Australia Was the Best Modern Olympic Host (Quote of the Day / ‘The Olympic Games’)

If the International Olympic Committee gave awards for hosting the summer games of the past quarter century, China would deserve the booby prize for embarrassments that began with lip sync-ing at the opening ceremony and keep unfolding. What country was the best recent host? The editors of The Olympic Games: Athens 1896–Athens 2004 (DK, 2004) vote for Australia:

“The Sydney 2000 Games were one of the greatest success stories in Olympic history. Over 10,000 athletes from 200 countries delivered the ultimate sporting even in a suberb venue.

“At the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Games, outgoing president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Juan Antonio Samaranch declared to the host nation, ‘I am proud and happy to proclaim that you have presented to the world the best Olympic Games ever.’ Quite a plaudit, but one few would argue with. Everything seemed perfect – the organization, the athletic performance, the setting, the climate …

“The only blot on the Sydney Games was the rash of athletes removed after failing drugs tests – a record total of 35. However, it is undeniable that the Sydney Games were the high watermark of the modern Olympics, and something that future Olympic hosts will have to live up to.”

This comment comes from a publisher that, though well-respected, is based in London www.dk.com. Do you agree with the editors? Or do you think their comments show a Commonwealth bias?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

A Good Sports Book for Middle-School and Older Students

Good news for anyone who is looking for a well-written sports book for middle-school and older students: Phillip Hoose’s Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me (Walker, 176 pp., $10.95, paperback, ages 10 and up) www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/ has come out in paperback. In this lively memoir Hoose www.philliphoose.com remembers when he was in the fourth grade and his cousin once removed, Don Larsen, pitched a perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. Walker Books www.walkerbooks.com/books/catalog.php?key=614 is rightly cross-marketing this book to adults and adolescents, both of whom may especially enjoy its moment-by-moment account of Larsen’s perfect game. The bright new cover art for the paperback edition, shown here, should heighten its appeal for young readers. Perfect, Once Removed was named one of the Top 10 Sports Books of 2007 by Bill Ott for the American Library Association’s Booklist.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Mark Bowden Remembers ‘The Best Game Ever’ and the Birth of Sudden-Death Overtime in National Football League Championship Play

To judge by the Amazon ratings for Black Hawk Down – a total of 672 reviews, not one less than four stars – I’m among the few who thought that Mark Bowden’s account of the bungled 1993 American military raid in Somalia was overrated. So although I’m in no rush to read Bowden’s new book about the first National Football League championship game decided in sudden-death overtime, I’d like to mention the most authoritative review of it that I’ve seen so far.

Jonathan Yardley wrote of The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (Atlantic Monthly, 279 pp., $23) in the Washington Post:

“It’s considerably more than a play-by-play account, though Bowden does manage to build up a surprising amount of suspense. Both pro football and the United States were very different half a century ago, and Bowden understands that this game caught both the league and the nation at a moment of deep and lasting change. … Early in his career Bowden covered professional football for the Philadelphia Inquirer, an experience that serves him well here. His explanations of shifts in the teams’ offensive and defensive strategies are lucid, and he knows enough about the extreme physical and mental demands the game exacts to convey a strong sense of the players’ exhaustion and determination as the game ground toward its conclusion. He isn’t entirely immune to journalistic cliché and at times overwrites, but generally his prose is competent and clear.”

Yardley also says that while Bowden respects the 1958 Giants, “this is a Colt fan’s book.” To read his full review, click here before the Post packs it off an archive:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/06/ST2008060602105.html. A slide show of the game that accompanies the review. The Atlantic Monthy Press site www.groveatlantic.com has additional information.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

