Sports Biblio Digest 8.28.16: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Man of Letters
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Conlon Baseball Photo Auction; The Trouble With College Football; America’s National Parks At 100; RIP Michael Brooks
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This is Digest issue No. 53, published Aug. 28, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To view this newsletter in a browser, please click here. Click here to view this newsletter in a browser.
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Note: There will not be a Digest next Sunday, Sept. 2. The next newsletter is Sept. 9.
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As he likes to remind anyone who will listen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been writing books, making and starring in films and television programs and serving in a number of public, non-sporting capacities longer than he ever played basketball.
The NBA’s all-time scoring leader and multiple record-holder, MVP, all-pro, six-time league champion and basketball hall of famer has forged a rare post-athletic career and persona that drew admiring notice from Publishers Weekly.
He’s a longtime jazz devotee, and last year became a novelist in a nod to Sherlock Holmes. He recently met with his literary hero, crime fiction writer Walter Mosley (author of “Devil in a Blue Dress”), in a public discussion at the New York Public Library.
Now 69, Abdul-Jabbar sounds off on politics, race and social issues in columns for Time, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post, and in campaigning for Hillary Clinton, who appointed him a U.S. cultural ambassador while she was Secretary of State.
At the Democratic National Convention last month that confirmed Clinton’s presidential nomination, Abdul-Jabbar took some pointed shots at her Republican rival, which shouldn’t have surprised anyone familiar with his political stances:
“I’m Michael Jordan, and I’m here with Hillary. I said that because I know that Donald Trump couldn’t tell the difference.”
Abdul-Jabbar may have sounded like a rank partisan with that remark, especially at a political convention. But to delve further into his public thoughts and past work is to appreciate a deeply complex individual whose intellectual forte is persuasion and nuance, not polemic and bombast.
This week marked the publication of his latest book, “Writings On the Wall: Searching For a New Equality Beyond Black and White.”
The title comes from a line in the Stevie Wonder song “Superstitious,” but Adbul-Jabbar’s appeal in these essays on race and American society is for reason, logic and a reverence for shared common values.
In his introduction, “Bridging Troubled Waters,” Abdul-Jabbar worries that his country has never been more divided about major social issues, especially race. For someone whose public consciousness was raised while starring as Lew Alcindor at UCLA in the late 1960s, that’s a serious admission.
And yet, Abdul-Jabbar retains the essential optimism that guided the civil rights movement of his youth, even against a current backdrop of police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests. His book, he writes, is:
“Pushing back against those who wish to corrupt the American dream, to make it harder to achieve, to make it exclusive only to certain people. And as a person who has had his share of being pushed and pushing back, I felt ready to write about it.”
This is a sentiment that drove him to write several books about African-American history in the years following his NBA career: “Black Profiles in Courage,” “Brothers in Arms” and “What Color is My World?”
In “On the Shoulders of Giants,” he profiled the New York Rens basketball team that was the sporting pride of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. His aim with all of these books was to flesh out a fuller portrait of black Americans, whose history he believes has been airbrushed when not ignored and misinterpreted.
As he noted from the outset of his latest book, and on his current speaking tour, Abdul-Jabbar has said if he hadn’t played basketball, he might have become a history teacher.
His liberal views are very clear. He’s not subtle about where he stands on politics and current affairs in America. He recently applauded Jordan, notoriously averse to political statements, for speaking up on the police shootings. Abdul-Jabbar thinks the gender pay gap in America is inexcusable, college athletes should be paid, and long before the convention, took square aim at Donald Trump:
“What’s really under attack is rational thought, with terrorists on one side and self-serving American politicians on the other. Trump, like ISIS, is really a symbol of this irrationality. They both appeal to those who feel powerless and inferior because they refuse to look at facts, weigh evidence, use logic.”
Now this is interesting. Abdul-Jabbar converted to Islam in the early 1970s, inspired by Muhammad Ali and the influence of Malcolm X. Extremists of any kind, even in his own faith, are an anathema to Abdul-Jabbar, whose racial views haven’t changed since he was a young man.
Whether it’s an enlargement of perspective that comes with age, or something else, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has become a welcome advocate of political engagement, of open discussion of issues and perspectives that might be in disagreement.
That’s why I think some ardent partisans of cultural identity politics, especially the white leftist sports-and-politics writer Dave Zirin, have had trouble understanding Abdul-Jabbar, even while acknowledging his “beautiful mind.”
My theory: Those who think Abdul-Jabbar doesn’t go far enough don’t have much of a sense of humor. I think his role as co-pilot Roger Murdock in “Airplane” is one of his most brilliant performances, revealing a clever willingness to participate in his own send-up.
In “Writings on the Wall,” Abdul-Jabbar offers an ode to the U.S. Constitution (“the rule book for being an American”) and a passionate defense of free speech, the latter of which is under siege, especially on college campuses. In a recent list of books about racial topics, Abdul-Jabbar recommends “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In noting that he doesn’t share the author’s “pessimism” about overcoming racial differences, Abdul-Jabbar thinks the book is still worth reading.
