Author Archives: Wendy Parker

An American soccer historian, honored and remembered

TweetThe example of Dave Wangerin — an American Midwesterner who moved to the United Kingdom to get his soccer fix — continues the spirit of When Saturday Comes.
Wangerin, who died at the age of 50 last summer, was given space in the iconoclastic British soccer “webzine” to ramble on about American soccer history, an obscure [...]

A proper tribute for the historian of women’s golf

TweetIn The New York Times on Sunday, Lisa Mickey penned a fine tribute to the golfing writer and journalist Rhonda Glenn, who has retired from the United States Golf Association after nearly 50 years of mostly uninterrupted service.
While she’s done a bit of television — incuding a brief stint as the first female sportscaster at [...]

Saving a museum for a forgotten team

TweetSome good news for sports museums, which were challenged for visitors and revenues even before the recession: The Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society has been saved from likely closure.
The small museum devoted to a largely unsuccessful team that left that town nearly 60 years ago moved into trophy company space as part of the reconstituted Philadelphia Sports [...]

No shortage of topics for baseball history books

TweetRobert Birnbaum surveys newly-released baseball books at The Daily Beast – many of them in an historical vein, of course — and as usual I came across something unanticipated and refreshingly welcome.
In addition to Stuart Banner’s history of the antitrust exemption, Dennis D’Agostino’s salute to legendary baseball writers and Robert Weintraub’s examination of the immediate [...]

More Belthian quality comes to the Interwebs

TweetAlex Belth — one of this blog’s favorites — is expanding his curatorial powers with a new feature on Deadspin called The Stacks.
He describes it as a “blog devoted to classic magazine and newspaper writing,” most of it sports, but not all. The initial posts are reprints of pieces by Gay Talese, John Schulian and [...]

History-making Huskies find the right gear

TweetNEW ORLEANS — On a night when the NCAA honored some of the legendary names of the early years of women’s college basketball, the Connecticut Huskies continued to remake the contemporary history books.
Their 93-60 win over Louisville on Tuesday ties them with Tennessee for an NCAA record eight national championships. And UConn rolled in record-setting [...]

The understated appeal of the undercard

TweetNEW ORLEANS — They’ve been underdogs so long that they relish continuing in the role even at the Final Four, and especially after dispatching one of the biggest names in the sport.
The Louisville Cardinals — Undercards? — do have a -2 figure beside their name on at least one Las Vegas sports betting line going [...]

More gradual steps or a big leap for the WNBA?

TweetCan the outgoing trifecta of women’s college basketball’s most visible stars attract a bigger spotlight for the WNBA?
That’s what both the league and ESPN are banking on as they held a tightly-staged press conference Thursday to announce an extension of their long-standing television partnership.
The six-year deal, which Sports Business Journal reported ahead of time [...]

The genuflection of the baseball poets

TweetI love baseball.
I love poetry.
But I hate baseball poetry. Or, more precisely, I absolutely despise the pretentiousness of baseball poets, no time more than the present, with another season soon upon us and the exhortations of spring and splendor are being uttered.
There is nothing subtle about how I feel, and it hurts me to confess [...]

Baseball, winter and remembrance

TweetBefore the winter set in, Alex Belth penned this marvelous tribute to his late father and how “his remaining connection to the sport was the two Rogers, Roger Angell and Roger Kahn. They have been linked in my mind ever since.”
The SB Nation Longform article delves deeply into that linkage, what “The Old Man” [...]