In 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 ESPN in 1981 — Glenn is best known to hardcore golf fans as the author of “The Illustrated History of Women’s Golf,” published in 1991.

Glenn displays a subtle sense of humor and playfulness when writing about Mary Queen of Scots as “the game’s first famous female player.” Mary met her dreadful demise in 1587 — at the behest of another female monarch — and Glenn notes that “women’s golf went into something of a decline after that.”

While the LPGA, which was formed in 1950, was popularized by Babe Didrickson Zaharias, Glenn details the careers of women golfers unknown to many. She chronicles the beginnings of the Curtis Cup, the rivalry between amateur greats Joyce Wethered and Glenna Collett Vare and the flamboyant British amateur-turned-journalist Enid Wilson, among many others.

Glenn also mulls what might have been for British women’s golf with the death of amateur standout Pam Barton, who died in a 1943 air crash.

The beginnings of the LPGA and its leading personalities — Zaharias, Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Betsy Rawls and the Bauer sisters — get worthy treatment from Glenn, a collegiate and amateur golfer who also gives the latter its proper due.

But to me the highlight of the book is Glenn’s chapter on Mickey Wright, the winner of 82 LPGA titles and whom both Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson said possessed perhaps the best swing ever by any golfer, regardless of gender.

Wright dominated the LPGA in the early 1960s the way Nancy Lopez followed in the late 1970s and Annika Sorenstam in the middle of the last decade. The only woman ever to hold all four major titles at once, Wright crafted her elegance and power with a club into the highly visible star power the tour needed in the years after Zaharias’ death from cancer.

Glenn includes sequential photos of Wright’s swing in action, and breaks it down not mechanically, but with a keen understanding of what made the golfer tick: “She viewed golf as a form of self-expression rather than as a contest between people.”

But Wright pulled away from full-time play due to injuries and the stress of being the icon of her sport. Glenn, who interviewed the reclusive Wright while she wrote the book, adds that the pressures building up also came from Wright’s own impossibly high standards: ”Her gift was her burden.”

Glenn later pushed for the USGA to add a Mickey Wright room in its Golf House museum; it opened last year. As Wright tells Mickey:

“That room in the museum is not just a tribute to me; it’s a tribute to all the women before me. If it weren’t for her, there would be no recorded history of women’s golf.”

In linking out to Mickey’s piece, ESPN.com’s Don Van Natta Jr. Tweeted today: “I could not have written ‘Wonder Girl,’ my bio of Babe Didrikson, without the help of the incomparable Rhonda Glenn.”

Said former LPGA golfer Barbara Romack, a longtime friend of Glenn, to Mickey:

“She loves the job telling the story.”

Some 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 Hall of Fame at the end of April.

After operating since 1998 in suburban Hatboro, the A’s museum fell upon hard financial times (and some claim mismanagement), and earlier this year appeared to be on the brink of shutting down.

Much of the musuem’s memorabilia — at least what wasn’t auctioned to prepare for the move – is devoted to the glory years of the A’s in Philadelphia, from 1929 to 1931, when they won two World Series and rivaled the best team the game had to offer, Babe Ruth’s “Murderer’s Row” New York Yankees.

(The essential magazine read is William Nack’s Sports Illustrated cover story in 1996; the most recent book treatment is Brett Topel’s 2011 self-published title, “Simply the Best.”)

Connie Mack’s best teams featured eventual Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Al Simmons and Mickey Cochrane, all of whom he economically acquired to build a powerhouse club. But days after the A’s won the World Series over the Cubs, the stock market crashed, and the Depression took a toll at baseball ticket booths. Notororiously parsimonious by nature, Mack had sold the cornerstone pieces of his club over the next three years.

The Philadelphia A’s not only never reached another World Series, they were among the consistently worst teams in baseball before moving to Kansas City in 1954. Mack died a year later.

But the memories — and the stories — resonate deeply with those who recall them, or who wish to preserve them for future generations. Lou Brissie, one of Mack’s late-era journeyman pitchers (and the subject of a 2009 book by Ira Berkow, “The Corporal Was a Pitcher”), told a suburban Philadelphia newspaper last month that Mack wrote to him and other baseball-playing veterans on World II duty, offering to give him a chance in the game after he suffered serious wounds in Italy.

