Big Leagues: Professional Baseball, Football, and Basketball in National Memory

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Big Leagues is, quite simply, one of the freshest, most original, most informative and entertaining books ever written about sports. Taking as its subject America's three favorite professional team sports - baseball, football, and basketball - it traces their evolution from unlikely beginnings to their present status as multibillion-dollar businesses that still manage to capture the passion and imagination of Americans from every walk of life. Starting with the very first chapter, "Going Airborne," it both resurrects forgotten heroes and provides new insights into established superstars. As author Stephen Fox points out, the jumpshot in basketball was invented over sixty years ago by John Cooper of Kentucky and Glenn Roberts of Virginia; in the 1920s Benny Friedman, first at the University of Michigan and then in the National Football League, was the major pioneer of the forward pass; and Babe Ruth was merely returning baseball to an earlier time when he made the home run a highlight of the game. We love these sports, Fox argues, because they evolve within long, repeating cycles that leave them stable at their cores. Ballplayers, like their games, don't change much. They remain forever young, children with a ball, retaining childlike attitudes toward sex and drink and drugs, as well as toward superstitions and practical jokes. The off-the-field escapades of nineteenth-century baseball heroes John Clarkson and King Kelly merely showed the way for shenanigans that make headlines today. Three chapters trace the origins and early histories of the games, with startling contradictions of accepted wisdom. Modern baseball began not in New York City in the 1840s but in Rochester, New York, two decades earlier. Football dates back at least to the early 1800s when Sir Walter Scott not only presided over a match but wrote a poem in tribute to it. The practices of Yale's legendary football maven Walter Camp could put today's recruiters to shame. One-handed shooting in baske

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This collection of nine original essays on America's major spectator sports by the author of Blood and Power contains much information that even dedicated fans are unlikely to know. In the first piece, ``Going Airborne,'' Fox makes the point that all three games increased their popularity when they got the ball off the ground via the home run, forward pass and jump shot. Other chapters examine fandom, the impact of black athletes in speeding up game play and what Fox terms ``National Teams,'' the Yankees of the '20s and '30s, the Green Bay Packers and the Boston Celtics of the '60s. He gives brief but nonetheless comprehensive histories of the three sports and concludes with ``Big Money,'' showing the effects of booze, drugs and unlimited, freely available sex on individuals from economically deprived backgrounds. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (Oct.)

Library Journal