Sports Biblio Digest: Soccer in North America, then and now
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday about sports books, history, culture and great reads. You can subscribe here and feel free to visit the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 20, published Dec. 6, 2015. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated with new posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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The professional domestic soccer season ends this weekend in North America with the MLS Cup.
Sunday’s match between the Portland Timbers and the Columbus Crew will be the 20th championship game for Major League Soccer.
New York-based soccer writer Michael Lewis—an acquaintance from my soccer-writing days—is the only journalist who’s covered all these games. He wrote about his favorite recollections of past MLS Cup affairs for The Guardian’s U.S. site.
Michael first began writing about soccer during the days of the North American Soccer League, which lasted from 1968 to 1984. There’s a refreshing new book about the league, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Soccer,” that I reviewed this week.
Author Ian Plenderleith argues the NASL has gotten a bad rap and that it was much more forward-thinking and innovative than it is given credit for having been. Far beyond the celebrated New York Cosmos, the NASL was an incubator for attacking play, and dared “to make professional soccer fun.”
In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, I also wrote this week about a soccer match I attended years ago at the Stade de France, where a security guard turned away a suicide bomber who had a match ticket on that deadly night. My visit there 15 years ago was at the dawn of what promised to be a more “open” era in Europe, but sadly that sentiment has all but evaporated.
I also reconsidered my thoughts about one of the most celebrated soccer books of all, Eduardo Galeano’s “Soccer in Sun and Shadow.” Despite the author’s pessimism about the corporatized world of global soccer, I found his occasional rays of hopefulness—including his admission that “soccer never stops being astonishing”—encouraging.
At the end of the week, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced more arrests and indictments in connection with the FIFA bribery scandal. Galeano died earlier this year, just as this scandal broke.
My favorite reads of the week
At Sports Illustrated, Chris Ballard weaves this terrific tale of how the Cal Tech men’s basketball team broke a 310-game conference losing streak and developed a formula for consistent winning;
At Vice Sports, Andrew Heisel asks if American football players are modern-day gladiators (not a new comparison). He looks for answers in a novel fashion, by contacting a classics professor and digging into a recent book examining the social psychology of Roman spectators who regularly consumed violent entertainment;
With David Price and Zack Greinke signing $200 million-plus free agent contracts this week, Joe Posnanski revisits the salary gambit that Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale took 50 years ago, when baseball's reserve clause was in full effect;
The widows of slain Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics reveal the horrific cruelty of the terrorist captors before the massacre;
A middle-aged mother is a novice runner, but she’s vying to compete in the 2016 Olympic marathon. At The Cauldron, John Gorman writes about Andrea Duke’s race against time;
Sportswriters are hardly the only casualties in the digital transformation of media industries. Shutterbug explains the demise of editorial sports photography.
College football comes to C-SPAN
Investigative journalist Gilbert Gaul, author of the recently published “Billion Dollar Ball,” is appearing on C-SPAN’s Book TV programming this weekend, as the major college conferences are having their football championship games.
Before last weekend’s firings of the athletic director and head football coach at Rutgers, Gaul spoke with the Star-Ledger of Newark about the misplaced priorities in college athletics. Rutgers, which is one of the most heavily subsidized athletic departments in the nation, moved to the lucrative Big Ten two years ago largely because of all the red ink.
Sports book news, reviews, miscellany
Published: The paperback version of “Concussion,” Jeanne Marie Laskas’ book about a medical researcher studying the effects of brain trauma in pro football players. The story of Bennet Omalu's battle against NFL resistance to his findings is the basis of the film with the same name starring Will Smith and Alec Baldwin. It opens in theaters on Christmas Day.
Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Game’s Not Over: In Defense of Football,” will be published Tuesday. On NPR Weekend Edition Saturday, he discussed his proposals for safety reforms. Jamil Smith, a former producer at NFL Films, argues in a review of the book in New Republic that Easterbrook hardly confronts football’s health concerns, “coating his book so thickly in an unearned sentimentality that his argument borders on willful ignorance.” I’ll be posting my own review during the NFL playoffs.
A biography of Billy Cannon, a star running back at LSU and the late, great AFL, is reviewed at the Tales From The American Football League blog;
The New York Times has rounded up sports books published in recent months, including Gaul’s book, which I also will be reviewing as the College Football Playoff is underway.
“Only A Game” host Bill Littlefield collects his favorite sports books of 2015 for The Boston Globe;
The New Daily in Australia serves up its best sports books list for the year winding down, with most of the titles from Down Under;
In Case You Missed It: I put together my own list of 15 notable 2015 sports books last week, with the promise of adding more. Over the next three Fridays (Dec. 11, 18, 25) I will do just that, so stay tuned.
And happy reading to all!
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