Brissie, who’s now 88, got his chance while wearing a leg brace, pitching for the A’s from 1947 to 1950, and he still maintains ties to the historical society.

Now the last official connection to the Philadelphia A’s has moved back into town, closer to the now-demolished Shibe Park (later Connie Mack Stadium) where the team played. I’ve always felt being close to hallowed ground makes the work of preservation easier, and I’m hoping this is the case with the relocated A’s shrine.

It’s been 20 years since University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick published “To Every Thing a Season,” his history of Shibe Park and its impact on a community of north Philadelphia that’s as much an afterthought to locals as the A’s.

In a 2011 interview with Philly Sports History, as the Phillies were three years removed from a World Series title, Kuklick couldn’t help but place that achievement in a larger historical perspective:

Finally somebody says, “Sure the Phillies are great. Sure Chase Utley is great. But is he the greatest 2nd baseman that’s ever played here? Absolutely not. He doesn’t even come close.” People don’t realize that the 1929, 1930, and 1931 A’s are better than even this team today, which I think is the best team this franchise has had.

Here are parts two and three of the Kuklick interview. A snippet:

That ballpark is right in the middle of the city. And you are in the middle of an urban area. And you walk into this park, and it’s dark and there’s concrete around, and then you come up to one of the entrances to the field, and you see this green diamond. There’s just something there that’s just incredible.

And another one:

My wife and I went on vacation one time to Club Med, and we were talking to some people, and we said, “Where are you from?” and this guy said “Wrigleyville.” He didn’t say Chicago. And we knew exactly where he was talking about. That ballpark is known all over the Western World. And every once in a while, I think, “Gee if they had only had the foresight.” But basically that area went through a really terrible period. It’s now come up considerably on its own. It’s a lot less nasty and dangerous than it was.

Robert 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 post-World War II game comes this gem from Edward Achorn: “The Summer of Beer and Whiskey.”

If that doesn’t grab your attention, the subtitle ought to stoke your thirst (pun intended): “How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game.”

It’s the story of how Chris Von der Ahe, a German-born saloon owner, founded the St. Louis Browns in 1883 — and later the American Association, which became the American League — as a way to sell more beer. Achorn, the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal, writes that Von der Ahe knew practically nothing about baseball. But his suds-selling scheme opened the game up to everyday working people, and in particular immigrants like himself.

Unlike the National League, which didn’t play on Sunday and didn’t sell alcoholic beverages at the ballpark, Von der Ahe did both, selling tickets for 25 cents for any and all comers to enjoy booze and ball on the Lord’s Day. From an excerpt on the NPR website:

With cheap tickets, Sunday ball, and beer, he grabbed control of the dying game in St. Louis and, in a turnaround at least as improbable and dramatic as the one engineered by the 2011 Cardinals, infused it with new life and popularity—while perhaps saving all of professional baseball in the bargain. Von der Ahe also played a role in founding a flamboyant new major league, whose influence echoes loudly through Major League Baseball to this day.

(Achorn, author of several baseball history titles, including Twitter star Old Hoss Radbourn, is interviewed by NPR’s Jacki Lyden here.)

The title of the book comes from how National League snobs regarded the maverick league, calling it the “beer and whiskey circuit.” But Von der Ahe’s entrepreneurial ruse changed the game during a time when the fate of what’s become the national pastime wasn’t always certain.

In addition to Birnbaum’s survey is a notable “project” by Los Angeles Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth, who recently embarked on a review of 30 baseball books in 30 days — it’s become an annual thing. Sports media writer Ed Sherman did this Q & A with Hoffarth last month:

I’m also huge on history-related books, but only if they’re written well, not like a college dissertation but with a writer’s flare to insert color and not just research. This year, another book by Robert Weintraub nails it with “The Victory Season.” The opposite is true with a bio on “Smoky Joe Wood.”

Hoffarth also references baseball book maven Ron Kaplan, proprietor of Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf and author of  the recently released “501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die.”

The book is organized into 15 chapters, detailing books according to categories, such as biography and memoir, the minor leagues and for young readers.

The meter’s running, folks. I say it’s time to get cracking with some of those.

The 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 the game, because it tends to whitewash or distort history. While historical interpretation is a largely subjective endeavor, the burden of placing the accomplishments of its greatest players in a proper, fair and accurate historical context has become an increasingly troublesome one.

