Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports - Rilegato

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0252041526 ISBN 13: 9780252041525

Casa editrice: Univ of Illinois Pr, 2017

Riassunto

What were the iconic sports moments of the last century? In Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles , a team of sports aficionados climb onto their bar stools to address that never-solved but essential question. Triumphs and turning points, rivalries and record-setters ”each chapter tracks down the real story behind the epic moments and legendary careers sports fans love to debate. Topics include Abner Doubleday and the origins of baseball; the era-defining 1979 duel between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson; how Denver and Cleveland relive The Drive; the myths surrounding the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle; Billie Jean King's schooling of Bobby Riggs; the Miracle on Ice; and ESPN's conquest of the sports world. Filled with eye-opening lore and analysis, Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles is an entertaining look at what we think we know about sports.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Steven P. Gietschier is an associate professor of history at Lindenwood University. Previously, he was Senior Managing Editor for Research at The Sporting News .

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Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles

The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports

By Steven Gietschier

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-04152-5

Contents

Foreword, vii, 
1 Abner Doubleday and the "Invention" of Baseball Thomas L. Altherr, 1, 
2 The "Stars and Stripes" at the Olympic Games Mark Dyreson, 10, 
3 The Black Sox Scandal Redux Daniel A. Nathan, 18, 
4 The Creation of the Negro National League Leslie Heaphy, 25, 
5 George Gipp, Knute Rockne, and the Post-Mortem Faux Pas Ronald A. Smith, 33, 
6 Babe Didrikson at the 1932 Olympic Games Lindsay Parks Pieper, 42, 
7 Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" in the 1932 World Series Larry R. Gerlach, 51, 
8 March Madness or Madness in March? Chad Carlson, 59, 
9 Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, and the Reintegration of the National Football League David K. Wiggins, 68, 
10 Althea Gibson, America's First African American Grand Slam Champion Maureen Smith, 77, 
11 Blaming Walter O'Malley for Moving the Dodgers West Robert Trumpbour, 85, 
12 The Greatest Game Ever? Richard C. Crepeau, 94, 
13 The Marichal–Roseboro Brawl and Its Coverage "Underneath America" Samuel O. Regalado, 104, 
14 What Really Happened When Curt Flood Sued Baseball Steven Gietschier, 112, 
15 Dan Gable's Unbelievable Defeat David Zang, 121, 
16 The 1972 U.S.–U.S.S.R. Olympic Basketball Final Kevin Witherspoon, 129, 
17 Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs, 1973 Jaime Schultz, 137, 
18 Ali–Foreman and the Myth of the Rope-a-Dope Michael Ezra, 145, 
19 Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson, 1979 Murry Nelson, 153, 
20 The Birth of ESPN, a Sports Junkie's Nirvana Travis Vogan, 161, 
21 Remembering and Forgetting America's Hockey Miracles Stephen Hardy, 171, 
22 Remembering and Reliving "The Drive" in Cleveland and Denver Andrew D. Linden, 180, 
23 The Rise and Fall of The National Sports Daily Dennis Gildea, 189, 
Afterword: The Future of Sports Memories, 197, 
Contributors, 201, 
Index, 207, 

CHAPTER 1

Abner Doubleday and the "Invention" of Baseball

THOMAS L. ALTHERR

Ten or fifteen years ago, most serious baseball historians subscribed to the line that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball in Cooperstown in 1839, that such a claim was the product of spurious evidence from a quasi-demented mining engineer named Abner Graves and the jingoistic crusade of Albert Spalding to revel in baseball's "American" origins. Indeed, around that time, I composed a short encyclopedia entry, the gist of which went, in paraphrase:

One of the most bedrock and celebrated myths in sports is that Abner Doubleday invented baseball. In 1889, allegedly following a friendly dispute with New York City sportswriter Henry Chadwick over a claim that baseball has its roots in the British game of rounders, baseball player-manager and sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding set up a commission that launched a nearly twenty-year campaign to establish indisputably that baseball was an American invention. After years of collecting evidence that proved no such American origin, Spalding and Abraham Mills, the rather reluctant commission chair, seized on testimony in 1905 from one Abner Graves that Graves himself had witnessed the Cooperstown creation and Doubleday's display of genius as a boy from the nearby hamlet of Fly Creek. Emboldened by Graves's assertions, the Mills Commission anointed Abner Doubleday as the creator of the National Pastime.