This is the essence of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. While I don’t agree with him on a number of issues, what I admire the most about him is his willingness to listen. He’s somebody you feel you can have a conversation with, a rare trait in our contemporary public discourse.
I hope younger Americans of all races will read him, and hear him out. He speaks and writes about race, gender, sports and other issues to understand our common humanity, not reduce everything to identity politics. The culture vultures of sports have no good response to this, also from "Writings On the Wall:"
“If you want to understand how important sports are in America, just imagine if everything sports-related suddenly vanished from our culture and our daily lives. The void would be more powerful than a black hole. I love books, music and art with as much passion as I love sports. But sport is different—it is art in motion. It is the thrum in the blood that begs the body to move, move, move. It is a physical sensation that connects the mind to the body in a way that expresses not only individuality but also our connection to others. It stimulates us to be more, not just as athletes but as human beings.”
The Saga of the Conlon Archive
For those of you who couldn’t get enough sports photography in last week’s newsletter, here’s some more, but with an unfortunate twist.
Bidding for the archive of noted baseball photographer Charles Conlon closed Saturday, and his collection of more than 7,500 negatives is expected to fetch more than $1 million. (Update: the collection sold for $1.8 million Saturday night.)
The Heritage Auctions sale contains many of the iconic shots of the earliest memorable images of the game’s pre-Babe Ruth era: Ty Cobb sliding into third and Christy Mathewson winding up. In all, those years spanned from 1904 through 1942.
The so-called “Dead Ball” era is when Conlon began his baseball work, laboring for The New York Evening Telegram around the turn of the 20th century. Many of the photos he took for The Sporting News, once the “bible” of baseball, were turned into ads and images for baseball cards.
His work is captured in several books, including “Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon” and “The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon's Golden Age Baseball Photographs,” both published in 2011.
Conlon died in 1945, and The Sporting News maintained his archive until 2010, when it was sold to John Rogers, a private collector in Arkansas. In January, the FBI raided his home amid a massive fraud investigation into what is alleged to be Rogers' counterfeit sports memorabilia business.
Those are hardly the only legal troubles for Rogers, as George Gene Gustines wrote this week at The New York Times. He also quotes photo dealer and auctioneer Henry Yee, a co-author of the 2005 book “A Portrait of Baseball Photography,” whose luminaries include Conlon:
“The bottom line is that Charles Conlon and his works present baseball photography at its absolute pinnacle. These artifacts are a physical record of our national pastime. It is irreplaceable, and I wish I owned it.”
While we’re fortunate enough to have the Conlon photos in book form, the sad reality is that these treasures, in their original form, may remain in private hands forever. While I don’t begrudge The Sporting News for selling the Conlon archive—it’s a media business trying to stay alive in a brutally competitive industry—I also think this is a tragedy. It’s bad enough that newspapers and magazines are dispensing with archival materials, dumping them in the trash if they can’t find a buyer or a library willing to become a custodian.
I wish there could be some other way to preserve this collection besides an auction. Given the allegedly sullied hands of its most recent owner, who knows what will happen to it? I’m hardly an expert on these matters, but I’m just thinking out loud in sentimental fashion, wondering what it would take for the Conlon collection, and others like it, to be secured in perpetuity for the enjoyment of the general public.
The ‘Paper Lion’ of London
After their April release in the United States, the six reissued sports books of George Plimpton have received a generally positive reception since they were published there earlier this month by Yellow Jersey Press.
As Tim Adams notes at The Guardian, not all of Plimpton’s books were initially published in Britain, “presumably on the short-sighted basis that British readers won’t read about American sports.” Instead, Adams concludes, “you could say these books invented a genre,” and that they influenced British novelist and author Geoffrey Dyer.
At The Spectator, Ben Markovits writes that “Plimpton uses these books to grow up,” and brings these childly exploits into a more contemporary context, notably in “Paper Lion,” about men who in some sense remain kids at heart:
"The book ends on a note of species lament: Plimpton, heading home, leaving the field for the last time, hearing ‘the long bleat from the players being whistled together by the coaches, almost one of sorrow.’ "
The Trouble With College Football
A new season starts gets fully underway in the coming week, with plenty of unresolved off-the-field issues remaining, most notably the mess at Baylor. Another player has been arrested, this time for animal abuse, as respected former Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe struggles to restore some order. Even the hometown Waco Tribune-Herald couldn’t avoid the topic in its otherwise upbeat preseason special section.
For those thinking the Penn State scandal was the low-water mark in moral depravity in recent college football history, the Baylor story is still unfolding. The full independent inquiry into the school’s handling of sexual assault charges hasn’t been released, but is being sought by a local prosecutor;
At cbssports.com, Dennis Dodds is flabbergasted that the University of Central Florida wants to create a monument for retired football coach George O’Leary, who won a lot of games for the Knights but whose career was clouded by allegations that he fostered an environment of abuse and neglect (and don’t forget the bogus resume that ended his Notre Dame tenure after only a few days);
Yet the riches the sport generates through television keep pouring in, and are disbursed in questionable ways. The University of Iowa is paying its strength coach nearly $600,000 a year, more than even high-spending Alabama, the reigning national champions;
I still regard college football as an American sporting treasure, and not just because I have covered it often and live in a part of the country where the game is massive. Its history is instructive to us now, since money and bad behavior have always been at the center of its moral conundrum. Is this history being well-preserved at the College Football Hall of Fame, which has relocated to my hometown of Atlanta? At Sport Heritage Review, Gregory Ramshaw takes a tour and offers his thoughts. Mine: it’s too short on the real history of the game, and very long on the noise, bells-and-whistles and high-tech immediacy of the television spectacle the game has become;
Once upon a time, Rice University was a college football powerhouse. In the years right after World War II, the Owls were the pride of the Southwest Conference as well as their hometown of Houston, where professional sports would not arrive until the 1960s.
But the decline of the Rice program might serve as a cautionary tale today. The school, noted for its excellent academics, built a 70,000-seat stadium to capitalize on its football success, just as the Texas Longhorns and other big public universities came to dominate that league.
A Few Good Reads
At ESPN.com, Don Van Natta Jr. goes on long on the daily fantasy sports industry, and in particular the quick rise and subsequent tumbling of Draft Kings and Fan Duel;
On Sept. 3, the Manchester Football Writing Festival takes place in Britain, with family-themed events including short films and writing lessons from Ben Lyttleton, co-author of “Football School,” aimed at young readers;
The English Premier League season has just begun, and six artists are drawing goal-scoring plays for charity. One of the illustrators is Bob Wilson, a former Arsenal goalkeeper;
You’re a heavily wined-and-dined member of the International Olympic Committee and a venerable (if unloved) sporting figure in your home country, and you’re also in a wheelchair. What could have led to your being put in jail while you were in Brazil at the Olympics? The sad tale of Pat Hickey, “the most hated man in Irish sport;”
Contributors to the U.S. Sport History academic blog assess the Rio Olympics in roundtable fashion, here and here;
The very first ballpark named Wrigley Field (it wasn’t in Chicago) was remembered fondly this week at the National Pastime Museum blog;
The man who’s made a living as the San Diego Chicken is nearing retirement age. After more than 40 years as a professional mascot, Ted Giannoulas is still playing minor league towns like Keizer, Ore., as well as the bigs, in the twilight of his career;
The Rams are back in Los Angeles, but what about the sportswriters they left behind in St. Louis?
New Sports Books
At Vice Sports, in an excerpt from the newly published book about Argentine soccer, ”Angels With Dirty Faces,” Jonathan Wilson writes about the humble origins of Diego Maradona;
Former Indianapolis Colts tight end Ben Utecht has written a new memoir, “Counting the Days While My Mind Slips Away,” a heartbreaking account of enduring multiple concussions and how he’s trying to hold himself together while battling physical and mental health issues.
Coming next week: Sports Biblio’s guide to fall sports books, with an emphasis on books published between September and November. Here’s our most recent list.
Passings
Michael Brooks, 58, was considered one of the greatest college basketball players in the history of the Philadelphia Big 5. At the Philadelphia Daily News, Dick Jerardi places him on the Mount Rushmore of LaSalle greats, but was deprived of stardom in post-college career due to boycott (he was selected for the 1980 U.S. Olympic team) and injury (playing parts of six NBA seasons). He died on Monday of a massive stroke at his home in Switzerland, where he had been coaching.
Last month, The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about the mystery of Michael Brooks, who rarely stayed in touch with friends, family members and basketball associates back home—including Bobby Knight, his former Pan Am Games coach—since leaving for Europe in the late 1980s.
Off the Sporting Green
Ken Burns’ 2009 PBS film on America’s national parks did much to advance the cause of preservation and appreciation for the network of federally protected lands. As the centenary of the creation of the NPS is being observed this weekend, devotees are celebrating President Obama’s decision to create the world’s largest protected area, on land or water.
Earlier this week, he enlarged the size of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off the coast of Hawaii to 580,000 square miles, twice the size of the state of Texas.
The decision was fraught with controversy ahead of time, as some in the Hawaiian fishing industry were opposed to the expansion. Obama returns to the state where he grew up this week, as Honolulu is the venue for the International Union for Conservation of Nature World Conservation Congress.
I won’t wade into all that, but I do agree with the “America’s best idea” refrain. I'm an admitted bleeding heart when it comes to two things in particular—public libraries and parks. I live near a national recreation area along a river and a national Civil War battlefield park, and it is wondrous that such areas have been preserved forever.
Whatever you think of the Progressive Era, what Congress and President Woodrow Wilson enacted a hundred years ago this week was one of their most magnificent accomplishments.
Just a Reminder
The next newsletter will be delivered on Sunday, Sept. 9, as I’m taking a break for the Labor Day holiday next weekend in the U.S.
Thanks for subscribing to the Sports Biblio Digest, and happy reading!