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254 books match the query 'Sports' and 11 start with b

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BETTING THE LINE

SPORTS WAGERING IN AMERICAN LIFE

Richard O. Davies and Richard G. Abram

The Ohio State University Press, 2001

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Baltimore Sports

Stories from Charm City

Daniel A. Nathan

University of Arkansas Press, 2016

To read a sample chapter, visit www.uapress.com.

Baltimore is the birthplace of Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the incomparable Babe Ruth, and the gold medalist Michael Phelps. It’s a one-of-a-kind town with singular stories, well-publicized challenges, and also a rich sporting history. Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City chronicles the many ways that sports are an integral part of Baltimore’s history and identity and part of what makes the city unique, interesting, and, for some people, loveable.

Wide ranging and eclectic, the essays included here cover not only the Orioles and the Ravens, but also lesser-known Baltimore athletes and teams. Toots Barger, known as the “Queen of the Duckpins,” makes an appearance. So do the Dunbar Poets, considered by some to be the greatest high-school basketball team ever.

Bringing together the work of both historians and journalists, including Michael Olesker, former Baltimore Sun columnist, and Rafael Alvarez, who was named Baltimore’s Best Writer by Baltimore Magazine in 2014, Baltimore Sports illuminates Charm City through this fascinating exploration of its teams, fans, and athletes.

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Baseball on Trial

The Origin of Baseball's Antitrust Exemption

Nathaniel Grow

University of Illinois Press, 2014

The controversial 1922 Federal Baseball Supreme Court ruling held that the "business of base ball" was not subject to the Sherman Antitrust Act because it did not constitute interstate commerce. In Baseball on Trial, legal scholar Nathaniel Grow defies conventional wisdom to explain why the unanimous Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which gave rise to Major League Baseball's exemption from antitrust law, was correct given the circumstances of the time.

Currently a billion dollar enterprise, professional baseball teams crisscross the country while the games are broadcast via radio, television, and internet coast to coast. The sheer scope of this activity would seem to embody the phrase "interstate commerce." Yet baseball is the only professional sport--indeed the sole industry--in the United States that currently benefits from a judicially constructed antitrust immunity. How could this be?

Drawing upon recently released documents from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Grow analyzes how the Supreme Court reached this seemingly peculiar result by tracing the Federal Baseball litigation from its roots in 1914 to its resolution in 1922, in the process uncovering significant new details about the proceedings. Grow observes that while interstate commerce was measured at the time by the exchange of tangible goods, baseball teams in the 1910s merely provided live entertainment to their fans, while radio was a fledgling technology that had little impact on the sport. The book ultimately concludes that, despite the frequent criticism of the opinion, the Supreme Court's decision was consistent with the conditions and legal climate of the early twentieth century.

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Baseball's Natural

The Story of Eddie Waitkus

John Theodore. Foreword by Ira Berkow

Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Baseball’s Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus is John Theodore’s true account of the slick-fielding first baseman who played for the Cubs and Phillies in the 1940s and became an immortalized figure in baseball lore as the inspiration for Roy Hobbs in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.

The son of Lithuanian immigrants, Edward Stephen Waitkus (1919–1972) grew up in Boston and served in the Pacific during World War II. His army service in some of the war’s bloodiest combat earned him four Bronze Stars. Following the war, Waitkus became one of the most popular players of his era. As a rookie he led the Cubs in hitting in 1946 and quickly established himself as one of the best first basemen in the National League. To the disappointment of fans, the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies in December of 1948. When he returned to Chicago in a Philadelphia uniform in June of the following year, he was hitting .306 and seemed destined for the All Star team.

On the night of June 14 at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, Waitkus’s bright career took an infamously tragic turn. He received a cryptic note summoning him to meet a young fan, Ruth Steinhagen. When Waitkus entered her hotel room, she proclaimed, “I have a surprise for you,” and then she just as quickly shot him in the chest. Steinhagen, then only nineteen, was one of the many young women—called “Baseball Annies”–who were fanatic about the game and its players, though her obsession proved more dangerous than most. A criminal court indicted Steinhagen and confined her to a state mental hospital for nearly three years.

Waitkus survived the shooting, made an inspirational return to baseball in 1950, and led the Phillies to the World Series. While Waitkus triumphed over his assault, he could not conquer his private demons. Depression stemming from the attack led to a severe problem with alcohol, a failed marriage, and a nervous breakdown. Waitkus found some happiness in his final summers working with youngsters at the Ted Williams baseball camp. Cancer claimed him in 1972, just days after his fifty-third birthday.

Through interviews with Waitkus’s family, fellow servicemen, former ballplayers, and childhood friends, and aided by fifteen photographs, Theodore chronicles Waitkus’s remarkable comeback as well as the difficult years following his eleven-year major league career.

