Sports and Entertainment

On March 31, 1929, seventy-seven men began an epic 3,554-mile footrace across America that pushed their bodies to the breaking point. Nicknamed the "Bunion Derby" by the press, this was the second and last of two trans-America footraces held in the late 1920s. The men averaged forty-six gut-busting miles a day during seventy-eight days of nonstop racing that took them from New York City to Los Angeles. Among this group, two brilliant runners, Johnny Salo of Passaic, New Jersey, and Pete Gavuzzi of England, emerged to battle for the $25,000 first prize along the mostly unpaved roads of 1929 America, with each man pushing the other to go faster as the lead switched back and forth between them. To pay the prize money, race director Charley Pyle cobbled together a traveling vaudeville company, complete with dancing debutantes, an all-girl band wearing pilot outfits, and blackface comedians, all housed under the massive show tent that Pyle hoped would pack in audiences. Kastner's engrossing account, often told from the perspective of the participants, evokes the remarkable physical challenge the runners experienced and clearly bolsters the argument that the last Bunion Derby was the greatest long-distance footrace of all time.

When he first took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke a color barrier that reached back sixty years to the very origins of American baseball. He would go on to play in six World Series and help the Dodgers win the 1955 World Championship. But Robinson was much more than just a baseball player. This book collects columns which Robinson wrote primarily for the New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News, as well as including excerpts of letters between Robinson and politicians such as Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy. These writings portray Robinson as a deeply passionate, intelligent, and eloquent man with strongly-held convictions about the Civil Rights Movement and the political decisions which shaped America in the 1960s and '70s. He was also a devoted husband and father conflicted by his ability to provide the best for his children and his desire to keep them grounded in the struggles facing all African Americans at the time. Each column is preceded by a brief contextualizing introduction by Long, and Robinson's columns are broken into three themes: "On Baseball and Golf," "On Family and Friends," and "On Civil Rights." The brevity of the columns and Robinson's vivid imagery and compelling voice make this an absorbing and often very moving read.

Wilma Rudolph was born black in Jim Crow Tennessee. The twentieth of 22 children, she spent most of her childhood in bed suffering from whooping cough, scarlet fever, and pneumonia. She lost the use of her left leg due to polio and wore leg braces. With dedication and hard work, she became a gifted runner, earning a track and field scholarship to Tennessee State. In 1960, she became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Her underdog story made her into a media darling, and she was the subject of countless articles, a television movie, children's books, biographies, and she even featured on a U.S. postage stamp. In this work, Smith and Liberti consider not only Rudolph's achievements, but also the ways in which those achievements are interpreted and presented as historical fact. Theories of gender, race, class, and disability collide in the story of Wilma Rudolph, and Smith and Liberti examine this collision in an effort to more fully understand how history is shaped by the cultural concerns of the present. In doing so, the authors engage with the metanarratives which define the American experience and encourage more complex and nuanced interrogations of contemporary heroic legacy.

Leveling the Playing Field tells the story of the African American members of the 1969–70 Syracuse University football team who petitioned for racial equality on their team. The petition had four demands: access to the same academic tutoring made available to their white teammates; better medical care for all team members; starting assignments based on merit rather than race; and a discernible effort to racially integrate the coaching staff, which had been all white since 1898. The players' charges of racial disparity were fiercely contested by many of the white players on the team, and the debate spilled into the newspapers and drew protests from around the country. Mistakenly called the "Syracuse 8" by media reports in the 1970s, the nine players who signed the petition did not receive a response allowing or even acknowledging their demands. They boycotted the spring 1970 practice, and Coach Ben Schwartzwalder, a deeply beloved figure on campus and a Hall of Fame football coach nearing retirement, banned seven of the players from the team. As tensions escalated, white players staged a day-long walkout in support of the coaching staff, and an enhanced police presence was required at home games. Extensive interviews with each player offer a firsthand account of their decision to stand their ground while knowing it would jeopardize their professional football career. They discuss with candor the ways in which the boycott profoundly changed the course of their lives. In Leveling the Playing Field, Marc chronicles this contentious moment in Syracuse University's history and tells the story through the eyes of the players who demanded change for themselves and for those who would follow them.

On April 23, 1929, the second annual Transcontinental Foot Race across America, known as the Bunion Derby, was in its twenty-fifth day. Eddie "the Sheik" Gardner, an African American runner from Seattle, was leading the race across the Free Bridge over the Mississippi River. Along with the signature outfit that earned him his nickname-a white towel tied around his head, white shorts, and a white shirt-Gardner wore an American flag, a reminder to all who saw him run through the Jim Crow South that he was an American and the leader of the greatest footrace in the world. Kastner traces Gardner's remarkable journey from his birth in 1897 in Birmingham, Alabama, to his success in Seattle, Washington, as one of the top long-distance runners in the region, and finally to his participation in two transcontinental footraces where he risked his life, facing a barrage of harassment for having the audacity to compete with white runners. Kastner shows how Gardner's participation became a way to protest the endemic racism he faced, heralding the future of nonviolent efforts that would be instrumental to the civil rights movement. Shining a bright light on his extraordinary athletic accomplishments and his heroism on the dusty roads of America in the 1920s, Kastner gives Gardner and other black bunioneers the attention they so richly deserve.

