Sports Biblio Digest, 8.9.20: Tokyo’s Second Missing Olympic Games
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Requiem for a Reliquarian; Jackie Robinson’s Inner Struggle; Black Rowers; The Mays-Newcombe All-Stars; 100 Years of Baseball in Buffalo; Toots Shor; Hacks at Runyon’s; Adolph Rupp; Running Creatives; Henrik Lundqvist; Pete Hamill on Sports; Remembering Horace Clarke
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Japan’s modern coming-out celebration was to have been the 1940 Summer Olympics, designed to showcase the dynamic international city that Tokyo was on the cusp of becoming.
But those Games were cancelled due to World War II, and Japan would have to wait nearly a quarter-century for that moment.
By the time Tokyo unveiled itself as the host of the 1964 Summer Olympics, the circumstances were far different, that of a nation rehabilitated following the destruction its military wrought in the Pacific Theater during the war.
That redemption tale also included a show of being a peaceful ally with its former enemies, including the U.S., whose atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month and whose armed forces still base their Asian operations from the Japanese mainland.
The 1964 Games were memorable for many reasons: Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia became the first back-to-back winner of the men’s marathon; the stellar gymnastics careers of Larissa Latynina and Věra Čáslavská intersected; the swimming excellence of Don Schollander, with his four gold-medal performance, and a last hurrah for Dawn Fraser; and the one time that Bob Hayes and Mel Pender raced together, in the 100-meter dash.
And American middle-distance runner Billy Mills pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the Games by winning the 1,000-meter run. Another surprise was turned in by American sprinter Wyomia Tyus in the women’s 100-meter run.
The success of any Olympics can be chalked up to competitive moments like those, but perhaps the most poignant moment took place during the Opening Ceremonies.
A young runner, 19-year-old Yoshinori Sakai, ran into the stadium, holding the lighted torch. Born in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, he survived to embody all of his nation’s aspirations, and would later become a prominent journalist.
His moment, captured by Neil Leifer and placed on the cover of Sports Illustrated, presented for many in the West a new appreciation of how far its former combatant had come.
(Another lauded sports photographer, Mark Shearman, also got his start at the Tokyo Games, working creatively without credentials, and he continues providing cover shots for Athletics Weekly and other publications.)
Fifty-six years later, Tokyo was aspiring to show off a new version of itself, a linchpin of the age of global economics, travel and culture, as the host of this summer’s Olympics. But COVID-19 forced a postponement until 2021.
But as Japan battles to stop a resurgence of the virus that first hit earlier this year, concerns are growing that this may end up being Tokyo’s second missing Olympics.
While staving off a pandemic is a very different proposition than ending a global war, the fact that other nations are still coming to grips with a proper response is creating new worries.
It may be months before anything resembling what had been normal returns to those and other nations.
Billy Mills had been looking forward to Tokyo this summer, and is eager to return next year, to reconnect with “the place where in a sense I was reborn.”
Roy Tomizawa, an American of Japanese descent who has written a history of the 1964 Olympics and has published photos with some of those athletes he’s interviewed on an Instagram page, has been making connections between those Tokyo Olympics and the Games he hopes will still unfold.
His father was part of the Tokyo Olympics broadcasting team with NBC Sports, which was making its Olympics debut.
Roy Tomizawa’s blog, The Olympians, historically traces Olympics Games between 1964 and 2020. Today, he would have been writing about the Tokyo Games at their zenith, on its final day of competition and Closing Ceremonies.
But with all that on hold, he’s posting about the boycotted Moscow Olympics of 1980. Last month, Tomizawa expressed optimism about 2021, saying that hope “is all we have in a time of uncertainty.”
He makes several film analogies to bolster his point—”The Lord of the Rings” and “Henry V” among them:
“I believe there are many people who see in their mind’s eye a packed stadium, a field filled with the best athletes in the world, and a brilliant blue sky, telling us all that anything is possible, including a Summer Games in 2021.
“If there are people who fight for that inch,
“If there are people who carry us when we need them,
“If there are people who paint us a picture of a glorious future, then there is hope.
“See you in Tokyo, in a year.”
Postscript
The cultural side of the Olympics also will be undergoing some revisions, and there are those who see the delay as an opportunity for Tokyo to demonstrate innovations in Japanese art.
From Tokyo-based graphic designer, illustrator and artist Ian Lynam comes this look at what he calls “The Small Olympics,” a history of Japanese Olympic design and art competitions dating back to those scuttled 1940 Games. A new 2021 logo is to be commissioned, not long after a revised 2020 logo had been selected.
