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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
TweetThe burden of history falls upon baseball like perhaps no other sport in North America. The idealism, desire for moral purity and poetic meanderings of some of the game’s most zealous gatekeepers (most of them self-identified, rather than actual) has hardly diminished after more than a century.
This absolutism has at times been a disservice to [...]
TweetTo discover one of the first institutions of higher learning to strike an entrepreneurial path in the burgeoning post-World War II business of college football, you must travel to an unlikely destination.
It is a place not to be found in the sleepy villages of the Deep South, or on the hearty land-grant behemoths of the [...]
TweetGiven the paucity of old NFL Films availability on television — this helps to explain why — I consider it a feat when I come across an episode I didn’t know existed.
It’s been nearly 42 years since the NFL split off into the NFC and AFC, with the winners meeting in the Super Bowl. For [...]
TweetThe University of Nebraska Press is a treasure trove of terrific books about sports and sports history, and a new issue about the early days of pro football by Washington Times sports columnist Dan Daly looks to be a real treat.
In the “National Forgotten League: Entertaining Stories and Observations from Pro Football’s First Fifty Years,” [...]
TweetIn “Tor! The Story of German Football,” Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger’s absorbing historical survey, he quotes iconic player Helmut Schön about competing during World War II, including the 1944 national championship finals between his Sporting Club Dresden and the Air Force Sports Club of Hamburg shortly after D-Day:
“The Allied Forces had landed in France, in Belarus the [...]
Tweet“Despite the perennial warnings of baseball Cassandras, time has yet to pass baseball by. What remains to be seen is not whether the game will survive, but how Americans in a rapidly changing world will again reinterpret and reinvent their national pastime.”
The conclusion to Jules Tygiel’s elegant meditation, “Past Time: Baseball as History,” isn’t [...]
TweetThe eminent sports historian Allen Guttmann never runs out of material and intellectual energy to conduct his learned and humane explorations of games and what continues to draw us to them.
I first learned of him some 20 years ago when I was beginning to explore topics in women’s sports. His “Women’s Sports: A History,” ought [...]