According to this long-cherished version, Doubleday, a West Point cadet, home for the summer in Cooperstown in June 1839, gathered a group of boys from local academies in Elihu Phinney's pasture, drew up the rules, and laid out the ball field for the first baseball game. For Spalding and many other American patriots and Anglophobes, this "Immaculate Conception" myth tidied up the nagging suggestions that baseball had derived from European games along a circuitous path. Toss in the fact that Doubleday became a bona fide Union Army Civil War hero, at Fort Sumter as well as at Gettysburg, and the ingredients calcified into an unshakable mix of myth.

Baseball historians and other scholars began discrediting this story as early as 1938, the year before the Baseball Hall of Fame opened its doors in Cooperstown. Robert Henderson, a librarian at the New York Public Library, launched the first salvo with some "Notes on Rounders," descriptions of all sorts of European ball games (and a few American ones) preceding baseball, and compiled this evidence into a 1947 book, Ball, Bat, and Bishop.

Other historians centered their critique on Doubleday's surmised role as inventor. The major arguments against it focused on Doubleday's absence from Cooperstown in 1839, his exemplary attendance at West Point that year, the fact that until his death in 1893 he himself never claimed to have invented the game, even in his autobiography, and the increasing number of discoveries by Henderson and others that bat-and-ball games had long antedated the hallowed date. Indeed, in 1816, Cooperstown itself had enacted an ordinance against ball play in the streets. How remarkably prescient of the village fathers to prohibit a game that would not be invented until twenty-three years later!

Then there was the matter of Abner Graves, a quirky character to say the least, whose checkered past and inconsistencies hardly inspired credibility. How convenient that he held on to not only his memory but the very ball from that first game! As cynical Catholics and non-Catholics alike are wont to point out, there are enough pieces of the "true" cross on altars across the world to construct another Notre Dame cathedral. Hardly a choirboy, Graves had left a long trail of shady investments and failed mining ventures. Later, in the 1920s, he married a woman quite his junior and then killed her during a marital dispute. Saved from execution by an insanity defense, Graves spent his waning years in a mental institution.

Yet a few supporters of the Doubleday creation story persist, even today. They maintain that Graves remembered the year wrong, that Abner, the young cadet, was in and out of town in years before and after 1839. Some argue that there was another Abner Doubleday who Graves mixed up with the future famous military leader. Yet others hold out hope that more evidence will surface to lock in the nationalist pedigree. Several members of the extensive Doubleday clan cling loyally to the legend, even to the point of occasionally sending a hate letter to anyone who may dare impugn their beliefs. For its part, the Hall of Fame acknowledges the substantial skepticism about Graves's evidence but still exhibits the ball Graves alleged he kept from that supposedly historic 1839 event. And as one waggish Hall of Fame official declared, "Well, maybe baseball wasn't invented in Cooperstown, but it should have been!"

As I now revisit the same topic after years of study, I find myself retreating from categorical statements. So much new research about the early phases of baseball and ball play history has appeared in the past ten or fifteen years that I hesitate to close the case on the whole Doubleday episode. One of the first things my dissertation advisor at Ohio State said in our first historiography seminar many years ago still rings in my ears: "Historians should never say 'never.'" Although I retired from teaching a couple of years ago, I spent the better part of my career counseling students to be wary of rushes to judgment, that just when they thought the answer was clear, some historian or two, evil creatures to be sure, would discover new evidence, reinterpret old evidence, or apply some new diagnostic tool. That third possibility may not figure in here unless we exhume Doubleday and find some baseball gene in his body, but it is more than likely that new evidence and reinterpreted older evidence will continue to muddy this intellectual fray.

In 2005, David Block published a monumental book on the roots of baseball, Baseball before We Knew It. As he developed a new interpretation, Block checked out the hoary assumption that baseball had derived from rounders and found little evidence to support Chadwick's claim. Spalding may not have cared either way, but even today too many baseball historians adhere like lemmings to the rounders theory. Block was skeptical. Essentially, he asked, "If not rounders, then what?" and he pitched us back to some drawing board, some proverbial square one. In 2009, Monica Nucciarone demolished claims that Alexander Joy Cartwright, a member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, was "the father of baseball." She demonstrated that Cartwright's interest in baseball was transitory at best, that the assertion he spread base- ball westward to California was based on fraudulent reediting of Cartwright's diaries by his grandson, and that Cartwright, once out in Hawaii, evinced much more interest in firefighting companies and American annexation of those islands than baseball. Following Nucciarone, John Thorn published Baseball in the Garden of Eden (2011), in which he challenged much of what we thought we knew about early baseball. Down went the assumed importance of the Knickerbockers. Up went an array of new finds, including a 1791 town ordinance prohibiting baseball in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and new evidence that other New York clubs predated the Knickerbockers and played games in the 1830s. My own research on pre-1845 ball games (not only baseball, but anything played with a ball or similar projectile), which awaits publication, resulted in two awards from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and also helped break new ground.

Possibly the most ambitious record of research on early baseball has been the Protoball Project, the brainchild of Larry McCray, who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For more than ten years, McCray has logged digitally thousands of references to baseball and similar games, all the way from ancient times to 1870. Just the most cursory view of the Protoball Web site (www.protoball.org) will amaze any historian or researcher just how extensively ball games figured into humans' play and ritual repertoire long before Doubleday. Another fertile source for pre-1839 baseball history is the periodical, Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game. Many essays published therein concern later years, but others, especially those edited by McCray for the Spring 2011 special issue on origins, attest to the frenetic pace of research and publication about the earlier periods.

In 2013, two books tossed the verdict up for grabs one more time. The first, Baseball's Creation Myth: Adam Ford, Abner Graves and the Cooperstown Story, by Brian "Chip" Martin, substantially re-researched the Doubleday/ Graves episode. Martin performed the most exhaustive search for new information, spending much time in archives in Denver, Iowa, and South Dakota, read newspapers and manuscript collections, consulted local historians, and constantly broadened the scope of his investigations. Graves came up for respectful reconsideration as Martin gained access to Masonic Temple records that rehabilitate Graves's reputation, at least somewhat.

Moreover, Martin became intrigued with possible connections between Graves and Adam Ford, a Denver-based physician, who had grown up and trained for the medical profession in Ontario, Canada. In April 1886, for reasons still not clear, Ford wrote a letter to Sporting Life, a weekly devoted to baseball, and gave a thorough rendition of a baseball game he witnessed played in his hometown of Beachville, Ontario, on June 4, 1838. Although Doubleday's coronation as creator was years away, Canadian baseball enthusiasts later celebrated this game as predating Cooperstown's by more than a year. Martin maintained that because Graves and Ford traveled in many of the same circles in Denver, Graves would have most likely heard Ford's story and maybe felt prompted to tell his own about Doubleday.

But just when the story seemed more complex than ever, another 2013 book, The Farmer's Game, by David Vaught, stirred the pot even more. In this work, ostensibly about baseball in rural places out West, the Midwest (Iowa and Minnesota) and back East (North Carolina), Vaught tucked in a chapter on dear old Otsego County, New York, where Cooperstown is situated. While Vaught didn't prove Abner Doubleday invented the game, he made a strong case for reexamining Graves's testimony. Vaught dredged up hitherto overlooked information about Doubleday's progenitors in the Cooperstown region. He especially singled out Seth Doubleday, somewhat renowned for playing town ball, a baseball ancestor, in the area in the late eighteenth century.

Vaught also described Cooperstown as a village fraught with class tensions and generational anxieties. For example, the 1816 ban on ball play, according to Vaught, resulted less from trepidation about property damage than from fears of the old Federalist-leaning elite that they were losing power to a new generation of Jeffersonian Republicans far less propertied and concerned with order. Ball play, baseball, or some similar game, threatened not only windows but social proprieties. Vaught then brilliantly pushed the comparison ahead in time to the 1830s and 1840s and showed how these clashes persisted in the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, son of William Cooper, one of the town's Federalist founders. If Abner Doubleday did anything in 1839, it happened within the context of this visible social turmoil.