When Girls’ Sports Injuries Go Beyond the Soccer Field

On May 11 the New York Times Magazine published a cover story provocatively headlined: “Everyone Wants Girls to Have As Many Opportunities in Sports as Boys. But Can We Live With the Greater Rate of Injuries They Suffer?” www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html. Written by Michael Sokolove, the article focused on soccer injuries, especially ruptures of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Journalist Joan Ryan explores the physical and emotional risks of two other popular sports in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters (Warner, 2000), a chilling exposé of the exploitation of young female gymnasts and skaters. The book grew out of an award-winning series Ryan wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle and became a 1997 made-for-TV movie www.imdb.com/title/tt0119551/.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One of the Year’s Best Books About High School Sports, Mark Kreidler’s ‘Four Days to Glory,’ Returns in a Paperback Edition

Masterly reporting sheds light on an athletic subculture little-known outside the Midwest

You can’t envy parents, teachers and librarians who are looking for sports books for high school students. So many books in the category are cheesy celebrity biographies that foster the worship of false demigods instead of a love of reading or a real understanding of competition. Not Mark Kreidler’s Four Days to Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland (Harper, 285 pp., $13.95, paperback, ages 13 and up), which recently came out in paperback www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/. Two high school wrestlers prepare to compete in the Iowa state championship in this book of masterly reporting that offers a fascinating portrait of a little-known athletic subculture www.markkreidler.com and www.harpercollins.com. Mary Ann Harlan rightly said in School Library Journal: “Teen wrestlers will appreciate a book that speaks to them and respectfully about them, and sports fans may find a new area to appreciate.”

Reviews of books for children or teenagers appear every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews, a site for people who like to read but dislike hype and review inflation. You can find other reviews in the “Children’s Books,” “Young Adult,” “Caldecott Medals” and “Newbery Medals” categories at right.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

Waving a Red-and-White Towel for ‘Veeck — As in Wreck’: The Best Book Ever Written About Cleveland Baseball?

He sent a midget to the plate in St. Louis, inadvertently caused a fan riot in Chicago and brought the first black player, Larry Doby, into the American League in Cleveland

By Janice Harayda

One of the first things I asked my new co-workers after I moved to Ohio to become the book editor of the Plain Dealer was, “What are the best books about Cleveland?” Many people mentioned the memoirs of the most colorful owner in the history of the Cleveland Indians, Veeck — As in Wreck : The Autobiography of Bill Veeck, by Bill Veeck with Ed Linn, with a foreword by Bob Verdi (University of Chicago Press, $16, paperback).

I later learned that ardent baseball fans regard this straight-talking book as one of the best ever written about the sport. And its admirers include the ex-baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who listed it among his five favorites in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

“Bill Veeck’s memoir is an irreverent and funny account of his days as an unorthodox baseball owner — and indeed he did try some silly tricks to draw crowds,” Vincent wrote. “Sometimes he went over the line, as with Eddie Gaedel, the midget he sent up to bat for the St. Louis Browns in 1951, and ‘Disco Demolition Night,’ which turned into a fan riot in 1979, when he owed the Chicago White Sox. But Veeck also made a serious and singular contribution to the game in 1947 when, as the owner of the Cleveland Indians, he brought the first black player, Larry Doby, into the American League. But because Jackie Robinson preceded Doby into the major leagues by a few months, both Doby and Veeck have been somewhat overlooked … Bill Veeck may have been a bit of a wreck, but he deserves much more attention and credit than he has received.”

One sign of the enduring importance of Veeck — As in Wreck is that its latest edition comes from the distinguished University of Chicago Press (which, it’s safe to say, is not going to be publishing Dennis Rodman‘s Bad as I Wanna Be a half century from now). You might say that the book, first published in 1962, is the rare sports memoir for which fans still wave the literary equivalent those red-and-white Tribe towels that you’ve seen if you’ve watched the American League Championship Series. You can read an excerpt from Veeck — As in Wreck on site for the University of Chicago Press: www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/852180.html.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Phillip Hoose Remembers When His Cousin, Don Larsen, Pitched the Only Perfect Game in World Series History

A baseball memoir that speaks both to young fans and those old enough to miss the days when players smoked Camels in the dugout

Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me. By Phillip Hoose. Walker, 176 pp., $19.95.

