WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories.  Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the world’s libraries:

Boxing: 5164, Hockey: 7083, Cricket: 10,881, Horse Racing: 11,933, Basketball: 12,875, Golf: 16,660, Football: 18,592, Soccer: 19,933, Baseball: 31,206

That’s a lot of baseball books.

Fortunately, Ron Kaplan has cut that number down to something a bit more manageable in 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). As host of the Baseball Bookshelf blog and bibliography editor of the Society for American Baseball Research, Ron has read a few thousand books on the sport, give or take a couple hundred.  His book doesn’t rank them.  As he explains in the interview, it was hard enough to pare down his list from 1001 to 501.  Instead, he offers an annotated guide, with books grouped by subject.  There are instructional books and novels, data-based analyses and tributes to ballparks, biographies of the great players and memoirs of ordinary fans.  Ron includes the familiar classics, like Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, and makes the case for books that deserve the status of a classic, such as Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings.  And Ron reveals a trove of older, overlooked gems: a 1915 instructional manual for college players, Bob Wood’s 1988 guide to ballpark food, and a compilation of Charles Schulz’s baseball-themed Peanuts comics (more than 600 strips when the book was published in 1977).

Ron’s expert guide will help in your choices of summer baseball reading.  Indeed, you’ll be eager to start on your baseball list after putting down Ron’s book.  That is, if you can put it down.  Ron’s thoughtful choice of titles and his insightful summaries of the selections make this not only a useful introduction to the baseball library but also a worthy–and enjoyable–addition to its shelves.

I have never been to the Super Bowl, and I will probably never will.  I’ve never been to a World Cup match or an Olympic event.  I’ve never been to the Final Four or the Rose Bowl.  I’ve never been to the Stanley Cup playoffs or the Champions League, the Kentucky Derby or the Masters.  The only sporting event of consequence that I’ve ever attended was the World Series.  It was game two of a series that went the full seven games.  My team won that night, I remember.  But I don’t recall much else.  I was sitting in the top row, far away in the right-field corner.  Certainly, it was fun to be there.  But I would have seen more of the game if I had watched it on TV.

The history of sports is typically told from the perspective of those who were there, at the stadium: the athletes and managers, the spectators, and the journalists who wrote the first accounts.  But most fans watch the great events of sport not in person, but from the comfort of their living room sofa.  Even when witnessed from this distance, the events are still moving and memorable.  We talk about them for decades afterward, recalling that one game, that one play, that announcer’s one call, to our friends and children.  So how does this experience of sport’s historic moments, the experience of the fans watching on TV, fit into the story?

This is the question that Martin Kelner sets out to answer in his book, Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV (Bloomsbury/Wisden Sports Writing, 2012).  A journalist and BBC radio presenter, Martin wrote a column about sports on television for The Guardian for the last 16 years.  For this book, he interviewed past commentators and producers, and dug through the extensive archives of the BBC, to uncover the history of televised sports in Britain.  But the book is also the memoir of a fan—Martin’s recollections of panelists and presenters, the excitement of Cup Final day, and the games of street football narrated with the imitated calls of famous announcers.  No matter if you grew up watching Match of the Day or Monday Night Football, Hockey Night in Canada or World of Sport, you’ll recognize the common experiences of sports fans on their sofas.  And you’ll appreciate Martin’s account of “the joy of not being there.”

For more on the history of sports television, listen to past New Books in Sports episodes featuring former ESPN producer Dennis Deninger and historian John Bloom, who discusses his biography of Howard Cosell.

Azzurri, cyclists, boxers, Berlusconi, Balotelli, strapping Fascist men preparing to bear arms, strapping Fascist women preparing to bear children, the shirtless Duce, Ferraris, Vespas, doping scandals, World Cup celebrations, Serie A officials on the take, Il Grande Torino, and the barefoot marathoner Abebe Bikila.  You find all this and more in Simon Martin’s history of Italian sports, Sport Italia: The Italian Love Affair with Sport (I.B.Tauris, 2011).

Simon’s book is sports history at its best—that is, it’s history at its fullest.  As you hear in the interview, Italian sport offers a window to understanding the country’s uneven economic development, its fractious politics, the ideology and aesthetics of Fascism, the unrelenting weight of corruption, the role of the Catholic Church, and the persistent divide between North and South.  Above all, there is the unresolved question of what it means to be Italian.  Metternich’s adage that “Italy is only a geographical expression” still holds a kernel of truth, some 150 years after the Risorgimento. One of Simon’s principal arguments is that sport is the one thing which most consistently binds the country together.

Simon’s book was awarded the 2012 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize, presented each year by the British Society for Sports History.  This was the second time he’s received the award, having won in 2004 for his history of Italian football under Fascism.  You can also find interviews with other winners of the Aberdare Prize in the New Books in Sports archive: the 2011 winners, Chris Young and Kai Schiller, talking about their book on the 1972 Munich Olympics; and Tony Collins on his history of English rugby union, which won the award for 2010.

In 2008, when entertainment magnate Lalit Modi launched the Indian Premier League, he took a title that was new to the world of cricket: Commissioner. Modi’s idea for the structure of the IPL had American origins.  He had studied in the United States in the mid-1980s, where he encountered the model of professional teams not as clubs rooted to their communities but as franchises held by wealthy owners, and thus saleable for handsome profit.  In American professional sports, each cartel of these franchises is led by a single, powerful executive.  Roger Goodell of the NFL and David Stern of the NBA represent the model of the Commissioner as CEO: they punish players, coaches, and even team owners for violations of rules, but more importantly, they work to increase the reach and revenue of the league and its teams.  As Lalit Modi recognized, a league led by a single Commissioner, rather than a fractious governing board, ensured that decision-making would be streamlined, negotiations with sponsors and networks would be straightforward, and profits for all of the owners would increase.

The model of the league Commissioner comes from America’s oldest professional team sport: baseball.  Amidst scandal in the game and rancor among team owners, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed Commissioner in 1920 and given extensive powers, in an attempt to save baseball from itself.  The title of Andrew Zimbalist’s book, In the Best Interests of Baseball: Governing the National Pastime (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), refers to the mandate that Landis and his successors received from the owners: they were to ensure that the game would not be sullied by the corruption of players or the greed of owners.  But there was one problem: baseball’s commissioners were appointed by and served at the pleasure of the team owners.  In the decades following Landis’ appointment, there was constant struggle between the holder of the office and the owners who paid his salary over the power and role of the Commissioner.  The story that Andy tells in his book is the evolution of this baseball institution, from Judge Landis to current Commissioner Bud Selig, a former team owner who now governs the game in the interest of the owners.

Bud Selig has been much maligned by baseball fans, including the host of this podcast.  But Andy offers a new view of the Commissioner.  The Robert A. Woods Professor of Economics at Smith College, Andy is the author of many books on the economics of baseball, and he has served as a consultant on various matters related to baseball, for teams, municipal councils, and even the Office of the Commissioner.  He has been a strong critic of Selig, but his overall appraisal of the Commissioner is favorable.  Baseball is stronger and more stable now than it was twenty years ago.  The question is: what will happen when the current, strong Commissioner steps aside?

Did you watch the game last night?

No matter if you live in Australia, England, India, Ontario, or the US, chances are you’ve heard that question today.  Televised sports are a constant presence in contemporary culture, providing a common set of experiences and references for people in the workplace, the airport terminal, the dormitory, and even, in the case of the World Cup and Olympics, around the world.  As individuals, televised sport shapes our everyday speech and behaviors (anybody ever lift their arms in celebration and mimic the roar of the crowd after tossing trash in the bin?).  Our life stories are punctuated by moments of watching sports.  Among my own fondest memories are hours at the TV, watching hockey with my grandmother, soccer with my children, the Olympics with my wife, and, on one late winter night, the NFL playoffs with a crowd of American travelers in an East European pub.  Whenever I catch the replay of a particular moment from an event I have watched years ago—say the closing seconds of the “Miracle on Ice,” or Ali lighting the torch in Atlanta, or Doug Flutie’s “Hail Mary” pass in 1984—the memories are immediate and vivid.  I can remember where I was, and who was with me, when I watched it happen live on TV.

The hold that televised sport has on our individual and collective memories is all the more remarkable when you consider that the medium is relatively young.  The first nationwide broadcasts of events in the US came only in the 1950s.  The Olympics first appeared on television in the mid-Sixties, the same decade that brought the rise of professional football, today the most popular sport on American television.  Dennis Deninger recounts this history in his book, Sports on Television: The How and Why Behind What You See (Routledge, 2012), beginning with the first televised baseball game in 1939 and taking the story to today’s round-the-clock, global sport networks.  But as the subtitle indicates, Dennis’ book is more than a history.  As a longtime producer at ESPN, Dennis offers an insider’s view of how televised sport is programmed and packaged, and the ways in which sports television has shaped our culture.  If you’re someone like me, who has grown up watching sports on TV, you’ll learn a lot from Dennis’ book, and hopefully our interview, from why the 1987 America’s Cup was an important event in the history of sports television, to how to prepare for the lights going out at the Super Bowl.

In the classic 1973 film The Sting, Robert Redford and Paul Newman lead a team of con men in an elaborate scam to take revenge on a dangerous crime boss and a corrupt cop.  The final play takes place in a high-stakes poolroom, an illegal parlor for the wealthy to bet on horse races, set up with a tapped Western Union wire connection to the tracks.  Just after the crime boss loses his money, a half million dollars, FBI agents storm the poolroom and hustle off the crooked cop and the unsuspecting mark.  But the feds are in on the scam as well, and the whole poolroom is phony.  The film ends with the supporting cast taking down the scene of the sting, while Redford and Newman walk off into the city.

As we learn from Steven Riess’ book, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York, 1865-1913 (Syracuse University Press, 2011), the setting of The Sting was common feature in America’s big cities from the late 19th century onward.  Bookies, crime bosses, cops on the take, fixers tapping into the wire links to the tracks, and men with money looking for the thrill of a bet: they were all found in the poolrooms, places not for billiards but for betting.  All that was missing from the film were the politicians.  Steve explains that horse racing in America was a web of sport and entertainment, new and old money, political bosses and crime kingpins.  Racing exists for gambling.  It is a sport of the wealthy, those with money to own horses and bet on them.  But in order for the races to run, these rich men needed political connections for the tracks to be built and operate as spaces of legal betting.  From President Andrew Jackson to the Tammany Hall political machine that dominated the city and state governments in New York, elected officials were willing to work with the owners of tracks and horses.  In fact, the owners of tracks and horses were often elected officials themselves.

But there were other politicians—do-gooders and reformers—who sought to shut down the tracks and especially the poolrooms.  Meanwhile, wherever bets were placed, there were shady people lurking in the background, looking to skim a few dollars.  All of these characters are found in the history of New York racing, and Steve’s book presents them in a revealing picture of big-city money, power, and sport.

This past October, David Stern announced that he would step down as commissioner of the National Basketball Association in February 2014.  In Stern’s three decades at the helm, the NBA has seen its domestic fortunes rise and ebb.  Television ratings for regular-season and playoff games have declined steadily since their peak in the late 1990s.  In the present season, ten teams in the league are filling less than 80 per cent of seats in their home arenas, and average attendance in the league overall has dropped below that of the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer. But Stern has been successful in meeting one of his stated aims: expanding the international profile of the NBA.  Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant have been global celebrities in a way that no American football or baseball player can imagine.  Meanwhile, some 20 per cent of players on current NBA rosters are foreign-born.  The league’s games are broadcast in 40 countries by various partner networks, and overseas sales of caps and jerseys account for more than a third of the league’s merchandising revenue.  Stern has even spoken of a European division of the league beginning play in the next decade.

The NBA’s international success is all the more striking when one considers that it the youngest of the major American sports leagues, and that it took some two decades to gain stable fan support and financial health.  Founded in 1946 as the Basketball Association of America, the league competed in cities of the Northeast and Midwest.  From the start, the BBA had rivals:  the celebrated barnstorming team of African American players, known as the Harlem Globetrotters, and a second professional circuit, the National Basketball League, which played in smaller cities like Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Waterloo, Iowa.  As David Surdam shows in his history of the NBA’s first 15 years, these were humble origins.  Professional basketball’s early years were marked by cheap owners, empty arenas, and plenty of red ink.  When the BAA and NBL merged in 1949, the combined league featured 17 teams.  Ten years later, there were only eight.

Dave’s book, The Rise of the National Basketball Association (University of Illinois Press, 2012), focuses on the economic history of the league’s early years.  Told from this perspective, the NBA’s rise is a story of survival—and somewhat bewildering tenacity.  But the league’s eventual stability can also be attributed to the innovations of its early leaders.  The widened free-throw lane, the 24-second shot clock, and other rule changes were aimed at bringing fans to the arenas.  The ultimate effect was to transform professional basketball from a game of defensive stalling and two-handed set shots to the fast-paced, high-scoring entertainment of today.

The sports pages, websites, and television channels are running their annual reviews of the year in sports.  The 10 Best Photos! The 10 Biggest Plays!  The Top 10 Athletes!  Whatever your sporting taste, there’s a year-end list for you.

New Books in Sports offers a different take on the end-of-the-year review.  This episode features a variety of guests—academics, journalists, and bloggers—from around the world.  You’ll hear their expert views (or at least, just intelligent commentary) on events of the past year and some of the deeper issues of sport.  And the episode does have a list, of sorts.  Each guest suggests his or her favorite books from this past year, or a noteworthy classic from years past.  So if you’re looking for a last addition to your gift list, we have plenty of recommendations.

The episode features a strong starting nine.  Journalist and blogger Siddhartha Vaidyanathan (aka Sidvee) talks about Indian cricket and his favorite books on American football and baseball.  Two American writers, Jonathan Eig and Jason Coskrey, give their selections from the baseball library from two very different vantage points: Chicago and Tokyo.  We hear from Barry Nicholls, host of the Australian radio program 110%, about the differences in sports idioms used Down Under and in the US.  Mark Norman, editor of the blog Hockey in Society, discusses how Canadian fans are managing another discontented winter without hockey.  At the close of the year marking the 40th anniversary of Title IX, law professor, author, and former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar talks about the continued obstacles to equal opportunity in US sports.  We learn about women and sport in the Middle East, as well as the lingering effects of last February’s stadium violence in Port Said, Egypt, from journalist James M. Dorsey, author of the blog The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.  At the close of a year that brought the word “Tebowing” into the sports lexicon, theologian Graham Tomlin discusses the connections of faith and sport.  And we close with Lisa Von Drasek, an expert in children’s literature, who gives her suggestions for some of the best sports books for young readers.

And for a more detailed overview of the year in sports, around the world, please visit the Facebook or Twitter pages for New Books in Sports.  You’ll find a lengthy digest of thoughtful and even provocative articles by journalists and bloggers.  We won’t list the Top 10.  You can decide that for yourself. 

