Category Archives: Sports

Summer Reading

August is here, and that means all sorts of things. For Braves fans, it means you brace yourself for the Annual August Flop, and sure enough, right on schedule, the swoon has begun. For college football fans, it means the long wait is almost over. And for we happy yet sweating denizens of Charm City, it means breaking out the kayaks for the evening commute after the drenching, frog-strangling storms that drop 3 inches of rain in 20 minutes every afternoon, hard on the heels of three-digit heat indices.

August also means that, despite the unrelenting heat and humidity, summer is winding down. The unofficial end is a mere two weeks away on Labor Day but if you define summer by summer “vacation,” it’s already over at my house, where school started on August 7. It was 96 degrees that day, by the way. There’s lots of things wrong with that, but then nobody asked me if we should start school that early. If you define summer by temperature, summer in Savannah will last at least 3 more months. But let’s not turn this essay into another rant about the weather, shall we?

I’ve always found the notion of “summer reading,” once you’re out of K-12 or college, to be a relatively useless term. What adult has more time to read in summer than in any other season? Unless you are blessed—and I won’t name any names or occupations—to not have to work in the summer, I’ll wager you actually have less time to read in that season than in any other. The kids are out of school and they keep you busy. Longer days mean more time to do things outside and probably less time reading. Weekends are filled with yard work and other more pleasurable outdoor activities. Personally, I find the cooler afternoons and longer nights of autumn and winter to be more conducive to reading, but that’s just me. I suspect the notion of having more time to read in summer comes from “beach reading” that publishers like to promote, and the lofty idea that people take along stacks of books and actually read when they’re on vacation. If you read the rest of the year, you probably read on vacation. If you’re not a reader, you won’t read on the beach or anywhere else you vacate to. Readers read, no matter the season.

But the term “summer” reading also refers to seasonal reading, of course, and this idea has more traction–we read different things at different times of the year. Is that true for you? I wrote an essay for this blog last October about some great books to read around Halloween, and there are any number of books that make great reading during the Christmas season and on cold winter nights. Here’s what I’ve been reading this summer, broadly defined as Memorial Day to Labor Day:

World War I: With the 100^th anniversary of the start of the war upon us this month, there is lots of good new scholarship being published on all aspects of the conflict. Here’s a few that I’ve picked up recently: Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914; Geoffrey Wawro, A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire; David Crane, Empires of the Dead: How One Man’s Vision Led to the Creation of World War I’s War Graves; Britt Buttar, Collision of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front, 1914; Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War; Margaret Macmillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914; and Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War.

This is a just a short list of some of the new stuff that’s out, and if it’s any indication, there’ll be a slew of new books over the next four years to mark the centennial of the Marne, the Somme, Flanders, Verdun, the Argonne, and Versailles, not to mention reassessments of all other aspects of battles, the carnage and personalities involved, and the war on the home front and its aftermath.

I’m giving a couple of upcoming talks on the centennial of the First World War, so I used that as an excuse not to dig into the new books but to re-read three compelling books that I enjoyed the first time around and that I now consider classics: Unknown Soldiers: The Story of the Missing of the First World War (Knopf, 2005) by Neil Hanson; Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I (Avon, 1996) by Stephen O’Shea; and John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (Penguin, 1976). Keegan’s account of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme is the best known, but all three offer riveting accounts of the slaughter of an entire generation and the scar the Great War left on the 20^th century. Hanson’s book in particular highlights how the unprecedented carnage of 37 million casualties changed the way societies memorialize the men who fought and died, and how those memorials institutionalize the trauma of coming to terms with the hundreds of thousands who have no known grave. All are highly recommended as we contemplate the continuing meaning of the Great War in our lives.