A Few Good Reads
Historian Jon Meacham, author of a forthcoming biography of the late Civil Rights leader John Lewis, writes about Jackie Robinson’s memoir, which shattered much of the romanticism of the sport he integrated and which Meacham says resonates today because of Robinson's reflections on the broader American culture;
The first all-black high school rowing team in the U.S. made its debut 20 years ago, and it’s the subject of a new documentary based on the self-published memoir of one of the crew members;
There’s an attempt underway by some black faculty to rename Rupp Arena, the municipally-owned home of the University of Kentucky Wildcats basketball team, due to the racial views of former coach Adolph Rupp. But some think the Baron, whose views were typical of the times in segregated America, has a much more complicated legacy than that, especially in his dealings with the few black players he coached;
Henrik Lundqvist may be nearing the end of his career, at least as the New York Rangers goalie, at the age of 38, and what’s next ahead is hard to tell;
Runners with creative interests can apply for what’s called Tracksmith Fellowships to nurture both pursuits. They’re year-long grants in such fields as music, photography, film, podcasts, fiction and poetry and visual arts.
A Toast to Toots, and Runyon’s
Legendary New York saloonkeeper Toots Shor, who feted athletes, celebrities and organized crime figures alike, had a really soft spot in his heart for ballplayers, as a fresh appreciation by Vince Guerreri at the SABR site details;
When Lesley Visser started her sports media career at the Boston Globe in the 1970s, Runyon’s was a popular watering hole in Manhattan for her tribe, and she recalls with pride her colleagues of another time and especially misses the conviviality:
"Writers today have to be more versatile, they have to know how to write, speak and perform on many platforms. They have to pivot quicker. . . . But more than ever, I wish we had a place, a Runyon’s, to physically lean in for some conversation and debate."
Sports History Files
After the 1955 baseball season ended, a team of black all-stars hit the barnstorming scene and included future home run champion Henry Aaron. Not many people got to see the Mays-Newcombe All-Stars, but they drew notice by tearing up the opposition in segregated Southern cities at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement;
The Toronto Blue Jays are playing their first “homestand” of the season at the venue of their AAA affiliate in Buffalo this weekend, after the Canadian government banned travel by U.S.-based teams. The city’s minor-league history dates back to the late 1870s, and before moving into their current home at picturesque Sahlen Field, the Bison played games at War Memorial Stadium, the old home of the AFL/NFL bills. The club’s illustrious history has been matched by an illustrious team historian, as for decades hopes soared in western New York that the big leagues may come some day. That day has come, albeit on a temporary basis and without fans.
Pete Hamill on Sports
There weren’t many subjects Pete Hamill didn’t write about, and when it came to sports subjects, they inevitably revolved around his favorite subject of all, his beloved hometown of New York City.
To classify Hamill, who died Wednesday at the age of 85, was to do disservice to his enormous, generous, passionate and morally powerful body of work across journalism, essays, fiction and magazine writing.
A tabloid reporter, he was a deeply touching observer of the human condition. His fearsome Irish Catholic sensibility could turn on a dime, fomenting outrage about the lawlessness, poverty and drug culture of Gotham during the 1970s.
All the same, he understood the importance of mid-20th century cultural icons who told us why people like Frank Sinatra mattered, perhaps more than we ever realized.
A high school dropout, Hamill was an art student in Mexico, and later wrote a biography of the celebrated Mexican painter Diego Rivera.
He briefly was the editor of the New York Daily News and similarly as a columnist for the New York Post, and along the way mentored many of what turned out to be the last print generation of journalists.
Among them was Mark Kriegel, a young New York Post sports columnist in the early 1990s and later biographer of Joe Namath, Pete Maravich and Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.
In a tribute to Hamill, Kriegel explained not only how Hamill improved his prose, but sharpened his sensibilities. And helped him grow up, a lot:
"He saw through all my young-man preenings, my fakery—and never held it against me. Only once.
"I was heartbroken and whining about something, probably the infinite injustice of having to write an early column, when he threw down a stack of papers and told me to shut up: 'Stop. F—ing. Complaining.' "
Hamill’s fabled lunch with another New York reporting legend, his fellow Brooklyn working-class native Jack Newfield, occupies a slice of sporting lore. It reads like a tall tale, but in the years after the Dodgers had decamped to Los Angeles, over many cocktails, each man challenged the other to name his three biggest villains in human history. Their lists were identical.
Hitler. Stalin. Walter O’Malley.
Hamill was great friends with Cus D’Amato, Muhammad Ali’s legendary trainer, and “Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato,” his remembrance upon D’Amato’s death in 1985, first published in the Village Voice, later was chosen as “The Story of the Week” by the Library of America.
When it came to sports, Hamill was deeply evocative of the New York of his youth, the Golden Age of baseball involving his Dodgers most of all. But in more contemporary times, especially out of the dark ages of the Big Apple in the 1970s, Hamill found baseball subjects from Keith Hernandez to the revival of the Derek Jeter-led Yankees compelling.