By Janice Harayda

Baseball books tend to preach to the bleachers. If you don’t understand the infield fly-rule or the job of a short-reliever, you can’t necessarily expect any help from their authors, who typically take a certain amount of knowledge – if not fanaticism – for granted.

Perfect, Once Removed is the rare baseball book that has something for fans at all levels. In this lively memoir Phillip Hoose tells how his cousin once removed, Don Larsen, pitched a perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series and, in doing so, helped him adjust to being a fourth-grader in Speedway, Indiana. The book could have become an exercise in special pleading for a famous relative. But Perfect, Once Removed gives such balanced view of Hoose’s and Larsen’s entwined stories that it may appeal to many people besides baby boomers who love to recall the great Yankee-Dodger games of yore, including a baseball-loving adolescents.

Part of the charm of Perfect, Once Removed is that Hoose respects his fourth-grade views and resists the impulse to correct them in hindsight, though he ends with a catch-up visit with then 76-year-old Larsen. He recalls that in the 1950s, ballplayers endorsed cigarettes so often that he created a scrapbook of the ads:

“To a man, these ballplayers reported that smoking helped them relax. They all enjoyed the mildness of a Camel. A cigarette before a game helped them perform better, and a butt in the locker room afterward helped them unwind. As Mickey Mantle put it, ‘For mildness and flavor, you can’t beat Camels!’ It all made sense to me.”

Hoose isn’t endorsing smoking, just recalling how he reacted to all that puffing by his heroes. And that kind of frankness help to give his book a relevance that extends beyond the personal. Perfect, Once Removed isn’t just family story. It’s a book about the way baseball used to be and a useful antidote to the tendency to idealize the past. If you think steroids are ruining the game, consider this: Would you prefer that ballplayers were still in endorsing Camels in major magazines?

Best line: One of many colorful details in this book involves how the catcher for Larsen’s perfect game celebrated the event: “Yogi Berra promptly went out and had his catcher’s mitt bronzed.”

Worst line: Hoose says that he has re-created some dialogue but that his book is “entirely accurate as to what was said and how it was said.” This claim is generally credible. It is much less so when he says that the Dodger fans on the school playground told him: “Your cousin sucks.” In 1956 they would have said, “Your cousin stinks.”

Editor: George Gibson

Published: October 2006 www.philliphoose.com

Recommendation? An excellent gift for a reader who loves to recall the days of demigods like Mantle, Berra and their teammates. School Library Journal also recommends Perfect, Once Removed for high school students (and it may appeal to some baseball fans as young as 10 or 11). This is a good book to read aloud to sports-loving children too old for picture books, especially moment-by-moment account of Larsen’s perfect game in Chapter 8.

Caveat lector: This review was based on the advance reading edition. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Furthermore: Hoose also wrote the award-winning The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20), a nonfiction book about the ivory-billed woodpecker that appeared on many “Best Books of 2004” lists.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Maybe Check Out This Golf Novel for Father’s Day?

What do great caddies have that others don’t?

I’ve read only the first 20 pages of Billy Mott’s just-published golf novel, The Back Nine (Knopf, $24), about a man who returns to golf as a caddy after 25 years away from the sport. So I’ll save most of my comments on it for later in the week. But you may want to check out the book before then if you’re looking for Father’s Day gift ideas for a golfer who loves to read (or if you’ll be opening the packages and are hoping to avoid getting another tangerine-colored polo shirt).

The first chapters of The Back Nine include this memorable description of what the best caddies have that others don’t:

“The best ones are in control of their wits, able to stay with the shot and think ahead at the same time. They’re admired, revered, and paid for their cool, for the knowledge and ease with which they carry out their tasks. They keep every club clean, are there when needed, and most importantly, know when to leave their player alone. And a good caddy always knows where the ball is; no matter how far off line, deep in the rough or the woods, he’ll find it and within seconds know the play, always aware of his position on the course and what shot to hit. He’ll know if his player should try to run the ball up to the green or just punch out, take his medicine and try to save bogey, maybe hole a putt and make par. ‘No, no,’ he’ll quietly insist. ‘You can’t make birdie. Forget it. Play for par.’ He gives just the right amount of information so his player can swing freely, play to his strengths and avoid his weaknesses. A nervous caddy makes mistakes, says the wrong thing and gets blamed for a bad shot or, worse, the whole round. And in a way, he is responsible. Indecision and lack of clarity are at the root of every bad shot.”

