October 2, 2025: The Thrilla in Manila: Joe Frazier and Boxing Villains

[50 years ago this week, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in Manila for their third and final professional boxing bout. So this week on the blog I’ll step into the ring with posts on a handful of contexts for that significant sports story, leading up to a tribute to one of our best sports scholars!]

In honor of Joe Frazier, who from what I can tell was just a really good boxer but because of the fascination with Ali became a legendary boxing villain, a few other instances of such adversaries in boxing and American history:

1)      Jim Jeffries: As I traced in that post, it was to white former champion Jeffries that the lonely eyes of Jack London and other white supremacists turned in their (unsuccessful) attempts to dethrone world heavyweight champ Jack Johnson. It doesn’t seem to me that Jeffries was himself particularly racist toward Johnson, at least not per extensive coverage of their July 4^th, 1910 fight like that in this post; but he unquestionably symbolized that white supremacist, villainous vision of the fight, the sport, and the whole nation (as reflected by his American flag boxing trunks).

2)      The Two Maxes (Baer and Schmeling): You apparently can’t have an iconic American boxing legend without a notable adversary, and these two Depression-era boxers with the same first name fit that bill for two inspiring mid-20^th century fighters: Baer was the most famous opponent for James “Cinderella Man” Braddock; and Schmeling played that role in two famous fights with Joe Louis. I’m not going to maximize (sorry) my analysis of either in these few sentences, so I’ll just add that, as with Joe Frazier, I’m quite sure their stories are much more interesting than can be reflected in these adversarial roles.

3)      Floyd Mayweather: I don’t think I can say the same for Floyd Mayweather Jr., one of the 21^st century’s most talented fighters but also a thoroughgoing villain who seems to relish that role (as his full-throated and very much ongoing support for Donald Trump would illustrate). I could have put Mike Tyson in this spot, and Tyson’s conviction for sexual assault is unquestionably worse than any detail about Mayweather that I’m aware of. But there’s societal villains and then there’s sports villains—the first are clearly more troubling overall, but the second have a special role in the history of boxing, as these fighters exemplify.

Final Thrilla talk tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Contexts for this fight or other boxing histories you’d highlight?

September 30, 2025: The Thrilla in Manila: Ali’s Evolution

[50 years ago this week, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in Manila for their third and final professional boxing bout. So this week on the blog I’ll step into the ring with posts on a handful of contexts for that significant sports story, leading up to a tribute to one of our best sports scholars!]

On what led up to an inspiring 1967 moment, what it changed, and why it still matters.

From the first moments of his professional boxing career in 1960 (when he was only 18 years old), Cassius Clay was known as much for his brash and bold attitude and statements as for his dominating performances in the ring. Apparently inspired in part by a fortuitous conversation with professional wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner, Clay consistently used press conferences and interviews to belittle his opponents and boast of his own prowess. While his 1964 name change to Muhammad Ali was driven by his personal spiritual conversion to Islam and evolving relationship with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, Ali nonetheless used that occasion to make similarly striking statements about American history and society, calling Cassius Clay “my slave name” and arguing that “I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” Given these statements, Ali’s announcement two years later, when notified that he was now eligible for the draft (after having previously failed the army’s qualifying test), that he would pursue conscientious objector status and refuse to be drafted, and his remark that “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” represented one more step in this outspoken life and career.

Yet while that 1966 announcement, and Ali’s subsequent April 1967 draft resistance and arrest in Houston, were thus not at all unprecedented, they nonetheless produced significant, lasting shifts in his career and image. On the one hand, Ali’s courageous stance cost him four years in the prime of his career and athletic prowess—his boxing licenses were stripped by every state after the arrest, and Ali was unable to obtain a license or box professionally again until the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Clay v. United States upheld his conscientitous objector status and overturned his conviction. Given the relatively short window in which a professional boxer can generally stay viable in the sport, it’s difficult to overstate the value (financial and otherwise) of this lost time in Ali’s career. At the same time, Ali shifted much more overtly and fully into the status of an activist and public intellectual over those years, giving speeches across the country along the lines of his 1967 “Black is Best” speech at Howard University (a speech given in support of the university’s Black Power movement, an alliance that Ali not coincidentally formed during this same period of his career). I don’t mean to suggest that such speeches or events in any direct way compensated Ali for his lost time or success as a boxer; instead, it’s more accurate to say that Ali’s public image and role shifted over these years, and that shift would endure long after both his 1971 reinstatement and 1981 retirement from the sport.