That’s a hell of a compliment coming from an old Brooklyn Dodgers apologist, but Hamill was purely in his element writing the introduction for the “Subway Series Reader,” a celebration of the 2000 World Series between the Mets and Yankees. It was the first all-New York Fall Classic since the Dodgers vs. Yankees in 1956, and Hamill deftly knitted the two eras in an alternating nod to nostalgia and the need to connect the past with the present:
“No young Americans could ever could have been as optimistically innocent as we were from 1946 to 1957. In the worst years of twentieth-century New York (roughly 1975 to 1995), when the city was being mauled every day by decay, poverty, crack cocaine, and ferocious violence, I’d think back to that time and place. Then I would ache for its simplicities, decencies and certainties. The defining metaphor for such lost innocence was baseball.”
Despite the cynicism of later years, including his own, Hamill wrote that the Mets-Yankees duel provided a renewal of those bonds of memory, giving not just old New York fans:
“Reason to reflect without shame on the years when they were young. That was a gift. But the young people of New York were given a gift too. The game of baseball gave them something they will remember for the rest of their lives: a Subway Series. That is, they were given another means of measuring time. And for five nights in October, they were able to live for a while in a magical republic where everything seemed possible. Wait’ll next year.”
Another New York tabloid journalist of fame, the former New York Daily News sports columnist and author Mike Lupica, wrote this piece about his old friend, having visited him often in recent weeks and months, Hamill’s health failing badly, yet managing these graceful thoughts amid deep sadness:
“He was gifted, and kind, and generous, and loyal. I spoke to him for the last time last week, and told him I loved him because I did, for more than 40 years; because I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without him in it.”
'A Radical, Irreverent, Creative Spirit'
When Terry Cannon founded the Baseball Reliquary in 1996, it was an oddball notion that embraced an oddball history of the game.
Technically, it also didn’t exist except as a museum in the mind of Cannon, who later became a librarian in Pasadena, Calif., and shepherded the Reliquary project into tangible reality.
Cannon, who died of cancer on Aug. 2 at the age of 67, spawned more from that concept than he initially imagined, developing a devoted following among baseball history aficionadoes.
Among them is sports author David Davis, who passed along this tribute to a personal friend:
He was as understated as a bank teller, but that only masked a radical, irreverent creative spirit. He loved jazz, books and zines, experimental films (he founded Filmforum in 1975), Pasadena history and culture, poetry and comedy, photography and baseball cards, pro wrestling, and the Detroit Tigers. Everlastingly curious, he looked much younger than his years.
His lodestars were Bill Veeck, Jr., the Cleveland Indians (and St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox) owner who felt that baseball was best appreciated while quaffing a cold one in the bleachers; Hilda Chester, the cowbell-ringing Brooklyn Dodgers fanatic; and Marvin Miller, the labor lawyer who successfully challenged the owners’ stranglehold on the sport.
Terry inhaled their philosophies and antics in creating the Baseball Reliquary in 1996, aided and abetted by his partner in crime, archivist-historian Albert “Buddy” Kilchesty. The Reliquary weaves baseball with culture in its many guises – art, photography, literature, film, music, comedy. You can almost hear them cackling as they thought up groundbreaking exhibits: the Eddie Gaedel jockstrap, the Walter O’Malley tortilla, the baseball purportedly signed by Mother Teresa, the Ebbets Field Cake.
He refused to suffer fools. One of his favorite pastimes was to zing the sanctimonious b.s. espoused by Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, and Terry took particular delight in mocking the pomposity of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
The Shrine of the Eternals was the Reliquary’s rebuke to Cooperstown. The Shrine championed the rebels and the rascals, the oddities and the maligned, the underrated and the under-appreciated who left their indelible mark on the game: Veeck, Miller, Hilda, and Gaedel, of course, but also Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, Glenn Burke, Dock Ellis, Jim Bouton, Curt Flood, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Casey Stengel, Ila Borders, Steve Dalkowski, Bill James, Kenichi Zenimura, Lester Rodney, “Dummy” Hoy, Dick Allen, Jim Piersall, Jim Abbott, Fernando Valenzuela, Moe Berg, Tommy John, Steve Bilko, Louis Sockalexis.
The annual induction ceremony, held inside Pasadena’s Central Library, was a type of performance art ably orchestrated by Terry. There were peanuts and crackerjacks, the ringing of cowbells a la Hilda Chester, the introduction of the year’s honorees, and a rousing rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
The Reliquary faithful packed the room for the festivities: Occidental College professors and newspaper columnists; House of David devotees and Pacific Coast League faithful; Dodger fans and Giant fans; Yankee fans and Red Sox fans; poets, artists, and Hollywood directors. (This year’s ceremony, which was slated to honor Rube Foster, Max Patkin, and Bob Costas, was cancelled due to the pandemic.) The year Dock Ellis was inducted, his tearful speech brought down the house.