This past September an independent panel commissioned in 2009 by the British government released its 395-page report on the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of April 1989.  The published findings and the accompanying release of documents confirmed what had long been charged: the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans at the grounds in Sheffield were the result of unsafe stadium design, insufficient crowd management, and failed policing and emergency response.  Most significantly, the report gave proof that authorities in Sheffield had covered their failure by casting blame on the supposedly drunken and unruly fans.  This line had been carried in the papers, most notoriously by The Sun, which published false reports that Liverpool fans had picked the pockets of the dead and wounded and even urinated on corpses.  Such stories gained traction because they fit a general narrative that the press and politicians, both Labour and Conservative, had been repeating since the 1960s: football fans were delinquents, and their violent behavior at grounds in Britain and abroad was a black mark on the nation’s reputation

Brett Bebber investigates the origins of this narrative and the corresponding government measures against fan violence in his book Violence and Racism in Football: Politics and Cultural Conflict in British Society, 1968-1998 (Pickering & Chatto, 2011).  As he acknowledges, much has been written about football violence in the UK.  But Brett brings a fresh approach to this familiar topic.  As an American who admits to having been cool to soccer, he has an outsider’s perspective to the deep passions and divisions in English football.  And unlike the journalists and social scientists who have focused on the fans, Brett is a historian whose research brought him to the archives of government offices and the records of police departments.  What these documents show is that the Home Office and other government departments adopted strategies that typically exacerbated, rather than reduced, the tense atmosphere at football grounds, and planted seeds that would bear ill fruit in 1989.  The Hillsborough report stated that Sheffield authorities viewed the task of crowd management “exclusively through a lens of potential crowd disorder.” This hostile perspective was guiding government policy already in the 1960s, when officials began to mandate the penning of spectators, and commissioned tests on how much force a human body could endure when pressed against a steel barrier.

My wife is a sports fan.  Together, we have cheered from the stands at college football games and track meets, for local minor-league baseball clubs and hockey teams.  We’ve spent Sunday afternoons watching the National Football League, October nights watching the World Series, and summer afternoons watching the World Cup.  We once waited in line for hours for tickets to the national college basketball tournament, and another time we awoke in the early-morning darkness, while living in Europe, to watch the live broadcast of the Olympic hockey final.  She has cheered, groaned, jumped from her seat in excitement, and slumped in despair.  But now, after lifetime of following sports, she has declared that her days as a fan are coming to an end.  What has brought this turn away from sports?  It’s not the outrageous salaries or loutish behavior of athletes.  It’s not scandals or cheating or excess.  It’s her sons—our sons.  At ages 14 and 11, our boys talk sports constantly.  And they talk in obsessive detail, like typical males: statistics, standings, predictions, post-game analyses, historical debates, and hypothetical speculations. For my wife, who has been an athlete and a fan since childhood, the incessant talk is more than she can bear.

My wife’s dilemma is common to female sports fans.  As Andy Markovits and Emily Albertson explain in their new book, female fans think and talk about sports in a vastly different way than do male fans.  Even the most avid women fans, whom Andy and Emily call “sportistas,” do not debate potential transfer signings, or recite from memory the announcer’s call from a classic match, or quiz each other on starting lineups from decades ago.  Unfortunately, however, women who follow sports find that male fans use these kinds of conversations as an entrance requirement to their circle.  “You don’t know who hit the winning home run in the 1960 World Series!  How can you be a REAL fan?!!”  Yet, even when a woman does know the name Bill Mazeroski, she still is not accepted.  Instead, the male fan sees her as a threat.

Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States (Temple University Press, 2012) looks at the barriers that women fans face as they follow sports.  Andy and Emily discuss the different ways that males and females talk about and consume sports and the roots of those differences.  Their conclusions, based on interviews with women fans and sports journalists, match what my wife has discovered in our household.  For her, sports are drama and entertainment and a spectacle of human accomplishment.  For our sons, sports is life.

Of all American sports, baseball has contributed the greater number of folk heroes to the larger culture.  Fictional characters of awe-inspiring ability, like the mighty Casey and Roy Hobbs, or quirky sages such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are broadly known in a way that few representatives of other sports are.  And one of baseball’s great folk heroes—a man of both extraordinary talent and peculiar sagacity—is Satchel Paige.  As a pitcher in the Negro Leagues and the barnstorming circuits of the Twenties and Thirties, Paige’s exploits on the field were the stuff of legend.  Rearing back his tall, lanky body, with a double and sometimes triple wind-up of his arm, Paige would unload rocket pitches that buzzed like a bee as they flew past the batter.  There were innings when Paige would tell his fielders to sit down, or even stay on the bench.  He didn’t need fielders when the batters weren’t even close to hitting his pitches.  But Paige also understood that fans not only wanted to see impressive displays of prowess.  They wanted to be entertained.  So he cultivated a nonchalant, even lazy persona on the field.  He taunted batters from the mound.  And as the years passed, he cast himself as the wizened old man of baseball, dispensing homespun proverbs such as: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

The problem with legendary figures like Satchel Paige is that their accomplishments are often buried under an accumulation of exaggerations and fables.  In his biography of Paige, historian Donald Spivey digs through the mythology to present the first scholarly account of the great pitcher’s life.  The result of more than a decade of research, “If You Were Only White”: The Life of Leroy “Satchel” Paige (University of Missouri Press, 2012) shows that, even without embellishment, Paige’s life was epic, sometimes turbulent, and often humorous.  From the Alabama reform school where Paige learned to throw a baseball to the black teams of the South that endured Jim Crow at every stop, from high-paying stints in North Dakota and the Dominican Republic to his World Series-winning season with the Cleveland Indians as a 42-year-old “rookie,” the story of Satchel Paige roams far and wide.  But it is more than a colorful tale.  As Don argues, Paige’s ability to draw large crowds of black and white fans, and a talent that drew praise from white Major Leaguers, were important factors in eroding the segregation of baseball.  While Jackie Robinson is hailed as the man who broke the color line in 1947, it was the wide popularity of Satchel Paige in the Thirties and Forties that set the stage for him.

This past August, the saga of Lance Armstrong came to its inglorious end.  The seven-time champion of the Tour de France and Olympic medalist ended his defense against charges that he had engaged in blood doping during his cycling career.  In the judgment of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, the end of Armstrong’s challenge was effectively a concession of guilt.  The body responded by stripping Armstrong of his titles and banning him from cycling competitions.  Armstrong, however, has continued to maintain his innocence.  It appears that many Americans agree with him.  In various polls conducted after the USADA’s actions, large majorities of respondents stated their belief that Armstrong had not engaged in doping.  But outside the US, opinion of the cyclist is somewhat different.  As Peter Beaumont remarked in The Observer, the real question is not whether Armstrong engaged in doping, it’s why his fall from grace didn’t come sooner.

Lance Armstrong now joins a notorious collection of athletes who have been stained by allegations or proof of doping: baseball’s Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, sprinter Marion Jones, swimmer Michelle Smith, cross-country skiers Olga Danilova and Larissa Lazutina, Chinese swimmers of the late 1990s.  Chris Cooper begins his study of the science of doping with what was perhaps the most shocking episode of a champion athlete caught doping: Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who set the world record in the 100-meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Olympics only to be stripped of his record and gold medal days later. As Cooper points out, athletes had long been using anabolic steroids.  And indeed, Johnson was not the only sprinter in that race to have been found using drugs.  But the fall of the gold medalist in the Olympics’ marquee event brought the use of performance-enhancing drugs to broad public attention.  Since 1988, great athletic accomplishments have been viewed with suspicion, while athletes have been obligated to pee in cups.

Athletes still take performance-enhancing drugs.  Why?  What benefits, if any, do they gain?  Chris’ book, Run, Swim, Throw, Cheat: The Science Behind Drugs in Sport (Oxford University Press, 2012), addresses these questions.  As a researcher in biochemistry, Chris explains what the drugs do, and whether they work.  We learn from the interview that doping does provide a clear advantage, in some instances.  But in other cases, the drug’s effects are slim—which raises the question: should they be banned?

In the history of American sports, few athletes were as famous and hated in their day as Jack Johnson.  The first African American boxing champion, Johnson was an astonishingly brash figure who flouted the prejudices held by white Americans.  His 1910 victory over James J. Jeffries, the former champion dubbed the “Great White Hope,” set off clashes between whites and blacks in cities across America—one of the most widespread and notorious episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.  But Johnson was far more than a figure of American sports.  He was, in the fullest sense, the world heavyweight champion.  He won the title in 1908 in Australia, and lost it seven years later in Cuba.  When he fought, news of the matches was reported around the world.  And during and after his years as champion, Johnson lived abroad as an exile.  Charged in the U.S. with trafficking a white woman for immoral purposes, Johnson spent seven years moving between England, France, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Barbados, Cuba, and Mexico.  At every stop, he was celebrated—and condemned.  But he was never quiet, and he was never boring.

In her book Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of California Press, 2012), Theresa Runstedtler presents the fighter in this broader, international perspective.  As she explains in the interview, Johnson was like other African American men of the turn of the century who traveled the world in order to overcome the racial constraints of American society.  While abroad, he offered direct criticisms of American racism in newspaper articles and autobiographical writings.  But he also encountered racism in new forms, coming to realize that Jim Crow was one part of a worldwide phenomenon.  At the same time, Johnson stoked white fears around the world.  In South Africa and India, as well as in the United States, officials and journalists dreaded the effects that another Johnson victory would have on local black and brown populations: the people who were supposed to be their subject inferiors.  For them, the search for a “white hope” was not simply a matter of putting the brash fighter in his proper place.  It was a matter of confirming their racial superiority.

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England.  Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural developments of the times.  Making the situation worse were the guardians of the sport, who were reluctant to respond to the changes around them.  The men of the Marlyebone Cricket Club and administrators of county sides held to the old class division, preferring amateur gentlemen to serve as their captains, even when there were few Oxbridge graduates with enough money or free time to devote themselves to the sport—or enough talent to merit a captaincy. And while other governing bodies of international sport were cutting ties with apartheid South Africa, the MCC still saw that country’s side as a legitimate competitor and made plans for tours.

As Guy Fraser-Sampson shows in his history of English cricket in the late Sixties and early Seventies, these obstinate positions led English cricket into one controversy after another.  When the professional Brian Close, son of a weaver, became captain of the England side in 1966, he went on to lead the team to successful series against the West Indies, India, and Pakistan.  But the following year the MCC stripped Close of the captaincy on feeble charges that he had violated the code of the game.  And when South African cricket officials warned the MCC that a team which included Basil D’Oliveira, a “colored” native of Cape Town, would not be welcome in the country, the talented D’Oliveira was excluded from the England side.  Both decisions brought scorn from English cricket fans.  But as Guy explains in our interview, the MCC was not an institution responsive to public mood.

Cricket at the Crossroads: Class, Colour and Controversy from 1967 to 1977 (Elliott & Thompson, 2011) tells the stories of the Close and D’Oliveira affairs, along with the successes achieved on the field by Ray Illingworth’s side in the 1970s.  The book concludes with Kerry Packer’s creation of World Series Cricket and the challenge that it posed to the English cricket establishment.  But even more significant, in Guy’s treatment, is the turn toward aggressive bowling in the 1970s, which left batsmen battered and ushered in what he terms “a dark age” for cricket.

There are few moments in recent sports history as riveting, perplexing, and widely debated as Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt to Marco Materazzi in the final match of the 2006 World Cup.  Think of your own reaction when the referee stopped play to attend to Materazzi, and you then saw the reply of Zidane trotting away from the Italian defender, turning back, and driving his head into Materazzi’s chest.  Perhaps a cheer of approval, or scorn for the blatant foul.  Then the red card came out, and with it the realization that Zidane’s brilliant career had come to an end.  And as the camera followed him leaving the pitch, and he passed the World Cup trophy waiting on its pedestal, we understood that Zidane’s act of anger had likely cost his team the victory.

Laurent Dubois, scholar of modern French history and devoted supporter of Les Bleus, recognized that the head-butt and the reactions it generated in France were questions needing serious investigation.  Finding the answers, he understood, required looking beyond whatever insults Materazzi shot at Zidane in the 109th minute of the final match.  Laurent’s book Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, 2011) sets Zidane’s act within multiple, overlapping frames: the history of the French national team and its traditionally multi-ethnic rosters; the development of football in France’s colonies; the experiences of immigrants from those colonies, like Zidane’s parents; the nationwide euphoria when France won the 1998 World Cup, with a team composed of players of Caribbean, New Caledonian, North African, and West African descent; and the poverty and social unrest in the banlieues of Paris and other French cities, where many of these players had grown up, which burst into violence in 2005.  Against this backdrop, Laurent follows not only the story of Zidane but also that of his teammate on the national side, Lilian Thuram, a native of Guadeloupe who openly challenged the French government’s handling of the 2005 riots.

As Laurent explains in our interview, his research began as the personal quest of a fan seeking to understand the action of a player.  But his book is about far more than football.  Soccer Empire offers insight into contemporary Europe society, with its increasing population of immigrants from around the world, by looking through the lens of sport.  And Laurent has opened an ongoing forum on soccer and society with his blog Soccer Politics, which offers his and other writers’ musings and research.  For the thinking football fan, it is recommended reading on the larger significance of the game, in Europe and around the world.

A number of modern sports are credited to a particular 19^th-century founder.   The inventive work of some of these figures, like basketball’s James Naismith, American football’s Walter Camp, and judo’s Jigoro Kano, is firmly planted in history.  But there are others, such as Abner Doubleday and William Webb Ellis, who are certainly historical figures but whose moments of sporting genius are wrapped in legend. And then there is Tom Wills, the man now credited as the primary inventor of Australian rules football.  There are statues in Wills’ honor, commemorating his work as a drafter of rules, a player, and an umpire in the mid-19^th century.  But as Greg de Moore discovered when he set out to learn about this distinctly Australian sport, the circumstances of Tom Wills’ life have been largely unknown.

To start, Greg learned that Wills had taken his own life, in a horrific manner, by plunging a scissors into his chest.  As an academic psychiatrist with a research interest in suicide, he set off to investigate what drove Wills to this act.  Starting at its troubled end, Greg went on to research the whole of Wills’ life, producing the first serious biography of this important figure in the history of Australian popular culture: Tom Wills: First Wild Man of Australian Sport (Allen & Unwin, 2011)

The subtitle of Greg’s book is appropriate.  Tom Wills was a 19^th-century example of the prodigiously gifted, narcissistic, and ultimately self-destructive male athlete.  Like Mickey Mantle or George Best, Wills could not maintain a relationship, manage his fortune, or hold a job after he left the field.  Nor could he handle his drink.  Although his end was shocking and unusual, the downward spiral is familiar to those who follow sports, in any country.  At the same time, while this is a story common to all sporting cultures, Tom Wills’ life opens a window to the history of colonial Australia.  His life intersected with episodes of violence between white settlers and Aborigines, as well as moments of reconciliation.  He took great pride in his English education, yet his father was committed to the idea that Australia distinguish itself as a separate nation.  As Greg explains at the start of our interview, the first spark of this project had come when he was living in New York City and wanted to learn what was distinct about his homeland.  Certainly, Tom Wills is a representative figure of Australian history.  But he also should be viewed as a compelling character of modern sport.

