Exploring the imagination of sports in books, history and culture
Also In This Issue: The Last Season of Comiskey Park; The Sun Sets at Camden Yards; The New York-Penn League Goes to Gotham; The Diversity Man of Sports; What’s Next for the NCAA; Dick Vitale; Saving the Soul of the NBA; 50 Photographs That Reshaped Sports; Remembering Just Fontaine, Terry Holland, Bud Grant, Dick Fosbury and Joe Pepitone
A wintertime trip to my local independent bookstore yielded its usual serendipitous joy and helped me warm up for a new season of baseball.
I hadn’t heard of John Sexton, who was the president of New York University when he wrote “Baseball as a Road to God” in 2013. But it was there on the shelves, and I soaked up the book’s graceful prose and wisdom. He evokes plenty of nostalgia, to be sure, but I didn’t think it was overwrought.
An exploration of the parallels between baseball and religion, I read it as his response to themes examined by former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti (who’s mentioned in the book).
It also stemmed from a seminar by the same name that Sexton taught at NYU, where he’s retired as president but continues to teach in the law school.
I’ve found some of his observations quite helpful as another baseball season will soon be upon us, and as Lent and Easter are on the Christian calendar and Jews will soon observe Passover.
Like many native New Yorkers, Sexton has Catholic and Jewish family lineage. But even non-believers will enjoy his ecumenical takes on a game that’s passed down from many generations before him and that he is seeing through a different lens with his son.
“Baseball evokes the life of its faithful features we associate with the spiritual life: faith and doubt, conversion, blessings and curses, miracles and so on.”
For fans of most teams, the “hope springs eternal” excitement has largely passed by the start of the summer.
However, “doubt is at the core of baseball. In baseball, as in religion, doubt and faith are intertwined.”
I certainly felt that over the last two years, thrilled by the miraculous 2021 World Series title by the Atlanta Braves, then crestfallen by their early flameout at the hands of the Philadelphia Phillies, who rode some sizzling momentum of their own before falling to the Astros in the Fall Classic last year.
Two years later, I still don’t get how the Braves pulled that off, yet every Sunday morning after the sermon we proclaim the mystery of faith. With the loss of All-Star Dansby Swanson to free agency, I’m trying to summon up the faith that young Vaughn Grissom can fill the bill, but doubts persist.
One of Sexton’s chapters, in fact, is titled, “Miracles,” as he explores the 1914 “Miracle Braves” in Boston, Willie Mays’ catch off Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series, and Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series.
As we set to enjoy—and agonize over—another season, those of us called to reflect on what’s meaningful for us spiritually can find some assurance from Sexton that there’s plenty of room in our minds for “science and religion” and “of the mind and soul.”
“I embrace enthusiastically the joys of the intellectual life,” he writes, “but I reject the notion that, as a consequence, I must forfeit the wonders of a deeply transformational religious life.
“Baseball calls us to live slow and notice. This alone may be enough—if it causes some to perceive the world differently and more intensely.”
A Few Good Reads
Sportswriter Ethan Strauss, formerly of ESPN and The Athletic, is one of the few journalists critically examining the “social justice” scene in sports, and in his House of Strauss Substack newsletter he recently took aim at a sacred cow figure: Richard Lapchick, who for decades has done a racial and gender “scorecard” for sports organizations, and it’s quite the takedown. “The racial conscience of sport,” Strauss writes, “isn’t just living, but thriving, to the tune of five figures per speech, as the White man commissioned to tell leagues that they should hire fewer men like himself;”
A white guy, G League drifter Mac McClung, won the NBA All-Star Slam Dunk contest, and black writer Jesse Washington offers up a mea culpa at Andscape, after suggesting beforehand that skin color was the only reason for his inclusion;
Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo has his Spartans back in the NCAA tourney, with a second-round game Sunday against Marquette. After a mass shooting on the MSU campus that left three students dead, Izzo offered a stirring challenge to a shattered university community;
ESPN college basketball commentating legend Dick Vitale, 83, was offered a chance to call NCAA games by CBS, which would be a first for him. But interestingly, he turned it down, out of loyalty to a 40-year employer who took him in after his coaching career flamed out;
It’s been 30 years since the North Carolina-Michigan NCAA men’s basketball championship game that was decided on a technical foul, after the Wolverines’ Chris Webber called a timeout his team didn’t have in the waning seconds. That’s the closest the Fab Five would come to fulfilling the vast hype of one of the sport’s most noted recruiting classes. “It was the last time when so many people from coast to coast could reel off from memory the starting five of virtually any college basketball team, let alone multiple college basketball teams,” Michael Weinreb writes at Throwbacks. “And it was proof that, amid the upsets and the surprises, the most interesting stories often emerge from the teams that don’t wind up winning anything at all;”
Former Ohio State basketball star and NBA washout Greg Oden has gotten into coaching, serving as an assistant at Butler, where his former Buckeyes coach Thad Matta has returned. After some troubling years that coincided with his brief pro career, Oden has a rejuvenated purpose not far from his hometown;
As former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker settles into his new job as the President of the NCAA, noted sports attorney and writer Michael McCann pens an open letter about the myriad challenges facing college athletics;
Sports stadiums have become an experimental ground for increasing surveillance efforts by law enforcement, as Arthur Holland Michel chillingly writes at The Atlantic.
