What’s really the matter with the NFL: Sports Biblio Digest, 9.11.16
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Babe Ruth Scrapbooks Digitized; Allen Iverson and John McClendon; New Sports Books; Fall Book Festivals
Welcome to the Sports Biblio Digest, an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 54, published Sept. 11, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To view this newsletter in a browser, please click here. Click here to view this newsletter in a browser.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com. You can also follow Sports Biblio on Twitter and hit the “like” button on Facebook.
* * * * * * * *
As another NFL season kicks off, many of the gloomy headlines that have accompanied the return to the gridiron in recent years have receded a bit.
With a new season comes a haul of NFL-themed books that bears out this changing topical fare. As I noted last week in my fall sports book preview, many of the new NFL books are biographies: Brett Favre, Chuck Noll, Steve Young and Ken Stabler.
Others go back in time: The late two-way Hall of Famer Bill Dudley, the inglorious history of the New England Patriots, and the first players to break pro football’s color line.
The issues of concussions and domestic and sexual assault involving NFL players remain, and the matter of the sport’s inherent violence is always worth a few loopy, meandering diatribes (the headline would more accurately have read “Buffalo Bagels”).
Other narrative paths have emerged. The sports media pack needs some new toys to chew on, and now has some, thanks to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and player protests about race and allegations of police brutality in the vein of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Reports of the existential threats facing the sport and the league haven’t exactly gone away. But dire state-of-the-sport accounts are noticeably absent this fall. The last of these from last season, “Two Minute Warning” by longtime NFL writer Mike Freeman of Bleacher Report, can be read as an update of his similarly-themed 2003 book, “Bloody Sundays.”
(Freeman’s been busy of late with books, writing the Stabler biography and ghosting a new book by former Oakland Raiders executive Amy Trask, both of which are on my fall list.
These gritty, no-holds-barred peeks inside the locker rooms and culture of the NFL are intended, I think, to have some shock value. Certainly the sordid tales involving Ray Rice and Greg Hardy have added to the antipathy, as has Michael Sam’s failed stab at being the first openly gay NFL player. The most nuanced, and successful recent book along these lines in my estimation is Nicholas Dawidoff’s “Collision Low Crossers” from 2013.
Of the few pieces I’ve read leading up to this week’s kickoff, only a few try to speculate about what’s happening on the “what’s wrong with the NFL?” front. At New York mag, Will Leitch thinks reviled commissioner Roger Goodell has won the day by staying silent as waves of bad publicity have rolled off his back, and those of the owners at whose pleasure he serves.
After all, Goodell finally prevailed in the long, drawn-out battle with the Patriots over “Deflategate.” Tom Brady won’t be in uniform today, or for the next three weeks, as he serves his long-delayed suspension.
Leitch indulges in some sly (and cynical) Roy Cohn and Donald Trump references, but he is right in concluding thusly: “There is no humility here. There is just a celebration. The message is clear: It’s okay to love football without apology again.”
So what may be the matter with the NFL, if anything, if it’s none of the above? I’ve been increasingly turned off for football reasons, and not just because of the lacking quality of my hometown Atlanta Falcons, who are crowing these days about the largest bird statue in the world at their new stadium instead of who might be able to protect Matt Ryan’s blind side.
I digress to make this point: I see the NFL product on the field as boring and mediocre. Freeman is right when he says the NFL has some of the best athletes on our shores, but so what? A barely ambulatory Peyton Manning walked off the field for the last time in February a Super Bowl winner, aided by a menacing defense that had one job, to contain Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton. The NFL’s MVP was a one-man offensive show all season, and once his single dimension was throttled, the game was a rout.
This week at The Ringer, Kevin Clark went long on his theory of mediocrity, and he chalked it up to ageism. A new rookie salary structure begun in 2011 has made experienced players more expendable. The cheaper kids are benefitting from the high demand for healthy, athletic bodies. This is a trend that is occurring in many fields and industries.
Clark has done some outstanding reporting here, and Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh has some thoughtful ideas on young player development that are well worth reading.
But I’m not sure if this is all there is to explain the mediocrity of the NFL. Matt Ryan’s entering his ninth season, and for as much as I want him to succeed, he just doesn’t appear to be the top shelf QB that’s needed to win in the NFL. The Ravens’ Joe Flacco, drafted the same year, has a Super Bowl ring, and when healthy, is as good as there is.
While there may be no lacking in athleticism, I think there’s a talent dearth at work here too, along with a free agency and salary cap system that makes it difficult for excellent teams (the Patriots are an exception) to sustain that status.
All I know is I miss the dynasties. I hate seeing teams with crappy uniform color schemes get to the Super Bowl. There is a multi-billion-dollar television beast that must be fed, and this is part of the problem too.
It’s no coincidence that there’s no shortage of books about the Pittsburgh Steelers, Oakland Raiders, Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers in recent years. Perhaps those of us who remember those teams are getting old and nostalgic (I’ll cop to that), but I love to see ruthless dominance.
That doesn’t make for good TV, and too much of that predictability ushered in the era of competitive suspense and spectacle that we see in today’s NFL. But when you set up such a relentlessly revolving door of parity, be careful what you wish for.