Ali’s enduring role as a late 20^th and early 21^st century public activist thus provides one important reason to remember the moment when he began to make that shift in earnest. But I would also argue that Ali’s 1967 civil disobedience offered a profoundly distinct model of athlete activism than any that had come before. There had of course been athletes whose very identity and public image represented a challenge to national and white supremacist narratives, such as Ali’s boxing predecessor Jack Johnson. And there had been those like Jackie Robinson whose groundbreaking sports careers themselves became a form of activism against the racist status quo. But to my knowledge, Ali’s draft resistance and his statements in support of that position took athlete activism in America to a new, much more publicly engaged level, one far beyond any sports-specific context. A more public form of athlete activism that quite possibly influenced the following year’s Olympic Black Power salute in Mexico City, and that certainly is worth linking to a contemporary example such as Colin Kaepernick’s ongoing protests and public activisms (and the shocking level of vitriol Kaepernick has received in response, from within the NFL just as much as outside of it). In all those ways, Muhammad Ali’s 1967 act of civil disobedience was a watershed moment in American society as well as its sports culture.

Next Thrilla talk tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Contexts for this fight or other boxing histories you’d highlight?

September 29, 2025: The Thrilla in Manila: Boxing and America

[50 years ago this week, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier met in Manila for their third and final professional boxing bout. So this week on the blog I’ll step into the ring with posts on a handful of contexts for that significant sports story, leading up to a tribute to one of our best sports scholars!]

On why AmericanStudiers can’t forget the sweet science, and why I wish we could.

If I were going to make the case for boxing’s crucial significance in American history and identity, I would start here: the story of African American life in the 20^th century can be pretty succinctly told through the sequence of Jack Johnson to Joe Louis to Sugar Ray Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Mike Tyson (three of whom were focal points for posts in this 2019 blog series, not coincidentally). Or maybe I would note how many great films use boxing as a metaphor for American history and identity, from The Champ (1931) to On the Waterfront (1954), Raging Bull (1980) to Cinderella Man (2005), Rocky to Creed (2006), and dozens more besides (a handful of which were also non-coincidentally the focus of this special weekend post at the end of that aforementioned series). Or maybe I’d talk about all the resonances of the Hurricane—the boxer, the song, the movie (and perhaps Denzel’s best performance to date), the history. In any case, as this week’s series will hopefully likewise illustrate, boxing and America seem profoundly and permanently intertwined.

Before I get into the rest of that series, however, I have to admit that I’ve got a couple problems with that association. For one thing, and it’s an obvious thing I guess but a hard one to get around, boxing is so thoroughly and unavoidably violent and destructive. I wrote a post my 2014 Super Bowl series on the necessary hypocrisy that comes with watching football these days, given what we have learned and continue to learn about the sport’s impacts on the bodies and (especially) brains of those playing it; I went even further in this post on MMA fighting. As with MMA, in the case of boxing such violent impact is not only part of the sport, it’s the most central and consistent part—and indeed, the point of the sport is for each participant to try to be more violent than his or her opponent, to damage that opponent sufficiently that he or she cannot continue. To be honest, the nickname “the sweet science” seems to me to exist in part to mask the fundamental reality that boxing is neither sweet nor scientific, but instead (or at least especially) a savage test of who can sustain the most violence and pain.

It’s hard for me to argue that such a sport should occupy a prominent role in 21^st century American society and culture. Of course, it’s also undeniable that boxing has already lost much of its prior prominence, a change that has been due not to its violence (since again the even more violent Ultimate Fighting is extremely popular at the moment) as much as to the impression that the sport is profoundly corrupt. And that’s my other problem with the role of boxing in narratives of American history and identity—we may have recently become more aware of the role that corrupt promoters and organizations, judges and paydays, and the like play in the world of boxing, but as far as I can tell those realities have been part of the sport for as long as it has existed. Of course America has always had its fair share of corruption and greed as well, but do we want a nationally symbolic sport that emphasizes those qualities? It’d be the equivalent of the Black Sox scandal being the norm in baseball, rather than a glaring exception. I can’t deny boxing’s role in our past and identity, but I can’t pretend I don’t find that more than a little disturbing.

