Baseball historian and Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) contributor Eric Vickrey (" Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything ") joins the podcast for a look back at one of the worst tragedies in the history of US pro sports. From the dust jacket of Vickrey's new book: "On June 24, 1946, a bus carrying the Spokane Indians baseball team crashed to the bottom of a deep ravine in Washington state’s Cascade mountain...
May 20, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 348
We celebrate the 94th birthday of legendary Soccer America columnist Paul Gardner ( The Simplest Game: The Intelligent Fan's Guide to the World of Soccer ; Soccer Talk: Paul Gardner on Soccer ) with this special archive re-release (and our 6th-ever episode!) from 2017. The universally acknowledged "dean" of American soccer writers waxes nostalgic on his unlikely journey from fledgling British pharmacist to the States' most persistently influential commentator on the "beautiful game." Gardner: Re...
May 13, 2024•1 hr 34 min
During the late 1960s, Dean Tolson (" Power Forward: My Journey from Illiterate NBA Player to a Magna Cum Laude Master's Degree ") emerged as a standout prep basketball talent during his junior and senior years at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri. His prowess on the court attracted the attention of a bevy of college recruiters, leading him to accept a full scholarship offer from the nearby University of Arkansas. Despite literally not knowing how to read or write, Tolson defied signi...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 347
It's our first journey into the chaotically exciting history of "professional" roller derby with former skater and long-time keeper-of-the-flame Scott Stephens (" Rolling Thunder: The Golden Age of Roller Derby & the Rise and Fall of the L.A. T-Birds" ). From the moment he laced up his first pair of roller skates at age six in mid-1960s Los Angeles, roller derby became more than just a sport to Stephens – it became his passion. In the midst of the craze sweeping through the city, Stephens fo...
Apr 29, 2024•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 346
It's a special mea culpa episode this week, as we welcome back Szczecin University (Poland) history professor and Episode 289 guest Łukasz Muniowski ( Turnpike Team: A History of the New Jersey Nets 1977-2012 ) for a deep dive into the drama of the NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies move to Memphis in 2001 - and an assessment of the winners and losers some 23+ years since. While Muniowski's current title on the topic ( The Grizzlies Migrate to Memphis: From Vancouver Failure to Southern Success ) has bee...
Apr 22, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 345
[ A dip into the archives for a one of our first-ever episodes from 2017 - by request!] Author Matt Algeo ( Last Team Standing: How the Steelers and the Eagles – "The Steagles" – Saved Pro Football During World War II ) joins Tim Hanlon all the way from Maputo, Mozambique to discuss the marriage of convenience that literally saved the National Football League from collapse in 1943. Algeo describes how a desperate Art Rooney scrambled to save his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise, depleted by wartime...
Apr 14, 2024•56 min
Former ESPN ad researcher, and current Elon University professor of communications and sport management David Bockino ( Game On: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out, and Got Personal with Billions of Fans ) helps us trace the evolution of the sports media industry - with historical points of interest both obvious (e.g., the 1958 NFL Championship Game; " Sports Illustrated " magazine; ABC's " Monday Night Football ;" the 1979 launch of cable's ESPN); and subtle (1967's live multinational " Our Wor...
Apr 08, 2024•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 344
We reach back into the vaunted Good Seats library stacks this week for a deep dive into one of Tim's favorite sports reference books - Roadside Baseball: The Locations of America's Baseball Landmarks - with its (prodigious non-fiction) author Chris Epting . Now in its third edition, Roadside is everything you'd imagine from the title: a detailed, geographic cataloging of over 500 important events in North American baseball history, including historical data, trivia, photographs, and lore - highl...
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 343
Sharing something special, an episode of the new podcast "Ways to Win" - where coaches Craig Robinson and John Calipari use their on-court wisdom to solve off-court problems. In this first episode (recorded before the start of the NCAA basketball tournament!), there's no better way to kick off March Madness than with President Barack Obama (and Craig’s favorite brother-in-law), who drops by to break down his bracket. Find out who’s in his Final Four and how far he thinks Coach Cal’s Wildcats wil...
Mar 26, 2024•52 min
We bust some brackets this week in honor of the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, with a look back at the old East Coast Athletic Conference and the coaching cradle of city of Boston - with return ( Episode 237 ) guest Clayton Trutor (" Boston Ball: Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun, Gary Williams, and the Forgotten Cradle of Basketball Coaches "). Before the formation of the original Big East Conference in 1979, much of DI college basketball in the US Northeast and Mid-Atlantic was part of a ...
Mar 25, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 342
We squint hard this week for a look into the story of American "professional" wrestling's formative years - with pop culture writer Jon Langmead ( Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling ). Langmead takes us inside the raucous period roughly between the mid-1870s to the early-1940s - where genuine competitive wrestlers and opportunistic amusement-minded promoters (both heavily influenced by the country's booming carnival circuit) together codified...
Mar 18, 2024•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 341
Harper's Contributing Editor and novelist/historian extraordinaire Kevin Baker (" The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City ") brings his blended affection for (and evocative portrayals of) both "The Big Apple" and the "National Pastime" - to make a compelling case for New York City as the rightful center of the baseball universe. From Alan Moores' review in Booklist : "Baseball fans beyond Gotham’s gravitational pull might bristle at the notion that New York was the epicenter of th...
Mar 11, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 340
It's a celebration of women's hoops this week, as we look back at the "early days" of the Women's National Basketball Association - including stops with the oft-forgotten Utah Starzz and San Antonio Silver Stars - with three-time league all-star Marie Ferdinand-Harris ( Transformed: The Winning Side of Losing ). A first-round pick in the WNBA's fifth-ever draft in 2001, Ferdinand was a dominant shooting guard at LSU prior to her 8th-overall selection by Utah - a formidable presence inside the pa...
Mar 04, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 339
It's a "retcon" special this week, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the most colorful and persistent franchises in American pro soccer history - with a return visit from Episode 40 guest Gary Singh ( The Unforgettable San Jose Earthquakes: Momentous Stories On & Off the Field ). As one of four West Coast expansion teams (along with the Los Angeles Aztecs, Seattle Sounders and Vancouver Whitecaps) added for the North American Soccer League’s breakthrough 1974 season, the origina...
Feb 26, 2024•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 338
Veteran Minnesota sportswriter Kevin Allenspach ( Mirage of Destiny: The Story of the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars ) takes to the ice with us this week, as we look back at one of the most improbable playoff runs in NHL history - one that came the closest to giving the self-professed "State of Hockey" its first Stanley Cup championship - a title that still eludes the region to this day. Throughout much of the 1990-91 season, the Minnesota North Stars were among the worst-performing clubs in the ...
Feb 19, 2024•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 337
We celebrate the launch of the new " MISL 1980s: The Story of Indoor Soccer " Substack series with its author and return ( Episode 31 ) guest Tim O'Bryhim (" Make This Town Big: The Story of Roy Turner and the Wichita Wings " & " God Save the Wings "). O'Bryhim's long-form pieces promise to bring to light myriad stories from the legendary original Major Indoor Soccer League - a pioneering pro soccer circuit that remains surprisingly under-chronicled, despite its outsized influence on the gam...
Feb 12, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 336
Iowa baseball chronologist Steve Dunn (" ' Pug,' 'Fireball,' and Company: 116 Years of Professional Baseball in Des Moines, Iowa ") joins for a surprisingly rich journey into the history of professional baseball in the Hawkeye State's largest city - currently home to the Diamond Baseball Holdings-owned Triple-A affiliate of the National League's Chicago Cubs. Besides today's Iowa Cubs, the city of Des Moines has been home to minor league baseball in various forms since 1887 - featuring a long li...
Feb 05, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 335
[ A dip into the archives for a fan favorite from 2019 - featuring a show-closing ode to the late, great 70s' TV game show " Celebrity Bowling "! ] + + + We hit the lanes this week to delve into the fascinating story of the nation’s first and only attempt at a professional team bowling league – a seemingly anachronistic idea by today’s standards, but a concept that made total sense in the early 1960s when pro bowling was in ascendance and the sport was seemingly everywhere on television. Bowlers...
Jan 29, 2024•1 hr 35 min
Valdosta State University history professor (and Episode 244 guest) Tom Aiello (" Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South ") returns after a two-year absence - for an enlightening look at the curious cultural history of the city of Atlanta's awkward relationship with professional hockey. In his new book " White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey ," Aiello interestingly juxtaposes the National Hockey League's aggressive expansion in the late 1960s/early 1970s (includ...
Jan 22, 2024•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 334
We buckle up this week for a wild and revelatory ride across 50+ years of big-time soccer in the United States with one of the biggest unsung heroes of the American game - and unquestionably, one of its most prominent "keepers of the flame." The professional and personal life journey of "Soccer Tom" Mulroy (" 90 Minutes with the King: How Soccer Saved My Life ") virtually parallels the 1970s-to-1990s boom-bust-and-boom-again roller coaster of soccer's early modern history in the US - and today t...
Jan 15, 2024•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 333
We turn back the clock 48 years ago this week for a revisit of one of the most consequential contests in the history of the National Hockey League - with sports historian Ed Gruver (" The Game That Saved the NHL: The Broad Street Bullies. the Soviet Red Machine, and Super Series '76 "). The dust jacket of Gruver's new book sums it up thusly: "In late 1975 and early 1976, at the height of the Cold War, two of the Soviet Union’s long-dominant national hockey teams traveled to North America to play...
Jan 08, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 332
It's the adventure-filled story of how a late-60s-era Scottish top-league footballer helped start the first-ever professional soccer circuit in the then-British colony of Hong Kong - punctuated by an unexpected off-season loan to one of the most forgotten franchises in North American Soccer League history. Derek Currie (" When 'Jesus' Came to Hong Kong: The Remarkable Story of the First European Football Star in Asia ") joins us live and direct from his home in Bangkok,Thailand for an anecdote-r...
Jan 01, 2024•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 331
We press the rewind button on a most interesting 2023, and peer ahead into the uncharted waters of 2024 with our fourth-annual(-ish) Holiday Roundtable Spectacular - featuring three of our favorite fellow defunct sports enthusiasts: Andy Crossley ( Fun While It Lasted & Episode 2 ); Paul Reeths ( StatsCrew.com , OurSportsCentral.com & Episode 46 ); and Steve Holroyd ( Crossecheck , Philly Classics & Episodes 92 , 109 , 149 , 188 & 248 ). Takes of varying temperatures fly as we re...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 330
After last week's ugly, team-record 63-21 drubbing by the Las Vegas Raiders, and the subsequent dismissal of its head coach and general manager - it's been a (yet another) rough season for the NFL's Los Angeles Chargers. While family owner/scion Dean Spanos tries (again) to plot a plan forward, we look nostalgically back to the franchise's early years in San Diego as one of the charter entries in the iconoclastic American Football League - an era that produced the club's (still) one-and-only cha...
Dec 18, 2023•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 329
We adjust our TV antenna rabbit ears back to the late 1970s for the origin story of one of the most influential firms in modern-day sports media - with Rick and Dee Ray, the founders of televised college sports juggernaut Raycom Sports . In their new George Hirthler-penned memoir " Unstoppable: A Story of Love, Faith and the Power Couple Who Ignited the College Sports Broadcasting Boom ," the Rays rewind the videotape to a time when a new technology called "cable" was still in its infancy, and t...
Dec 11, 2023•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 328
The 1960s were a tumultuous, but crucial period in the development of professional soccer in the United States and Canada - with teams from Scotland, of all places, playing a particularly interesting role. The dividing line for the modern North American pro game, of course, was the breakthrough, near-live (two-hour-delayed) NBC-TV network telecast of the 1966 World Cup final between eventual champion England and West Germany - the first-ever national standalone broadcast of the sport. Prior to t...
Dec 04, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 327
[By popular demand, an archive re-release of Episode 321 guest and " The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America " author Michael MacCambridge - from his first appearance on the show from March 2017!] Sports author/historian Michael MacCambridge (" Lamar Hunt: A Life in Sports ") joins Tim Hanlon to discuss the legacy of Lamar Hunt – the most unlikely of sports executive pioneers – and the outsized role he played in modernizing 1960s pro football into the enduring American sports j...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr 20 min
11-year pro football offensive lineman and budding Renaissance man Steve Wright (" Aggressively Human: Discovering Humanity in the NFL, Reality TV, and Life ") helps us check off a few new boxes in our obsessive quest for forgotten sports franchise completism. Before his post-career exploits as the 10th-place finisher in the 22nd season of the CBS reality competition series " Survivor " (" Survivor: Redemption Island "), and as the inventor of pioneering sideline cooling-mist tech firms Cloudbur...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 326
Veteran Tennis.com writer, Racquet Magazine columnist & " Three - A Tennis Show " podcast host Joel Drucker (" Jimmy Connors Saved My Life ") stops by to drop some serious knowledge on how the decade of the 1970s transformed the sport of professional tennis into the global juggernaut it is today - including pivotal turning points such as: The groundbreaking World Championship Tennis (WCT) and Virginia Slims Circuit tours that brought standardized scheduling, big-time media exposure and unpre...
Nov 13, 2023•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 325
Football biographer Mike Richman ( " George Allen: A Football Life " ) joins us for a decades-long journey back into the old-school NFL (and USFL) exploits of one of pro football's most intense and enigmatic sideline characters. From the dust-jacket of " A Football Life ": " George Allen was a fascinating and eccentric figure in the world of football coaching. His remarkable career spanned six decades, from the late 1940s until his sudden death in 1990 at the age of seventy-three. Although he ne...
Nov 06, 2023•1 hr 40 min•Ep. 324
