Showing titles in Sports History

In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet - and Paris Review sports columnist - Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it's divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams.

Ed Van Put begins this important new book with the history of native brook trout and offers little-known details about their sizes, abundance, and demise from over-fishing, the growth of streamside industries, and the introduction of competitive species. He records the attempts to restore the depleted fishery by restocking streams with hatchery-bred trout, and then the introduction of rainbow trout from California and brown trout from Europe, and their impact upon Catskill trout fishing.

The victory and legend of the Super Bowl XLV-winning Green Bay Packers continues in Chuck Carlson’s Tales from the Green Bay Packers Sideline. In this behind-the-scenes look at the NFL’s second oldest franchise, Carlson captures the determination, aggression, and vision that have constantly spurred the Packers to greatness. Through interviews and extensive research, Carlson brings to life stories from Packers legends such as Curly Lambeau, Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, Ray Nitschke, Brett Favre, and the stars of today’s Packers like Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews, Jr.

Rodeo is a dangerous and painful performance in which only the strongest and most skilled riders succeed. In the popular imagination, the western rodeo hero is often a stoic white man who embodies the toughness and independence of America’s frontier past. However, marginalized people have starred in rodeos since the very beginning. Cast out of popular western mythology and pushed to the fringes in everyday life, these cowboys and cowgirls found belonging and meaning at the rodeo, staking a claim to national inclusion.

How does it feel to play your last college game and land on the cover of Sports Illustrated? What was it like to be a part of the team that won the University of Kentucky’s first national championship ever? Listeners will find the answer to these questions and so much more in Ryan Clark’s newly updated edition of Game of My Life: Kentucky Wildcats. Clark takes listeners into the arena and onto the court with this in-depth look at the legends of Kentucky basketball.

Since 1935, roller derby has thrilled fans and skaters with its constant action, hard hits, and edgy attitude. However, though its participants’ athleticism is undeniable, roller derby has never been accepted as a “real” sport. Michella M. Marino, herself a former skater, tackles the history of a sport that has long been a cultural mainstay for one reason both utterly simple and infinitely complex: Roller derby has always been coed.

In Game On David Bockino, a former marketing and advertising manager at ESPN turned professor of communications and sport management, provides the first overview of the evolution of the sports media industry.

The 1890s was the peak of the American bicycle craze, and consumers, including women, were buying bicycles in large numbers. Despite critics who tried to discourage women from trying this new sport, women took to the bike in huge numbers, and mastery of the bicycle became a metaphor for women’s mastery over their lives. Spurred by the emergence of the “safety” bicycle and the ensuing cultural craze, women’s professional bicycle racing thrived in the United States from 1895 to 1902.

Taking us back to that feverish spring, The Last Good Year gives an intimate account not just of an era-defining seven games, but of what the series meant to the men who were changed by it: Marty McSorley, the tough guy who took his whole team on his shoulders; Doug Gilmour, the emerging superstar; celebrity owner Bruce McNall; Bill Berg, who went from unknown to famous when the Leafs claimed him on waivers; Kelly Hrudey, the Kings' goalie who would go on to become a Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster; Kerry Fraser, who would become the game's most infamous referee.

For 33 years, Bobby Bowden was the heart and soul of Florida State football. Now Seminoles fans of every generation will get to relive the glory and passion of Florida’s winningest coach in this edition of Tales from the Florida Seminoles Sideline. In this gripping narrative, Bobby Bowden and Steve Ellis bring readers right up to the sideline to experience pivotal moments in Florida’s football history.

Even in their worst of seasons, the Philadelphia Eagles maintained their tradition of toughness, thanks to great players - from legends like Chuck Bednarik and Steve Van Buren to modern-day heroes. In Tales from the Philadelphia Eagles Sideline, veteran football writer Gordon Forbes profiles the individuals who have thrilled Philadelphia fans since the team’s inception in 1933 through Andy Reid’s last championship contenders during his 14 years as head coach.

Following the 1956-57 NBA season, the Fort Wayne Pistons relocated to Detroit, and the Rochester Royals were moved to Cincinnati. The relocations of the Fort Wayne and Rochester franchises left Syracuse as the last small market team in the NBA.

Every sports fan recalls with amazing accuracy a pivotal winning moment involving a favorite team or player - Henry Aaron hitting his 715th home run to pass Babe Ruth, Christian Laettner's famous buzzer-beating shot in the NCAA tournament for Duke. Yet lost are the stories on the other side of these history-making moments, the athletes who experienced not transcendent glory but crushing disappointment: the cornerback who missed the tackle on the big touchdown, the relief pitcher who lost the series, the world-record holding Olympian who fell on the ice.

February 6, 1958, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on take-off at Munich Airport. On board were the young Manchester United team, 'the Busby Babes', and the journalists who followed them. Twenty-one of the passengers died instantly, four were left fighting for their lives while six more were critically injured.

A story of faith, family, and determination, this book chronicles Notre Dame’s legendary football coach Terry Brennan and the intense, comeback season of 1957....

As a columnist for Time magazine, among many other publications, Tom Callahan witnessed an extraordinary number of defining moments in American sport across four decades. He takes us from Roberto Clemente clinching his 3,000th, and final, regular-season hit in Pittsburgh; to ringside for the Muhammad Ali - George Foreman fight in Zaire; and to Arthur Ashe announcing, at a news conference, that he'd tested positive for HIV.

Stan Fischler, the dean of American hockey journalists and best-selling author of more than 60 books on hockey, profiles the heroes of Hockeytown in Detroit Red Wings: Greatest Moments and Players. One of the National Hockey League's "Original Six", few teams in professional hockey have enjoyed more success than the franchise in Detroit. Among the players Fischler glorifies are the immortal Gordie Howe, Terry Sawchuk, Ted Lindsay, Alex Delvecchio, and Sid Abel, all players whose numbers reside on banners in the rafters of Joe Louis Arena.

Join celebrated UNC history professor Matthew Andrews to discover how sports have reflected various facets of American identity - both laudatory and troubling - throughout our nation’s history.

Froome, Wiggins, Merckx - we know the winners of the Tour de France, but Lanterne Rouge tells the forgotten, often inspirational, and occasionally absurd stories of the last-placed rider. We learn of stage winners and former yellow jerseys who tasted life at the other end of the bunch, the breakaway leader who stopped for a bottle of wine and then took a wrong turn, the doper whose drug cocktail accidentally slowed him down, and the rider who was recognized as the most combative despite finishing at the back.

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world's war zones; from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colors playing soccer in any open space they could find.