Sports Biblio Reader 1.24.21
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: Loving and Hating Tom Brady; The Drafting of Aaron Rodgers; Fantasy Sports and the Real Thing; Ali in Miami; Remembering the Kansas City Scouts; William Jennings Bryan, Ballplayer; Walt Whitman, Plagiarist?; The Mets and Pop Culture; Baseball in the Age of JFK; Remembering Don Sutton, Marilyn Barnett and Bud Lea
I’m not going to intrude too long before linking below to a collection of marvelous remembrances of Henry Aaron, who passed away on Friday at the age of 86.
Just a couple of weeks after Phil Niekro’s passing, and days after former Dodgers pitcher and Braves announcer Don Sutton succumbed to cancer, Aaron’s honorable and decent time on this earth came to an end.
The Hammer and Knucksie were simply put, my earliest childhood baseball heroes. Even during some lean years growing up, the world made sense to me when they were in uniform for the Atlanta Braves.
What I admired equally about both men was their quiet dignity off the field. Their careers had reached the twilight phase when baseball free agency came about, but their humble upbringings distinguished them as much as their Hall of Fame talent.
Aaron’s history of enduring racism in Jim Crow Alabama has been well-documented, as was his home run chase that culminated in April 1974.
I was an eighth-grader then, my baseball fandom having reached a peak as Aaron was closing in his pursuit. Just a few years earlier, I attended the first suburban Atlanta public school in my district to integrate, though I was hardly aware of what was happening in the burgeoning civil rights movement as a grade schooler.
My only certain memories were watching the sorrow unfold not long after as the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. was televised from the streets of Atlanta, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church where he preached.
With racial progress in the South beginning to take shape in the coming years, Aaron’s home run pursuit paralleled the times. Atlanta had just elected its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, but grotesque bigotry had made Aaron miserable and fearful.
As Howard Bryant recounts in his luminous 2010 biography of Aaron, “The Last Hero,” that historic night at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium in which he hit No. 715 was fraught with relief as much as joy: “I just thank God it’s all over with.”
While he carried himself with outward dignity, his real feelings about race in America, even during the time of a black American president, quite often reflected something different.
After his retirement, he was active in many business and civic endeavors in Atlanta, as the metro region became a mecca for black entrepreneurs, celebrities, artists and athletes. Today, it’s one of the biggest hip hop hubs in the country, and retired superstars like Shaquille O’Neal are full-time residents of the region.
Hobbled by diabetes for a number of years, Aaron made one of his last public appearances a few weeks ago, getting a COVID-19 vaccination and encouraging his fellow black elderly citizens to do the same.
Two days before Aaron died, Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first black U.S. Senator and the current minister at Ebenezer Baptist, was sworn into office.
It may seem symbolic, but Aaron served as an important bridge for racial progress between the civil rights years and our contemporary age, without really setting about to do that.
His own personal battles with racial hostility affected him forever, although he didn’t often express it in public. Bryant quotes his attorney, Allen Tannenbaum, about the impact of the pursuit of Ruth:
“There is no question he lost something he could never get back, a piece of himself. The chase did that.”
Aaron understood his baseball achievements extended beyond the field, and especially in the South that he helped change with so much more than the swing of his bat.
From my former AJC colleague, Terence Moore, who knew Aaron well: “There was so much more to to Hank Aaron” than baseball;
Two more former AJC colleagues, now at The Athletic: columnist Jeff Schultz and longtime Braves beat writer David O’Brien;
The AJC package is exquisite, and includes an extensive photo gallery; longtime sports columnists Steve Hummer and Mark Bradley weigh in;
From Bradford William Davis of the New York Daily News, “Don’t forget Hank Aaron’s true life story;”
Aaron’s last biographer, Howard Bryant, writing at ESPN about Aaron’s “uncommon decency” and how his lasting impact is about much more than home runs;
From Slate, the woman who read Hank Aaron’s hate mail;
Vin Scully’s classic call of homer No. 715 off the Dodgers’ Al Downing: “What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol;”
The Society for American Baseball Research with a deep profile of Aaron’s baseball career.
