Showing results by publisher "University Press Audiobooks" in Sports & Outdoors

The home run is the single most dramatic moment in baseball. Often it has been the exclamation point that appears at the end of a game, a season, a playoff, or a World Series. For fans, certain images such as that of Carlton Fisk urging his shot fair over Green Monster or of Kirk Gibson limping around the bases are engraved in memory. From Babe Ruth to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, the author tells of the stories of what he has selected as the thirty most memorable home runs.

Each year on the first Saturday in May, the world turns its attention to the twin spires of Churchill Downs for the high-stakes excitement of the "greatest two minutes in sports," the Kentucky Derby. No American sporting event can claim the history, tradition, or pageantry that the Kentucky Derby holds. For more than 130 years, spectators have been fascinated by the magnificent horses that run the Louisville track. Thoroughbreds such as Secretariat and Barbaro have earned instant international fame.

Smart Ball follows Major League Baseball's history as a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business. MLB's challenge has been to market its popular mythology as the national pastime with pastoral, populist roots while addressing the management challenges of competing with other sports and diversions in a burgeoning global economy. Baseball researcher Robert F. Lewis II argues that MLB for years abused its legal insulation and monopoly status.

In From Sandlots to the Super Bowl, Craig R. Coenen recounts the NFL's ascension from a cash-strapped laughingstock to a perennial autumn obsession for millions of sports fans. It offers an in-depth summary of the NFL's early years and its struggles to build an identity. This book approaches the history of the National Football League not only with stats and scores but with what happened beyond the gridiron.

The story of black professional baseball provides a remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history: the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional baseball teams and leagues operated for decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.

Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport for nearly a century. Reconstructing the culture and experience of early baseball through a careful reading of the sporting press, baseball guides, and the correspondence of the player-manager Harry Wright, Warren Goldstein discovers the origins of many modern controversies during the game's earliest decades.The 20th Anniversary Edition includes information about the changes that have occurred in the history of the sport since the 1980s.

Biking from Oregon to Maine is no small feat, especially for two newly retired women who carry everything they need for three months, powered only by the strength of their legs and a desire for adventure. Alice Honeywell and Bobbi Montgomery invite listeners to follow their ride by bicycle across the United States, as they face scorching sun, driving rain, buffeting winds, equipment failures, killer hills, wild fires, and even a plague of grasshoppers.

In this concise social history of golf in the United States from the 1880s to the present, George B. Kirsch tracks the surprising growth of golf as a popular, mainstream sport, in contrast to the stereotype of golf as a pastime enjoyed only by the rich elite.While golf retains a strong association with upper-class, male-dominated, socially exclusive country clubs, it has also boasted a dedicated following among Americans from different social classes, ethnic backgrounds, races, and genders.

In the 1930s, Monroe, Louisiana, was a town of 26,000 in the northeastern corner of the state, an area described by the 

New Orleans Item as the "lynch law center of Louisiana." Yet for a few years in the early 1930s, this unlikely spot was home to the Monarchs, a national-caliber Negro League baseball team. Crowds of Black and White fans eagerly filled their segregated grandstand seats to see the players who would become the only World Series team Louisiana would ever generate, and the first from the American South.

Baseball's Natural is John Theodore's true account of the slick-fielding first baseman who played for the Cubs and the Phillies in the 1940s and became immortalized in baseball lore as the inspiration for Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Eddie Waitkus grew up in Boston and fought in the Pacific theater in World War II. Following the war, Waitkus became one of the most popular players of his era. In 1949, with his career on the rise, his life changed dramatically in a Chicago hotel when a 19-year-old shot him in the chest.

In descriptions of athletes, the word “hero” is bandied about and liberally attached to players with outstanding statistics and championship rings. Gil Hodges: A Hall of Fame Life is the story of a man who epitomized heroism in its truest meaning, holding values and personal interactions to be of utmost importance throughout his life - on the diamond, as a marine in World War II, and in his personal and civic life.

In Pinstripe Nation, Will Bishop explores the myriad of ways in which the Yankees and their successes (or spectacular failures) became interwoven with the nation's larger cultural narrative. As this informative and entertaining audiobook amply shows, the Yankees have, through all their ups and downs, retained a hold on the American imagination unmatched by any other sports franchise.

Throughout the NCAA Tournament’s history, underdogs, Cinderella stories, and upsets have captured the attention and imagination of fans. Making March Madness is the story of this premiere tournament, from its early days in Kansas City, to its move to Madison Square Garden, to its surviving a point-shaving scandal in New York and taking its games to different sites across the country.

New York has long been both America’s leading cultural center and its sports capital, with far more championship teams, intracity World Series, and major prizefights than any other city. New York Sports collects the work of 14 leading sport historians, providing new insight into the social and cultural history of America’s major metropolis and of the United States.

Reflective and literary and also entertaining and funny, David Stevenson's accounts move across the great climbing locations of the Western United States, with forays into the spires of the Alps and slip freely in time from the author's childhood when he could not wait to head west to his adulthood, with a wife and two sons, in which he still feels compelled by a longing to scale the heights.

The Players League, formed in 1890, was a short-lived professional baseball league controlled and owned, in part, by the players themselves, a response to the National League’s salary cap and “reserve rule” which bound players for life to one particular team. Led by John Montgomery Ward, the Players League was a star-studded group that included most of the best players of the National League who bolted, not only to gain control of their wages but also to share ownership of the teams.

The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture - both at home and abroad - against communism.

The 1890s was the peak of the American bicycle craze, and consumers, including women, were buying bicycles in large numbers. Despite critics who tried to discourage women from trying this new sport, women took to the bike in huge numbers, and mastery of the bicycle became a metaphor for women’s mastery over their lives. Spurred by the emergence of the “safety” bicycle and the ensuing cultural craze, women’s professional bicycle racing thrived in the United States from 1895 to 1902.

The hardening of racial lines during the first half of the 20th 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 12 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. 

As Don Shula and Johnny Unitas elevated the brutal game of football, the world around them clashed about Vietnam, civil rights, and sex. Collision of Wills looks at the complicated relationship between Don Shula, the league's winningest coach of all time, and his star player Johnny Unitas, and how their secret animosity fueled the Colts in an era when their losses were as memorable as their victories.