Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age

Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age
Author: Lee Congdon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2017-05-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1442277521

During the 1920s—the Golden Age of sports—sports writers gained their own recognition while covering such athletes as Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Jack Dempsey, and Red Grange. The top journalists of the era were the primary means by which fans learned about their favorite teams and athletes, and their popularity and importance in the sports world continued for decades. Legendary Sports Writers of the Golden Age: Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Shirley Povich, and W. C. Heinz details the lives and careers of four sports-writing greats and the iconic athletes and events they covered. Although these writers established themselves during the 1920s, their careers extended well into the decades that followed. They reported on Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Sandy Koufax, Arnold Palmer, and many other stars from the 1920s and beyond. Lee Congdon examines not only the lives and careers of Rice, Smith, Povich, and Heinz, but the distinctive writing style that each of them developed. Taken together, these four writers lifted sports reporting to heights that it is unlikely to reach again. This book brings to life the greatest era in sports history, as seen through the eyes of four legendary sports writers. Sports fans, historians, and those interested in sports journalism will all find this a fascinating and informative look at a time when the sports world was at its peak.

The Steamer

The Steamer
Author: Andy Furillo
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2016-05-31
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1595808078

For nearly sixty years, Bud Furillo wrote and talked about sports in Southern California. For fifteen of those years, he authored a popular column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner called The Steam Room, which gave him the nickname that lasted him for the rest of his life: “the Steamer.” As a reporter, columnist, editor, and pioneer of sports talk radio, the Steamer dished out insight and understanding to Southern California sports fans while Los Angeles grew into a sports empire. On his watch, L.A. acquired the Rams from Cleveland, the Dodgers from Brooklyn, and the Lakers from Minneapolis. He covered them all while they won championships for the city. In The Steamer: Bud Furillo and the Golden Age of L.A. Sports, Furillo’s son, Andy, himself a longtime newspaperman, uses his father’s lens to give focus to the city’s rise as a sports empire. The Steamer is a history of a great sports town at its most dynamic, told from the point of view of a legendary reporter who used his phenomenal access to reveal the inside story of the greatest athletes and teams to ever play in Los Angeles.

Sportswriter

Sportswriter
Author: Charles Fountain
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1993
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

This colorful portrait ranges from Rice's childhood in Nashville to his days as a star athlete at Vanderbilt to his first jobs in Atlanta, Nashville, and New York. Filled with stories of Rice's many friends, including Babe Ruth, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Jack Dempsey, and many others. Halftones.

Grantland Rice and His Heroes

Grantland Rice and His Heroes
Author: Mark Inabinett
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780870498497

With no way for fans to verify their facts, the sportswriters of the 1920s enjoyed a near monopoly on sports news. Journalist Mark Inabinett explores the incomparable Grantland Rice's role in creating the legends that surrounded six sports stars--Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, and Knute Rockne. Photographs.

Heroes & Ballyhoo

Heroes & Ballyhoo
Author: Michael K. Bohn
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2009-11-30
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1597974129

A handful of star athletes, along with their promoters and journalists, created America's sports entertainment industry during the 1920s, the Golden Age of American sports. The period had an extraordinary impact, profoundly changing individual sports, establishing the secular religion of sports and sports heroes, and helping bond disparate social and regional sectors of the country. It's when sports became a cornerstone of modern American life. Heroes and Ballyhoo profiles the ten most prominent Golden Age heroes and describes their effect on sports and society. Babe Ruth saved baseball after the Black Sox Scandal. Boxer Jack Dempsey made the “sweet science” a respectable sport. Red Grange single-handedly set professional football on a path to eventual success. Knute Rockne helped transform college football from a game to a colossal enterprise. Bobby Jones changed golf into a spectator sport, and Walter Hagen sparked the first national interest in professional golf. Bill Tilden put tennis on the front of the sports section. Tennis player Helen Wills Moody joined swimmer Gertrude Ederle in empowering women athletes. Johnny Weissmuller astonished international swimming before becoming Tarzan. The book also explores the ballyhoo artists—sportswriters, promoters, and press agents—who hyped the stars to a receptive public. Simultaneously, the spectators established themselves as the focus of popular sports. The personalities and events of the 1920s thus created today's entertainment conglomerate of heroes, promoters and advertisers, fans, arenas—and money. Sports as a profit center started with the Golden Age's heroes and PR artists, and the public's obsessive interest in sports helped shape America's emerging mass society. Heroes and Ballyhoo tells the story of what was both a symptom and a cause of modern America.