For further reading
“I Had a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story,” by Hank Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler;
“Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America,” by Tom Stanton;
“Hank Aaron: Brave in Every Way,” by Peter Golenbock and Paul Lee;
“Home Run: My Life in Pictures,” by Hank Aaron with Dick Schaap
A Few Good Reads
In his first season in Tampa Bay, Tom Brady will be quarterbacking the Buccaneers in the NFC Championship Game Sunday at Green Bay, and Throwbacks editor Michael Weinreb examines why there’s not much middle ground on what to make of him in the twilight of a glittering career;
Former Dallas Cowboys general manager Gil Brandt looks back at how Packers’ QB Aaron Rodgers ended up in Green Bay’s lap in the 2005 NFL Draft, chosen 24th, with Brett Favre still lodged firmly as the starter;
A lament at how newer fans of football and other sports don’t root for teams as much as individual players, as fantasy leagues reach their culmination in the NFL postseason;
The entrepreneurial credo of “failing fast” has a hockey equivalent in the long-gone Kansas City Scouts, who failed spectacularly in two seasons during the mid-1970s, before eventually decamping to the East Coast and becoming the New Jersey Devils;
Reviews are pouring in for “One Night in Miami,” a fictional rendition of the aura in South Florida in 1964 when Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston. Streaming on Amazon after debuting last fall at The New Yorker Festival, the film, based on a stage play of the same name, includes an ensemble cast of characters including Jim Brown, Malcolm X and Sam Cooke. Author and journalist Greg Mitchell gives the film a big thumbs-up, and includes a video clip of Ali and Cooke in a real-life duet; more from the BBC;
During one of William Jennings Bryan’s failed runs for the U.S. presidency in 1900, his days as a star amateur baseball player made for some interesting campaign fodder. It didn’t help him in a losing bid against incumbent William McKinley, who was assassinated the following year after a speech in Buffalo by steelworker and anarchist Leon Frank Czołgosz;
John Thorn tries to trace the origins of words that opened Ken Burns’ “Baseball” film long attributed to Walt Whitman, who in the 1840s is said to have written “Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms. The game of ball is glorious.” What is clear in this period before “Leaves of Grass” is that Whitman, then in his 20s, was bounding about unimpressively between newspaper work and producing mediocre prose and verse as a freelance writer;
Spitball magazine, devoted to baseball literary endeavors, has named Thomas W. Gilbert’s “How Baseball Happened” as the 2020 winner of its CASEY award for best baseball book. Spitball also is seeking submissions for a special issue this spring devoted to memoir, with a deadline at the end of February;
In March of 1970, various Hall of Famers suited up at Dodger Stadium to honor the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. in what became of one of baseball’s most obscure exhibition games, raising funds for civil rights causes;
Maybelle Blair, a 94-year-old veteran of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, is raising money to build a women’s baseball center in her hometown in Illinois;
Author David Krell, who’s written two previous books about baseball and pop culture, published another in the genre in regards to the New York Mets last fall. In May, he’s broadening his horizons with “1962: Baseball in America in the Age of JFK.” It’s set during inaugural season of the Mets and the opening of Dodger Stadium and as the country was expanding not only on the diamonds but in civil rights and other social arenas.
Passings
Don Sutton, 75, won 324 games in a 23-year Major League career that included 756 starts, third only to Cy Young and Nolan Ryan. Known for his durability and work ethic, Sutton successfully transitioned into a radio play-by-play career for the Atlanta Braves, continuing a strong regimen learned from his days in the rural South. Along with Aaron, he’s the 9th Baseball Hall of Famer to die in recent months, and had endured a long battle with cancer;
Bud Lea, 92, was a sportswriter in Wisconsin for more than 60 years, starting with duties as the Green Bay Packers beat writer in 1954 for the Milwaukee Sentinel. He covered the Lombardi years and was the author of a history of that period before becoming a sports editor and columnist at the Journal-Sentinel and later a Packers writer for a specialty publication. He also was the founder of the Milwaukee Braves Historical Association. A 1965 newspaper clipping from that site has a photo of Aaron and Eddie Mathews walking together in uniform above the headline, “Fans’ Tribute Shakes Mathews, Aaron” as the franchise announced its move to Atlanta;
Marilyn Barnett, 97, was a tennis player, a classical music disc jockey and sports reporter in her native New Orleans, where she also spent time with celebrities while they were in town (and not to be confused with a figure by the same name from Billie Jean King’s personal life). In her fourth career, Barnett did public relations work for local hotels and was inducted in the Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame.
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. 231, published Jan. 24, 2021.
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