Exploring the imagination of sports in books, history and culture
Also In This Issue: Baseball Books; Smart Football, Dumb Art; Making Art and Sports; The Work of Sumo; A Golf Clubmaking Legend; Love, Death and the Astrodome; Doing the Pok-Ta-Pokey in Pensacola; Jim Nantz; The Genius of ‘Baseball Stars;’ Blackballing NFL Integration; Surviving Media Industry Turmoil; Remembering Willis Reed and Jerry Green
It’s been a good, albeit strange, few weeks for women’s sports.
The college basketball tournament recently aired by ESPN/ABC, culminating in a spicy Women’s Final Four title game between LSU and Iowa, had killer ratings.
Some taunting gestures between LSU’s All-American Angel Reese and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, the national player of the year, had grown women who rarely watch the women’s game trying to put a cultural and racial import on something they don’t understand.
The same incident also had grown men who rarely watch the women’s game sound like it was Ali-Frazier.
Former ESPN reporter and University of Colorado basketball player Kate Fagan, in an op-ed in The New York Times, thinks women athletes deserve the same kind of mythologizing that heavyweight boxers get.
Some women most definitely do, especially tennis players and Olympic gymnasts and skaters.
In team sports, that’s starting to happen more frequently. Fagan noted the longer history of male competition, and the power of nostalgia in forming those myths.
“Nostalgia is a byproduct of history,” she writes, asserting that women’s sports history has a “much quicker half-life.”
I’m not sure where she gets that idea, because the tales of women’s sports over time are only now starting to get their due.
“To borrow a line from Jay-Z, women’s sports is always trying to reintroduce itself. Or rather, being forced to,” Fagan continues, and I scratch my head.
These perspectives, aimed at a polite, enlightened audience, rarely mention the most surreal backdrop in the world of females and sports.
A growing number of international sports governing bodies are finally defining what a woman is, for the sake of athletic competition, since those who should be won’t do it.
With the Paris Olympics a little more than a year away, World Athletics and World Aquatics are barring any athlete who experienced male puberty from competing in women’s competitions.
(That’s a sentence that I, in covering women’s sports for nearly three decades, never thought I would write.)
Various state legislatures in the U.S. also are protecting the female category, yet the headlines read only of trans athletes being “banned.”
It’s now considered a human rights violation not to be allowed to compete according to one’s feelings, instead of respecting the boundaries of biological facts.
But those in the women’s sports establishment, outside of Martina Navratilova and a few others, remain noticeably silent.
Some female athletes have given up hope they can level the playing field again. The few who are speaking out are finding that the backlash is fierce.
Former Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines, forced to compete in the NCAAs against transgender athlete Lia Thomas, was confronted by protesters after speaking this week at San Francisco State University. She was detained by police in a room for several hours before they could safely escort her away.
In Vermont, a Christian private school was banned from competing in all sports after its girls basketball team forfeited a state tournament game instead of playing an opponent with a male player who identifies as a girl.
And in what I think is nothing less than an utter betrayal of girls and women, the Biden Administration this week issued proposed regulations to change the essence of Title IX.
The measure would push back against many of those state laws, and forbid schools and athletic bodies to issue blanket transgender “bans.”
The White House wants to transform Title IX from being a law about sex discrimination to one relating to gender identity without any Congressional input.
I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t see how that can possibly stand up in court. And if it does, the chaos that will be spread across the land will be seismic. It will make what happened to those Vermont hoopsters truly look like child’s play.
I have nothing against transgender athletes competing in sports, but biology matters. Playing with the sport of your sex shouldn’t be a hard reality to accept, but those who say that are called bigots at the least, and even subject to threats and violence.
Where are the leaders in women’s sports? The Women’s Sports Foundation is absolutely gutless on this subject and has been for a long time.
It’s been 50 years since its founder, Billie Jean King, waged a gutsy fight for equal pay in professional tennis, but she’s nowhere to be found on such fraught controversies today.
Where is the American version of Linda Blade, a Canadian and former national track champion and coach who’s written the only book I’ve seen thus far about the need to keep female sports female?
What I hate most is how women’s sports has become a culture-war issue. I wish I understood why it’s such a mess, but girls and women are paying the price for what cowardly adults aren’t willing to do.