Founding the ACC

Founding the ACC
Author: Robert B. McCormick
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2023-08-30
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1476689946

In 1953, seven universities seceded from the NCAA's Southern Conference to form the Atlantic Coast Conference. Founding members Clemson, Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, North Carolina State, South Carolina and Wake Forest were soon joined by Virginia. Inspired by national academic and gambling scandals, and a bowl game crisis in 1951, the ACC's leaders hoped to reduce the commercialism and professionalism that permeated college athletics in the 1950s. This first ever full-length history examines founding of the ACC, the star athletes and coaches and football and basketball season highlights, along with the negotiations that led to the creation one of America's most successful athletic conferences.

Basketball

Basketball
Author: Jackie MacMullan
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1524761796

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Inspired by a major ESPN film series, this is an extraordinary oral history of basketball—its eye-opening untold history, its profound deeper meaning, its transformative influence on the world—as told through an unprecedented series of candid conversations with the game’s ultimate icons. This is the greatest love story never told. It has passion and heartbreak, triumph and betrayal. It is deeply intimate yet crosses oceans, upends lives and changes nations. This is the true story of basketball. It is the story of a Canadian invention that took over America, and the world. Of a supposed “white man’s sport” that became a way for people of color, women, and immigrants to claim a new place in society. Of a game that demands everything of those who love it, yet gives so much back in return. To tell this story, acclaimed journalists Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew and Dan Klores embarked on a groundbreaking mission to interview a staggering lineup of basketball trailblazers. For the first time hundreds of legends, from Kobe, Lebron and Steph Curry to Magic Johnson, Dr. J and Jerry West, spoke movingly about their greatest passion. Former NBA commissioner David Stern and iconic coaches like Phil Jackson and Coach K opened up like never before. Those who shattered glass ceilings, from Bill Russell and Yao Ming to Cheryl Miller and Lisa Leslie, explained what it really took to lay claim to their place in the game. At once a definitive oral history and something far more revelatory and life affirming, Basketball: A Love Story is the defining untold oral history of how basketball came to be, and what it means to those who love it.

Brick City Grudge Match

Brick City Grudge Match
Author: Rod Honecker
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2023-01-17
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1476689431

On June 10, 1948, the eyes of the sporting world were focused on a minor league ballpark in Newark, New Jersey--the unlikely venue of a much-anticipated rubber match between the two men at the top of boxing's prestigious middleweight division, Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano. They had met in the ring twice before, each winning one bout. In their third fight, Zale, a clever and powerful puncher, hoped to regain his title from Graziano, a knock-out artist six years his junior. This book tells the story of the greatest middleweight trilogy of boxing's Golden Age, a championship battle Newark hoped would catalyze brighter days for a city rife with political corruption and organized crime and grappling with the beginning of deindustrialization.

Playing Ball with the Boys

Playing Ball with the Boys
Author: Betsy Ross
Publisher: Clerisy Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2010-11-09
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1578604605

Female sideline reporters are the fastest-growing trend in broadcasts of professional and college football: names like Suzy Kolber, Erin Andrews, and Andrea Kremer are now as well known as any of the men in the booth. But even more has been going on. In recent years women have garnered spots as sports columnists and reporters, talk-show hosts, and even coaches and team administrators. Yet there has never been a book about this phenomenon. Former ESPN news anchor Betsy Ross fills this gap with Playing Ball with the Boys, a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the emerging role that women play in sports broadcasting and reporting, as well as in the business of sports. The book features interviews with the legendary women’s sports activist Billie Jean King, as well as Women’s Professional Soccer League leader Tonya Antonucci and ESPN College Basketball Analyst Rebecca Lobo. Prominent women working in the media are also featured in the book, including WFAN’s Ann Ligouri, CBS’ Lesley Visser, ESPN’s Pam Ward, USA Today’s Christine Brennan and Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts. Playing Ball with the Boys delivers firsthand accounts of the struggles and triumphs of women succeeding in what has long been a man's game.

The Gilded Age of Sport, 1945–1960

The Gilded Age of Sport, 1945–1960
Author: Herbert Warren Wind
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2016-01-26
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1504027558

From gridiron to diamond, lawn to green, a legendary sportswriter captures the wins, losses, and draws of an exciting period in American sports history Throughout his long and distinguished career, Herbert Warren Wind covered many of the most dramatic contests and iconic athletes of the twentieth century. Inspired by Paul Gallico’s classic dispatches from the golden age of the 1920s and ’30s, The Gilded Age of Sport collects Wind’s finest pieces on the people and places of the postwar era. With graceful prose and an authoritative eye for the telling detail, he profiles sports heroes including Yogi Berra, Ben Hogan, Maurice Richard, Bob Cousy, Sam Snead, Ted Williams, Herb Elliott, and Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman. Wind reveals Rocky Marciano’s training regimen, journeys as far afield as Japan and Australia to report on the international sports scene, and delights in the startling discrepancy between the woeful record of Harvard’s football team and the glory of its marching band. An elegant and comprehensive survey of fifteen thrilling years in sports history, The Gilded Age of Sport is a testament to the versatility, wit, and wisdom of a master craftsman.