The Great Books: In 2008 I subscribed to Easton Press’s list of the “100 Greatest Books Ever Written,” and I read three offerings this summer: Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev; and The Red and the Black by Stendhal. Shelley’s gothic novel, first published in 1818, is not at all like the camp versions served up by Hollywood, which is a real shame. It seems to me that there have been many missed opportunities to get this story about the creation of life and what, in the end, makes us human, on film. I remember the 1973 made-for-TV movie, Frankenstein, the True Story, though critically lampooned, as coming closer to the novel than Boris Karloff ever did. Stendhal’s work is rightly hailed as a groundbreaking novel, one of the first to explore the psychological dimensions of its multi-layered characters. The three books each feature some of the most memorable characters in literature: Victor Frankenstein and his unnamed Creature (not at all like the Golem featured in films); the young Nihilist physician Bazarov in Turgenev’s 1862 novel of generational conflict; and the ambitious climber Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s 1830 realistic classic. Are they three of the greatest books ever written? Read and decide for yourself.

Autobiography: Washington Post book reviewer and Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda is one of my favorite writers and I’ve devoured everything he’s published. He is, in my humble opinion, the best American literary critic writing today; you can find him every Wednesday in the Post, the New York Review of Books, and online on The American Scholar and Barnes and Noble reviews. His books of essays have brought dozens of great reads into my life—new ones and overlooked classics. This summer I came across a copy of his memoir, An Open Book: Growing up in the Heartland (2003), a heartfelt tribute to a lifelong love of reading and the printed word that began in Lorain, Ohio. If you haven’t already, get to know Michael Dirda.

History: Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart (W.W. Norton, 2014) A full review of this book is forthcoming on this blog, but suffice it to say that this is a very controversial book (or will be to many people who read it) and is a full-throated rebuttal to those who insist that the United States was founded by Christians as a Christian nation. Read this one and discuss with your book club if you want to liven things up.

Bedtime Reading: Finally, what to read before turning out the lights? I save the heavy stuff for the early mornings. Clifton Fadiman, he of The Lifetime Reading Plan fame, wrote in his 1955 essay, “Pillow Books,” that bedtime reading should be chosen carefully. “I hold with neither the Benzedrine nor the Seconal school,” he declared. “As for the first, to read the whole night through is to trespass upon nature. The dark hours belong to the unconscious, which has its own rights and privileges. To use the literary lockout against the unconscious is unfair to the dreamers’ union. Hence the wise bed reader, rendering unto Morpheus the things that are Morpheus’, will shun any book that appears too interesting.”

The ideal bedtime book, he says, should neither bore nore excite. Wise advice. So at night this summer I turned to Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife, # 27 in the Perry Mason series, first published in 1945, and containing the usual cast of characters—the erstwhile counselor Perry, his girl Friday (and sometime love interest) Della Street, detective and Mason sidekick Paul Drake, and the pompous and overbearing DA, Hamilton Burger. The literary Perry Mason cracks jokes, smokes, curses, enjoys a drink, and is occasionally profane. Why Raymond Burr was ever cast as television’s Perry Mason, I’ll never know. I find Gardner’s Mason to be much more human than the unbending Burr ever was on screen. All the stories in the Perry Mason series are interesting but easy to put down and pick up the next night without losing your place. Ideal for pillow reading.

Just for fun I tossed in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, a collection of short stories first published in in 1921 in the Strand Magazine. For those of you not blessed to have made their acquaintance, all the stories involve English gentleman/socialite/fop Bertie Wooster, his humble but all-knowing valet Jeeves, and Bertie’s friend and fellow Drones Club member Bingo Little. This was the second collection of Jeeves stories published, following My Man Jeeves, with the celebrated first chapter, “Jeeves Exerts the Old Cerebellum.” Wodehouse was the unparalled master at British Upper Crust Old Boy humor, and his stories have a charm, lightness, and hilarity all their own. There is a whole other universe in Wodehouse’s writing, and it’s all perfect for perusing just before turning out the lights.

Which it’s time to do for this column. Turn the page and enjoy the rest of your summer.

Historic Selfies and Presidential Poo Poo: History in the News

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In case you missed them, here’s a roundup of some interesting stories related to history that have been in the news recently. The freshest advices, foreign and domestic. Enjoy.

Selfies before Selfies: Here’s a story about a cache of photographs that were found of a man who took almost 450 pictures of himself in a photo booth over a number of years. Who is he, and why did he take these pictures? Was he documenting his appearance over time? Was he, as some have suggested, a photo-booth repairman who was simply testing the equipment? Or was he simply taking selfies before the invention of cellphone cameras? This is an exhibit worth seeing.