A Few Good Reads
Dave Wood looked at making golf clubs as an art even as he crafted a lauded persimmon driver Bernhard Langer used when he won The Masters in 1993. But as Brendan Prunty writes at Golf magazine, the work became all-consuming, and Wood walked away from it all to pursue a career in art;
The Texas Observer was in danger of shutting down after 68 years as a liberal voice in the deep red Lone Star State, featuring the bylines of Molly Ivins, Ronnie Dugger and other homegrown journalistic luminaries. A lastditch fundraising effort is keeping the lights on for now. Sports topics have gotten some occasional feature interest from time to time, including a 1965 classic by Larry McMurtry about the opening of the Astrodome;
At The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh laments what he sees as the decline of cultural commentary on art as intellectual energy about soccer is on the rise: “There is an old idea of football as where people go to let out something primal. That hasn’t stopped being true. More and more, though, it is also where people go to take their brain for a ramble;”
The Pensacola Blue Wahoos, a Miami Marlins’ Class A affiliate in the Florida panhandle city, recently honored the indigenous game Pok-Ta-Pok with special branding and using the name as its club identity as that sport was holding its 90-team Copa de la Diversion in Belize. It was the first ballgame played in Latin America, by the Mayans as early as the 1600s BC;
At The Athletic, Grant Brisbee gets nostalgic over “Baseball Stars,” a late 1980s video game released by Nintendo that started out slowly, but “became a seminal game, the kind that would make dorks like me talk about it three decades later, as if playing this game was a generational rite of passage, an 8-bit Woodstock that you had to experience for yourself. You should have been there, man;”
It’s also been a little more than three decades since the heyday of Eastbay magazine, a mail-order athletic shoe marketplace that closed down in December. At ESPN, Ohm Youngmisuk and Nick DePaula talk to current and recent basketball players, including P.J. Tucker, DeMar DeRozan and Sue Bird, and other fans of the magazine whose “pages were a part of the fabric of sports culture for a generation;”
At Real Clear Books, Oliver Bateman is intrigued by sumo, and likens his fascination to what his father, a former college football linemen, told him about what he got from the game: “He played the game not because he enjoyed football — he hated its labored, stop-and-start pace — but because he enjoyed the frisson that came from laying one’s hands on an opponent and feeling their strength or weakness.” | Order “Sumo: A Thinking Fan’s Guide”
Sports Book News
From The New York Times, a review of “The Longest Race,” Olympic runner Kara Goucher’s account of a scandalous ordeal involving distance running legend Alberto Salazar on a Nike-funded team.
A slate of new baseball books greeted the 2023 season, and as he does each year, Los Angeles writer Tom Hoffarth reviews a good number of him at this Farther Off The Wall website. Here’s his intro post, which includes a lineup of what to expect in the coming weeks. Tom’s also busy at work on a Vin Scully tribute, among other projects. | Order “Welcome to the Circus of Baseball”
In September, St. Martin’s Press is publishing “Fair Play,” which examines transgender sports controversies. The author is by Katie Barnes, a “non-binary” writer at ESPN, who’s getting a six-figure advance to claim that sex isn’t binary. That’s not in the latest promo, but there is praise coming from former U.S. women’s soccer captain Julie Foudy, who happens to have a podcast at ESPN. I’ll likely be gnashing my teeth, so you've been warned.
Now Hear This
The Ringer recently aired an audio documentary series, “Blackballed,” about the four players who integrated the NFL. Episode 2 examines the black sportswriters who put pressure on the league;
The FanGraphs “Effectively Wild” podcast recently featured Noah Woodward of The Advance Scout newsletter on recent rule changes in Major League Baseball and LJ Rader, proprietor of the Twitter/Instagram account Art But Make It Sports that I absolutely adore. Rader promises not of what he does involves AI.
Media Notes
Right before Jim Nantz called his last college basketball game for CBS, Ryan Brown at Barrett Sports Media ruminated on the versatile announcer’s rather full plate for 33 years, flitting from the Final Four to Augusta with a little bit of a breather before the NFL season beckoned;
As spring training was winding down, the Tampa Bay Rays were rocked by the sudden death of David Wills, their longtime radio announcer, whose calls included a World Series championship;
How do veteran sportswriters who are still in the industry manage to hang on, and what about the younger ones coming up? At House of Strauss, Ethan Strauss is pessimistic about the continuing turmoil in the business, including the onset of AI, even while acknowledging his success since switching to Substack: “Yes, I got incredibly lucky. Who knows what becomes of my ambitions if Steph Curry’s ankle surgery is botched in 2012? And yet, I still believe I would have made it in some capacity with or without that level of luck. Why?”
A few graphs later, Strauss provides an answer, and it’s one that I nodded to in accordance as I continue to shape a vision for my community news website: “I believe I can do something great with the right raw materials and inspiration.”
Passings
Willis Reed, 80, was the inspirational center for the New York Knicks team that won the franchise’s first NBA title in 1970, as he famously braved a leg injury to play the decisive game 7 against Wilt Chamberlain and the Los Angeles Lakers. He battled health issues throughout a 10-year career that ended when he was 31. At Andscape, Bill Rhoden goes deeper into the indomitable spirit of Reed, whom he thought just as dominant as Chamberlain and Bill Russell for the few years he could be: “He made the most of his moment.” | Order “A Will to Win”
Jerry Green, 94, was the last sportswriter to have covered every Super Bowl, and spent 41 years at The Detroit News. His streak came to an end in January, and his last byline was several weeks before his death. He covered the Detroit Lions’ NFL championship in 1957 for the Associated Press, after starting his career at the New York Journal-American. At The Athletic, media reporter Bill Shea talked to Green a month before he died, with the latter acknowledging that the Super Bowl streak defined his career: “I knew eventually something like this would happen. It’s going to be a different experience. I’m trying to lessen whatever feelings I have, my emotions, which are not nearly as bad as what I thought they would be.”
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. 260, published April 9, 2023.
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