Sports Biblio Reader, 5.9.21
Also in This Issue: Friendship, Memories and the ‘69 Mets; Dennis Eckersley; Thomas Boswell Retiring; The Fab Five Grown Up; The Black Fives; Selling the All-Blacks; A Transgender Olympian; When Football Banned Women; Football and the Decline of Englishness; ‘A League of Their Own’ TV Series; Remembering Tamara Press
Willie Mays turned 90 this week, and was honored Friday by the San Francisco Giants at Oracle Park in a stylish tribute.
It’s been 71 years since the then-19-year-old son of Alabama first suited up for the New York Giants, and 67 years since his iconic over-the-shoulder catch in the Polo Grounds in the 1954 World Series, a play that seems more amazing with each additional viewing.
The oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame (SABR bio here), Mays prepared for his nonagintennial in the recently published “24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid,” written with John Shea.
Yet when the Giants decamped to San Francisco in 1957, he and his wife had a hard time buying a home, the redlining in what’s now America’s most progressive city quite blatant. As Al Saracevic wrote this week at the San Francisco Examiner:
“Willie Mays was the ultimate integrator. A young man who developed his talent in baseball’s Negro Leagues before dominating the National League. A grown man who played stick ball in Harlem before facing racial hardball in San Francisco. He has persevered through it all, with grace and talent, dignity and defiance.”
His path was forged in similar fashion to Bob Gibson and Henry Aaron, his recently deceased generational peers, molded by segregation and celebrated by an often superficially integrated society—but on its own terms.
James Hirsch, author of a 2011 biography of Mays, wrote this week that glaucoma bothers Mays enough to make it difficult to watch baseball on his home TV. He’s also been distraught by the continuous loss of aging family members and friends, including Tom Seaver, a teammate during Mays’ final season with the Mets in 1973:
“As with anyone who reaches their 90s, what is most difficult for Mays is that he keeps losing friends and loved ones — and he has always been anxious about death. He was raised by his Aunt Sarah in Fairfield, Ala., and when she died in 1954, Mays returned home for her funeral but was so distraught that he stayed in his bedroom for most of the visit. He avoids all funerals, if possible, but they are, of course, inevitable. His beloved wife, Mae, died in 2013, and rarely does a month go by in which someone he knows from the baseball world, including the Negro leagues, does not pass away.”
As the tributes continue (including Baseball Digest’s Lifetime Achievement Award and well-wishes from Barack Obama), HBO announced this week it’s working on a new documentary about Mays.
A Few Good Reads
This week Thomas Boswell, sports columnist for The Washington Post, announced he will retire at the end of June, pulling down the curtain a 52-year career. He stuck around long enough to see a World Series champion in the District of Columbia, but wrote in his announcement that now “it’s time to see what I missed,” saying he wants to rest a little before figuring out what’s next, and describing what brought him to step away:
“For many of us, age eats energy, both physical and mental. When that energy is what you always had in the largest quantity and your standards refuse to change with the calendar, the result is that the job — to be done right — gets more and more and everything else gets less and less. Nobody’s fault.
“For me, that won’t do. Branch Rickey said, ‘Trade a player a year too early rather than a year too late.’
“I’m trading me into retirement. I’m happy about it. But I’m going to miss many aspects of the only job I’ve ever had.”
For Further Reading:
Thomas Boswell, “The Heart of the Order,” a 1990 collection of his journalism.
From Elizabeth Merrill at ESPN, a visit with Art Shamsky, who helps his fellow members of the 1969 New York Mets stay in touch as they age, and as memories recede into the background;
From Jen McCaffrey at The Athletic Ink, a longform oral history piece on Dennis Eckersley, with interviews with the subject, Tony LaRussa, Duane Kuiper, Jose Canseco, Jim Palmer, Dwight Evans, Ray Fosse and other former teammates and players he faced during his revolutionary Hall of Fame career;
Former MLB closer Mike Henneman took a DNA test a few years ago to find out more about his past and recently connected with family members he never knew he had for the first five decades of his life;
At Yahoo! Sports, Dan Wetzel steps catches up with members of the University of Michigan’s Fab Five, who played in two NCAA title games, enjoyed NBA careers, and in the case of Juwan Howard, returned to his alma mater and coached the Wolverines to within a game of the Final Four this year;
Before there was an NBA, a circuit called the Black Fives filled a role in the disjointed world of semi-professional basketball similar to the Negro Leagues. The Black Fives Foundation has been set up to honor the legacy of black basketball in the first half of the 20th century, and to make connections with those involved in the game today;
Players for the All-Blacks—New Zealand’s world-famous national rugby team—are fighting efforts to sell a 12.5 percent stake in the financially challenged New Zealand Rugby organization to Silver Lake, a U.S. private equity firm that recently purchased 10 percent of Manchester City, on the cusp of winning another English Premier League title. As Jonathan Liew writes at The Observer:
It is, at its heart, a question of who gets to own sport. Who gets to own our traditions, our memories, our institutions, our passions. It feels, above all, like a moment to wake up.
Laurel Hubbard, a male-to-female transgender weightlifter from New Zealand, is on the verge of making history at the Tokyo Olympics, thanks to revised policies by the International Olympic Committee. Not surprisingly, biological females are being told to stifle, and the women’s sports establishment has been largely quiet. As I wrote in this space in February, there are few prominent people publicly standing up for preserving sex-based sports for girls and women, and it’s an absolute travesty. We are quickly becoming a society sharply divided between whether biology is an actual thing or just a feeling that supplants reality;
In 1921, the English Football Association banned organized soccer for women, on the heels of the extraordinarily successful and popular Dick, Kerr women’s factory team during The Great War. The year before, they played in front of 53,000 on boxing day. But after the boys returned home, their game was cleared for center stage, and a few weeks before Boxing Day 1921, the FA lowered the boom on the distaff game until the early 1970s. For further reading: “Girls With Balls: The Secret History of Women’s Football,” by Tim Tate;
A TV series based on the women’s baseball movie “A League of Their Own” is in development for Amazon Prime Video, and is expected to shoot in the Pittsburgh area later this summer.
In the wake of the foiled attempts at the European Super League, Dominic Sandbrook writes at UnHerd about the eroding sense of Englishness and its connection to football:
“Saying that football clubs are just businesses is like saying that the medieval church was just a landowner. It might sound clever, but it completely misses the point. If clubs are just businesses and the game just a product, why do so many people bother supporting clubs in League One or League Two? Why do Newcastle and Sunderland attract a combined 100,000 people, when the product is invariably so bad? Why do grown men cry when their teams win?”
Passings
Tamara Press, 83, won Olympic gold medals for the Soviet Union in the shot put in 1960 and the shot put and discus throw in 1964 and set 11 world records during the height of her career, amid questions about her gender. She and her sister Irina, also a gold medalist in track in Rome and Tokyo, retired before the 1966 European Championships, right before sex verification requirements were imposed, and never competed internationally again.
The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe hereand search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 242, published May 9, 2021.
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