This was the dilemma faced by many writers given Baseball Hall of Fame ballots last year. The results were announced yesterday, and for the first time since 1996, the members of the Baseball Writers Association of America who voted approved no living players for induction.

The lengthy list of names on the ballot made it difficult enough for any player to reach the threshold of being voted on 75 percent of the ballots cast. That some of those names have been associated with steroids use has ushered in what is considered a “new” era on the matter of reaching Cooperstown.

I would agree with that argument, up to a point. This was the first year of eligibility for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the players most hounded by the federal government for doping allegations. We’re not many years removed from the absurdity of Jeff Novitzky, an anti-steroids IRS agent, sifting through a dumpster at the BALCO lab, and the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted to prosecute Bonds and trot Clemens before Congress to get them to confess to their “crimes.”

A number of writers have explained why for them even being connected to or suspected of steroids use crosses the line of “Rule 5,” the Hall of Fame voting provision that goes to a player’s character.

Howard Bryant of ESPN.com, as prominent a steroids scold as there is in the media and author of the 2005 book, “Juicing the Game,” wrote Wednesday that he sent in a blank ballot “because the damages to the game were real:”

I understand that we live in a pharmacological age. There is a pill for everything, whether it is Viagra, Lipitor or Adderall. I understand that we will never get clarity about who used and who didn’t or about how much drugs helped the numbers or hurt them. What will always baffle me, however, is that even in an age of intense cynicism, the lying and deceit don’t matter to some. Why are people who were offended by these years of dishonesty being cast now as outdated charlatans, soapbox preachers or the “moral police”? I wonder why there is so little outrage toward the liars and cheaters who for years used their clout with the fans, their enormous wealth, their fame and their influence in the game to deceive the public.

While I don’t doubt the sincerity of his feelings, the historical holes in his column are vast. First of all, anyone who routinely uses the word “cheaters” in this discussion tends to be an absolutist in expressing an intolerance for steroids. The same goes for “lying and deceit.” This verbiage is commonly employed by writers engaging in far too much schadenfreude regarding Lance Armstrong, for example.

After taking a beating from commenters on the column, Bryant poorly defended himself on Twitter Thursday with about the most arrogant thing I’ve ever seen from a sportswriter (and that’s saying a lot):

BBWAA is nothing but a mop.MLB, players sit back as HOF voters get pummeled for their mess. They punted Steroid Era to us+this is the price

Unlike those now turning their wrath against Armstrong and (alleged) baseball dopers after years of looking the other way, Bryant can’t be accused of being inconsistent about steroids. But he is terribly remiss in ignoring the fact that Cooperstown includes a rogues’ gallery of less-than-earnest human beings who cheated their way through life, if not necessarily on the diamond.

In Thursday’s SB Nation Longform feature, the father-son tandem of Michael and Colin MacDonald contend that absolutists waxing indignant now — and Bob Costas is singled out here — have no one but themselves to blame:

We do not think that steroid use is good or laudable. We wish the game were free from them. We wish steroids never had been used in baseball. But we also recognize reality. When the genie escaped the bottle, it forced players to choose between using and gaining a competitive advantage, and not using and suffering a competitive disadvantage. Using also endangers the player’s health and imposes the same choice on other players. Not using risks losing games and jobs (and the 1989 World Series). Some players will cheat at every opportunity and others will honor all rules no matter the temptation. But many players will play within the rules as the guardians of the game define and enforce them. But if the enforcement of the rules signals a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, the blame originates with those sending the signal.

Prior to the publication of his 2009 book, “Cooperstown Confidential,” author Zev Chafets answered the absolutists as forthrightly as anyone ever has, pointing out the many unhealthy commodities consumed by players, Hall of Famers and otherwise, during the long history of the game:

Since the dawn of baseball, players have used whatever substances they believed would help them perform better, heal faster or relax during a long and stressful season. As far back as 1889, the pitcher Pud Galvin ingested monkey testosterone. During Prohibition, Grover Cleveland Alexander, also a pitcher, calmed his nerves with federally banned alcohol, and no less an expert than Bill Veeck, who owned several major-league teams, said that Alexander was a better pitcher drunk than sober.

In 1961, during his home run race with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle developed a sudden abscess that kept him on the bench. It came from an infected needle used by Max Jacobson, a quack who injected Mantle with a home-brew containing steroids and speed. In his autobiography, Hank Aaron admitted once taking an amphetamine tablet during a game. The Pirates’ John Milner testified at a drug dealer’s trial that his teammate, Willie Mays, kept “red juice,” a liquid form of speed, in his locker. (Mays denied it.) After he retired, Sandy Koufax admitted the he was often “half high” on the mound from the drugs he took for his ailing left arm.

These arguments are gaining more traction in the mainstream media, including with some Hall of Fame voters, who are responding forcefully to the puritans. Another early chronicler of steroids in baseball, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, wrote this week why he won’t cross the same line as Bryant. So some voters who couldn’t check off Bonds or Clemens also excluded Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza by extension, which riled up Richard Justice of MLB.com:

Oh, Lord, scoop out my eyes with a plastic spoon. There are few things sportswriters enjoy more than preaching about right and wrong.

Ditto for baseball business writer Maury Brown, who doesn’t have a Hall of Fame vote but ought to:

People are not all “rainbows and unicorns.”…. Cheating in baseball began long before steroids were the lightening rod they are today… The HOF isn’t Church, so don’t vote like it is…. Those that are not filling out their ballots as a form of protest are weak, making the story about them, and need to get in the trenches, deal with it or step aside. Your vote is a privilege, not a right. Deal with the complexities of it all.

(Similarly smart views here from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kevin Modesti of the Pasadena Star-News and Jayson Stark of ESPN.com.)

As the Hall of Fame votes were being finalized, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns anointed himself as Savonarola of Swat in rather churlish comments to the Hollywood Reporter that have ricocheted around the sports media world:

We know some pitchers extended their playing careers, we know some people hit the ball farther, but nobody hit .406, nobody had a 56-game hitting streak, no pitcher won 30 games, no pitcher won 35 games, no pitcher won 25 games. Maybe that helps you make it less onerous, but at the same time, those motherf—ers should suffer for a while.

Burns — who gave Costas, Bryant and Verducci unquestioned face time about steroids in his “Baseball” film — is among the last of the baseball Romantics, and it is a sad state of affairs. There’s a sense of desperation, if not moral outrage to their rhetoric, rife with the notion that the game’s robber barons of today aren’t owners who purloin public money for their playhouses but pumped-up sluggers who give fans the long ball they constantly crave.

But to denounce the absolutism of the Romantics is not to endorse the use of steroids, or to say that they are a good thing. It is to acknowledge the human flaws of many of those already in the Hall of Fame, and to understand the full historical range of so-called “cheating” behavior that predates the “steroid era” by decades. This is a nuanced topic that some wish to banish from discussion with a hardline sense of retroactive justice.

I wonder if Verducci missed this 1969 Sports Illustrated article about drug use in sports, with some prescient quotes at the top from Denny McLain.

The black-and-white persistence of the Romantics is fading away, but not because of any perceived moral relativism by a younger generation of writers or players who may shrug their shoulders at “juicing.” There is a heavy dose of realism and probity that is entering the discussion, a strong counter to those who wish to oversimplify.

What we are in now is the tail end of the Romantic era, for better or for worse. Some marginal candidates tied to steroids use may never get in, but with 14 years remaining on the ballot, Bonds and Clemens figure to gain induction. Their careers were well-established long before Major League Baseball began drawing a line against doping.

In blistering the zeal to sanitize the vote, Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports provides one of the few perspectives that puts the historical dereliction of duty by some Hall of Fame balloters in its rightful context:

This wasn’t just a referendum on steroids. It was one on the writers and their failure to recognize as long as they want the privilege of creating history, they must in doing so protect the worthy institution that finds them fit for the task. And considering the backlash following Wednesday’s revelation that it wasn’t just Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens who didn’t pass muster but Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Mike Piazza and so many others, the 10-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America with Hall of Fame votes seem not to care about the damage they’re doing.

To 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 Midwest, or amid the sun-splashed Italianate and Romanesque buildings of southern California campuses.

Your journey would take you instead to an Ivy League school immersed in the vibrancy of urban and highbrow intellectual life and that still boasts the Palestra, an iconic basketball cathedral, and the oldest active college football stadium in the nation.

For it was in 1950 that the University of Pennsylvania, located near the heart of Philadelphia, sold the rights to its home football games to the upstart American Broadcasting Company.