Robinson takes readers on a globe-trotting tour that combines a historian's in­sight with vivid personal memories going back to just after World War II. From experiencing the 1948 "Austerity Olympics" in London as a young spectator to working as a journalist in the Boston Marathon media center at the moment of the 2013 bombings, Robinson offers a fascinating first-person account of the tragic and triumphant moments that impacted the world and shaped the modern sport. He chronicles the beginnings of the American running boom, the emergence of women's running, the end of the old amateur rules, and the redefinition of aging for athletes and amateurs. With an intimate perspective and insightful reporting, Robinson captures major historical events through the lens of running. He recounts running in Berlin at the time of German reunification in 1990, organizing a replacement track meet in New Zealand after the disastrous 2011 earthquake, and the tri­umph of Ethiopian athlete Abebe Bikila in the 1960 Olympics in Rome. As an avid runner, journalist, and fan, Robinson brings these global events to life and reveals the intimate and powerful ways in which running has intersected with recent history.

Fit for America is at once an intellectual biography of Major John L. Griffith, one of the preeminent intercollegiate athletics administrators of the twenti­eth century, and an in-depth look at how athletics shaped national military preparedness in a time of war and anticommunist sentiment. Lindaman traces Griffith's forty-year career, one that spanned both world wars and included his appointment as the first Big Ten commissioner from 1922 until 1945. Griffith also served as NCAA president in the 1930s and later became the secretary-treasurer during World War II. Throughout his career, he worked tirelessly to advance the role and importance of collegiate sports on a regional and national level. In an era of heightened fears of com­munism, Griffith saw intercollegiate athletics as a way to prepare young men to become fit, disciplined military recruits. Griffith also founded his own publi­cation, the Athletic Journal, in 1922 in which he published opinion pieces and solicited the opinions of other leading coaches and administrators nationwide. Through these pages, Lindaman explores not only Griffith's philosophy but also the emergence of a coaching and athletic administration network. Draw­ing on voluminous primary source material and the many writings Griffith left behind, Fit for America brings long-overdue attention to a figure who was in­strumental in shaping the world of American intercollegiate sports.

The bicycle has long been a part of American culture but few would describe it as an essential element of American identity in the same way that it is fundamental to European and Asian cultures. Instead, American culture has had a more turbulent relationship with the bicycle. First introduced in the United States in the 1830s, the bicycle reached its height of popularity in the 1890s as it evolved to become a popular form of locomotion for adults. Two decades later, ridership in the United States collapsed. As automobile consumption grew, bicycles were seen as backward and unbecoming-particularly for the white middle class. Turpin chronicles the story of how the bicycle's image changed dramatically, shedding light on how American consumer patterns are shaped over time. Turpin identifies the creation and development of childhood consumerism as a key factor in the bicycle's evolution. In an attempt to resurrect dwindling sales, sports marketers reimagined the bicycle as a child's toy. By the 1950s, it had been firmly established as a symbol of boyhood adolescence, further accelerating the declining number of adult consumers. Tracing the ways in which cycling suffered such a loss in popularity among adults is fundamental to understanding why the United States would be considered a "car" culture from the 1950s to today. As a lens for viewing American history, the story of the bicycle deepens our understanding of our national culture and the forces that influence it.

In late 1998 and the early months of 1999, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was an organization in crisis. Revelations of a slush fund employed by Salt Lake City officials to secure votes from a number of IOC members in support of the city's bid for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games invited intense scrutiny of the organization by the international media. The IOC and its president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, staggered through the opening weeks of the scandal, but ultimately Samaranch and key actors such as IOC vice president Richard Pound, marketing director Michael Payne, and director-general François Carrard weathered the storm. They also safeguarded the IOC's autonomy and subsequently spearheaded the push for reforms to the Olympic Charter, intended to better position the IOC for the twenty-first century. In Tarnished Rings, the authors delve into this fascinating story, exploring the genesis of the scandal and charting the IOC's efforts to bring stability to its operations. Based on extensive research and unparalleled access to primary and source material, the authors offer a behind-the-scenes account of the politics surrounding the IOC and the bidding process. Wenn, Barney, and Martyn's potent examination of this critical episode in Olympic history and of the presidency of Samaranch, who brought sweeping changes to the Olympic Movement in the 1980s and 1990s, offers valuable lessons for those interested in the IOC, the Olympic Movement, and the broader concepts of leadership and crisis management.