American women dominated the swimming competition at the London Olympics, earning a total of sixteen medals in seventeen events.  This template of success was set already at the 1920 Games, the first Olympics in which American women swimmers competed.  Women’s swimming races had been introduced in 1912 at Stockholm, but U.S. women had been barred from attending by their own country’s athletics officials.  When they were finally able to compete in Antwerp, the American women, led by 18-year-old Ethelda Bleibtrey, swept all of the medals in the two individual events and won gold in the one relay race.  In successive games from the Thirties through the Fifties, swimmers from the Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, and Australia bested American women.  And of course, the infamous East German women reigned at Montreal, Moscow, and Seoul.  But throughout the history of the Olympics, American women swimmers have consistently shown themselves to be among the best in the world.

According to Lisa Bier, female swimmers must also be considered the ultimate trailblazers in early women’s sports in the United States.  The barriers they faced were not simply the male leaders of American amateur athletics, or the men and women who felt that participation in any sport was contrary to female nature.  They also had to deal with gawkers eager to see a bit of skin, and police who forced them to cover up (the aforementioned Bleibtrey was arrested for “nude swimming” when she appeared on a beach without her stockings).  And above all, both female and male swimmers of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries had to ply through bays and rivers that also served as city dumps.  Lisa’s book Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870-1926 (McFarland, 2011) details these obstacles and presents the women who battled them: swim teachers who promoted water safety, racers who moonlighted as Vaudeville performers, and lifeguards who became Olympians.  If you’re looking for a book for that last day on the beach, this one offers a colorful view of what it was like, a century ago, to take a trip to the shore, put on a swimsuit, and jump in the water.

The 2012 London Olympics are here.  To mark the event, New Books in Sports offers another of its occasional seminar episodes.  And as with any great seminar, you’ll be eager to tell people what you’ve learned.  Our slate of Olympic experts don’t offer any medal predictions.  But you will find out about Coca-Cola’s first Olympic promotion.  You’ll learn how traditional Chinese medicine can cure the snarled hamstring of a hurdler.  And you’ll discover the truth about Kerri Strug’s gold medal-winning vault in 1996.

The double-length episode features a full roster of scholars and journalists.  Historians Martin Polley and Jean Williams tell us about Britain’s long connection with the Olympics, while Barbara Keys explains why the Thirties were a pivotal decade in the history of international athletics.  We hear from Mark Dyreson and Andrew Billings about Americans’ nationalist view of the Olympics, both with the early games and today.  Steve Menary talks about nationalism within the UK and how that has stoked controversy over the British men’s football team that will compete in the London games.  We learn about the gains and losses that come with hosting an Olympics from economist Victor Matheson.  Looking back four years after the Beijing games, anthropologist Susan Brownell tells us about sport in China.  And Sports Illustrated photographer Bill Frakes talks about his experiences covering the games over the last three decades.  You’ll hear Bill describe the moment that most stands out for him in career of covering the games, and our other guests will likewise share the reasons they enjoy the Olympics as fans as well as researchers.  And if you’re looking for the right book on the Olympics, for that last summer weekend, they’ll have plenty of suggestions.

26.2 is one of the most recognizable numbers in sports.  It is also a curious number.  The length of the marathon race is the only distance in track that is still measured in English units.  Yards have become meters.  The mile is now the 1500.  But the marathon remains 26 miles, 385 yards.  Why this peculiar distance?  Explanations for the marathon’s length are varied and wrapped in myth.  The first marathon race, held at the 1896 Athens Olympics, presumably retraced the route that Pheidippides ran from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens—a distance of 40 kilometers, or just under 25 miles.  Subsequent marathon races ranged from roughly 25 to well over 26 miles, depending on the whims of organizers.  The distance of 26.2 miles was first established at the 1908 London Olympics.  But even the setting of that odd length has several explanations.  The one story I’ve often repeated is that the 385 yards were necessary to bring the finish line to the front of the Queen’s box at the Olympic stadium.  But now, after reading David Davis’ book, Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze (Thomas Dunne Books, 2012), I know that the royal intervention in London is just as legendary as Pheidippides’ run to announce the Athenians’ victory.

The plotting of the now-standard marathon distance is just one of the stories David tells in his fascinating book.  At the center of the book is the meeting of three runners at the London Games:  Tom Longboat, the celebrated Onondaga runner from Ontario who entered the race as the favorite; the unheralded Irish-American Johnny Hayes; and Italian runner Dorando Pietri, who was determined to improve on his performance in the previous Olympics.  David weaves the biographies of the three runners into a history of the early Olympics and marathon racing in Europe and North America.  Runners will be stunned by his accounts of these early races, which included doses of liquor served at refreshment stations and marathons run entirely indoors.  And even those who are winded by a jog across the lawn will find much to enjoy in David’s book. If you are planning to watch the Olympics that begin next week, your appreciation of London 2012 will be enhanced by looking back at this picture of the spectacle and scandal of London 1908.

During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football.  As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture, and college football has long been regarded as the one sport that best demonstrates American values.  For outsiders, a useful analogy to understand American college football’s popularity and cultural importance might be European football.  Like the soccer clubs of Europe, many college football teams date back to the 19th century, with long-standing rivalries and traditions.  The teams have unbreakable connections to particular localities, unlike American professional franchises that are sold, bought, and moved.  Generations of supporters attend Saturday games at storied grounds.  Dressed in team colors, they sing songs and perform other time-honored rituals.  And like European football, American college football is still fundamentally regional in organization.  Teams compete in various leagues, planted in specific parts of the country, with the top teams in the table advancing to national games.  College football fans tend to identify with the teams of their own regional league, arguing vigorously that “our” brand of football is better than “theirs.”  Of course, American college football teams are also like European soccer clubs in that they bring in a lot of money, from tickets, television, and branded merchandise.  According to one estimate, the top programs in American college football—if they could ever be sold—would be worth as much as clubs like Manchester City, Inter Milan, and Olympique Lyon.

But of course, these teams can’t be sold.  Even though they draw hundreds of thousands of spectators in the fall season, millions of television viewers, and tens of millions of dollars in revenue, college football teams are the property of institutions of higher education, many of which are public, taxpayer-funded entities.  Other nations have sports teams affiliated with universities.  But only in the United States have college athletics become such a prominent part of the sports landscape.  The history of how this curious system emerged is surprising.

In his book The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), Brian Ingrassia shows that the early history of American football and the early history of the American university were intertwined.  As universities developed, and faculties and administrators sought to give them a public face, they saw football as a means of gaining the allegiance of people who would likely never visit a lecture hall or laboratory.  They argued that football was beneficial to players and spectators alike.  There were critics who warned of the dangers of football, and for a brief time in the early 20th century some West Coast schools even adopted rugby as an alternative.  But by the Twenties and Thirties college football was firmly established and hugely popular across the country.  Snobby academics today will grumble about the scourge of big-time college football.  However, the blame for its rise falls not on coaches, players, and boosters, but on university presidents and professors.

The one play of my football career that my father remembers most fondly came in my very first game, when I was eleven years old.  Younger and smaller than the other players, I was positioned out of harm’s way at outside linebacker.  But on one play, the opposing running back caught a pitch to my side and turned to run up-field, seeing only me blocking his path to the end zone.  Fearlessly, I charged across the line of scrimmage into the offensive backfield.  The tackle was textbook perfect: I lowered my shoulder pads into his thighs, wrapped my arms around his legs, and stopped the bigger player in his tracks, bringing him down for a loss.

My proudest moment in watching my dad on the football field came years later.  He was the referee for a youth game, and I was assisting him, as an official-in-training.  At halftime of a close game between rival neighborhood teams, the coaches from both sides converged at midfield, shouting and swearing.  My dad stepped into the middle of these half-dozen fuming men and berated them for their behavior.  The coaches retreated, a bit cowed but still pointing fingers and hurling oaths at each other.  Watching from a few yards away, I knew that, if not for my father, this Saturday-morning game of 14- and 15-year olds would have ended in a fistfight between the responsible adults.

These episodes reveal the two sides of violence in our games.  On the one hand, a clean hit to the body—an act forbidden in normal, everyday life—is an integral part of some sports.  A good hit is exciting for fans and exhilarating for players.  But on the other hand, the competitiveness in sport often leads to hostility, fueling uncontrolled, deviant actions among players, coaches, parents, and fans.  Just this week, for instance, a viral video showed a youth hockey coach in British Columbia deliberately trip a player on the opposing team during the postgame handshake, causing the 13-year-old boy to break his wrist.

Kevin Young understands this complex dynamic of aggression, contact, and violence in sports.  Like me, Kevin has fond memories of hard tackles on the field, having grown up playing rugby in northern England.  But as sociologist who did his student research work on soccer hooligans, he also knows that sporting matches are regularly scenes of illegitimate and even criminal violence.  His book Sport, Violence and Society (Routledge, 2012) is the product of more than two decades of research on the topic.  Looking at episodes of player fights, fan riots, and abuse by coaches and parents, in Europe and North America, Kevin discusses the characteristics of sports-related violence and the sources of such actions.  As a fan and a former player, he knows that we cannot remove hitting from our games—nor does he want to.  But as a scholar, Kevin recognizes that we, the fans and commentators, do need to change the ways we watch and describe violence in sports.

Two days before this year’s Champions League final between Chelsea and Bayern Munich, the top two women’s clubs in Europe played on the same pitch, at Munich’s Olympic Stadium, in the final match of the Women’s Champions League.   In a pairing of the defending champion, Olympique Lyon, and the club that has won the most titles in the tournament’s 11-year history, FFC Frankfurt, the French side took the cup with a 2-0 victory.  The game drew just over 50,000 spectators, by far the most people ever to attend a Women’s Champions League final.  UEFA officials and organizers in Munich had worked deliberately to ensure a record-breaking turnout.  Match time was moved to the early evening, and special family-priced tickets were available to ensure that mothers could attend with their children.  Men’s clubs in the Bundesliga have adopted similar family pricing along with other measures aimed at bringing women to the grounds.  As a result, matches in the German first division draw a higher percentage of female spectators than any other European league.  Add to that the large number of girls and women who play football in Germany, along with the seven European championships and three Olympic bronze medals, and the country presents an impressive picture of female involvement with the sport.  This is striking, as it was only in 1970 that the German Football Association lifted its ban on women playing.

Women’s soccer in the United States has had a similarly remarkable rise in the last four decades.  Women weren’t banned from the game.  They simply didn’t play.  But with the expansion of athletics for women and girls in the Title IX era, soccer has boomed.  The U.S. has become the center of the women’s soccer world, with players coming from other countries to play for American university teams and American players going overseas to play, coach, and act as advocates for girls’ sports.  Tim Grainey tells the story of these women, as well as players and coaches in other world regions, in his book Beyond Bend It Like Beckham: The Global Phenomenon of Women’s Soccer (University of Nebraska Press, 2012).  As a longtime journalist and organizer, Tim draws upon decades of experience in the sport.  The story he tells is encouraging, showing how the profile of women’s soccer has grown.  However, girls and women still face resistance to their desire to play.  FIFA President Sepp Blatter has said that the future of soccer is feminine.  Tim’s book shows that the statement is not simply the empty phrase of a sportocrat.  At the same time, though, its fulfillment is not assured.

The NBA Finals are under way, with the Oklahoma City Thunder facing the Miami Heat.  Network executives and the sports punditocracy are elated with the match-up.  Ratings for Game 1 of the series were up more than 10 per cent over last year, as casual fans tuned in to see the teams’ marquee players, NBA scoring leader Kevin Durant and three-time MVP LeBron James, face each other.  Meanwhile, opinion-makers are happy with teams and personalities that can be easily slotted into arresting narratives.  It’s safe to say that the Thunder are cast as the “good guys”: a team of young and talented players, gathered through the draft, who have committed themselves to their coach and to an un-glamorous city on the Plains.  Meanwhile, the Heat are a high-priced experiment always teetering on the edge of implosion, a collection of uncoachable stars led by LeBron, who alienated the entire sports world by declaring on an ESPN special in 2010 that he would take his talents to South Beach.

While perceptive fans are aware of the media-driven narratives that mold the presentation of sports, we don’t often acknowledge the racial stereotypes at the root of these storylines.  Sociologist David Leonard insists that ideas of race are always present with the NBA, a league of predominantly black players watched by predominantly white fans.  When fans or commentators talk about “the NBA player” in the abstract, the picture that typically comes to mind is a black man.  In his book After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (State University of New York Press, 2012), David examines how white American fans and commentators, as well as NBA officials, have struggled with this image of the black player.  Once upon a time, when the embodiment of the NBA player was the universally liked Michael Jordan, blackness was not a problem.  But after Jordan’s departure, the model of the black player became someone more than Allen Iverson, with his tattoos, braided hair, and sideways cap, ridiculing the idea of attending practice.  The perception of the NBA player as overpaid and undisciplined thug burst open with the 2004 “Brawl at the Palace.” In response to scenes of Ron Artest and other players fighting with fans at the close of a game, commentators and fans stated openly that the problem with the NBA player was that he was a product of black, hip-hop culture.  David’s book looks at these responses and the efforts of the league to rectify the NBA’s damaged image, by turning players into respectable professionals who would be more acceptable to white fans in the seats, to the wealthy buyers of luxury boxes, and to the league’s corporate sponsors.

There are a lot of balls in my house.  Baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, basketballs, volleyballs.  We have Wiffle balls, Nerf balls, and Super Balls. My children and I occasionally use the balls for their intended purposes.  We play catch in the yard, or shoot baskets in the driveway.  There is also a good amount of innovation in how balls are used.  My older son smacks tennis balls across the street with his baseball bat, while my younger son dribbles a soccer ball while jumping on a trampoline in the backyard.  And during the winter months, they argue over who gets possession of a worn rubber football.  Whoever is the holder at any particular time tosses it to himself, squeezes it, kneads it, and runs down the hallway with it tucked under his arm, imagining himself weaving through defenses in the NFL.  They never actually play football with it.  Instead, it serves as something of a comfort object.

