Sport

Daniel A. Nathan's wide-ranging, interdisciplinary cultural history is less concerned with the details of the scandal than with how it has been represented and remembered...

In" The Chicago Marathon," Andrew Suozzo reveals this citywide ritual as far more than a simple race. Providing a full-spectrum look at the event's production and participants, Suozzo shows how the elements that comprise the marathon also reflect modern Chicago's politics, its people, and the ways the city engages with the wider world.

The book encompasses all of the forces that come together to make the race the spectacle it has become today. Beginning with a brisk history of the marathon, Suozzo leads readers from its origins in Greek mythology to its modern reality, and also along its...

As fire is to prairie or water to fish, so is basketball part of the natural environment in Indiana. Round ball, or Hoosier Hysteria is so much a part of the state's heritage that many people believe basketball was invented in Indiana. Naismith's game is a virtual religion in the state.
While everyone knows about the growth of basketball in high schools and in college, the story of Indiana's role in the development of professional basketball has not been told before. It is a fascinating, passionate, lively story of men who loved the game and were willing to play for nickels, of raucous...

"Sperber...tackles the details, great and small, unearthing a treasure." --New York Times Book Review

Shake Down the Thunder traces the history of the Notre Dame football program--which has acquired almost mythical proportions--from its humble origins in the 19th century to its status as the paragon of college sports. It presents the true story of the program's formative years, the reality behind the myths. Both social history and sports history, this book documents as never before the first half-century of Notre Dame football and relates it to the rise of big-time intercollegiate...

"Nothing in basketball beats Hoosier Hysteria, and this true-life Cinderella story of the 1954 Milan Indians has it all courage, heart, suspense, and triumph. Greg Guffey brings the team and its championship odyssey to life again in this action-packed book. A great read " Digger Phelps

With the release of the movie Hoosiers starring Gene Hackman, the whole world discovered the "Milan Miracle." The true story of the Milan miracle is even better, and Greg Guffey tells it here in graphic and gripping detail. Here we get to know the real Coach Marvin Wood and the remarkable group of high...

This is the story of the 1953 Hoosiers, NCAA champions, coached by Branch McCracken and boldly led by star players Bobby Leonard and Don Schlundt. This legendary Indiana University team from the pre Bob Knight era has begun to fade from memory, but Mac s Boys brings it vividly back to life.

One of the Hoosier state s most beloved basketball teams, the 1953 Hoosiers was also one of the best in the history of college hoops. It was a squad that had a great coach, a pair of star players, and teammates who accepted their roles and executed them flawlessly. With Leonard and Schlundt...

The years 1945-1959 marked the time when basketball truly became the sport of Indiana. High school basketball bound together communities across the state and interest in the sport rose to a new level. The period saw the Milan/Muncie Central game, given new fame through the movie Hoosiers. It also saw the first televised game, the start of the career of Oscar Robertson (who played for Crispus Attucks), and friendly town rivalries to build the state's biggest gymnasium. It was a time before the massive consolidations of the 1960s and '70s, with more than 700 teams involved in basketball...

The companion book to the PBS television special of the same name, For Gold and Glory retraces the little-known history of the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes. This highly celebrated auto-racing event for African Americans was held in Indiana and throughout the Midwest during the racial turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s, when the Ku Klux Klan cast a shadow over the social and political landscape of the state and region. The story is told through the eyes and emotions of Indianapolis auto mechanic Charlie Wiggins. The greatest African American driver of the era, Wiggins was known as the ""Negro...

Judaism's Encounter with American Sports examines how sports entered the lives of American Jewish men and women and how the secular values of sports threatened religious identification and observance. What do Jews do when a society--in this case, a team--"chooses them in," but demands commitments that clash with ancestral ties and practices?

Jeffrey S. Gurock uses the experience of sports to illuminate an important mode of modern Jewish religious conflict and accommodation to America. He considers the defensive strategies American Jewish leaders have employed in response to sports'...

The National Pastime has made big news and big money since its Silver Age (1900-1920), but what old-timer would have dreamed of TV networks bidding tens of millions for camera time, of baseballers getting paid like movie stars, or of all concerned--players, managers, owners, even umpires--having their lives exposed in intimate detail by keyhole journalists? So far the great American game has survived media hype, as this book shows, with the same vitality that brought it through the doldrums of World Wars I and II and the Great Depression and that withstood the shocks of racial integration...

Organized baseball from the establishment of the National Commission in 1903 to the period of national expansion in the 1950s and 1960s--buffeted by the winds of two world wars and a Great Depression--is chronicled here in colorful detail.

The glories of the Silver Age--Ty Cobb's record-setting, Ed Walsh's pitching innovations, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fielding orchestration--might have been eclipsed by World War I and the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal. Instead, the Roaring Twenties boomed for baseball as well as the stock market. Baseball stars like Babe Ruth rivaled movie stars like...

How did "America's National Game" evolve from a gentlemen's pastime in the 1850s to a national obsession in the Roaring Twenties? What really happened at Cooperstown in 1839, and why does the "Doubleday legend" persist? How did the commissioner system develop, and what was the impact of the "Black Sox" scandal? These questions and many others are answered in this book, with colorful details about early big league stars such as Mike "King" Kelly and pious Billy Sunday, Charles Comiskey and Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie and "Cy" (Cyclone) Young.

The author explores historically the four...