You Never Write Anymore: An interesting story about a recently-translated letter written by a Greek soldier to his family, complaining that he’s written six letters home with no response. Have they forgotten about him? The letter was written nearly 2,000 years ago.

Tippecanoe Poo: Historians have long thought that President William Henry Harrison literally talked himself to death. He died a month after his 1841 inauguration, where he talked for over an hour in the wet and cold and caught pneumonia. New research shows that perhaps something else got him: Washington’s bad sewage that flowed too close to the White House.

Quiet on the Set: Mickey Rooney celebrated his 93^rd birthday last September and film buffs now have another reason to celebrate: A copy of the silent film that featured his very first starring role, 1927’s Mickey’s Circus, was recently discovered in the Netherlands, along with dozens of other long-lost silent films, and they are all now slated for restoration. Film fans rejoice.

I Got You, Babe: Recently discovered footage of Babe Ruth standing in the New York Yankees dugout was shot on an historic day: June 1, 1925, the day that Lou Gehrig began his streak of 2,130 consecutive games. Baseball fans rejoice, and not just because the season started this week.

Not so fast, my friend: The Brits halted the sale and export of two manuscripts that they deemed irreplaceable cultural treasures, and they’re now housed at the British Museum. It doesn’t say who the buyer was, but probably some wealthy American. Good for them. That’s how they lost the papers of James Boswell (the great biographer of Samuel Johnson) nearly a century ago that are now housed at Yale. But isn’t it ironic that the Brits have had the Rosetta Stone, an Egyptian cultural treasure, safely housed at the British Museum since 1802, and have resisted all calls by the Egyptians to return the stone to them?

Read it and Weep: The National September 11 Memorial Museum opens next month in Manhattan, and some folks are questioning the use of a line from Virgil’s Aeneid that will be on prominent display at the Memorial: “No Day Shall Erase You From the Memory of Time.” But who, exactly, is the “you” referring to in this quote? Read the article to find out. No matter where you stand on this issue, I’m in favor of seeing classical authors like Virgil in the news. If this controversy prompts one person to actually read the Aeneid, that’s a good thing.

Dumb, dumb, dumb: Finally, there’s this little gem, which just confirms that dodo birds are not, in fact, extinct. My mother taught me that if you take something that doesn’t belong to you, it’s stealing. When you spend the $31,000 the bank erroneously deposits into your account, you better hope you look good in orange.

Have a nice day.

Going, Going, Gone

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The news this week that the Atlanta Braves are leaving downtown Atlanta when their lease expires at Turner Field after the end of the 2016 season made me think about the Braves teams I grew up with.

Ted Turner may have called them “America’s Team,” but for most of their time in Atlanta before 1991 they were lovable losers. The Braves played their first Atlanta season after moving from Milwaukee in 1966. In 25 years, they made the playoffs twice, in 1969 and again in 1982.

In between, Braves fans witnessed everything from Chief Noc-A-Homa to “Not Too Shabby” while learning to pronounce names like Pocoroba, Messersmith, and Asselstine. There were a few highlights and some great players like Hank Aaron, Phil Niekro, and Dale Murphy, but the Braves lost more games than any other Major League franchise between 1966 and 1990.

Those teams, of course, played in the old Atlanta Fulton-County Stadium, which was the brainchild of Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr., who promised in his 1961 mayoral campaign to bring major league sports to Atlanta. With financial support from C&S Bank president Mills B. Lane, Jr., they chose a 62-acre site that had been a neighborhood. Since this is a history column, it’s worth noting that it was the neighborhood where Leo Frank lived when he was working at the National Pencil Factory in 1913 when he was arrested for the murder of Mary Phagan.

In February 1964, the city lured the Braves from Milwaukee, city officials broke ground on the new stadium on April 15 of that year, and the “concrete donut,” as critics called Atlanta Stadium, was completed a year later in April 1965 for $18 million.