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Paul Hornung and Friends Remember Vince Lombardi

As if we didn’t know it, players and others tell us that he believed in winning

Lombardi and Me: Players, Coaches and Colleagues Talk About the Man and the Myth. By Paul Hornung with Billy Reed. Triumph, 161 pp., $24.95.

This book tells you little about Vince Lombardi that hasn’t been said – and said better – elsewhere. This, of course, is like saying that a book tells you little about Jesus that hasn’t been said better in the Gospels. As the journalist Dave Maraniss reminds us in his contribution to Lombardi and Me, Lombardi was the rare coach who transcended his time and sport.

“During his nine-year tenure with the Green Bay Packers (1959–1967), he did more than build and maintain one of the most colorful and efficient dynasties in the history of the National Football League,” former sports editor Billy Reed writes in the preface. “He became a folk hero, a cultural icon, a symbol of excellence and discipline and all those qualities that define greatness.”

What made him tick? Paul Hornung, the legendary halfback and onetime playboy who was suspended for a season for betting on games, tries to pin it down in this slim collection of interviews with former teammates and others. He has assembled an all-star cast, including such players as Bart Starr, Sam Huff, Jerry Kramer, Sonny Jurgensen, Willie Davis, and Max McGee.

But the men’s comments are often contradictory. Lombardi believed in treating players humanely but refused to let them drink water during practice, even in 90-degree heat, on the premise that dehydration was a sign of “being out of shape.” He believed winning but, while coaching the Washington Redskins, chewed out Jurgensen for throwing a first-and-goal touchdown pass from the four-yard line when the team was behind. “You’ve got to get everyone on the team involved in scoring a touchdown,” he said. “We want the line to be happy. We want the backs to be happy … You can [throw for a touchdown] on the third down, but don’t ever do it on first down again. We want everybody to be involved, not just you and the receiver.” This is interesting but begs the question: Which was more important — winning or keeping the defense happy?

So Lombardi and Me has limited value for anyone seeking a definitive analysis of the man behind mystique. It will no doubt appeal to some hard-core Packers fans and school and other coaches. But its oversized font — at least 16-point, by my guess — may be the biggest draw. Packers fans and school coaches aside, this book may have appeal most to people old enough to remember watching Lombardi lead his team to victory in Super Bowls I and II on a rabbit-eared television set. That large font is as easy on aging eyes as a game-winning Hail Mary pass with three seconds on the clock.

Best line: A quote from Jurgensen: “The coaches today want to choreograph everything. They call plays and don’t give the quarterback an opportunity to think through games the way we did. They’re mechanics now. They’re made it a coaches’ game instead of a players’ game. That’s too bad. A quarterback in the huddle has a better feel for the game than a coach on the sidelines.”

Worst line: Paul Hornung on Frank Gifford, whom Lombardi coached at the Giants: “I used to kid him about being Mr. Kathy Lee Gifford.” You’re a card, Paul.

Recommended if … you’re the sort of Packers fan who would schedule your own wedding around Green Bay games.

Published: September 2006.

Consider reading instead: Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer (Doubleday, 2006), by Jerry Kramer and Dick Schaap, just reissued after a decade out of print in an edition with a foreword by Jonathan Yardley. The revelations in Kramer’s classic diary of the Packers’ 1967 season may seem tame in the age of the Balco steroids scandal. But Instant Replay is the real thing, a trailblazer among inside-the-locker-room chronicles and still one of the best books ever written about professional football.

Posted by Janice Harayda

© 2006 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.