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Battling Siki

A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s

Peter Benson

University of Arkansas Press, 2008

Battling Siki (1887–1925) was once one of the four or five most recognizable black men in the world, and was written about in detail by such figures as Ring Lardner and his son John, Damon Runyon, and Westbrook Pegler. One can find his legacy in the name of a popular rock group, one of Che Guevara’s lieutenants, a character on Xena, Warrior Princess, and the Battling Siki Hotel in the fighter’s homeland, Senegal. Peter Benson’s biography of the first African to win a world championshipin boxing delves into the complex world of sports, race, colonialism, and the cult of personality in the early twentieth century. Born Amadu Fall, Siki was taken from Senegal to France by an actress and assumed the name Louis M’barick Fall. After an inauspicious beginning as a boxer, he served in World War I with distinction then returned to boxing and compiled a most impressive record (forty-three wins in forty-six bouts). Then, on September 24, 1922, at Paris’s Buffalo Velodrome, before forty thousand stunned spectators (including a young Ernest Hemingway, who wrote about the fight), Battling Siki, employing his trademark “windmill” punch, fought and defeated the reigning world and European light heavyweight champion, Georges Carpentier. The colorful Siki spent a fortune partying and carousing, was arrested for firing a pistol in the air, and was frequently seen on the streets of Paris, dressed in flashy clothes, walking his pet lion cubs on a leash. But he also provoked a scandal by exposing the corruption of the fight game in France, spoke out boldly against racisim, and was arrected for deliberately defying the code of racial segregation in the American South. Siki’s flamboyant image was largely created by newsmen. In fact, the real Siki, while he did certainly like to party, was also an intelligent and socially conscious person, who detested the media’s image of him as a simple-minded drunken savage. Offers rushed in for him to fight in the United States, maybe even against Jack Dempsey. But in a move many have called one of the strangest a fighter ever made, he fought Irishman Mike McTigue in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day—and lost. After losing his European title he came to the United States and fought without much success. He continued to drink and get into street brawls. On the evening of December 15, 1925, at the age of twenty-eight, he was shot and killed in Hell’s Kitchen in what some claimed was a gangland execution. Peter Benson’s biography beautifully captures Battling Siki’s amazing boxing career and sheds new light on the scandal surrounding his marriages and public behavior, his alleged participation in ring fixes, and the mystery surrounding his death.

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Berlin Sports

Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis

Heather L. Dichter

University of Arkansas Press, 2024

In many American cities, individual athletes, professional teams, and university sports are integral to the cities’ sporting identities. Berlin, in contrast, features no single hallmark sport, team, or annual event. Five political regimes, wartime destruction, and four decades of division instead fostered ever-changing teams, allegiances, and venues. Yet, the desire to play and watch sport continued unabated across these political watersheds. Berlin Sports: Spectacle, Recreation, and Media in Germany’s Metropolis explores the history of sport in Berlin from the late nineteenth- to the early twenty-first centuries against the backdrop of the city’s sharp political shifts, diverse populations, and status as a major metropolis with both regional and global resonance.

This book begins with a long-distance equestrian race in the 1890s and continues with the role of media in spectacle, celebrity, urban life, and gender from the 1890s to the 1920s.It then turns to grassroots sport participation and spectatorship as well as sport diplomacy at the elite international level during the postwar period and the years of German division. Next, it explores recreational sport associations within the context of immigration and youth counterculture. It concludes with the 2015 European Maccabi Games, an international Jewish sports festival through which Berlin sought to grapple with the infamous 1936 Olympics and showcase Berlin as a cosmopolitan and multicultural city. Taken together, the book’s scholarly essays on all of these sporting endeavors reveal the rich and varied sporting culture in Berlin and yield fresh insights into spectacle, recreation, and media in the city.

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Beyond C. L. R. James

Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity in Sports

John Nauright

University of Arkansas Press, 2014

Beyond C. L. R. James brings together essays analyzing the intercon¬nections among race, ethnicity, and sport. Published in memory of C. L. R. James, the revolutionary sociologist and writer from Trinidad who penned the famous autobiographical account of cricket titled Beyond a Boundary, this collection of essays, many of which originated at the 2010 conference on race and ethnicity in sport at the University of West Indies, Cave Hill in Barbados, cover everything from Aborigines in sport and cricket and minstrel shows in Australia to Zulu stick fighting and football and racism in northern Ireland. The essays, divided into four sections that include introductory comments by each editor, are written by some of the more well-known sport historians in the world and characterized by a focus on the role of culture and sport in society in the context of both political economies and the state as well as colonial and postcolonial struggles. Included also are discussions on how sport at once brings people together, shapes the identities of its participants, and reflects the continuing search for social justice.

