TweetGiven a previous rant here about baseball poets — most notably those who come out of hibernation in the spring — I may not be temperamentally suited to write about the most recent commemorations of “Casey at the Bat,” which turned 125 years old this week.
(Is a centenary and a quarter even a noteworthy milestone? [...]
TweetThe new documentary about the life of George Plimpton won’t be in wide national release as it’s slowly rolled out this summer, so many of us will be reading more about the film and the man.
Playing at the Film Society at Lincoln Center through next Thursday, Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton As Himself doesn’t appear to [...]
TweetSam Borden of The New York Times tells the tale of how “Champions League” — the anthem composed by Tony Britten specifically for the UEFA Champions League competition — has gained as much popularity as the soccer it introduces since it debuted 20 years ago.
The Lords of European soccer, Borden writes, were seeking an image [...]
TweetThe writer known best for his mountainous study of the 1988 presidential race, “What It Takes,” was remembered just as much this week for his equally memorable magazine work.
Richard Ben Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was 62 when he died Monday from lung cancer, was especially hailed by fellow authors and journalists for his [...]
TweetDave Kindred on the sportswriting character that the recently-departed Jack Klugman made famous:
“Anybody can be hard on Lance Armstrong. Oscar was hard on Christmas: ‘Don’t talk to me about Christmas, will ya? All that sticky, phony goodwill. I’d like to get a giant candy cane and beat the wings off a sugar plum [...]
TweetEvgeny Morozov Tweeted the other day that:
True story: Harvard’s library subscribes to “Journal of the Philosophy of Sport” but not to “Journal of the Philosophy of History”
The author of “The Net Delusion” is embarking on a Ph.D. in Harvard’s lauded history of science program, so this must have been an odd discovery. But not [...]
TweetI’ve never watched an innings of cricket. Nor have I opened one of the many books written about it, both fiction and non-fiction, that reveal the long history and deep lore of a sport as synonymous with the peak of the British Empire as baseball is with the rise of the modern American nation.
But after [...]
TweetOn the fantastic Bookforum Omnivore blog I found this argument by essayist and author Pamela Haag about why Americans should pay more attention to sports than to presidential politics.
Sports, she claims, better reflect the values we used to believe we could find in campaigns:
“Sports earn our attention and devotion, while this presidential election has not. [...]
TweetSexual assault charges against two members of Boston University’s wildly successful ice hockey team have prompted the usual media hand-wringing on the meaning of it all in a societal context.
So naturally, we must have a quote like this one in The New York Times today, from Dan Lebowitz of the Center for Sport in Society [...]
