishing LLC), to mark the 50th anniversary of his start at The New York Times, where he spent 33 years;
Also coming up next month is a new book by David Davis—a longtime friend of this newsletter who sends many links that make what you read here so much better—called “Wheels of Courage” (Center Street). It's about the first wheelchair athletes, many of them crippled during World War II, and how they helped able-bodied Americans look at the disabled in more enlightened ways;
A Q & A with Brett Cyrgalis, New York Post sportswriter and author of the newly published “Golf’s Holy War: The Battle for the Soul of a Game in an Age of Science” (Avid Reader Press), a critical look at the increasing role of technology and analytics on the PGA Tour and how it’s riled those who prefer a more aesthetic enjoyment of the game; mini-review here from Publishers Weekly, which notes how Cyrgalis explains how Babe Ruth influenced the golf swing.
Sports On Film
With no baseball going on, here's a fun discovery via reader Dennis Anderson of author (and recent Roger Angell biographer) Joe Bonano writing on the 40th anniversary of the 1966 short film “No Game Today.” A boy breaks into an empty Comiskey Park, and dares to dream about World Series glory. It’s charming and wistful all at once and Bonano talks to filmmaker Tom McComas, who's run a book and video store for years in northern Indiana;
For The Ringer, Ross Scarano has this marvelous yarn about the only screenplay American novelist Don DeLillo ever wrote, for a 2004 indie film about a playwright who’s a Red Sox fanatic. “Game 6” starred Michael Keaton and Robert Downey Jr. and played in only a handful of cinemas. DeLillo, whose most famous sports story remains the “Pafko at the Wall” prologue to “Underworld,” will be publishing a new novel in October. “The Silence” also has a sports backdrop, with five people in Manhattan watching a Super Bowl in the future “when an unknown catastrophic event renders the digital world silent.” The book was completed just before COVID-19 set in around the world;
A six-part biopic series about Jack Johnson is in production for HBO and is based on Ken Burns’ documentary “Unforgivable Blackness.” Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali will be starring as the American boxing champion in “Unruly,” and he’s also the executive producer;
Gotham Chopra, son of the New Age guru Deepak Chopra, is carving out a niche as a sports documentary filmmaker, his latest project being another collaboration with Tom Brady called “The Greatness Code,” which debuted on Apple TV+ Friday. Chopra’s shop is called Religion of Sports, which also goes heavy on Kobe Bryant, athlete activism and what he calls “Sportuality.”
Passings
Jack Charlton, 85, played on England’s 1966 World Cup championship team and later coached Ireland to a memorable upset of Italy in the 1994 World Cup and was a beloved soccer figure in both nations.
His entire club career, spanning 1952-73, was spent with Leeds United, playing nearly 800 times and taking a leading role in the 1969 English First Division title squad.
With his late brother Bobby, a 1966 teammate and longtime English club manager, he had a public feud that eventually was reconciled.
“Big Jack” was a manager with brief tenures with Middlesbrough and Sheffield Wednesday before being named Ireland’s first foreign manager in 1986.
Charlton stayed in that role until 1995 and was granted honorary Irish citizenship. Remembrances there of his death on Saturday due to lymphoma and dementia included tributes to “the sporting father figure we needed at that point in the country’s life.”
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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. 209, published July 12, 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.