So where do we stand? What further questions beckon us? One thing we can categorically state is that whatever the young West Point cadet did or didn't do in 1839 in Cooperstown, he did not "invent" baseball. No one invented baseball. Unlike basketball's attempts to give sole credit to James Naismith for his 1891 version, and some weaker claims that Amos Alonzo Stagg created football, baseball grew topsy-turvy from an evolutionary tree — sorry, creationists — of a variety of predecessor, competing, isolated, or now-lost games. Further research may elevate one or more of these games to special status as the likely progenitor(s) of baseball or, just as likely, leave us awash in a dazzling array of possibilities. My own wild speculation with no more evidence than gut feelings is that baseball historians, no longer tethered to the British origins, may locate the origins of baseball, along with einkorn agriculture and certain forms of social organization, in what is now Iran, Afghanistan, and/or Kazakhstan.

But back to the Doubleday controversy. If he did draw up some rules and playing dimensions, shouldn't he receive due congratulations and Abner Graves some vindication? To the point critics level that Doubleday never claimed any credit, perhaps he knew that his game was not the only one, so why celebrate something not unique? As a cadet at West Point, he surely studied mathematics, engineering, and surveying. The raucous chaos and inefficiency of town ball may have offended his own search for precision, and he slapped a temporary application of such on the boys' game. Already demonstrating the leadership abilities that would carry him through the Civil War, Doubleday may have commanded respect and admiration from boys eager to obey his directions.

Regarding other criticisms, such as his failure to mention baseball in his autobiography, perhaps we should step back. In his autobiography and other Civil War writings, Abner discussed virtually nothing of his childhood, adolescence, or pre-Civil War experiences. Perhaps lost manuscripts about his younger days still exist, but until they surface, why require Doubleday to write on matters other than military?

Additionally, historians should pay closer attention to his post-Civil War life. Doubleday retired from military duty in San Francisco, moved to Texas in 1873 and then New York City, and listed himself as a lawyer. By 1878, however, he had moved to New Jersey and became immersed in theosophy, a strain of spiritualism, eventually becoming president of the American Theosophical Society. Would his spiritualist beliefs have precluded interest in baseball as too worldly, something separate from the true path? Or, as an adult, a Civil War hero, did he see baseball as just a boys' game, unworthy of his manly bearing and regard?

And what of baseball itself during those years? Admittedly, the organized major leagues had rebounded from the National Association days and the initial missteps of the National League. The arrival of the American Association in 1882 had invigorated rivalries. But by Doubleday's last years, major league baseball was on the brink of the doldrums era. The Players' League fiasco of 1890 had brought down the American Association and left the National League weakened. As a New Yorker, Doubleday may have found little to cheer about as Boston, Baltimore, and Brooklyn (a separate city from Manhattan then) carried off all the Temple Cup trophies during the decade. New York teams were mediocre. Maybe Doubleday, probably a staunch moralist, was embarrassed by baseball's unsavory connections to gambling, alcohol, and prostitution. Perhaps the immigrant-filled team rosters awakened in him some nativism akin to that of the Know-Nothings of the 1850s.

One of the key players in the Doubleday drama still deserves more scrutiny, namely, Albert Goodwill Spalding. First, given his nationalist/jingoist bent and his personal feud with Chadwick, why did Spalding pursue his crusade to establish baseball as an American game so passionately? Were there other motives? Did Spalding organize the argument at first as a stunt, a promotional gimmick to stimulate public interest in baseball and thus increase the bottom line of his sporting goods business? Did he then feel himself trapped by his own rhetoric? Did he dig in his heels when the first committee findings illustrated non-American origins? How much did he badger Abraham Mills into buying the Graves story? Was he one of the great American showmen, such as P. T. Barnum in an earlier generation, seizing on and manipulating spectacle for all its crowd-pleasing worth?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles by Steven Gietschier. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Illinois Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0252041526
• ISBN 13: 9780252041525
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 218
• Redattore: Gietschier Steven
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile