Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Sports History

Each November, about a hundred people with paper poppies pinned to their coats gather around a memorial in Edinburgh. They're there to commemorate the more than a dozen members of the local football team, Heart of Midlothian - almost every member of its starting lineup and many of its backup players - who went to war. A Bigger Field Awaits Us tells the little-known but poignant story of a group of Scottish athletes and their fans who went to war together - and the stories of the few who made it home.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.

As a new decade dawned, 2020 was supposed to be the best year to be a wrestling fan. Few in the industry realized that in China, a mysterious virus had begun to spread. By the time a pandemic was declared in March, the business—and the world—was in disarray. Still, when everything else shut down, wrestling never went away. The entire time, New York Times bestselling author and historian Keith Elliot Greenberg was chronicling the scene, juxtaposing pro wrestling developments with actual news events like the U.S. presidential election and Brexit.

You Are Looking Live! is about the genesis, success, and magic of a live television show that in 1975 captured the excitement of the country and launched four magnetic personalities to stardom: Brent Musburger, Phyllis George, Irv Cross, and Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder. It was the first NFL studio show to go live and the first to have both a Black and female cohost. Those four personalities battled each other and the competition, and America loved them for it. This is the story of how they got there, their drama and front-page headlines, and what happened after the magic ended.

The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular memory: "Mean" Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth.

In a mere twelve months, between May 2020 and May 2021, horse racing's most recognizable face—Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert—had five horses that failed postrace drug tests. Among those was the 2021 Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit. While the incident was a major scandal in the Thoroughbred racing world, it was only the latest in a series of drug-related infractions among elite athletes. Milton C. Toby addresses the historical and contemporary context of the Thoroughbred industry's most pressing issue.

Peter Golenbock brings to life baseball greats from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s through timeless stories told straight from the players themselves. Like the enduring classic The Glory of Their Times, this book features the reminiscences of baseball legends, pulled from hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the author. The players interviewed were All-Stars, Hall of Famers, and heroes to many, and their impact on the national pastime is still seen to this day. Baseball history comes alive, offering a fascinating account of the golden age of baseball.

Each week, when Sports Illustrated's 21 million readers open up their magazine, many turn right to the last page - because that's where to find SI's most popular feature: the Life of Reilly column, written by best-selling author Rick Reilly. This new collection includes 100 of Reilly's favorite columns from the last six years, along with an introduction by Lance Armstrong.

Take a rollicking tour through the sports world of 1996, when debuts, comebacks, movies, and pop culture crossover changed the sports landscape forever. From college to the Olympics to the pros; from the NBA to golf, tennis, and boxing, 1996 was home to athletes and teams who were among the best marketed, most beloved, colorful, and greatest in history. Sportswriter and author Jon Finkel uncovers the stories behind the stories while interviewing a who's who of '96ers to reveal in thrilling detail how their collective influence on sports and pop culture still resonates to this day.

Golfing With Dad is a heartwarming collection of golf's best players' favorite memories with their fathers and how those memories shaped them not only as players but as the men and women they are today. Many professional golfers have been greatly influenced by their fathers, and some of the very best have contributed interviews to this special book, edited by longtime Golf magazine editor David Barrett.

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy, brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman to lecture at the Sorbonne, and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London.

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.

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.

Marion Motley was recognized as one of the gridiron's most outstanding players when he was enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1968. His legacy as one of four Black players to reintegrate pro football in 1946 helped blaze a path for Black athletes in the highest echelons of professional sports. This book tells Motley's story of adversity, personal tragedy, and triumphs using archival interviews and new interviews with historians, friends, and descendants.

In Written in the Snows, renowned local skiing historian Lowell Skoog presents a definitive and visually rich history of the past century of Northwest ski culture, from stirring and colorful stories of wilderness exploration to the evolution of gear and technique. He traces the development of skiing in Washington from the late 1800s to the present, covering the beginnings of ski resorts and competitions, the importance of wild places in the Olympic and Cascade mountains (including Oregon's Mount Hood), and the friluftsliv, or open-air living spirit, of backcountry skiing.

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.

Before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, there were only nineteen men, throughout history, who played in the Major Leagues of baseball and in the National Football League, in the same season. Only one man from that group, Walter French, can lay claim to having played for a World Series winner and an NFL Championship team. In 1925, he starred for the Pottsville (PA) Maroons in their win over the Chicago Cardinals, in what was believed to be the NFL championship game, only to see the title stripped by a league office decision, a controversial move still being argued about today.

While sportswriters rushed into Major League Baseball locker rooms to talk with players, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn barred the lone woman from entering along with them. That reporter, twenty-six-year-old Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke, charged Kuhn with gender discrimination, and after the lawyers argued Ludtke v. Kuhn in federal court, she won. Her 1978 groundbreaking case affirmed her equal rights, and the judge's order opened the doors for several generations of women to be hired in sports media.

From 1976 to 1978, the Cornell men's lacrosse team went on a tear. Winning two national championships and posting an overall record of 42-1, the Big Red, coached by Richie Moran, were the class of the NCAA game. Christian Swezey tells the story of the rise of this dominant lacrosse program. Pulling from interviews with more than ninety former coaches and players from Cornell and its rivals, We Showed Baltimore paints a vivid picture of lacrosse in the 1970s and how Moran and the Big Red helped create the game of today.

During the 1980s, Black athletes and other athletes of color broadened the popularity and profitability of major college televised sports by infusing games with a "Black style" of play. At a moment ripe for a revolution in men's college basketball and football, clashes between "good guy" white protagonists and bombastic "bad boy" Black antagonists attracted new fans and spectators. And no two teams in the 1980s welcomed the enemy's role more than Georgetown Hoya basketball and Miami Hurricane football. The Hoyas and the 'Canes made the bad-boy image look good. Pop culture took notice.