I always left the library in wonderment: here was an institution that for much of its life didn’t have a physical home, and yet Terry (with the help of Mary and other loyal compadres) had managed to concoct a close-knit community through vision, imagination, and the force of his easy-going and yet strong-willed personality. He made it look effortless.
Until a few years ago, Terry fretted about what would happen to the Reliquary’s collection of books, art, and ephemera that were stashed in storage facilities and in the Pasadena house he shared with Mary. Thankfully, a solution emerged in 2015, when the folks at Whittier College created the Institute of Baseball Studies that’s built around the collection. The first humanities-based research center associated with a college or university in the U.S., it has grown quietly into a vital place for researchers and Reliquarians alike.
It almost goes without saying, but Terry was incredibly generous to creative types. He long served as patron saint to his friend, artist Ben Sakoguchi, and his “Unauthorized History of Baseball” series of paintings (now numbering over 200). Cumulatively, Sakoguchi’s idiosyncratic artistry may well be the Reliquary’s enduring masterwork: a slice of Americana resistance that both defies and belies its Southern California-inspired orange-crate motif.
Terry also helped launch the Latino Baseball History Project to document the role of baseball within the Mexican-American communities of L.A. County. The grassroots project has spawned numerous books and articles while highlighting a long-neglected segment of baseball history.
Meanwhile, from his post at the Allendale branch of the Pasadena Public Library system, Terry sponsored umpteen public programs. He invited authors, curators, and filmmakers to speak about their work in an informal setting. Not only would he present them with a much-needed honorarium, but they had the opportunity to earn a few bucks selling their wares. Win-win.
I was among the legion of writers and authors that benefited from his largesse. He was extremely generous with his knowledge whenever I wrote about such arcane subjects as Jose Feliciano’s controversial National Anthem at the 1968 World Series or the flag-burning incident in the Dodger Stadium outfield during the bicentennial. And, whenever I had a book or a project to flog, he helped spread the word among his loyal followers.
Flora and I had dinner with Terry and Mary a couple times a year, usually at Casa Bianca, the old-school Italian joint in Eagle Rock that Terry long enjoyed. After the late dinner rush had dissipated, over pizza and the house Chianti, he’d tell us about the exhibits he was planning for the coming year.
At our last meal together, he spoke about finally realizing his long-cherished dream to commission a jazz suite that paid tribute to Jackie Robinson. That cornetist-trumpeter Bobby Bradford was able to compose “Stealin’ Home,” assemble a band to play the composition in public, and then go into a studio and record the music before Terry’s death is a true blessing.
The spirit of the Reliquary will live on. Even so, we’ll forever miss Terry and his giving soul. We’re going to enjoy a cold beer while listening to the ballgame today in his honor.
Rest in power, Terry.
Links to the above-mentioned Institute for Baseball Studies and the Latino Baseball History Project.
Other Passings
Horace Clarke, 81, was “the losing face” of the New York Yankees during one of the leanest periods of their hallowed history, playing nine seasons from 1965-74. A moderate-hitting second baseman and respectable defensive player who inherited the sizable task of succeeding Bobby Richardson, Clarke wasn’t surrounded by a wealth of talent.
As the Mickey Mantle-Whitey Ford-Elston Howard era faded, the Yankees were brought down by expansion and a college draft that prevented them from stockpiling farm prospects. They never won a pennant during Clarke’s time, earning second-division status in all but two of those seasons. Bad ownership was a big part of the problem, with Clarke’s years bridging the sale of the team from Dan Topping and Dean Webb, to CBS, to George Steinbrenner.
As Mike Vaccaro pointed out in the New York Post, calling those fallow years “The Horace Clarke Era” was an unfair moniker for a player who said “I was proud to be a Yankee. I just played there at a difficult time for everyone. But I had a blast.”
In the 1975 season, right after Clarke had retired, the Yankees climbed to 3rd place in the American League East with rising star Thurman Munson and new pitcher Catfish Hunter, signed in the first year of full free agency in Major League Baseball. Four World Series appearances followed in the Reggie Jackson era, with the Yankees reclaiming top of the heap status in 1976 and 1977;
Bob Ryland, 100, was the first black tennis professional in the United States, competing in an all-black league before being allowed onto integrated circuits in 1959. He coached future pros Serena and Venus Williams and Harold Solomon, and was listed as the oldest pro on New York City tennis rolls at the age of 99.
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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. 213, published Aug. 9, 2020.
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