The Braves began play on schedule in 1966. There were bad games, but there were other milestones at the old Stadium as well: the Beatles concert in 1965, the Braves first National League West championship in 1969, Hank Aaron’s record-breaking home run in 1974, the Braves World Series championship in 1995, and Olympic baseball in 1996. The stadium was demolished in 1997 and the site of the old field is now a Turner Field parking lot.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has said that Turner Field will be torn down when the Braves move. No word yet on whether the outline of the old Atlanta Stadium playing field that now lies in a Turner Field parking lot will be preserved or not. Make no mistake, the site of Hammerin’ Hank’s historic tater in 1974 deserves to be marked and remembered, no matter what happens to the Ted itself after the Bravos head north on I-75.

My very first Braves game was on Saturday, September 29, 1973,the penultimate game of the ’73 season. I was not yet 9 years old and in fourth grade at W.C. Britt Elementary School in Snellville, then a small bedroom community of Atlanta. My parents took my brother and me to see the Braves play the Astros in hopes that we’d also see history: Hank Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth’s homerun record of 714, and Hank stood at 712 entering play that night. After stopping for supper at Jack’s Corral on Highway 78, we headed down to my first major league baseball game.

We were part of a crowd of 17,836 who showed up that evening, and The Hammer almost did it. We had seats on the upper deck of the third base side, and Aaron hit a long drive off Jerry Reuss down the line in left that just barely missed the foul pole. That would have been 713 but wasn’t by only inches. He actually did hit 713 a few innings later, his 40^th of the season, on the way to a 7-0 Braves win behind a complete game shutout by Carl Morton. Hank went 3 for 3, with 3 RBIs, but he came up one dinger short of tying the record that night.

Hank didn’t hit one the next day either , so Braves fans had to wait till the start of the ’74 season for him to tie the record on opening day, April 4, in Cincinnati. I’ve always thought there should be a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown for my 4^th-grade teacher, Mrs. Moon, who turned on our classroom TV that afternoon and allowed us to witness baseball history.

Four days later, Aaron shattered Ruth’s record at home in the Concrete Donut on April 8. It was a 4^th inning shot off Al Downing of the Dodgers, and I watched it on TV, a rare local pre-TBS telecast that featured Milo Hamilton on WSB Channel 2 in Atlanta.

After that first game in 1973, it was nearly three years before I attended another game in person, but I was a baseball lifer. I began watching the World Series in 1973, and have seen the deciding game of every Series since.

In 6^th grade I made straight A’s (which apparently I did quite frequently in my early scholastic career until the equivalent of a head-on and bloody collision with 9^th-grade algebra), and the Braves gave away tickets to three games that season in a “Straight A” ticket program. For all I know they still do this. I remember taking the information home to my Dad, who picked out the teams and games we’d go to. Dad had an eye for the good teams.

First up were the Pittsburgh Pirates on Sunday, June 13, 1976. The Pirates of course had the legendary Willie Stargell at first, and the Candy Man, John Candeleria, started for them on the mound that day, a 6-2 Pirates win.

I can still remember the Braves lineup that day, as I watched nearly every game on TBS after this one: Rowland Office, Lee Lacy, Jimmy Wynn (the “Toy Cannon”), Earl Williams, Tom Paciorek, Ken Henderson, Jerry Royster (“Rooster”), Darrel Chaney, and Phil “Knucksie” Niekro on the mound. That day was historic also because it was the day the Braves acquired from the Giants my soon-to-be favorite player, Willie “Hot Dog” Montanez , to play first base. The Braves got him and three other players for Darrell Evans and Marty Perez. Montanez flipped his bat on the way to the plate, wore colorful wrist bands, snatched fly balls out of the sky with his first baseman’s mitt, and repeatedly tagged opposing players who slid back safely into first on steal attempts, much to their annoyance.

A month later we went to see the Braves play the Big Red Machine, one of the great baseball moments of my life. The Cincinnati Reds had beaten the Red Sox in the previous fall’s World Series and were on their way to a repeat that summer. I saw them in a July doubleheader, and they were all on the field: Pete Rose, Ken Griffey, Joe Morgan, George Foster, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Cesar Geronimo. Andy Messersmith pitched the Braves to a 5-4 win in the opening game, but we lost 6-3 in the nightcap. Hot Dog, however, went 3 for 5, so I was happy. And not one but two games in the same day with the Big Red Machine? What baseball fan wouldn’t be thrilled.

Despite their losing 92 games that season, I stuck with the Braves. The next season, 1977, was among the worst in Braves history. The team lost 101 games, including 17 in a row at in April and May. Things got so bad that season that Ted Turner came down out of the owner’s box and actually managed a game at one point. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn put a stop to that happening again.

To give you some idea of how bad the Braves were, starting pitcher Phil Niekro won 16 games but lost 20 that season, and he would repeat the 20-loss feat two years later by going 21-20. Virtually no manager ever lets a starter lose 20 games in a season anymore. It’s only happened once since 1980 (Mike Maroth with the Tigers in 2003). Knucksie did it twice in three seasons, and he’s in the Hall of Fame.

Finally, at long last, the 1982 season promised to be different. The Braves won the first 13 games coming out of the gate that season and the sky seemed the limit. In typical Braves fashion, however, they played .500 ball for the remaining 149 games, including losing 11 in a row and 15 out of 16 at one point coming down the stretch, and held on by their fingernails to win the National League West by one game over the Dodgers. They got swept by the Cardinals in three games in the NLCS.

The one bright spot in those dreadful years, besides Aaron and Niekro, was # 3, Dale Murphy. Murph was and still is one of the classiest guys who ever put on a baseball uniform, a role model for any young person watching and trying to learn the right way to play the game. Murph made his debut as a catcher, playing 19 games in the ’76 season, before moving to first base and then finally center field. He won back-to-back league MVP awards in ’82 and ’83 and finished his career two homers shy of 400. The fact that he’s not in Cooperstown is a travesty. He proudly represented the team and the city for 15 seasons before they traded him to the Phillies in the middle of the 1990 season.

Everything changed for the Braves in 1991, with the arrival of Terry Pendleton, Sid Bream, Rafael Belliard, closer Juan Berenguer (“Señor Smoke/El Gasolino”) and the return of Bobby Cox in his first full season of his second-go-round as Braves manager. The Braves run of 14 consecutive division titles, five National League pennants, and a World Series championship was the fulfillment of what we all dreamed about during all those dismal years before.

If the Atlanta Stadium years represent one chapter of the Braves, the Turner Field years represent another (though there is some overlap in terms of division and league championships), and now that chapter is coming to a close too. The Braves will move away from their home of 50 years (geographically speaking) when the 2016 season ends, and head north to play in Cobb County, hoping the fans follow with them. That seems to be open to debate at this point.

And what will the new stadium be named? The Braves say they will sell the naming rights, so it won’t be named for Hank Aaron, Phil Niekro, or Dale Murphy, though it should be. Aaron-Niekro-Murphy Stadium has a nice ring to it, and it would be a fitting tribute to three giants of the game, men of class and integrity who played the game the way it was meant to be played and who made following the Braves in those long-ago summers worth every bit of the anguish and heartbreak of losing all those games. Incidentally, the broadcast booth of the new stadium should be name for Skip Carey, Pete Van Wieren, and Ernie Johnson, the radio and TV voices who journeyed with us all the way, and who made it all seem like fun no matter the score.

When the Braves leave downtown Atlanta, something of lasting value will be lost that can’t be tallied up in the won-loss column or in a box score. The memories—and the ghosts—of Capitol Avenue will linger on in the hearts of one Braves fan at least long after the last game at Turner Field is over and the stadium has returned to dust. Hail and farewell. Game called.

Game Called, by Grantland Rice–1956 version

Game Called. Across the field of play
the dusk has come, the hour is late.
The fight is done and lost or won,
the player files out through the gate.
The tumult dies, the cheer is hushed,
the stands are bare, the park is still.
But through the night there shines the light,
home beyond the silent hill.

Game Called. Where in the golden light
the bugle rolled the reveille.
The shadows creep where night falls deep,
and taps has called the end of play.
The game is done, the score is in,
the final cheer and jeer have passed.
But in the night, beyond the fight,
the player finds his rest at last.

Game Called. Upon the field of life
the darkness gathers far and wide,
the dream is done, the score is spun
that stands forever in the guide.
Nor victory, nor yet defeat
is chalked against the players name.
But down the roll, the final scroll,
shows only how he played the game.