In his wide-ranging book The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game (HarperCollins, 2012), John Fox offers an explanation for the varied use of balls in my house.  A trained anthropologist and journalist who has written for Smithsonian and Outside, John describes the ball as a nearly universal feature of human culture.  Ball games are deeply rooted in our instinct for play, something that we share with other mammals (my dog also has a collection of balls).  But ball games also have uniquely human elements.  John speculates that the throwing of balls is part of our evolutionary make-up, an inheritance from the Paleolithic hunters who figured out that it’s easier to whack an animal on the head with a well-thrown rock than chase it down on foot.  And as we discuss in the interview, ball games throughout history have been wrapped in ritual and seen as being in some way pleasing to the gods.  We see this element of the sacred even today in our ball games.  Think of how baseball fans extol the transcendent splendor of their game, or how soccer fans anticipate the World Cup as a quadrennial festival of global harmony.

For anyone who enjoys the crack, swoosh, or bounce of a ball, John’s book is a pleasure.  He presents a history of ball games around the world, as well as colorful accounts of traditional games that survive to today.  We learn how balls of different sizes and shapes have been made through the centuries, and we meet players of all ages who see the ball as much more than a simple plaything.  As regular listeners of the podcast know, we often raise the question: Why do we watch sports?  John Fox’s book offers the possibility that maybe there is something deeper than aesthetic appreciation or team loyalty to our interest in sports, something found in an instinctual attraction to these objects that we kick, throw, and swat.

It’s springtime in the American Midwest.  The playoffs for the NBA title and hockey’s Stanley Cup are moving into the later rounds, and the new baseball season has already produced history-making performances and rising stars.  But the students in my sports history class don’t want to talk about any of that.  Instead, the subject of sports talk among these red-blooded Americans is . . . the Champions League!

European football, unlike the American variety, is a sport of global reach and increasing popularity.  In the weeks ahead, hundreds of millions of fans around the world will watch the final match of the UEFA Champions League and the group stages and knockout rounds of 2012 UEFA European Championship.  To mark the occasion, we take a break from our normal slate of interviews to bring together a team of scholars and experts who look at European football in its various dimensions.

In this special double episode, we talk about the economic and business side of soccer with Simon Chadwick and Brad Humphreys, contributor to the blog The Sports Economist.  Director of the CIES Football Observatory, Raffaele Poli, discusses the movement of players in the European labor market, while Dàvid Ranc, manager of the research project Football Research in an Enlarged Europe, explains how football fans have responded to the arrival of foreign players to their clubs.  We welcome back sociologist Peter Millward, who talks about his work on the club, national, and European identities of soccer fans.   Historians Jean Williams and Manfred Zeller speak to us about women’s football in Europe and the history of soccer in Ukraine, one of the co-hosts of Euro 2012.  We chat about football shirts with one of the bloggers at the sites Football Shirt Culture.com and Design Football.com.  And the BBC’s Tim Vickery offers his views, as a removed but certainly knowledgeable observer, on the Euro tournament and European football’s worldwide appeal.  Whether you are also a distant fan, or a supporter of your local club, hopefully you’ll learn something new from this podcast seminar.  At the very least, our guests have plenty of suggestions of football books for your summer reading list.

And watch out for another special episode of the podcast, later in the summer, as we’ll gather another team of experts to help us understand the Olympics.

In the summer of 1957, Robert Lipsyte answered a classified ad.  He was an English major who needed some cash, and The New York Times was looking for an editorial assistant.  He went to work on the night shift in the sports department, serving as a copyboy for the surly old-timers.  He didn’t like sports, and he hated the job.  This would be just a brief stop on the path to literary fame, he presumed.

But one assignment followed another at the paper.  Along the way, Bob crossed paths with Malcolm X, the Beatles, and the NYPD narcotics detective who would be immortalized as Popeye Doyle.  Eventually, by accident, he became a mainstay of the Times sports page.  He did end up writing novels, both for adults and young adults, and he earned an Emmy award in television journalism.  But it was in sports writing that he made a lasting mark in American journalism—as a reporter covering the saga of young Muhammad Ali, in two stints as the Times sports columnist, and as the author of some of the most trenchant commentaries on sports and contemporary society, most notably his 1975 book SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

In his memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter (Ecco, 2011), Bob unfolds this story with the literary style of an English major and the wry humor of a former fat kid.  He tells of his long, sometimes stormy relationship with Ali, his run-ins with Mickey Mantle, tennis lessons with Althea Gibson, admiring friendship with Howard Cosell and friendly disagreements with Bob Costas, and his respect for Billie Jean King, his choice as the most important athlete of the century.  Bob does not shy from stating his opinions.  But he also does not hesitate to admit when he has been wrong.  His memoir makes for an amusing, absorbing, and insightful picture of postwar American culture—and sports.  Hopefully, our interview captures just of bit of that.

Bob was also a guest on last year’s Book List episode of the podcast.  You can find that episode, which features Bob’s choices for the best sports books of 2011, in the New Books in Sports archive.

Mention the name Bill Veeck to a baseball fan and what will likely come to mind is the back-and-white image of three-foot, seven-inch Eddie Gaedel at the plate of a Major League game, swimming in his St. Louis Browns uniform, the opposing catcher having just caught a pitch well over his head.  Gaedel’s sole appearance for the Browns in 1951 is part of the lore of baseball, and it is often cited as the prime example of Veeck’s antics and his irreverence as a team owner.  As owner of the Browns, the Cleveland Indians, and the Chicago White Sox, as well as owner of the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers and executive for the Chicago Cubs, Veeck was famous—and infamous—for his promotions and publicity stunts.  Veeck wanted to bring people to the ballpark, and he was willing to try any scheme to do that: giving away 100 dollar coins frozen in a block of ice, serving free breakfast cereal for morning games, inviting fans to bring their detested disco records for an on-field demolition, or sending a midget into a Major League game.

Paul Dickson’s new biography of the owner, Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick (Walker & Company, 2012), shows that there was far more to Veeck than Gaedel at the bat, Disco Demolition Night, or any other promotional stunt.  Veeck had a genuine interest in serving his customers, in making a day at the ballpark an enjoyable experience for the whole family.  The owners of the time judged his schemes as insults to the game. Even more than that, they resented Veeck’s willingness to mix with fans at the stadium gate and in the bleacher seats.  Eventually, baseball’s owners came to recognize the wisdom of this so-called showman.  The fan-friendly ballpark experience of today owes much to Bill Veeck’s innovations, from wider seats and widely available restrooms to specialty foods and promotional giveaways.  At the very least, Veeck should be remembered for directing the renovations of Wrigley Field in 1936-37, a project that included building a brick wall in the outfield and planting ivy at its base (the Chinese Elms planted by the scoreboard didn’t survive the famous winds at the North Side park).

But perhaps Veeck’s greatest legacy was his commitment to the integration of baseball.  As Paul explains in the book and the interview, Veeck had a bold plan to introduce black players into the Major Leagues already in 1942.  League officials, however, intervened to scuttle the plan.  Five years later, just eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson first stepped onto the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Veeck signed Larry Doby to the Cleveland Indians, making him the first black player in the American League.  The following year, he signed the legendary pitcher of the Negro Leagues, Satchel Paige.  And in 1949, Cleveland had 11 black and Latino players in spring training as well as African Americans working in the front office, the stadium staff, and the grounds crew.  Veeck was indeed a maverick and a showman, but he was also a man of principle and resolve.  Not many owners of sports teams merit such a description.  Nor could many owners be the subject of such an illuminating and entertaining biography.

There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame.  One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan.  Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s (after one season as a running back in the NFL), winning three batting titles and numerous selections to All-Star teams.   And the third is Frank “Lefty” O’Doul.  A power-hitting outfielder who won two National League batting titles, O’Doul was a member of two teams of American players who toured Japan in 1931 and 1934.   O’Doul fell in love with Japan during these visits.  He returned to the country in 1935 to assist in the creation of the Tokyo Giants, a professional team that toured the United States.  And he came back again in 1949, this time as the manager of the minor-league San Francisco Seals.  With much of the country still in ruins from the war, the Seals’ four-week tour lifted Japanese morale and helped repair Japanese-American relations.  Emperor Hirohito invited O’Doul to the palace to offer his personal thanks.  General MacArthur called the Seals’ tour “the best piece of diplomacy ever.”

Lefty O’Doul is one of the principal characters of Rob Fitts’ history of the 1934 tour of Japan by Major League players.  O’Doul was joined on the team of “All Americans” by future Hall-of-Famers Jimmie Foxx, Charlie Gehringer, and Lou Gehrig, as well as legendary manager Connie Mack.  But the marquee attraction was Babe Ruth, at that time coming to the end of his playing career yet still the biggest star in baseball.  Rob’s book, Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), shows that Ruth was also an international star.  Japanese fans swarmed around him at every stop on the tour, and they cheered for his home runs, even when they were part of another lopsided win by the Americans.  Japanese fans’ admiration of Ruth and the other American players, and the overall success of the tour, convinced organizers that there was a place for professional baseball in Japan, alongside the well-established and popular high school and college leagues.  Two years after the tour, Japan’s professional league played its inaugural season, featuring the Tokyo Giants and six other clubs.

For his own part, Ruth came away from the tour with a great affection for Japan.  He was then bitterly disappointed seven years later by the attack on Pearl Harbor.  As Rob explains in his book and the interview, even during the weeks of the tour, when thousands of Japanese were cheering American players in the streets and stadiums, the forces that would lead to war were moving in society and the military.  Babe Ruth and baseball were unable to keep that war from coming.  But Lefty O’Doul and baseball were at least able to help repair the damage.

Two weeks from now the National Football League will hold its annual draft of college football players.  For the league’s teams, the draft is the chance to re-stock their rosters with fresh young talent, basing their choices on reams of analytical reports and hours of dissected game films.  The players, on the other hand, see the draft as the fulfillment of their lifelong dreams, the chance to slip the penury of amateur collegiate status and earn millions as a professional athlete.  Like everything the NFL does, the draft is an epic, made-for-television spectacle, with fans cheering and jeering from the balcony of New York’s Radio City Music Hall, team executives arrayed on the floor like UN diplomats in crisis deliberations, the wise chorus of ESPN experts predicting each team’s selection and then decrying those teams that didn’t do as they had predicted, and the players themselves, dressed in tailor-made suits purchased with their expected millions, waiting for their names to be called.  The whole proceeding is broadcast with an accompanying riot of statistics, scrolling text, and computer-generated graphics.

Once upon a time, football was different.

Historian Randy Roberts presents this earlier age of college football, in all its color and drama, in his newest book, A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).  At the start of World War II, government and military leaders decided (after much debate) that college football had to keep going; it was good exercise for young men soon to leave for overseas service and good entertainment for the home front.  And two teams that gained the most talented recruits and the most national attention during the war were the academies for prospective officers: Army and Navy.  Randy’s book focuses on the Army team of coach Red Blaik, who came to West Point in 1941 to revive a losing program.  By autumn 1944, through his own relentless preparation and innovations in strategy, and with the contributions of two of the greatest backs to play the game, Blaik had built one of the best teams in the country.  In November of that year, troops overseas were stalled on the battlefield, and people at home were weary of rationing.  They turned on their radios to listen to a football game, the biggest game of the year, played not by pro prospects looking ahead to their big payday, but by officer candidates who expected to go to war.

As a young, patriotic American, I was torn by the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.  On the one hand, I knew already as an eleven-year-old, long before Ronald Reagan had uttered the phrase, that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire.  Their invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was not only an act of unjust aggression, it was also the first step of the Soviet leadership’s insidious plan to seize the Persian Gulf, squeeze off the supply of oil, and then easily defeat a weakened America.  Knowing all this, as I did, there was no question about whether the U.S. should participate in an Olympics held in the very capital of our enemy.  But on the other hand, after the U.S. hockey team’s victory at the Winter Olympics in February 1980, I recognized that by boycotting the summer games, we were giving up our chance to inflict even more humiliating defeats on the Soviets.  As spring turned to summer, I found myself wishing that our athletes were going to Moscow—to kick some Soviet butt.

Recent studies of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan make clear that the American view of the invasion as part of Moscow’s plan for world domination was woefully wrong (you can hear interviews with the authors of these books on New Books in History and New Books in Russia and Eurasia). But as Nicholas Sarantakes explains in his diplomatic history of the boycott, Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010), most Americans did support the withdrawal from the Moscow Games.  Jimmy Carter’s announcement of the boycott in January 1980 had near-unanimous approval.  And even though this high level of support waned over the following months, especially after the “Miracle on Ice,” a majority of Americans continued to back the boycott.  Outside of the United States, however, the boycott was a fiercely contested issue.  Much of Nick’s book describes clumsy American diplomacy and debates within countries such as Britain and Australia, whose governments declared support for their U.S. allies while national Olympic committees refused to submit to Washington’s wishes.

The boycott was a diplomatic flop, one that revealed the bumbling of the Carter Administration as well as the personal intransigence and heavy-handed politics of Jimmy Carter.  Several allies of the U.S. sent their athletes to Moscow.  And the Games did go on, with a good measure of success.  At the same time, though, the Moscow Games and the boycott are a turning point in the contemporary history of the Olympics.  This summer’s Olympics in London will be a lucrative, made-for-TV spectacle of international tourism and corporate sponsorship (with some high-quality athletics at the center, of course).   But the good will and high revenues of London 2012 would not have been possible without the muddle of 1980.

Coming to terms with the limitations of our own sporting achievement is one of the hardest things many of us have to do in life. A couple of years ago, after one too many serious injuries, I realised that I would never again line up on the rugby pitch waiting for the referee to blow his whistle. For others it can involve failing to make it as a professional sportsman or woman, or even missing out on making the cut for a team at school. At whatever level, these things matter.

For Paul Watson, coming to terms with these limitations did not mean giving in. His desire to play international soccer, despite not having the requisite talent, let him to a more creative solution: if he wasn’t good enough to play for England, what about somewhere where the standards were perhaps a bit lower? His hopes finally settled on a tiny Micronesian island called Pohnpei, far far out in the Pacific Ocean. When it turned out that playing for their international team was more complicated than he had envisaged, he rejigged his plans and resolved to become their manager. What could possibly go wrong?

Up Pohnpei (Profile Books, 2012) is the remarkable story of the eighteen months that Paul spent, not just coaching Pohnpei’s national football team, but actually creating that team in the first place. It is a story with much to say about how sports are governed and the impoverished lower reaches of a sport otherwise seemingly awash with cash. It is also a snapshot of how the Micronesian islanders live and the motivational powers that taking part in football games had on the members of the Pohnpei team. Although Paul never managed to win his international football cap, it’s also a reminder why we all love playing and watching sport – at whatever level.

Alabama-Auburn.  Maple Leafs-Canadiens.  Boca Juniors-River Plate.  Carlton-Collingwood.  Fenerbahçe-Galatasaray.  Great rivalries are the catalysts of national sporting cultures.  They are the high point of a season, fueling emotions as well as ticket sales and media hype.  The most famous rivalries typically have bearing for league standings and championships.  But many are also grounded in long-standing divisions between social classes or religious and ethnic communities.

