Showing titles in History of Sports

Baseball explores the history of organized baseball during the mid-twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures whose stories figure prominently in baseball's past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.

These days you can play a round on the ice floes in the Arctic, in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq and on the plains of Africa. The rich history of the sport has produced a wealth of screwball, outlandish and just plain weird tales.

One of the greatest marathon runners of all time, Tom Longboat was one of the best-known athletes of the western world in the early 20th century. Longboat was an astonishing long-distance runner who grew up on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario. He won the Boston Marathon in record time, 2:24.24, almost five minutes faster than the 10 previous winners. Longboat then raced in the Olympic Marathon in 1908, but he collapsed on the course amid rumours that his manager had drugged him with strychnine.

Since our nation was first conceived, Canadian athletes have been involved in some of the weirdest moments in sport. Learn facts that will astound, confuse and make you laugh.

In 1990, though no one knew it then, a fearless group of players changed the sport of soccer in the United States forever. Young, bronzed, and mulletted, they were America’s finest athletes in a sport that America loved to hate. Even sportswriters rooted against them. Yet this team defied massive odds and qualified for the World Cup, making possible America’s current obsession with the world’s most popular game. New Kids in the World Cup is the origin story of modern American soccer.

Celebrated sports commentator Dan Patrick and comedy writer Joel H. Cohen team up with some of America’s greatest comedy writers to tell you everything and nothing about America’s sport.

Few sports have had a more eventful last 50 years than rugby union. Even fewer involve such a range of different cultures, contrasting characters or diverse geographical settings. With the 2023 Rugby World Cup in France and the 200th anniversary of the game’s ‘birth’ on the horizon, Around the World in 80 Minutes sets out to find the game’s most inspiring people and places. Observant, amusing and thought-provoking, the book takes listeners on a global journey to meet key figures from rugby’s ‘golden age’ between 1973 and 2023.

Answered Prayers is a definitive history of the most famous event in British sporting, the triumph of the 1966 England world cup football team and the disastrous effect that victory had on the game.

For five years Peter Ueberroth spearheaded the committee that oversaw the 23rd Olympiad held in Los Angeles, California. While the athletes trained, competed, and qualified, this future baseball commissioner and his committee—primarily comprised of business leaders and entrepreneurs—tackled the financial, political, and logistical problems they faced. Made in America is a detailed, behind-the-scenes look at what Ueberroth and his colleagues encountered on the road to the 1984 games

Who won the first Daytona 500? Fans still debate whether it was midwestern champion Johnny Beauchamp, declared the victor at the finish line, or longtime NASCAR driver Lee Petty, declared the official winner a few days after the race. Author John Havick interviewed scores of people, analyzed film of the race, and pored over newspaper accounts of the event. He uses this information and his deep knowledge of the sport as it worked then to determine what probably happened. But he also tells a much bigger story.

Bruce Lee remains the gold standard that all martial artists are compared to. But could he actually fight? World Champions in karate competition have gone on record to point out that he never once competed in tournaments. Were his martial abilities merely a trick of the camera? For the first time ever, Bruce Lee authority and bestselling author John Little takes a hard look at Bruce Lee's real-life fights to definitively answer these questions with over thirty years of research that took him thousands of miles.

During the height of the Cold War, a group of small-town young men would lead their underdog hockey team from the little country of Czechoslovakia against the Soviet Union, the juggernaut in their sport. As they battled on the ice, the young players would keep their people's quest for freedom alive, and forge a way to fight back against the authoritarian forces that sought to crush them. Freedom to Win tells a story that ranges from iconic moments in history to courageous individual stories.

The GAA is Ireland's largest civil society organisation, woven into the fabric of families and communities - and yet most books about Gaelic games focus on the greatest players and inter-county teams. This is the Life is a book about the 99 per cent: a witty and provocative look at grassroots GAA from the most intelligent and interesting Gaelic games pundit at work today.

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in The Big Time, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators.