Playing Tough: The World of Sports and Politics

Notes on Sources

[Notes on Sources] [Introduction] Sports and Pol i t i cs The examples of the intersection of sports and politics are drawn from a variety of sources. John Sayle Watterson’s collection of stories about the sporting habits of U.S. presidents in ἀ e Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency proved particularly helpful. Lissa Smith discussed female athletes in Nike Is a Goddess: ἀ e History of Women in Sports, as did Susan Chan in Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport. For general reference, consider Elliott Gorn and Warren Goldstein’s A Brief History of American Sports, Kathryn Jay’s More ἀ an Just a Game: Sports in American Life since 1945, and Robert Lipsyte’s Sportsworld: An American Dreamland. [1] E arly Baseball and the Urban Pol i t i cal M achi ne The literature on the history of baseball is broad in scope and rich in detail. All studies of the origins of the game must begin with Harold Seymour’s seminal work Baseball : ἀ e Early Years. Although most books about the national game begin with the founding of the National League in 1876, there are a few splendid studies of the early amateur game, including Peter Morris’s But Didn’t We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843–187 0, Warren Goldstein’s Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball, and Tom Melville’s Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League. Of particular interest to those studying baseball archeology is David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. Two books on Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall stand out for mention: Alexander B. Callow Jr.’s ἀ e Tweed Ring and Kenneth D. Ackerman’s Boss Tweed: ἀ e Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York. They place the nefarious work of the urban machine in a social context that includes the activities of social clubs, including those that played baseball. Over the past decade, researchers online have found contemporary newspapers, truly the “first rough draft of history,” a phrase coined by Katherine Graham of the Washington Post in a speech in 1963. For the most part, early reports of baseball matches were 232 Notes on Sources short and hyperbolic. The press would not create separate sports pages until later in the nineteenth century. By comparison, broad attacks on the Tweed Ring, in particular in the New York Times, would fill pages of the dailies. Tweed famously dismissed the early Times reports, but recognized the political damage inflicted by the Nast cartoons in Harper’s Weekly: “I don’t care so much what the papers write about—my constituents can’t read—but damn it, they can see pictures.” [2] The Nazi Olym pi c T r i um ph As part of the extensive scholarship on the Nazi regime, historians have focused on the events of the 1936 Olympic Games to try to understand the underpinnings of that malignant regime. Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream by Guy Walters , Nazi Games: ἀ e Olympics of 1936 by David Clay Large, and ἀ e Nazi Olympics by Richard Mandell are very good starting points for research. Jeremy Schaap, among the premier popular scholars on sport, has written an impressive biography of the most memorable athlete of the Berlin Games in Triumph: ἀ e Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics. [3] The War of the World: Joe L oui s v. M a x S chm el i ng Joe Louis, the boxer and the man, has fascinated America since his emergence on the world sports stage in the 1930s.There are a number of splendid resources on the two Louis-Schmeling fights. David Margolick’s Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink is a comprehensively researched, brilliantly executed book that not only documents the events and the historical context of the bouts but also debunks many myths about the fighters. Lewis Erenberg’s ἀ e Greatest Fight of Our Generation is of similar quality and usefulness. A new biography by Randy Roberts, entitled Joe Louis: Hard Times Man, combines thoughtful research with splendid prose. It is a welcome addition to the Louis library. Accounts of Louis’s fights also filled the world’s newspapers and highlighted the importance of the bouts as a reflection of world politics. [4] The “Futb ol War...