The case can be made that the most intense rivalry in all of sports is between Glasgow’s two football clubs: Celtic and Rangers.  Known collectively as the “Old Firm,” the two clubs have dominated Scottish football for more than a century. The last time a team other than Celtic or Rangers won the Scottish league was 1985.  But the rivalry is built on more than the competition for titles and trophies. Rangers were long associated with Scottish Protestantism, and the club refused for decades to sign a Catholic player. Celtic, on the other hand, was historically the club of Irish Catholic immigrants, and still today fans wave Irish tricolor flags at matches.

As sportswriter Richard Wilson explains, the sectarian division that undergirds the Old Firm is waning, as secularization advances and intermarriage becomes more common.  But the intensity surrounding the Old Firm derby has not lessened.  In his book Inside the Divide: One City, Two Clubs, the Old Firm (Canongate, 2012), Richard presents the story of a single match in January 2010, as viewed from different participants: the players and managers, the police and the press, supporters of both clubs, and even the nurses who tend to the drunk and wounded after the game.  The composite picture shows the anxiety and tension that precede the match, and then the energy and passion that erupt inside the grounds.  Richard makes clear that the two hours or so at Ibrox or Celtic Park are exhilarating, exhausting, and breathlessly quick.  The noise is overpowering, as supporters of both sides do battle in chants and song.  On occasion, though, they will still slide into slurs against their opponents.  Despite the policing and the anti-sectarian campaigns, the deep animosities still emerge, offering a reminder that in the Old Firm, as in all rivalries, fans are still tribal creatures.

During his tenure as a university lecturer, the novelist (and former football goalkeeper) Vladimir Nabokov instructed his students that the reader of literature needed three things: imagination, memory, and a dictionary.  This advice applies as well for the reader of Gideon Haigh’s essays on cricket, collected in Sphere of Influence: Writings on Cricket and Its Discontents (Victory Books, 2010).  Certainly, Gideon taps the lexicon like no other sportswriter, peppering his columns with sibilance, hypertrophic, and phosphoresce (verb), and even nifty neologisms like gossipmongery and zeitgeistiest.  The reader’s memory is stretched with cultural allusions that go beyond the standard sports commentator’s references to Will Ferrell movies or Saturday Night Live skits.  The essays feature cameos by Dean Rusk, William O. Douglas, John Kenneth Galbraith, P.G. Wodehouse, and Captain Renault from Casablanca.  And the imaginative reader will delight in metaphors and similes that conjure brilliant images: a bowler demolishes a wicket stump “like a dynamited chimney”; the excess of millions in contemporary cricket is compared to a saturnalia; and Sachin Tendulkar’s entry to the pitch has the same awe and drama as if he was being carried “on a bejeweled palanquin by dusky maidens amid the flourish of imperial trumpets.”

But there is also substance behind the style.  Gideon’s career began in business journalism, and many of his articles probe the financial side of cricket.  He questions the direction that cricket’s commercialization is heading, and how it is fueling a profligacy of competitions and leagues and televised matches that is threatening to cannibalize the sport.  There is much cause for discontent, from hyperbolic television commentary to WAG’s staking their place in the tabloids, and fans who do not follow cricket will find that many of Gideon’s critiques apply to their own sports as well.

At the same time, Gideon is also a cricketer.  As he makes clear throughout the interview, he has a profound love and respect for the game that comes from avidly playing it.  He shows an appreciation for the skill of the masters in his comments on Tendulkar and Shane Warne.  And he has hope for the future, despite the looming retirement of these icons and the current tumult in the sport, because it is a good game—perhaps even, as he says, the best game.  But for all this pride in his favorite sport, Gideon also appreciates the compliment he’s received from readers, including this one, that he writes about cricket in a way that outsiders to the game can understand.  Certainly, this ability to communicate cricket, even to non-cricket speakers, is apparent in our interview.

On the Minnesota rinks where I spent many days of my childhood, the skates made the man—or the boy, to be more accurate.  Hockey skates had a boot of tough leather and a reinforced toe to protect against sticks and pucks, like work boots mounted on thick, sharp, rounded blades.  In contrast, girls wore figure skates.  The boots were made of softer leather, laced high up the ankle, with a tapered toe.  And of course, the girls’ boots were white, whereas our hockey skates were black, preferably with plenty of scuffs.  There were figure skates for boys and men, and these also had a black boot.  But rare was the male who stepped on my neighborhood’s outdoor rink with figure skates.  The few times it did happen, heads turned, fingers pointed, and the teasing was cruel.  “Fairy nice skates” is what the boys said.

Although we didn’t realize it, our taunts expressed a deep-rooted stereotype in the United States and Canada: figure skating is an activity for girls, and men who skate are certainly effeminate, and most likely gay.  Like most stereotypes associated with gender, this view of figure skating as inherently feminine was not always held.  A century ago, figure skaters were almost all men, and their performances were regarded as exhibitions of controlled and graceful athleticism.  Only since World War II has skating come to be viewed, in North America, as an activity for cute, pixieish girls and dandy men with a taste for sequins.  Periodically, there have been attempts to draw more boys into the sport, with the spotlight placed on the athleticism of a Dick Button or the ruggedness of an Elvis Stojko.  But the boys on the rinks of Minnesota or Ontario, and their parents, are hard to convince.

Sociologist Mary Louise Adams examines this gender history of figure skating in her book Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport (University of Toronto Press, 2011).  As even she discovered in her research, the transformation of the sport is surprising.  Our interview, and her book, reveal how influential a single athlete—in this case, Olympic champion Sonja Henie—can be for the popularity and the perceptions of a sport.  And Mary Louise raises the troubling point that now, in an age of women’s boxing, rugby, and water polo, the gender limitations in sports might not be on what girls are able to do, but on what boys are allowed.

Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network.  Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate.  From his interviews of Muhammad Ali on Wide World of Sports in the Sixties, through his 13-year tenure in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, Cosell came to be the most prominent personality in sports television and one of the most recognizable figures—certainly, the most recognized voice—in all of American popular culture.

Throughout his career, Cosell aspired to be more like the trusted journalist Cronkite than the entertainer Carson.  And one of the main points of historian John Bloom’s biography, There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), is that Cosell was an innovative, probing, and fearless reporter.  Cosell defended Ali when the boxer was stripped of his heavyweight title.  He spoke on behalf of Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they were sent home after their protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.  And he denounced boxing and refused to work in the sport again, after announcing the horribly one-sided Holmes-Cobb championship fight in 1982.

At the same time, Cosell recognized that sports was entertainment.  He played his role for laughs in the Woody Allen film Bananas and on the made-for-TV “athletic competitions” of lesser actors and actresses.  But as his fame peaked, Cosell’s stated opinion of sports turned sharply and dismissively critical.  The broadcaster always felt himself an outsider in the world of sports, a characteristic that Bloom attributes to Cosell’s Jewish background.  And as a trained attorney, Cosell felt himself intellectually superior to the jocks and shills, as he called them.  He gained wealth and fame through sports, but he came to see himself as bigger than sports.  In that sense, Cosell can be seen not only as a legendary figure, but also as a tragic one.

It’s the English Premier League’s birthday!  On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to create a new, breakaway league.  A lucrative television deal with Sky Sports followed soon after, bringing plenty of seed money to the new league.  At the time, however, English football was not a certain investment.  Attendance had been declining for decades, and in the EPL’s first season stadiums were filled to less than 70 per cent of capacity.  In terms of revenue and star players, the top European leagues were in Spain and Italy.  In fact, the EPL couldn’t even boast the biggest money-making club in Britain.  That team was Rangers, playing in the Scottish league.

What a difference two decades make.  The EPL today is the biggest revenue-generating league in Europe, and its top clubs are among the valuable sports properties in the world.  The league draws international investors, and its matches are televised in more than 200 countries.  In a recent interview, EPL chief Richard Scudamore remarked on the league’s worldwide popularity.  The parity in American professional sports was enviable, Scudamore admitted, but “theirs is an incestuous, contained, domestic world. . . . I wouldn’t swap our global appeal.”

But as sociologist Peter Millward points out, the Premier League’s global success has had its discontents.  In his book The Global Football League (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Pete looks at supporters of the league’s most successful clubs, Manchester United and Liverpool, examining how they responded to the arrival of new, affluent fans and new, American owners.  For many of these fans, the on-field results that this money brought was not worth the loss, as they saw it, of the clubs’ traditions.  In looking at these supporters and their protests, Pete’s book deals with questions that go well beyond English football.  This is a study of how sports fans find meaning and identity—and how the yearning for local connections can outweigh success and riches in the global market.

Here is a quiz.  What is your idea of the perfect sports-watching experience: a) watching your team crush its rival in a one-sided, humiliating contest, or b) watching two top-quality opponents, neither of which you support, in an epic, closely fought match, highlighted by brilliant individual performances?

Your answer to the question indicates what kind of sports fan you tend to be: the partisan, whose interest in sports is rooted in devotion to a particular team, or the purist, who watches sports for the thrill of athletic prowess and competitive drama.  Certainly, two natures can beat within the same breast.  In my heart of hearts is the longing to watch my team lift the championship trophy.   But I am resigned that this will not happen in my lifetime (if ever).  So I have taken to watching sports for the sake of sports.  I must admit: it is quite liberating.

Stephen Mumford had a similar conversion from agitated partisan to serene purist.  The change brought the realization that there is so much we miss in sports when we are cheering, or more often cursing, our teams.  A professor of philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Nottingham University, Stephen inquires into these potential benefits in his book Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011).  As the subtitle indicates, he sees three ways in which sports can touch us: the realization of beauty, the appreciation of moral lessons, and the fulfillment of our emotions.  In our interview, Stephen discusses these three areas of benefit—as well as more specific questions of contemporary sports, like how we should view the athletic performances of a Tiger Woods or a John Terry in light of their off-the-field failings, and whether or not the transcendent mastery of Barcelona is good for world football.  We hear plenty on those questions from the guys on sports radio.  Sometimes, though, it’s good to hear from a philosopher.

You can follow New Books in Sports on Twitter and friend us on Facebook.  During the week, we’ll keep you thinking with suggestions of engaging, intelligent sports writing, from around the world.

For years, the morning skate was a Christmas Day ritual for my father and me.  After the presents had been unwrapped and before the morning service, my dad and I walked to the nearby city park and took to the ice. We’d take a few runs down the empty rink, trading long passes across the ice, then challenge each other in some turns at one-on-one, and then maybe finish with a shooting match, calling the spot in the net that we were going to hit.  My dad lives now on a lake in the Minnesota woods.  This year, he and my mom had shoveled the snow to clear a rink for their visiting grandkids.  The ice was perfect for the Christmas morning skate.  Father and son took to the ice again, along with grandsons and granddaughters.

One of the pleasures of Roy MacGregor’s hockey writing is that it infused with the same love of a fresh rink and the feel of skates cutting into clean ice.  For close to four decades, Roy has been covering the game for the Ottawa Citizen, The Globe and Mail, National Post, and Maclean’s, and he has written several fiction and non-fiction books on hockey.  His new book, Wayne Gretzky’s Ghost: And Other Tales from a Lifetime in Hockey (Random House Canada, 2011), brings together a generous sample of this work.  The dedicated fan will savor this expert tour of the sport, from the Forum of the 1970s to Walter’s backyard, while a newcomer will appreciate the far-reaching introduction to hockey’s great players, pressing issues, and its place in Canadian culture.

In the book and our interview, Roy discusses some of hockey’s most prominent characters: TV commentator Don Cherry, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, and the Great One himself.  We talk about Roy’s personal encounters with the game’s legends, such as Bobby Orr and Paul Henderson, and the stories of unsung figures like Mark Visentin and Mario Lemieux’s mother.  We discuss the cloud of violence that has darkened hockey for decades and has become even more menacing in recent years.  And we talk about how the experience of playing the game, even with medium talent, can—and should—shape the way we watch and write about sports.

As several guests on this podcast have told us, sports have been fundamentally connected with the major developments of modern history: urbanization, class conflict, imperialism, political repression, globalization.  The history of bicycle racing brings in another key ingredient of the modern age: technology. The sport began only with the invention of a machine, and its history, from the mid-1800s to today, has been linked to the constant adaptation of that machine.

Andrew Ritchie documents the first decades of this history in his book Quest for Speed: A History of Early Bicycle Racing 1868-1903 (Cycle Publishing, 2011).  As he explains in our interview, an important part of the story is the evolution of the bicycle, from early wood-and-steel models that rattled their riders, through the high-wheel bikes that we typically associate with 19th-century cycling, to the more familiar bicycles of the 1890s, with chain-driven rear wheels and pneumatic tires.  An important point Andrew makes is that technological development and changes in competition were always linked.  Riders, mechanics, designers, and manufacturers worked in concert, always seeking a better and, above all, faster bicycle.

Andrew does discuss the people of early cycling as well as the machines.  We talk about two figures who gained international stardom as champion cyclists, Arthur Zimmerman and Major Taylor, the African-American rider whom Andrew profiled in a previous book.  We also discuss what sets cyclists apart.  In the 1800s riders had emotional attachments to their bicycles, they tended to hang out in bike shops, and they stood out on the roads in their strange clothes.  In short, they were not much different from today’s cyclists—with the exception of those nifty handlebar moustaches.

In the celebrity firmament that circles around us, sports stars are among the brightest lights. Kobe, Tiger, Messi, Márta, Sachin, and Serena can be recognized from most points on the globe.  But other stars are visible only in certain lands:  Yuna Kim, Barbora Špotáková, Sébastien Chabal, Andrés Guardado, Israel Folau, Buster Posey, Brian Urlacher.  Although not as bright as first-magnitude stars, these sports celebrities are prominent in their particular areas, selling products, talking religion, visiting schools, hosting reality shows, or simply showing their athletic talent.

But do these stars have a larger significance, or are they just part of the media din?  Can we learn something about societies by charting the sports celebrities that people look to?  What might we learn, for instance, about America in the Eighties from studying the stories and images of Bird and Magic, or Australia at mid-century from The Don, or Austria of the interwar decades from Uridil and Sindelar?  And is it possible that there are common features to our fixation on sports stars, across different cultures?

Historian Dennis Frost takes up these questions in his book Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2011).  Beginning in the late 1800s, when Japan’s modernization program was spilling into sports, Dennis looks at the prominent place of star athletes in the nation’s culture through the 20th century.  His case studies feature some of the most famous figures in Japanese sports: the sumo grand champion Hitachiyama, track athlete Hitomi Kinue, baseball pitcher Sawamura Eiji, and champion boxer Gushiken Yoko.  We learn of these stars’ influence in modern Japan, as well as that of the brightest sports star of them all: Ichiro.