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Beyond the Booth

Merrill's Fifty Years with the Eagles

Cindy Reese and Merrill Reese

Temple University Press, 2027

Merrill Reese is the longest tenured radio play-by-play announcer in the history of the NFL. He has been with the Philadelphia Eagles since 1977, covering the team’s players, coaches, and owners in locker rooms, on the sidelines, and on road trips.

Beyond the Booth is a heartfelt history of the Eagles as recounted by Reese in conversation with the interviewer who knows him best—his wife, Cindy. Reese shares his memories and recollections of the team from the Dick Vermeil years through the Nick Sirianni era. (Spoiler alert: he was no Chip Kelly fan.) Cindy draws out her husband’s observations on the authenticity of the team’s personalities and leaders and how they make it successful. Merrill also describes his relationships with his broadcast colleagues and players, including Jalen Hurts.

With her insider perspective, Cindy knows what to ask for Merrill to share his thoughts on his connection with the fans and success as a broadcaster, such as how performing in TV commercials as a child helped him develop his keen memorization skills. (She uses flashcards to test Merrill on players.)

Reese’s passion for the game, shared by his wife, is infectious. Beyond the Booth will excite every Eagles fan.

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Bill Veeck's Crosstown Classic

Bill Veeck and Ed Linn

University of Chicago Press, 1962

Baseball Hall of Famer Bill Veeck (1914–86) was an inspired team builder, a consummate showman, and one of the greatest baseball men ever involved in the game. Bill Veeck’s Crosstown Classic, drawn from his uproarious autobiography (cowritten with the talented sportswriter Ed Linn), is an unforgettable trip packed with anecdotes and insight about the history of baseball and tales of players and owners—some of the most entertaining stories in all of sports literature. Veeck’s own love for the game began when his father was manager and then President of the Chicago Cubs; upon his father’s death in 1930, Veeck was hired as an office boy for eighteen dollars a week. Here, Veeck recollects those halcyon days and how they underscored his development as a wily franchise owner, leading up to quite a rumpus, many years later, during his purchase of the White Sox from the “Battling Comiskeys.”

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Borchert Field

Stories from Milwaukee’s Legendary Ballpark

Bob Buege

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017

Someone lucky enough to live on Milwaukee’s near north side between 1888 and 1952 could experience the world without ever leaving the neighborhood. Nestled between North Seventh and Eighth Streets and West Chambers and Burleigh, Borchert Field was Milwaukee’s major sports venue for 64 years. In this rickety wooden stadium (originally called Athletic Park), Wisconsin residents had a close-up view of sports history in the making, along with rodeos, thrill shows, and even multiple eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. In Borchert Field, baseball historian Bob Buege introduces the famous and fascinating athletes who dazzled audiences in Milwaukee’s venerable ballpark. All the legendary baseball figures—the Bambino, Satchel Paige, Ty Cobb, Joltin’ Joe, Jackie Robinson, the Say Hey Kid—played there. Olympic heroes Jim Thorpe, Babe Didrikson, and Jesse Owens displayed their amazing talents in Borchert. Knute Rockne’s Fighting Irish competed there, and Curly Lambeau’s Green Bay Packers took the field 10 times. Buege tells stories of other monumental moments at Borchert as well, including a presidential visit, women ballplayers, the arrival of television broadcasting, the 1922 national balloon race, and an appearance by scat-singing bandleader Cab Calloway. Borchert Field is long gone, but every page of this book takes readers back to the sights, sounds, and spectacle of its heyday.

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Boxing Shadows

By W. K. Stratton, with Anissa "The Assassin" Zamarron

University of Texas Press, 2009

Reaching the top in any sport requires a long, hard climb. But when you start with the baggage of years of family dysfunction and incarceration in a hellish mental hospital, the climb is especially steep. Yet even with such weights to carry, Anissa Zamarron won not one, but two, world championships in women's boxing. Her story, as dramatically intense as the Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby, is one of tremendous courage and determination to overcome the odds against her as a Latina and as a woman working through mental illness and addiction—a fight in which Zamarron has been as powerful and successful as she has been in the boxing ring.

In this compelling biography, acclaimed author W. K. "Kip" Stratton collaborates with Zamarron to tell the story of her unlikely rise to the pinnacle of women's boxing. With searing honesty, Zamarron describes how the chaotic breakup of her childhood family caused her to develop "demons" that drove her to aggressive behavior in school, an addiction to self-destructive habits, including cutting, and eventually to a corrupt for-profit mental hospital in which she spent eighteen months tied to a bed. She explains how boxing became her salvation as an adult; she learned how to turn her anger and aggression into motivation to train hard and excel at her sport, not only becoming the first woman to fight as a professional in a sanctioned fight in New York, but also fighting more ten-round fights than any other woman in history. A gripping account of Zamarron's 2005 upset win over Maribel Zurita to claim her second world championship caps the book.

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