Basketball Hall of Fame News
Allen Iverson’s stirring induction speech at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Friday lasted for a half-hour, starting with him thanking his Georgetown coach, John Thompson, for saving his life. Justin Tinsley and Aaron McKie, a former teammate with the Philadelphia 7ers, wrote set-up pieces illustrating how Iverson’s emotional delivery shouldn’t have been a surprise. Kent Babb’s 2015 Iverson biography, “Not A Game,” is also well worth the read;
Others enshrined in Springfield included Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Izzo, Yao Ming, Sheryl Swoopes, Zelmo Beaty and referee Darell Garretson. From the wayback files are Cumberland Posey, a former Negro Leagues player who is the first person inducted in the baseball and basketball halls of fame, and John McClendon.
The true father of the fastbreak offense, McClendon is the first person in Springfield to go in as a contributor and as a coach. He learned the game from his University of Kansas physical education professor, basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith, and taught at North Carolina College for Negroes.
He was there during World War II when his team played an all-white team of military inductees attending Duke University, a tale fleshed out expertly by Scott Ellsworth in “The Secret Game,” which won the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.
For McClendon’s second induction, an acquaintance of mine, former Chicago Bulls scout Clarence Gaines Jr. wrote this tribute. The son of Hall of Famer Clarence “Big House” Gaines, he writes that McClendon was more than a mentor and rival for his father, and that his enshrinement as a coach is “a wrong [that] has been righted.”
On the Sports Biblio blog this week, I debuted a new Q & A feature with Curtis Harris of the Pro Hoops History site, who thinks the Hall of Fame selection process needs to be overhauled.
Baseball History Files
Scrapbooks from Babe Ruth’s career mark the debut of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s new Digital Archive Project. As Tyler Kepner writes at The New York Times, not everything housed in Cooperstown can be placed online; instead the emphasis is on personal correspondence and other artifacts, from players of Ruthian proportions to the little-known, that aren’t on display in the main viewing rooms. Says Hall library director Jim Gates: “We don’t collect stuff to gather dust in the basement. We want it to be used;”
During World War II, the American heartland was the geographic region for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Last weekend, the International Women’s Baseball Center dedicated its new headquarters near Beyer Stadium, the home field of the AAGPBL team Rockford Peaches. Several former players were on hand for the event, as were stars of the movie “A League of Their Own;”
The beginnings of baseball in Texas is the subject of an exhibit at the Interurban Railway Museum in Plano. “Home Runs and Heartaches” is on display through Nov. 18.
A Few Good Reads
In February, at the age of 33, sportswriter Jesse Hogan of The Age in Australia suffered a major stroke. After coming out of a coma and very nearly dying, he’s undergoing a long, grinding recovery;
RB Leipzig was promoted to the Bundesliga this season, but isn’t winning over fans with its Red Bull ownership and corporate structure that many think runs contrary to the culture of club soccer in Germany.
New Sports Books
New York sports columnist Mike Lupica’s “Last Man Out” is being published Tuesday. It’s about a youth football player whose father is a firefighter. For someone who’s written several sports book, Lupica admits he’s not a big reader of them, preferring fiction instead, and Elmore Leonard in particular;
Sports Biblio’s new list of fall sports books (September and October releases) is out, and there are quite a few selections I’d love to think even Lupica might want to read. In addition to the football books I mentioned above, the biography subjects include Kobe Bryant, memoirs from U.S. women's soccer stars Carli Lloyd and Abby Wambach, the mysterious death of Sonny Liston, Pat Summitt’s last season and the 2016 edition of the Best American Sports Writing series;
In Britain, author, journalist and playwright Anthony Clavane has published the last of a trilogy of books examining wider issues in sports. “A Yorkshire Tragedy: The Rise and Fall of a Sporting Powerhouse,” details the decline of soccer teams in that region of northeast England, coinciding with the relegation of Newcastle FC from the Premier League.
On Book Festivals and Sports Tracks
September is a big month for book festivals in the United States, kicking off a healthy fall schedule that includes the Texas Book Fest and the Miami Book Fair. Two of the best-known festivals this month are the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sept. 18, and the Library of Congress National Book Festival on Sept. 24.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, featured on the Digest a couple weeks ago, is scheduled to appear at the latter in Washington, and is the only sports-related author I see on either of these major festival lineups. He’s being featured for his latest collection on race and society.
The same goes for my local event that took place over the Labor Day holiday weekend, the Decatur Book Festival, just outside of Atlanta. There wasn’t a sports track and this has been the case for the last few years, as the festival has become best known for focusing on Southern culture, including fiction, food and history, as well as emerging local authors.
Previously the D Book Fest has included a number of sports authors, including Jack Wilkinson and Drew Jubera, my former colleagues at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleagues, and Robert Weintraub, Decatur-based author of “The House That Ruth Built” and “The Victory Season.”
I also enjoyed meeting Australian boxer Mischa Merz, author of “The Sweetest Thing,” when she visited here in 2011. Last year I was glad to finally meet Andrew Maraniss, author of “Strong Inside,” the recipient of the Lillian Smith Book Award presented at the festival.
I’m seeing a paucity of sports book authors at festivals around the country, and I’d like to find out if there’s a larger trend here or just the vagaries of scheduling from year to year.
While I love the regional and local flavor of my nearby festival (especially the cooking demonstrations!), I’m disappointed that there’s not been much in the way of sports authors recently. I’ve been thinking of getting in touch with organizers to find out why, and volunteer to get this track back on track.
Passings
Sylvia Gore, 71, scored the very first goal for England’s women’s national soccer team in 1972, and was known as the “Denis Law of women’s football.” She later managed the Welsh women’s team, was a longtime member of the English Football Association’s women’s committee and was inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame in 2014.