“I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” acknowledged Jackie Robinson, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” To Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis was an inspiration and an idol. “I just give lip service to being the greatest,” said Ali in 1981, after Louis’ death. “He was the greatest.”

Yet, while Jackie Robinson is now one of the most revered athletes in American history and Ali remains a cultural icon, the man who paved the way for both is lesser known today, more a distant folk hero than a historical figure whose accomplishments are understood and respected.  Unlike Robinson, Louis was not the pioneering black athlete in his sport, and unlike Ali, he did not translate his success in the ring into a platform for larger media fame and political statements.  Nevertheless, as Randy Roberts shows in his acclaimed biography Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press, new in paperback in February 2012), the heavyweight champion was an athlete without peer in his sport, one of the most talked-about celebrities of the day, and a man who did effect change, in some positive way, in white Americans’ perceptions of black athletes.  He was a symbolic figure of the Thirties and Forties and, as Randy argues, an essential character for understanding the history of that era.

A distinguished professor of history at Purdue University, award-winning teacher, and author of books on Jack Dempsey, Jack Johnson, Charles Lindbergh, and John Wayne, Randy brings to the book an expert understanding of sports and celebrity in American history and a lively, arresting style.  With attention to colorful detail and to the larger context of early 20th-century American history, he describes Joe Louis as a man of his times—and as a giant of the age.  This is a story that certainly deserves retelling.

New Books in Sports is now available on the Stitcher radio app for iPhone and Android.  Friend us at Facebook and follow us on Twitter to leave feedback, receive updates of new podcasts, and get daily links to quality shorter sports writing.

I am a fan of the end-of-the-year, double-size issues of magazines—full of photographs, lists of the best and worst of the year, notable quotes, and vignettes  about the year’s events.  This week’s podcast follows in the spirit of those year-end special issues.  The episode is thicker than usual, but it is full of colorful observations, reflective commentary, and expert recommendations on the best recent sports books.

We call this final podcast of 2011–the Special Year-End Book List.  Instead of a single author talking about a new book, we have a variety of guests offering their views on the year in sports and their choices of favorite books.   The suggestions come from a range of sports commentators, in the US, the UK, and beyond.  We welcome back to the podcast sports historians Kurt Kemper and Tony Collins as well as New York Times writer Don Van Natta.  We hear from a Fulbright-winning doctoral student working in sports history, Shay Wood.  The episode features the BBC’s Tom Fordyce and Sean Wheelock of the World Football Phone In; the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, Steven Goldman; and Atlanta-based sports journalist Wendy Parker.  We get recommendations from E, author of the hockey blog A Theory of Ice, and Supriya Nair, contributor to the soccer blog The Run of Play.  And offering his views on the significant recent events in American sports is Robert Lipsyte, longtime sports columnist and writer for the New York Times.

Our guests have suggestions for books, new and old, in baseball, football, hockey, soccer, cycling, boxing, and host of other topics related to sports.  If you are still making your shopping list, or writing your letter to Santa Claus, or simply looking forward to a gift card from that certain online retailer named after a South American river, this episode will have plenty of good ideas for you.New Books in Sports is then going on holiday for the rest of the season.  Look for new episodes in January 2012, when we will discuss recent books on Canadian hockey, Japanese sumo, American owners of English football clubs, and the philosophy of being a sports fan.

“We live in the age of globalization, with the interconnection of markets, technology, and cultures making the world a smaller place.”

Sure.  Tell that to the guys on my local sports radio show.  For them, the world is bounded by the Big Ten and the North Division of the National Football Conference, the groupings to which our state’s college and pro football teams belong.  Other teams?  Other games?  Conferences in other parts of the country?  Those barely rate a mention.  And different sports, in other parts of the world?  They don’t even exist.  Tune to your local sports radio station or open the sports page and you’ll find the same, whether you’re in America or Europe: the average fan remains intensely regional—maybe even tribal—in his sports interests.

But as Andrei Markovits argues, globalization is creeping into sports.  At the University of Michigan, where Andy is an Arthur Thurnau Professor and Karl Deutsch Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, European students follow their countrymen in the NBA, Korean students talk Major League Baseball, and white Americans, dressed in Barcelona and AS Roma shirts, debate whether Arsène Wenger should be fired.  The world of sports is getting smaller.  However, just as economic globalization has met resistance, so does the interweaving of sports cultures spur opposition.  In Europe, ordinary football fans protest the takeover of their clubs by American owners, while my local sports radio guys scoff at the suggestion that soccer could ever rival baseball and real football.

In his co-authored book Gaming the World: How Sports Are Shaping Global Politics and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2010) Andy looks the diffusion of sports cultures across the Atlantic, in both directions, and this hostility of fans to the changes brought by sports globalization.  He takes the creative approach of viewing particular sports as languages.  A native speaker of Hungarian, who was raised in Romania, schooled in Austria, and then came to the US, Andy is adept in several languages.  Likewise, he is a speaker of many sports languages.  But he acknowledges that sports polyglots are just as rare as the linguistic variety.  Since learning even a few phrases of someone else’s language can be potentially embarrassing, we stick to the safety of our native tongue.  It is the same in sports.

This is a wide-ranging and lively interview about contemporary sports in America and Europe, with someone who is both a scholar and a true fan.  How are sports fans similar to nerds?  Why were the crowds at last summer’s Women’s World Cup so polite?  How is it that being a fan ruins our appreciation of the actual games? And why does the ultimate success of soccer in the US require the conversion of average fans—in other words, fans like my local sports radio guys?  We cover it all in an interview that will be ideal listening for your Thanksgiving travels.

On November 10, 2009, Robert Enke stepped in front of an express train at a crossing in the German village of Eilvese.  At age 32, Robert left behind a young family: he and his wife, Teresa, had just adopted a baby girl only six months earlier.  And Robert was also at the top of his professional career.  He was the star goalkeeper for the club Hannover 96 of the Bundesliga, and he was expected to be the starting keeper for the German national team at the World Cup in South Africa.  But despite this success, and the new addition to his family, Robert was unable to overcome a severe clinical depression that had gripped him for months.  Only a small circle of family and friends knew of the depth of his illness.  For others, both those who knew Robert personally and those who knew of him only as one of Germany’s best footballers, his death was an incomprehensible shock.

Ronald Reng was among those stunned by Robert Enke’s death.  An award-winning German sports journalist based in Barcelona, Ronnie had meet Robert in 2002, when he was the standout keeper for the Portuguese side Benfica.  The two men became friends when Robert moved to Barcelona months later, after signing with the city’s storied club.  But Ronnie was never aware of his friend’s depression, and he was left to ask what could have drawn Robert, a man with seemingly everything to live for, to the belief that death was his only solution.  The answers unfolded in the research and writing of his biography A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011).

In writing his friend’s life story, Ronnie drew upon the diaries and letters of Robert and Teresa, interviews with Robert’s friends, family, teammates and coaches, and his own conversations with Robert over the years.  As he explains in the interview, his aim was to tell Robert’s story from Robert’s own perspective.  In this, he succeeds.  Readers gain a sense of the anxiety and anticipation as a football keeper tracks his opponents and then decides, in the space of a split-second, whether to leap or retreat.  And readers also realize how debilitating and uncontrollable depression can be.  Robert did everything that is recommended to battle depression: he admitted his illness, sought medical help, took medications, and pushed himself out of bed to follow a structured routine.  Still, his thoughts remained black.

Ronnie’s portrait of his friend is an extraordinary piece of writing, and the book was the deserving winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for 2011.  The story is indeed a tragedy.  Robert Enke was, at once, a remarkably gifted athlete and also a pleasant and humble man.  Readers will like him, and root for him, and ache for him.  And I believe that those who pick up the book will hold the thought while reading, as I did: “I hope this ends differently that I know it does.”

Modern sports carry the DNA of the games of ancient Greece and Rome. This genetic inheritance will be most apparent next summer, when London hosts the 30th Summer Olympic Games. But these genes are also expressed any time we visit a stadium or arena to watch athletes compete. The Greeks also called a competitor an athlētēs, a word derived from the root athlon, meaning “prize.” The stadion was the field of competition at Olympia, as well as the marquee event at the ancient games: a sprint of roughly 200 meters. Arena, meanwhile, was the Latin word for the sand that covered the floor of an amphitheater, ideal for absorbing the blood of slaughtered animals and executed criminals (but only infrequently, as we’ll learn, the blood of slain gladiators). And even when we visit the gym for our own workout, we are manifesting our genetic heritage. The Greeks also frequented the gymnasion for physical training. But as this was ancient Greece, the exercises at a gymnasion were performed gymnos—naked.

As David Potter points out in his survey of Greek and Roman games, The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2011), there have been only two periods in human history when spectator sports have had a prominent place in society and culture: our own modern age, and the ancient and classical eras in the Mediterranean. The parallels between ancient and modern games are numerous. The athletes of millennia ago, whether Olympic competitors or Roman chariot racers, were celebrities of their day, lauded by the earliest sports columnists (Greek lyric poets) and fan bloggers (Roman graffiti scribblers). They were also well rewarded. Olympic victors were the objects of bidding wars among competing Greek cities, similar to today’s free agency and transfer windows, while the richest athlete of any age remains the Roman charioteer Diolces, whose wealth was surpassed only by the emperor’s.

There is also plenty that is surprising in Potter’s book—and hopefully our interview. The Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Michigan, David has spent his career writing and teaching about the classical age. And as a former college wrestler and member of the university’s athletics advisory board, he has an inside knowledge of contemporary sports. He tells us of the links between ancient and modern athletics, the strange and gory details of past competitions, and the accuracy of films like Gladiator. Along the way, we learn about figures like Diocles, the six-time Olympic champion wrestler Milo of Croton, and the poet who was the Grantland Rice of ancient Greece. If you are a fan of the Olympics, or of Gladiator and Spartacus, you’ll enjoy this tour of the ancient world.

The 107th World Series is underway, with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers vying for the championship of Major League Baseball.  The Cardinals’ star, Albert Pujols, has already entered the record books, joining Hall-of-Famers Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson as the only players ever to hit three home runs in one World Series game.  This historic slugging performance follows that of Rangers outfielder Nelson Cruz, who broke a record earlier in the postseason by hitting six home runs in one playoff series.

Pujols and Cruz share not only an ability to crush home runs.  They are also both originally from the Dominican Republic.  Of the 50 total players on the Cardinals’ and Rangers’ rosters, 14 are of Latino background, with seven of those coming from the Dominican Republic.  Many of the biggest stars in American baseball today are originally from Latin America, players like Pujols and Cruz, top hitters Miguel Cabrera, José Bautista, and Robinson Canó and two of the game’s premier pitchers, Félix Hernández and Mariano Rivera.  Indeed, players of Latino background have long been an important part of professional baseball in the US.  More than a half century before Pujols, and even decades before Reginald Martinez Jackson was hitting his World Series home runs, a Cuban named Miguel González was managing the Cardinals.

But the history of Latinos in baseball and other American sports is not a convenient story of opportunity and inclusion.  When white settlers first introduced modern team sports to the American Southwest in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, their approach resembled that of other colonial powers taking over a subject land, like the British in South Asia and the Japanese in Taiwan.  As Jorge Iber explains in our interview, team sports was a means of both distinguishing Latinos as inferior and assimilating them into white American society.  In their book Latinos in U.S. Sport: A History of Isolation, Cultural Identity, and Acceptance (Human Kinetics, 2011) Iber and his co-writers make the point that the use of sports as a vehicle of social integration is still visible today, but has moved beyond the borderlands of the Southwest to places like Arkansas, Nebraska, and Michigan.  And just as political parties today have recognized the importance of courting the growing “Hispanic demographic,” so have the marketers of professional and college sports realized that Latinos in the U.S. have potential not just as athletes but also as viewers and ticket-buyers.

Here’s a sport quiz for you.  Name a world-class athlete who hailed from the state of Nebraska: an Olympic champion, a hall of famer, someone who was among the very best at his or her game. (And no sneaking over to Google!)

If you’re stumped, as I was, you’ll find some hints below.  But first, think of another distant land with the same population as Nebraska (roughly 1.8 million), far removed from financial and industrial centers, like the state on the American Plains, with a hard climate and a waning economy.  Then mix in violent sectarian conflict that turns athletic rivals into bitter enemies.  Yet surprisingly, from this marginal and divided region came the greatest footballer of his generation, an Olympic gold-medalist in the pentathlon, a world champion boxer, and a young golfer hailed as the sport’s next great star.  This is Northern Ireland.

Teddy Jamieson grew up in Coleraine, a small city in County Londonderry.  He was a boy when the Troubles began, but as he explains in the interview, his hometown was mostly quiet in the years of bombings and shootings.   Nevertheless, he was eager to leave to go to university, and he has lived in Scotland ever since.  Teddy came to realize early on, however, that he would never be Scottish.  That realization came while watching sports.  Even though he had been desperate to leave the North, believing that there was nothing there for him, Teddy’s first loyalty—expressed spontaneously, unconsciously, when watching a football match on television—remained with Northern Ireland.

Teddy’s book Whose Side Are You On? Sport, the Troubles, and Me (Yellow Jersey Press, 2011) is, in part, a history of the mixing of sports and politics in Northern Ireland.  He presents the stories of the great footballer (George Best), the Olympic pentathlete (Mary Peters), the boxing champion (Barry McGuigan), and the young golfer (Rory McIlroy), as set against the Troubles and its aftermath.  But his book is also the memoir of fan who comes to understand how deeply his sports allegiances and memories shape him.  In that respect, Teddy’s book—and hopefully our interview—offers insight into the experiences of any fan, whether from divided Northern Ireland or placid Nebraska.

And as for world-class athletes, Nebraska has indeed produced a few.

It’s October.  In the American sports calendar, that means it’s time for the baseball playoffs.  My team, the Minnesota Twins, wasn’t even close this year, going from first place last year to the cellar this year.  But I gained some measure of consolation last week in watching A-Rod strike out to end the Yankees’ season.

Jenny Ring’s team, the Oakland Athletics, is also sitting out this October.  A scholar of political theory, Jenny is a lifelong baseball fan.  She was born with, as she calls it, the “baseball gene.”  She follows the Major Leagues, she played ball in the neighborhood as a girl, and she passed the gene on to her daughter.  But whereas Jenny was left alone with her ball and glove when the boys her age went off to play in organized leagues, her daughter joined the team—and proved herself on the field.  Jenny’s daughter played the game well, as well as any of the boys.  As she grew older, though, and tried out for teams in the higher ranks, it became clear that a girl playing baseball was not acceptable to many coaches and parents.  But Jenny’s daughter refused to leave the game, and she still plays baseball today for the USA Women’s National Team.

As Jenny watched her daughter encounter overt discrimination in her attempts to play baseball, she asked the question: “Why aren’t American girls allowed to play baseball?”  Boys and girls play soccer together.  In swimming and cross-country, they practice side-by-side.  Boys and girls teams share basketball courts and lacrosse fields.  But baseball remains off-limits for girls.  For example, 337 players were on teams in my local Little League last spring.  Only two of those players were girls.  And unlike in other sports, there is not the option to play in a girls’ baseball league.  Instead, girls who love to throw a ball and hit it with a bat are steered into a different sport: softball.

In her book Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Jenny looks at the history of baseball to find that women were on the diamond from the sport’s beginnings, only to be openly and deliberately excluded in the 20^th century.  As we discuss in the interview, the reasons given by baseball’s guardians for girls’ inability to play covered the bases of male ignorance and insecurity toward women.  But beyond the stated reasons, there was something deeper going on.  The fact that resistance to girls playing baseball is still strong in the United States (while Canada, Australia, and Japan all have girls baseball programs) suggests that a belief in baseball as the sacred domain of American manhood is still strong.  There will be girls, like Jenny’s daughter, who will find a place on the diamond, and even stand out among the boys.  But despite all the advances for girls and women in sports, baseball in America remains a game of fathers and sons.

There are beautiful sports photos, and dramatic sports photos.  There are sports photos that are funny, and others that are poignant.  There are photos that capture athletic brilliance, and tenacity, and passion.  But there are few images from the modern history of sports that have transcended the games, photos that have inspired and provoked those with little interest in athletics.  Perhaps the only image to have had such a far-reaching effect is that of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

But some would object—and many did in 1968—that what Smith and Carlos did on the medal stand after the 200-meter finals was not a sports moment.  It was a political moment, a protest, and therefore it was outside the boundary of athletics.  Smith and Carlos had violated a fundamental principle of sport by mixing it with politics.  But those who made that criticism in 1968 likely did not denounce George Foreman ten days later, when he waved the American flag in the ring after winning the boxing gold medal.  Likewise, fans who objected to NBA player Steve Nash’s criticism of Arizona’s law on illegal immigrants likely did not oppose the prominent military presence in NFL commemorations of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or the contributions that sports owners make to political parties and candidates.  As sports journalist Dave Zirin notes in our interview, politics are always present in sports.  People get upset, though, when their sports are mixed with somebody else’s politics.  And in 1968—and the years that followed—people were furious with the politics of Smith and Carlos.

Dave Zirin has written a number of books on sports in U.S. history and contemporary society, and he comments regularly on sports and politics for The Nation and the weekly Sirius XM program, Edge of Sports Radio. As co-author of The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (Haymarket Books, 2011), he helps tell the story of an extraordinary athlete and activist.  In the interview, we talk of Carlos’ youth in Harlem, the events that led him and teammate Tommie Smith to make their shocking protest, and the burdens that Carlos endured after 1968.  And we talk about the hard work of telling another man’s life, of trying to convey not only his experiences but also his motivations, his commitments, and the way he understands the legacy of one transcendent act.

This past summer Germany hosted the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The 32 matches drew more than 800,000 fans, while the total number of foreign tourists visiting Germany increased by nine per cent over the previous summer. The German government’s commissioner for tourism proudly declared that the success of the Women’s World Cup “strengthened the global image of Germany as a cosmopolitan and family-friendly travel destination with excellent infrastructure,” making the country the “world champion of hospitality.”

As the statement shows, German officials are highly conscious of their nation’s “brand,” and the effectiveness of that brand in drawing tourists. The same can be said of other nations that host major international sporting events. Think of the attention to the “new South Africa” in 2010 or the “new China” in 2008. Organizers of these events do not simply plan a schedule of competitions; they seek to present an attractive image of their country to visitors at the stadiums and viewers watching on television.

This concern with national image was at the center of planning for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. When the organizers made their bid to host the games, only two decades had passed since the end of the Nazi state. Germany still had a big image problem, something that the planners hoped to remedy with the Munich games. Kay Schiller and Christopher Young examine this effort to re-craft the German brand in The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany (University of California Press, 2010), named the best book for 2011 by both the British and North American societies for sports history. As Kay and Chris discuss, the West German planners were alert to everything from the graphic design of the venue posters to the legacies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The aim was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk—a complete work of art—that would depict their country as modern, welcoming, and non-ideological. And in Kay and Chris’ judgment, they were largely successful: the Munich games were a model of planning and executing a major international event.

But then came the fifth of September.

With the NBA in the midst of a labor disagreement, players from the world’s premier basketball league are scattering in different directions to maintain their skills (and get paid). This past summer, a number of NBA players returned to their roots, so to speak, by playing in summer leagues in places like DC, LA, New York, and Baltimore. For many black players who grew up in big cities, summer leagues were the place where they first learned basketball, under the watchful eyes of older men who had also played the game—and made names for themselves—on the same courts.

Scott Brooks spent four years coaching youth basketball in one of these leagues in South Philadelphia, bringing the perspective of a sociologist to this institution of inner-city neighborhoods. The book based on his experiences and his research, Black Men Can’t Shoot (University of Chicago Press, 2009), follows two of the league’s young players, Jermaine and Ray, as they learn the game, develop their skills, and work to “get known” in the world of Philadelphia basketball. As Scott explains in the interview, “getting known” is a complicated and demanding process of gaining status on the court and in the community. Like athletes in other sports, young basketball players like Jermaine and Ray seek to get the attention of scouts and recruiters by participating in multiple leagues, traveling teams, and regional tournaments. But “getting known” in South Philly basketball is about much more than a coveted college scholarship. Being a known player brings social prestige at school and the protection and patronage of older men in the neighborhood, the chorus of elders known as “old heads.” Attaining this status, Scott explains, is not a matter of simple ability, the so-called natural athleticism of blacks.  Instead, it is the product of disciplined work, careful networking, and study of the game.

Scott’s book is not about the hoop dreams of Jermaine and Ray. Instead, it is about hoop reality—about basketball as part of the social fabric of an inner-city neighborhood and the ways that black men, young and old, use the game to improve their personal situations and better their communities.

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When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift.  The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates present and past encircling him, the packed bleachers and Bronx cityscape in the background; an exhausted and bloodied Y.A. Tittle kneeling on the gridiron grass on an afternoon of defeat; young Wilt Chamberlain, still in his uniform after the game, displaying a sheet of paper scrawled with “100”; Jesse Owens exploding into a sprint at the Berlin Games.  But the image in the book that most captivated me was not a photograph.  Instead, it was a painting: George Bellows’ 1924 oil of Luis Firpo knocking Jack Dempsey through the ropes in the first round of their fight at the Polo Grounds.  I remember studying the colors, the scramble in the ringside seats, the passive expression of Firpo as he follows through his punch, and the unbelievable scene of Dempsey (who would then—even more unbelievably—go on the win the fight) falling from the ring.  The painting remains for me an example of how art can capture the drama, the sounds, and the power of a sporting moment.

Allen Guttmann offers many examples of the crossing of art and sport in Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011): pastoral scenes of hunters and fishermen in the early republic, the accomplished paintings of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins in the mid-19^th century, and the pop art portraits of celebrity-athletes in the 1970s.  But the book is not simply about sports in art.  Instead, Allen looks at the parallel histories of these two forms of cultural expression.  The similarities are surprising.  As Allen points out at the start, both art and sports have no utilitarian value to society: “They serve no practical purpose.”

Allen’s work is built on decades of writing about sports history, and a career of teaching American cultural history.   You get a glimpse of his expertise and insight from the interview.  But you don’t get to see the pictures.  For that, you have to get the book.

My Little League baseball career spanned the late Seventies and early Eighties. During those summers, I always set aside the afternoon in August when the championship game of the Little League World Series was broadcast on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” There was a thrill to watching kids my own age and from teams like my own playing baseball on national television. But this anticipation and my youthful patriotism were always dashed when the teams representing the United States suffered their annual, humiliating defeat to the team from Taiwan.

That was my introduction to Taiwanese baseball.

The story of Taiwanese dominance in youth baseball is one part of Andrew Morris’ book, Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (University of California Press, 2010). In the book and the interview, Andrew explains the secrets to Taiwan’s string of ten world championships in thirteen years. But he also ably sets the story of this Little League dynasty—and baseball’s development throughout the 20th century—against the backdrop of Taiwan’s political and social history. Baseball was brought to the East Asian island not by the Americans who invented the sport, but by the Japanese who had adopted it in the late 1800s as part of their own process of Westernization. During their fifty years of rule, Japanese colonial officials saw baseball as means of cultivating the local Taiwanese population and turning them into reliable imperial subjects. In some ways this project was successful, as baseball was adopted by Taiwan’s ethnic Chinese and aborigine populations, and came to be recognized as their national sport.

Like other sports that spread across the globe—cricket in India, rugby in South Africa, soccer in Latin America—baseball was an imperial legacy that both connected Taiwan to the larger world and helped form a distinctly Taiwanese sense of identity. In our interview, Andrew explains this mix of baseball, politics, and ethnic tensions in Taiwan. It is a complicated history and an intriguing one, as Andrew shows with stories of Sadaharu Oh, a 1920s school team that could have come right out of a Hollywood script, and the greatest Little League baseball teams ever to take the field.

The instructor of my freshman physics course fit the stereotype of a physics professor: unkempt white hair, black glasses case in the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, thick German accent, and a tendency to mumble to himself while mulling over formula on the chalkboard. I was not his most attentive student, and finished the term with a grade of C (for which I was ecstatically grateful).  Judging from his book Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), I imagine that my physics experience would have been much more enjoyable if John Eric Goff had been my professor.

Eric’s enthusiasm for both science and sports is evident in the book, as he explains concepts and laws of physics by analyzing well-known athletic feats.  In the interview, we talk about Doug Flutie’s miraculous touchdown pass, Bob Beamon’s record-breaking long jump, and David Beckham’s bending free kicks.  As Eric explains, his aim is not to turn the performances of athletes into purely mechanical processes.  Instead, his analysis offers a new perspective and appreciation for what athletes can accomplish.  And you’ll also pick up some fascinating nuggets to share with your friends, such as why the players at the 2010 World Cup complained about the ball, and why using a baseball without laces would bring a drop in home runs.

After listening to the interview, check out Eric’s blog, where he gave his stage-by-stage predictions for the winning times in the this year’s Tour de France—with impressive accuracy.

And please link to the Facebook page of New Books in Sports, where you can tell us with you think of the interviews, get announcements of new podcasts, and find links to recent, thoughtful sports writing.

Last spring’s Cricket World Cup was a major global event.  Estimates of the television audience for the final matches ranged from 400 million to one billion, while the website ESPNcricinfo.com had an average audience, throughout the entire 43-day tournament, of 72,000 people per minute.  But for most American sports fans, the Cricket World Cup was a distant curiosity, if it registered at all.  A lengthy piece at one reputed sports site treated the Cricket World Cup with college-dude mockery. The writers’ judgment of the sport as “effing weird” surely reflects a common American view of cricket.

But while their tone was generally derisive, the writers did come to a realization during their introduction to cricket: the characteristics of cricketers can be explained in relation to baseball players—the grace of a fielder, the power of a batsman, the dominance of a bowler.  Another, more appreciative piece by an American sportswriter who attended the World Cup found that the two sports share similarities not only on the field but also in what draws their fans. ”I do know this: I am a fan,” he wrote of watching Sachin Tendulkar bat against England. “I am sunburned but do not care. I lose track of time.”  A baseball fan could have written the same line about an afternoon at the ballpark.

Martin Rowe and Evander Lomke have long recognized the commonalities between cricket and baseball.  Their book Right Off the Bat: Cricket, Baseball, Literature & Life (Paul Dry Books, 2011) points out those analogies in an erudite yet readable style.  The book is a primer to both sports.  They give a brief and comprehensible explanation of what happens on the field.  But more important to them are the lessons of the sports’ histories, the patterns of their cultures, and the deeper attractions they have for their fans.  In the book, and our interview, Martin and Evander talk about the slow meander of time at a game, the expanse of green spaces under summer skies, the guarantee of the familiar and the thrill of the unexpected.  If you are new to cricket or baseball, you will find their book a gratifying guide.  And if you are already a fan of one of the sports, you will gain a new appreciation and new insights when seeing it alongside its cousin in the bat-and-ball family.

Be sure to visit Martin and Evander’s website, where they continue their conversation about baseball and cricket.

And stop at the Facebook page for New Books in Sports.  You can leave your comments about podcasts, get announcements of new interviews, and find links to thoughtful, shorter sports writing.

Most modern sports have some creation myth that usually links them to an almost-sacred place of origin.  Baseball has its Cooperstown.  Golf its St. Andrews.  Basketball its Springfield College.  If you are a football fan, whether of the All Blacks or the Springboks, the Magpies or the Swans, the Longhorns or the Stampeders, your ancestral shrine is a centuries-old boarding school in the West Midlands of England.  It was at this place in 1823, according to legend, that schoolboy William Webb Ellis first caught a football and ran with it.  The game that developed after this violation of the rules took the name of young Webb Ellis’ school: Rugby.  The branches of rugby football spread widely in the 19th century and took on distinctive shapes, so that every sport today in which players run with and toss an oval ball, as opposed to dribbling and kicking a round one, can trace its history back to Webb Ellis’ forward rush.

The legend of William Webb Ellis is just one subject that Tony Collins addresses in A Social History of English Rugby Union (Routledge, 2009). The book is a masterly work of scholarship that earned the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for Sports History in 2010.  Tony unfolds the history of rugby union from its origins at Rugby and other elite schools of the 19th century, through its expansion into Britain’s industrial cities and overseas empire, and down to its current status as a worldwide sport that draws big crowds, bigger television audiences, and even bigger revenues.  But the larger and more important story is what the sport’s history reveals about England in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Even if you are not a fan of rugby, you will learn a lot from this book about England and its empire, the nation at war, and the social and cultural changes of the postwar decades.

As Tony explains in the interview, a study of rugby is particularly useful for viewing larger historical issues.  The two codes of rugby—”rugby union” and “rugby league”—are distinguished not only by different rules and styles of play but also by different social, cultural, and political outlooks.  If you don’t know the first thing about union and league, don’t worry: Tony gives us a lesson.  But whether you know of rugby only from Matt Damon in Invictus or you’re a veteran player, you’ll appreciate Tony’s insights into the game, the history of modern England, and the reasons that the history of sports matters.

When sports fans list the greatest games, they talk about close contests, outstanding performances, and dramatic finishes. Think of game six of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Reds, or Boston College’s 47-45 win over the University of Miami in 1984, capped by Doug Flutie’s miraculous touchdown pass. But when sports historians draw up their lists of the greatest games, they point to contests that had significant influence on the development of a sport yet might have been one-sided or unremarkable in their action. Take, for example, the 1958 NFL championship between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, which inaugurated professional football’s popularity in the United States. Although close and dramatic, the game was not a show of high-quality play. Likewise, one of the most important matches in soccer history, Hungary’s 1953 victory over England, which signaled the end of English dominance in world football, was a 6-3 drubbing.

