Big leagues :professional baseball, football, and basketball in national memory
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 453-503) and index.

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 basketball did not start with Hank Luisetti. Here, too, is the history of the black ballplayer in America, going back to such unknown slave athletes as Preely Coleman and Green Cumby. Dozens of black baseball players made it into organized ball in the late 1800s before exclusion made the Negro leagues necessary. The black presence in football can be first noted in 1892, when William H. Lewis was named an All-American at Harvard, and in basketball it can be traced to the St. Christopher's 1911 team in New York. As early as 1940, a black sportswriter was claiming white men can't jump; and a new interpretation of Branch Rickey's reintegration of baseball in 1946 is drawn from previously unpublished materials in his papers at the Library of Congress. In addition to discussing the phenomena of the fan and of franchises so successful they acquired a nationwide following, the book also examines the "big money" explosion of the last two decades, the effect of TV incomes and exposure, players' unions and strikes, the rise of the National Basketball Association in the 1980s, and considerations of the future in light of the past