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A new preface updates this richly detailed look at the major role sport played in shaping Pittsburgh's black community from the Roaring Twenties through the Korean War. Rob Ruck reveals how sandlot, amateur, and professional athletics helped black Pittsburgh realize its potential for self-organization, expression, and creativity.
Born to an Irish Catholic working-class family on the Northside of Pittsburgh, Art Rooney (1901–88) dabbled in semipro baseball and boxing before discovering that his real talent lay not in playing sports but in promoting them. Though he was at the center of boxing, baseball, and racing in Pittsburgh and beyond, Rooney is best remembered for his contribution to the NFL, in particular to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the team he founded in 1933. As Rooney led the team in the early years, he came to be known as football’s greatest loser; his influence, however, was instrumental in making the NFL the best-run league in American pro sports. The authors show how Rooney saw professional football—...
An oral history about the life of Steve Nelson, the immigrant teenage son of a Croatian miller, and later an American Communist Party organizer. Follows Nelson's varied career, and his rise in the ranks of the Party. Tells the inside story of the workings of the Party, from a small group of Detroit autoworkers to the Party leaders in New York.
The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the twentieth century eliminated almost all African Americans from white organized sports, forcing black athletes to form their own teams, organizations, and events. This separate sporting culture, explored in the twelve essays included here, comprised much more than athletic competition; these "separate games" provided examples of black enterprise and black self-help and showed the importance of agency and the quest for racial uplift in a country fraught with racialist thinking and discrimination.
Before Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball in 1947, black and white ballplayers had been playing against one another for decades—even, on rare occasions, playing with each other. Interracial contests took place during the off-season, when major leaguers and Negro Leaguers alike fattened their wallets by playing exhibitions in cities and towns across America. These barnstorming tours reached new heights, however, when Satchel Paige and other African- American stars took on white teams headlined by the irrepressible Dizzy Dean. Lippy and funny, a born showman, the native Arkansan saw no reason why he shouldn’t pitch against Negro Leaguers. Paige, who feared no one and chased a...
Practiced and watched by billions, sport is a global phenomenon. Sport history is a burgeoning sub-field that explores sport in all forms to help answer fundamental questions that scholars examine. This volume provides a reference for sport scholars and an accessible introduction to those who are new to the sub-field.
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The Black Fives is a groundbreaking, timely history of the largely unknown early days of Black basketball, bringing to life the trailblazing players, teams, and impresarios who pioneered the sport. “For a game that has meant so much to the world, Claude Johnson somehow presents a definitive account for a part of basketball’s history that for so long was kept away from us. Claude is a superhero storyteller, and this book is a bona fide superpower.” —Justin Tinsley, author of It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him From the introduction of the game of basketball to Black communities on a wide scale in 1904 to the racial integration of the NBA in 1950, dozens of African A...
Winner of the Telegraph Sports Book Awards Rugby Book of the Year Among the best stories in modern British team sport has been the rise of Exeter Chiefs. How, exactly, did an unfashionable rugby team from Devon emerge from obscurity to become the double champions of England and Europe? What makes them tick? What are their secrets? Exe Men is a compelling story of regional pride, fierce rural identity, larger-than-life local heroes, remarkable characters, epic resilience, big city snobbery, geographical separation, steepling ambition and personal sacrifice which will strike a chord with anyone who enjoys a classic underdog story. This is not any old rugby book, it is the inside story of Exeter's incredible journey from the edge of nowhere to the summit of the English and European club game.