But the exhibition between the Montreal Canadiens and the Soviet Red Army team on New Year’s Eve 1975 meets all the requirements of a great game: legendary players, closely matched teams, sensational action, a nail-biting finish, and a lasting influence on the evolution of hockey. In his book The Greatest Game: The Montreal Canadiens, the Red Army, and the Night That Saved Hockey (McClelland & Stewart, 2010), Todd Denault approaches this famous game from all sides. It was, on the one hand, a single contest between the two best teams in the world, pitting players like Ken Dryden and Guy Lafleur against their Russian equals, Vladislav Tretiak and Valeri Kharlamov. But far more than that, this was a demonstration of hockey at its most spectacular, coming at a time when the professional game, as played in the NHL, was in danger of sinking into thuggery. As Todd states in the book and the interview, this game, and the Canadiens’ subsequent Stanley Cup win, pointed the way to NHL hockey of the 1980s and today: a sport of speed and strength that combines the Canadian and European styles.

“Isn’t it funny?” once mused Buck O’Neil, the sage of Negro League baseball. “Everybody remembers going to their first baseball game with their father. They might not remember going to their first day of school, . . . or their first Thanksgiving dinner. But they always remember going to the baseball game with their father.”

O’Neil’s observation applies to me (the game was between the Twins and Angels, at Met Stadium in 1977), as it does to Lee Congdon (a game at Wrigley Field in 1948). The starting point of Lee’s book is this understanding of the important place that baseball holds in the memories of its fans. Baseball and Memory: Winning, Losing, and the Remembrance of Things Past (St. Augustine’s Press, 2011) is filled with recollections of wins and losses, of moments comic and tragic, from all eras of baseball history. As Lee explains, these remembered visits to the ballpark or great plays seen on television point to larger questions of the ways that memory shapes us and the ways that we understand larger periods of history.

As a scholar of European intellectual history, Congdon takes a somewhat different approach to baseball, and names like Ricoeur, Kundera, and even Nietzsche figure into our conversation. Certainly, this is a baseball book, and Lee revisits many of the well-known and lesser-known moments and characters of baseball history. But it also a more philosophical, personal reflection on how Americans view the nation’s pastime and the nation’s past.

My older daughter is twelve years old. Like many girls her age, she has spent countless hours on the soccer field. She has played volleyball and run cross-country at her school. She was the catcher for her Little League baseball team. Now she is taking up fencing. My daughter is not athletically gifted nor in any way competitive, but she takes the opportunity to play sports—any sport. It’s fun, she says simply.

My daughter lives in a world that Babe Didrikson Zaharias helped to create.

Later this week, June 26, 2011, will mark the 100th anniversary of Babe’s birth. Hopefully, the occasion will bring renewed and deserved attention to a woman who ranks near the top of any list of the greatest athletes of the 20th century. Although she died young, still in the midst of her career as a professional golfer, Babe’s accomplishments in sports were unrivaled. Some will never be topped, such as single-handedly claiming the team title in the 1932 national women’s track championships or winning 14 golf tournaments in a row. But far more than a natural athlete of astonishing, all-around talent, she was a woman determined to make a life in sports. In pursuing this goal, she was ahead of her time. In accomplishing it, she became one of the most influential figures in the history of American sports.

Babe was also a colorful and complicated figure, and the fullness of her personality—the talent, the drive, the spark, and the conceit—is revealed in the new biography by Don Van Natta, Jr., Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrikson Zaharias (Little, Brown, 2011), winner of the 2011 USGA Herbert Warren Wind Book Award. A long-time correspondent with the New York Times and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his journalist work, Don brings his talents as a writer to a story that is, at turns, exciting and poignant, inspiring and funny. Don’s biography of Babe is a masterly portrait of an extraordinary woman: a book that our sports-playing daughters—and sons—should read.

It is the summer of discontent for fans of the National Football League. What will they do if team owners and players cannot reach a labor agreement before the fall season? The satirists at The Onion have offered their speculations: fans of the Green Bay Packers will gather by the thousands to watch the sprinklers at Lambeau Field, the crime rate in the US will increase by 5000%, and Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo will injure his arm tossing a shirt into the laundry bin.

Like all good satire, The Onion isn’t far off the mark (especially in regard to Romo). In the quarter-century since the last NFL labor dispute, professional football has become an even larger part of American society and culture, so much so that its absence is unthinkable. How is it that the NFL, organized in 1920 in the showroom of a car dealership, has grown to be the most popular and influential sport in the US as well as the professional league with the highest average attendance and highest overall revenue in the world?

This is the story that Michael Oriard investigates in Brand NFL: Making and Selling America’s Favorite Sport (University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 2010). As a scholar of football in American cultural history and a former player with the Kansas City Chiefs, Michael combines the approach of an expert researcher with the understanding of an insider. His book spans the period from the 1960s to the present, addressing how the league navigated drug scandals, labor problems, and tensions over gender and racial issues to become the colossus of American sports and entertainment.

In the interview, Michael addresses the key points of this history, and he talks about the league’s current problems: the owners’ lockout of players and the growing awareness of the potential health risks of playing football. Our conversation is far-reaching, but it still gets to only a few of the many subjects that Michael hits in his book. Whether you watch every Sunday or just tune in for the Super Bowl, you’ll learn a lot from Michael’s account of the league’s rise and his view of its future challenges.

Corruption in big-time college sports recently claimed another victim: Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. Once regarded as a paragon of integrity, Tressel is now seen as one more example of a coach who recruited star players and built a successful program with the benefit of illegal gifts from boosters. Whether the result of Tressel’s deliberate disregard of rules or his neglect as coach, the scandal at Ohio State reminds us again that big-time college sports is deeply flawed.

Big-time college sports, meaning major-conference football and men’s basketball, has its defenders and opponents. Some insist that it benefits both student athletes and the universities for which they play. Others mock the idea of the amateur “student-athletes” and view the programs themselves as for-profit enterprises that rake in tens of millions of dollars in television, ticket, and merchandise revenue. Both sides in the debate, and anyone who has a serious interest in college sports, will find much that is revealing and startling in Charles Clotfelter‘s book Big-Time Sports in American Universities (Cambridge University Press, 2011). The Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics and Law at Duke University, Charlie easily combines the rigorous approach of a respected scholar with a knack for easy-to-understand explanation. Both experts and sports fans (and expert sports fans) will learn a lot about the economics of big-time college athletics from this book.

Charlie investigates some of the basic justifications for multi-million-dollar programs—for example, that they pay for non-revenue-generating college sports, or that they increase student enrollments—to see if they bring the benefits their supporters claim. He also exposes the troubled finances at the foundation of most major programs, and the networks of influence that university leaders cultivate through access to luxury boxes and prime seats. And he offers an economic rationale for why coaches like Jim Tressel are led to break the rules.

As he says in the interview, Charlie remains a fan of college sports. But he also calls for an honest acknowledgement of what big-time college sports really is: a lucrative entertainment business that is connected with higher education in a distant, but mutually dependent, relationship. That, he says, is the first step toward any reform.

I have the habit of reacting audibly when reading good works of non-fiction. Members of my household and strangers on airplanes have been startled by my hmms and huhs of surprise, my ews and ughs of disgust, and my wows of disbelief.

I put my whole vocabulary of interjections to use while reading Gavin Mortimer‘s book The Great Swim (Walker Books, 2008). Mortimer, an English writer based in Paris, tells the story of four Americans who attempted in 1926 to become the first woman to swim the English Channel: Gertrude Ederle, Lillian Cannon, Amelia Gade, and Clarabelle Barrett. The woman who succeeded was Ederle, a 19-year-old Olympic swimmer who broke the existing record—set of course by a man—by nearly two hours. But while Ederle bested the rough seas of the Channel, she was unprepared for the media storm that engulfed her afterward. Her story, as told by Mortimer, shows the beginnings of the celebrity-mad culture in which we live today, and the damage that culture can do to people who are, for a brief time, turned into idols.

Mortimer’s account of Ederle’s life is poignant, and his narrative of the competition between the four swimmers is brimming with intrigues, scheming newspapermen, and flappers—and even a cameo by General Black Jack Pershing. And the chapters that describe the swimmers’ attempts at the crossing are real page-turners, as the women battled against tides, weather, jellyfish, and big ships. If you’re looking for a book to read while on the beach, this is ideal. My dad, a lifelong swimmer, will be getting a copy for Father’s Day.

Chances are, if you were one of the 700 million people who watched the 2010 World Cup, you likely heard mention of the soccer games that prisoners on Robben Island played during the decades of apartheid rule.  The stories of these soccer matches on the barren island, played by political prisoners sentenced to years of hard labor, were cast as evidence of the sport’s power to lift the human spirit, to bring inspiration in the midst of oppression.

But the matches on Robben Island were much more than a diversion from the tedium and harshness of prison life.  Hundreds of inmates participated in creating a fully organized league, the Makana Football Association, with multiple divisions, clubs governed by constitutions and officers, fixtures and tables, and league administrators.  The workings of the association produced hundreds of pages of documents that ended up in 1993, by chance, in the hands of American sports historian Chuck Korr.  Drawing from these boxes of materials and from interviews with the men who played on Robben Island, Korr produced a complete and moving account of soccer in apartheid’s most notorious prison.  This book, which he co-wrote with British writer Marvin Close, is More Than Just a Game—Soccer vs. Apartheid: The Greatest Soccer Story Ever Told (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

Korr brings to this story the perspective of an experienced historian of sports.   And as he explains in the interview, never has he encountered such dedication to the ideals of sports as he discovered in researching the book. It is a story based on a sport, he explains, but it is also about the struggle for dignity and the conveying of values.  The book reflects the conviction, as one of Korr’s subjects explained it, that “sports is much too important to be just fun.”

When we think of sports and the Cold War, what typically comes to mind are steroid-fueled East German swimmers, or the Soviets’ controversial basketball win at the Munich games, or Mike Eruzione’s game-winning goal in 1980 (or Paul Henderson’s goal in 1972, if you’re so inclined). What we don’t think of is football, meaning American football, because it’s so, well, American.

But that is the point of Kurt Kemper‘s book College Football and American Culture in the Cold War Era (University of Illinois Press, 2009). The early Cold War was a time not only of international tension but also of domestic anxiety, with debates raging as to what were American—and un-American—activities and characteristics. Football came to be seen during this time as the quintessential national sport, one that manifested the American virtues of toughness, teamwork, and discipline. But this use of football as a defining feature of American character was controversial, and professors, administrators, alumni, and students, on university campuses across the country, debated the benefits of the sport.

Kemper’s book views these debates through an interesting case study: the selection of two teams for the 1962 Rose Bowl game. Looking at four contenders for the bowl invitation, Kemper offers a convincing, and unexpected, view of how college football was a catalyst for many contentious issues of the late-1950s and early-1960s, with debates raging about the game’s connection to higher education, commercialism, and racial integration. If you’re a college football fan, you won’t find detailed accounts of great teams and epic games in this book—but you will be surprised at the inner workings of the game fifty years ago. And if you’re looking for a revealing picture of sports and American cultural history, this book has much to offer.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] Here’s a simple–or should we say simplistic?–line of political reasoning: communities are made of people; people can either be sick or healthy; communities, therefore, are sick or healthy depending on the sickness or health of their people. This logic is powerful. It explains success: “We lost the war because we, individually and therefore communally, were ill.” And it explains victory: “We won the war because we, individually and there communally, were healthy.” And it suggests a program for political progress: get healthy and stay that way. It’s an old idea. We find it among the Greeks, the Romans, and throughout the various 19th- and early 20th-century programs for “national renewal” that swept Europe and Asia.

In his excellent book Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity (Oxford UP, 2010), Erik Jensen explores how Germans of the Weimar era were seduced by this “self-wellness = national-wellness” logic. They’d lost a war, and they couldn’t understand why. They knew that German culture wasn’t the problem. They believed–and with some good reason–that it was the most advanced in the world. So perhaps, they thought, the problem was some failure in themselves. They had grown weak and ill. Yes, that was it. So something had to be done about it. As Jensen shows, it was. And here’s the really interesting part, at least by my lights: it wasn’t done by the state. The Weimar government itself, though hardly disinterested, did not lead the campaign to make the German body well. Rather, “ordinary Germans” did. They began to play and follow sports, and to form countless clubs that played and followed sports. Sports became, well, “progressive” among the “right thinking people.” Rich and poor. Men and women. Everyone played. For Germany.

[Crossposted from New Books in History] I imagine the guys who first faced Bill Russell felt like I did when I had to guard Antoine Carr in high school. I “held” Carr to 32 points. But no dunks! Russell’s opponents in college and the NBA rarely fared any better. Sports talk is full of hyperbole, but in Russell’s case most of it is true. In his time, he was far and away the best player to ever step on the court and, for most of his career, he completely owned every court he stepped on. He was so dominant that they changed the rules so less gifted players would have a chance.

Bill Russell, however, was not only a surpassingly great basketball player, he was also an African American star in an era in which being an African American star (or just being an African American) was very complicated. Today we are used to seeing outstandingly successful blacks in all (or almost all) spheres of life. In the mid-1950s that just wasn’t true. The American ruling elite was lily white, and that’s the way most white Americans thought it should be. Bill Russell (and Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Willie Mays, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, among others) were anomalies: they were black, but they were both extraordinarily accomplished and remarkably famous. They couldn’t just be athletes; they had to be symbols of some promising (or frightening) new world as well. That’s quite a burden to bear.

In King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (University of California Press, 2010), Aram Goudsouzian has done a great service by detailing the ways Russell bore this weight, and the ways in which he fought to throw it off. Aram makes clear that Russell was a conflicted soul. He lacked self-confidence, but he was brusk and even arrogant. He was friendly and gregarious to some, but often simply rude to others. He was hot tempered, but he affected a cool, distant demeanor. He believed he was a man of principle (and convinced others he was), but he periodically abandoned his family for a playboy lifestyle. If Russell couldn’t be honest about himself, he insisted on being honest about everything and everyone around him. He meant what he said and said what he meant–about race, about sports, about anything that bothered him. He was a sort of athletic Socrates, always questioning and never fully accepting the way things were. And, like Socrates, Russell was willing to suffer for his beliefs. As Aram points out, he did in many ways. But in the process he gained the respect of almost everyone he encountered. He was a hard man to like, but he was an easy man to admire.

I should add that if you like white-hot game narratives, this book is full of them. Remember this?: “Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones… Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over… It’s all-l-l-l over!” Johnny Most, RIP.

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