Exploring the imagination of sports in books, history and culture
Also In This Issue: Buffalo Bills Mafia; The Legend of Pudge Heffelfinger; Continuing the Negro Leagues Legacy; The SNL of Sabermetrics; The Analytics of Wilt Chamberlain; The Grim Financial Reality of Pro Tennis; Making Elite Running More Welcoming for Women; The Con Artistry of Rose Ruiz; A Sports Architecture Visionary; Remembering Sal Bando
This history-focused newsletter edition starts with new accessibility to some of the papers of Grantland Rice that have been held at Vanderbilt University.
Recently more than 300 files of Rice’s work—sportswriting and more ranging from 1905 to 1950—were posted to the JSTOR digital academy library, and they’re free of charge to read.
The Tennessee native was born in 1880 and died in 1954, graduating from Vanderbilt in 1901 and writing for the Nashville Tennessean, among other Southern newspapers, before becoming a sports columnist with the New York Tribune.
In addition to some of his storied, albeit purplish prose, there’s also some sports poetry, including “Football Elegy,” written in 1937, and which starts thusly:
The whistle sounds the knell of parting play.
The chilly crowd winds slowly from the park.
The halfback plods his weary way,
And leaves me checking first downs in the dark.
Well, it does rhyme. Then there’s “Football’s Mother Goose,” from the same year, and in the same digital filing:
Hickory-dickory-dock-when the blocking back doesn’t block,
The running star doesn’t run so far-hickory-dickory dock.
And so all that goes. The Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt have some additional items not included in the JSTOR files; Byliner has this summary of some of Rice’s career highlights; and at The Athletic, Joe Rexrode delved in 2020 into Rice’s complicated legacy. | Order “The Tumult and the Shouting”
Rice went back far enough in American sports history to have seen the first American football player known to have taken money to play.
W.W. “Pudge” Heffelfinger was a star at Yale under Walter Camp in the late 1880s, when Rice was a boy, then accepted $500 from the Allegheny Football Association in 1892. That was nearly 30 years before the founding the National Football League, but Heffelfinger played in various pro and semi-pro capacities until 1930, when he was 63 years old.
Rice paid homage to Heffelfinger as only he could: "To borrow a line from old Bill Shakespeare: ‘Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant never taste of death but once."
Heffelfinger got involved in politics and business, and wrote extensively about pro football as it grew in the interwar years and beyond. His “Heffelfinger’s Football Facts” were annual booklets packed with statistics and analysis of the college and pro games.
He died in 1954, the same year as Rice, and as his memoir, “This Was Football,” was published, with a foreward by Rice. In a 2012 profile of Heffelfinger, Allen Barra wrote that Heffelfinger’s legacy has been vastly underrated, including his induction in the College Football Hall of Fame. Naturally Rice, as an eyewitness, had to have his say:
"It takes you back to the misty canvas-jacketed era, brings roaring across the gridiron in all their glory the delightful likes of Pa Corbin, Snake Ames, Lonny [Amos Alonzo] Stagg, Gil Dobie, Hurry-Up Yost, Knute Rockne, George Gipp, Red Grange, Jim Thorpe, Bronko Nagurksi, the Four Horsemen, Ernie Nevers . . . Well, all of the immortals."
Numbers and Such
Sports and statistics get some interesting links this issue, first from The New York Times, about how today’s top NBA performers measure up to the mind-boggling figures accrued by Wilt Chamberlain. Harvey Araton talks to those who competed against The Stilt, including Walt Frazier, who says the ultimate comparison is what players of different eras do in the playoffs: “That’s when the continuity and defense that we older guys love does return.” | Order “Wilt 1962”
At The Athletic, Rustin Dodd and Justin Jenks talk to some of the founding writers at Baseball Prospectus, which helped create the Sabermetrics revolution. | Order “Baseball Between The Numbers”
A Few Good Reads
The Buffalo Bills and Cincinnati Bengals will get to play a football game after all, on Sunday, in the AFC Divisional playoffs. After weathering the devastating injury to safety Damar Hamlin and holding off the upset-minded Dolphins, the Bills will have home-field advantage, backed by thousands of die-hard fans known as the Bills Mafia, whose zaniness is grounded in a history of heartbreak on the football field and generosity in adversity. Sports Illustrated diasporan Steve Rushin does the honors for his old magazine, which is always a treat;
Far from the center court venues of tournaments on the Association of Tennis Professionals and Women’s Tennis Association tours is the grim reality for many of the pros: They don’t make much prize money, and often have to hustle to finance their expenses just to compete in lower-level events;
James Proctor, the grandson of one of the last players in the Negro Leagues, is eyeing a possible career in baseball administration after getting injured pitching in High-A ball. Jim Proctor, now 87, played two games for the Detroit Tigers in 1959 as one of the team’s first black players, and never appeared in the majors again. | Order “Crossing the Line”
Women on the Run
Champion distance runner Lauren Fleshman is the author of the newly published “Good for a Girl,” which argues that the running world remains inhospitable to women, and that the sports world could do better for women in general, especially when it comes to health, diet and objectifying female athletes. In this “Fresh Air” interview, she wants to have it both ways when it comes to transgender athletes. For someone who asserts her familiarity with sex-based differences in sports, saying that “inclusion is extremely important and that our definition of fairness is so narrow” is a cop out. | Order Book | More: Women’s Running; Runner’s World; Another Mother Runner
It’s been 42 years since Rose Ruiz’ imposter act at the Boston Marathon, which was on Michael Weinreb’s mind this week as the biographical fudgery of Congressman George Santos continues: “Ruiz, it would seem, had embraced that uniquely American path to fame: She was a con artist.”
Media
More mass layoffs in media, as Vox cutbacks have reduced the ranks of SB Nation bloggers writing about NHL and Major League Soccer teams;
Randy Riggs, 71, a retired sports columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, has died of liposarcoma cancer;
Gwen Knapp, a sportswriter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle and a staff editor at The New York Times, has died of cancer at the age of 61.
Passings
Sal Bando, 78, was a third baseman and captain of the Oakland A’s teams that won three World Series from 1972-74. In a 16-year career, he collected 1,790 hits, 242 of them homers, and batted .254;
Ron Labinski, 86, was an architect and pioneering sports venue designer, helping transform facilities in his hometown of Kansas City that inspired similar projects across North America in the 1990s and beyond.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 257, published Jan. 22, 2023.
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