Sports Book News
Some new releases to note are below; we’ll have plenty of new baseball books to preview in the coming weeks.
Theresa Rundstetler, an historian of race and sports at American University, is the author of the newly published “Black Ball” (Hachette), addressing the NBA in the 1970s during racial and social upheavals. The careers of leading black players are examined against tales of drug addiction and other lurid off-court activities that hurt the league’s reputation. | Los Angeles Times | CNN | TrueHoop Podcast
Sister Jean, the 103-year-old retired nun and official first fan of the Loyola-Chicago basketball team, has written a memoir with basketball writer Seth Davis, “Wake Up With Purpose!,” published last month by Harper Select. Stories from the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times;
Coming April 1, by Michael Sokolow, “Bush League, Big City,” from the State University of New York Press/Excelsior. The book explores the diverging fates of two New York-Penn baseball teams after they’re relocated to the New York City area, and the ultimate destruction of one of the more venerable minor leagues. The author, a professor at the City University of New York, was recently featured on the Good Seats Still Available podcast;
Also coming in April, from Fair Play Publishing, “Hell for Leather,” a memoir by longtime Australian sportswriter and columnist Phil Wilkins, who recounts his 45-year career, especially covering cricket for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald, then The Australian and The Sun newspapers.
Film & Photography
The last installment of the three-part YouTube documentary “The Last Season at Comiskey Park” was posted Saturday, and it’s a detailed, fun and well-done production by Chicagoan Matt Flesch featuring interviews with players, fans and more from a rousing 1990 season for the White Sox. What resonates with this film is the enduring quality of a big city’s love affair with a team that’s lost more than it’s ever won. | Chicago Magazine | Sun-Times | South Side Sox | Order “The Base Ball Palace of the World”
For The Guardian, sports photography legend Neil Leifer was asked to select and explain 50 photos that helped transform perception of sports. Not surprisingly, boxing photos involving Muhammad Ali take center stage, but he examines iconic images of Michael Phelps, Bob Beamon, Abebe Bikila, the Super Bowl, Brandi Chastain, Olga Korbut, Diego Maradona, Roger Bannister and many more.
Media Notes
The media and technology blog/newsletter Stratechery had this interesting post about what the NBA can learn from surging American interest in Formula 1, which is making something of a surprising comeback on these shores. Ben Thompson points to a new Netflix series, “Drive to Survive,” which he admits has stoked his fandom;
Longtime ACC basketball writer Ed Hardin laments the lack of hometown coverage of the conference tournament in Greensboro, which is struggling to stretch its increasingly thin roster of journalists to handle many other beats in town, including hard news;
More staffing cuts have come down at Sports Illustrated, among them executive editor Adam Duerson and noted NBA writer Howard Beck;
The Baltimore Sun is no longer sponsoring a billboard at Camden Yards at Oriole Park, which had been in place since the ballpark opened in 1992, after what newspaper management said was a decision “to redirect our marketing dollars . . . due to a change in pricing;”
John Valerino, 70, was the longtime sports editor of the Lakeland Ledger. I never met him but he married a former college newspaper colleague of mine who loved him dearly, and who has handled his recent and sudden passing due to a heart attack so admirably and with, forgive me, amazing grace.
Passings
Just Fontaine, 89, still holds the World Cup scoring record with 13 goals in the 1958 event. He scored 21 goals in 30 international matches for France, and played and managed in the French domestic leagues and for his native Morocco;
Bud Grant, 95, was a Minnesota sports legend, playing in four sports at the University of Minnesota and coaching the Vikings to four Super Bowl appearances. After his retirement, he was an avid outdoorsman and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. | Order “I Did It My Way”
Terry Holland, 80, coached the University of Virginia basketball team to 326 wins and two Final Fours, and was the school’s athletics director and later at East Carolina;
Dick Fosbury, 79, invented a revolutionary approach to high jumping known as the Fosbury Flop, and using it to win the gold medal at the Mexico City Olympics. From then on, his technique, once dismissed as too unconventional, became the standard in his sport. | Order “The Wizard of Foz”
Joe Pepitone, 82, was a rebellious figure on a button-down New York Yankees franchise as the dynasty was fading in the 1960s, but never quite lived up to some colossal billing. He was one of the first “bad boy” figures in baseball in that decade, and exemplified his tough Brooklyn upbringing the rest of this life. | Order “Joe You Coulda Made Us Proud”
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. 259, published March 19, 2023.
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