The Penn Quakers were among the best teams in the country at the time, ranked in the Top 20, routinely drawing 60,000 and more at Franklin Field, and enjoying the modest fruits of a local television arrangement.

For most of the leaders of organized sports — from college athletic directors to Major League Baseball owners — ticket sales were the lifeblood of their enterprises, and they were growing fiercely protective of their gates.

That’s because by 1950 more than 9 million televisions were owned by Americans, up sharply from the 7,000 sets sold in 1947, and the various networks were vying for sports programming to fill their airwaves.

As he became the Penn president, perpetual Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen was eager for his football team to aspire to a larger public profile. He saw nationally televised games as means to this end.

The leaders of other schools and the National Collegiate Athletic Association did not, and in early 1951 NCAA members voted overwhelmingly to sharply curtail the television exposure of college football.

This ban also affected powerhouse teams at Georgia Tech and Notre Dame, which like Penn pioneered college football at the dawn of the television age.

But Stassen forged ahead, ordering his athletic director to work out terms of a $180,000 deal with ABC for the 1951 season. It took all of one day for the NCAA to declare Penn a member “not of good standing.”

Under NCAA pressure, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton and Dartmouth vowed to cancel games against Penn if its Ivy League rival insisted on its television course. Penn backed down, and the largely toothless NCAA gained some real power for the first time.

This story constitutes the opening pages of “The Fifty-Year Seduction,” Alabama sportswriter Keith Dunnavant’s 2004 history of televised college football and an authoritative account of the growth of big-time college athletics.

In the wake of Penn’s retreat, Notre Dame flirted with, but eventually abandoned, the idea of challenging the NCAA, which would soon add enforcement authority under the domineering leadership of executive director Walter Byers.

In a rare bit of sharp editorializing, Dunnavant strongly sympathized with those schools looking out for their own interests:

“By attempting to coerce Penn to surrender its television property, the NCAA and the four Ivy League schools crossed a line. It was a despicable, shameful act of thuggery, a strong-arm tactic worthy of back alley hoodlums and pulp fiction gangsters.

. . . . . .

“It was the sports equivalent of a third-world dictator nationalizing a foreign corporation’s assets, and such socialistic robbery violated the foundations of American justice and economic liberty.”

Such fierce rhetoric, usually coming from the solons of college football, is laced through Dunnavant’s book, peaking with the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision to strip the NCAA of its chokehold on college football television contracts and continuing through the start of the Bowl Championship Series era in the late 1990s.

These views reflect the perspective of the university presidents and athletic directors who morphed into businessmen as the TV deals fattened, and as the stadium crowds on Saturday afternoons surged.

Although the protectionists’ fears may have been reduced to rubble as the game became awash in more money than ever before, reformers, women’s sports activists and those alarmed by the commercialization of college athletics grew more concerned.

These are tensions that remain today, with conferences purloining individual schools amid a rollicking wave of realignment and a four-team college football playoff replacing the current BCS format in 2014.

While many bemoan the confounding geography of what’s transpiring today, Dunnavant writes of an “airplane conference” floated in the late 1950s that would have included the defiant trio of Notre Dame, Penn and Georgia Tech, along with Penn State, the military academies and USC, UCLA, Cal, Washington and Stanford of the temporarily-disbanded Pac 8.

It’s tempting to think that college football is in unprecedented times, and it is, in terms of the amount of money that’s being pursued. There are plenty of reasons to fret about what continued shuffling will mean not only for the sport, but other men’s and women’s offerings as well.

But while Penn may have been rebuffed in its attempt to go rogue, the most recent conference jumps by Maryland, Rutgers and Louisville illustrate that far from disrupting the order of things, those moves symbolize more than six decades of constant restlessness at the root of post-war college football.

Given 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 the 1970 season, three longtime NFL teams — the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns and Pittsburgh Steelers — joined former AFL teams to even out the AFC.

This time period comes right after the cut-off point covered by Dan Daly’s new book, “National Forgotten League,” that I wrote about yesterday.

The Colts were coming off the bitter disappointment of being the first NFL team to lose in the Super Bowl to an AFL team, the Joe Namath-led New York Jets, and the firing of coach Don Shula.

Don McCafferty guided the revamped 1970 Colts. On a chilly day in January 1971, two aging quarterbacks — Johnny Unitas of the Colts and George Blanda of the Oakland Raiders, the latter coming in for an injured Daryl Lamonica — served up a classic, along with John Facenda’s narration.

Baltimore went on to win its first Super Bowl as Jim O’Brien booted his way to history against the Dallas Cowboys. Like Blanda, he was among the last of the straightaway placekickers, another relic of a time in Daly’s account that was soon to become history as well.

The 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,” Daly comments that “it’s amazed me how little literary attention has been paid to pro football’s early days.”

In the days before the creation of NFL Films, and the arrival of Pete Rozelle and the television age, there was virtually no literature to speak of. Daly, a co-author of “The Pro Football Chronicle,” points to the lack of newspaper coverage. By the time the NFL was created in obscurity the early 1920s, baseball and college football already had enjoyed decades of flattering prose by some of the best stylists in sportswriting and beyond.

As George Halas once observed: “The history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word a la baseball.”

This 424-page volume is Daly’s effort to rectify that, after two decades of painstaking research, including the discovery of hard-to-find newspaper articles and other materials on tucked-away microfilm reels: “Up to now, the game’s early days have been a silent movie. I’m trying to turn them into a talkie.”

Daly breaks down what he calls his “scrapbook” by decades, and ends promptly at 1969, and not just because that year winds up his 50-year survey:

“At that point, in my mind, the party was over. Pro football will never be as fascinating as it was from the ’20s to the ’60s. It’s all about maintaining success now, protecting everyone’s investment. And that breeds conservatism. The league moves so slowly these days that it took thirty-six years to fix the obviously flawed overtime rules (for the playoffs, at least). If the AFL were still around, prodding the NFL into being better, the correction would have come much sooner.”

An excerpt published on ESPN.com in October recounts the NFL saga of one Steve Belichick, who started the 1941 season as the equipment manager for the Detroit Lions and wound up starring as a fullback. And later became the father of you know who.

In “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 Russians began their largest offensive. Didn’t we feel fear? This question, people tend to forget, didn’t present itself to Germans. The map of Europe still led us to believe in strength. Norway and Denmark, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary — they all were ‘firmly in German hands’. No one realised how quickly it could all tumble down.”

Noah Davis settles in on that match in a fine piece today on SB Nation, with Schön at the center of the encounter at the Berlin Olympiastadion. “Last champions of the Third Reich” details the symbolic need Hitler felt for the Nazi regime to attend, since it was the venue for the 1936 Olympics.

Yet there was the fear of Allied bombing, war-weary German citizens didn’t fill the place up despite cheap admission prices and some conscripted players had to work to get military leave in order to show up. As Davis explains, it wasn’t a complete diversion:

“In less than an hour, the fans and players would have to return to the reality of Germany at war. But now, the game was on, and it remained close. Soccer was the main event. Dresden attacked as the second period started, but Hamburg captain Reinhold Münzenberg, a defender who played more for the national team between 1930 and 1939 than anyone else did, marshaled his troops in response. The Luftwaffe Eagle sat prominently on the chest of his LSV uniform as he urged his men to maintain their formation. It was, briefly, a valiant defensive effort by a team being overrun.”

Davis draws from Hesse-Lichtenberger’s work, especially his emphasis on how important it was for the Nazis for soccer to continue during the war, mostly for domestic morale. Both the German championship finals and the German Cup finals were played through 1944, to be followed by several years of inactivity only after the fighting had stopped.

The national team played friendlies until 1942 under Sepp Herberger, who spent the early years of Hitler’s dictatorship in charge of the famous Breslau-Elf team.

By contrast, the English domestic league play was not contested between 1939 and 1946, and its FA Cup was suspended from 1940 to 1944.

West Germany rose fast after the war, upsetting Hungary under Herberger’s guidance to win the 1954 World Cup, admitted back into the family of sporting nations at the dawn of the Wirtschaftswunder.

Schön, whose family survived the devastating Dresden bombings, managed West Germany to the 1966 World Cup finals, won by England at London’s Wembley Stadium in Geoff Hurst’s memorable (and still controversial) two-goal performance.

That event was the international coming out for a young Franz Beckenbauer, who was captain of West Germany’s World Cup-winning team in 1974 and coached it to its last title in 1990. The star of that team was Jürgen Klinsmann, the current U.S. national team head coach.

Davis does well to illustrate how this final wartime sporting interlude, near the end of a tragic period of German and world history, offered a flash of normalcy, if not a completely joyous one.

Hesse-Lichtenberger’s full book, written in English and which I’m finishing now, tells a very rich story of a nation’s embrace of a sport that has been one of its brightest post-war cultural legacies.

“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 just for Americans. The Irish blogger and soccer devotee known as Fredorrarci surely would be interested after expounding on The Classical about his admiration for the sport’s sense of its own past.

He writes this as he watches Ken Burns’ lauded  “Baseball” film, and his closing flourish is especially worth noting:

“I’ve got my first real feel for the heft of baseball history. That’s another way in which sport can feel appealingly bigger than yourself. It’s a powerful thing to step into something that’s existed for so long relative to your own puny span that it may as well have been going forever, and for all you know may continue indefinitely. That can be dangerous thinking, because a sport is just a culture, and cultures are fragile things that get born and dead like nobody’s business. But that’s just why a sense of history is important. My principle sporting passion, soccer, seems to be in the process of shedding its memory, believing itself to be an invincible megabeing that sprung from nothing, fully mega, around 1992. I don’t know enough about baseball to know whether, for all its apparent history-fetishism, it suffers from the same thing these days. I may be wrong, but it seems to have a better sense of where it’s come from than soccer does.”

He should know that baseball’s last existential crisis, on the heels of the 1994 strike that cancelled the World Series, left many fans revolted, forever swearing off the game. But as was illustrated by last night’s walkoff playoff finishes (especially for Yankees and A’s fans), the thrilling immediacy of events feeds the unbroken loop of history.

“Sport’s continuity is one of its most attractive qualities, but we should feel that it’s eternal while knowing that it’s not. There’s the false consolation of eternity, and there’s the consolation of false eternity, and a thin line between them.”

As I felt a couple of decades ago at the start of my immersion into global soccer, I hope this is also the beginning of a beautiful exploration.

The 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 to be read by anybody who cares about women’s athletics. Like most of his work, it is interdisciplinary and empirical, but avoids the gender politics and atrocious cultural studies jargon that passes for most academic feminist “scholarship.”

A longtime literature professor at Amherst College, Guttmann is best known for his books about the Olympics and the modern history of sports. My favorite is “The Erotic in Sports,” in which also puts feminist kvetching about the so-called “sexualization” of the female athletic body in its proper place.

He brilliantly denounces suggestions that male voyeurism of women athletes leads to sexual violence against women. I could not resist including this passage in “Beyond Title IX,” my recent book about the cultural politics of women’s sports:

“The gaze-leads-to-rape argument reduces all men to the status of a single litter of Pavlovian dogs.”

In catching up with Guttmann’s oeuvre recently I came across a book he published last year — he says it will be his last one — called “Sports and American Art from Benjamin West to Andy Warhol.”

As I sharpen the focus of this blog, I want to explore the connections between these two seemingly irreconcilable worlds, because I’ve long believed they’re more alike than we realize.

This is what drew Guttmann to the subject, and in a “New Books in Sports” podcast with Calvin College history professor Bruce Berglund, he explains how he went about his project:

“I first imagined it would be sports-themed art but saw that there were so many similarities between the histories of sports and art in the America that I decided to do something more ambitious.”

Like the American artists of the 19th century who insisted on carving out a unique American identity for their work — Homer Winslow and Thomas Eakins in particular — so did the historians, “inventors” and mythmakers of American sports during the same period of time.

Guttmann says Eakins “gets it all” when it comes to reflecting the elemental attraction to the human body in his work — the athletic, the aesthetic and the erotic. (Example: The Swimming Hole.)

More modern painters, however, hold little appeal for Guttmann. Norman Rockwell “sentimentalizes America and children’s sports” and doesn’t help us understand either, he says.

Contemporary artists come in for even more withering disdain. The celebrated LeRoy Neiman was “completely uninteresting” to Guttmann, who’s generally not fond of the postmodern sensibility.

After Neiman’s death in June, the American Sport Art Museum in Daphne, Ala., displayed some of his work as a tribute. But unlike the sports-in-art approach that Guttmann dislikes about Neiman, there appears to be plenty else of which he would approve.

If this indeed is Guttmann’s last book, it’s a magnificent departing gift.

And I’ve got this one near the top of my shopping list for the upcoming holidays.