Next Thrilla talk tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Contexts for this fight or other boxing histories you’d highlight?

August 20, 2025: University of Michigan Studying: Football

[Later this week, we’ll be moving my younger son Kyle into his first-year dorm at Michigan. So this week, through proud Dad tears, I’ll share a handful of UMichigan contexts, leading up to a special post on some of Kyle’s plans there!]

Three moments that help chart the rise of a perennial pigskin powerhouse.

1)      Pond’s score: One of the many innovations of President Angell (for much more on whom see yesterday’s post) was to bring football to the university, and in May 1879 the team played its first intercollegiate game, against Wisconsin’s Racine College. Hosted at Chicago’s White Stocking Park, the groundbreaking contest was, according to the Chicago Tribune, “the first rugby-football game to be played west of the Alleghenies.” Civil engineering major and future architect Irving Kane Pond scored the team’s first touchdown (and the game’s only one, as Michigan triumphed 1-0) on a long running play, and the crowd—already die-hards, it seems—responded with cheers of “Pond Forever.”

2)      Birthing a rivalry: As that Tribune quote indicates, Michigan was instrumental in extending this new collegiate (and budding professional) sport beyond its Northeastern origins, and it likewise helped spread the sport to other colleges in the area. Perhaps the most striking such moment took place in 1887: traveling to another game in Chicago (this one apparently against a high school team—the pickings remained pretty slim in the 1880s), the Michigan team made a stop in South Bend, Indiana, and introduced football to students at the University of Notre Dame. Apparently they learned fast, as in November of that same year Michigan played its first game against the Fighting Irish (winning 8-0, natch), inaugurating one of the sport’s oldest and most fierce rivalries.

3)      A happy hire: In 1899 Michigan football went 8-2, and in 1900 they were 7-2-1; those might seem like perfectly acceptable records, but only if you didn’t know Michigan fans. After the 1900 season, the university’s first athletic director Charles Baird wrote to one of the nation’s most famous young coaches, Fielding Yost, noting that “Our people are greatly roused up over the defeats of the past two years” and offering Yost (then the head coach at Stanford) a job. Fortunately for Michigan, Yost accepted, and the results speak for themselves: by the 1902 season Michigan was outscoring its opponents 644-12 en route to an 11-0 record, and the New York Times would write of one of its victories (a 128-0 trouncing of the University of Buffalo) that it was “one of the most remarkable ever made in the history of football in the important colleges.” Let’s just say that the fans haven’t been satisfied with much less ever since.

Next MichiganStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

April 17, 2025: Kyle Contexts: Track & Field Fighters

[This week, my amazing younger son Kyle turns 18! So I wanted to dedicate the week’s blog series to AmericanStudying some Kyle Contexts, leading up to a repeat of his excellent Guest Post on the OJ Simpson trial.]

In honor of a track career which has faced way more than its share of setbacks (from all of which Kyle has bounced back and then some), quick hits on five moments when track & field stars fought the good fight.

1)      Jim Thorpe: Being a Native American athlete brought up on a reservation who became known as the greatest American athlete of the 20^th century would be more than enough to earn Jim Thorpe a spot on this list, as would his genuine successes at more than a few distinct sports. But for a post on track & field fielders, I’ll highlight the story—hard to confirm, but I’m very willing to believe it—that the reason Thorpe is wearing two different shoes in pictures from the 1912 Olympics is that his were stolen and so he found two mismatched ones in the trash and wore them when he set hugely longstanding records in the decathlon.

2)      Babe Didrikson Zaharias: I wrote about Zaharias’s Olympic track & field achievements at the 1932 Games (when she was known as Babe Didrikson), among many other inspiring layers to her sports successes, in that hyperlinked post. Her fight was against the kind of sexism that led sportswriter Joe Williams to write, as I noted in that post, that “it would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up, and waited for the phone to ring.” Don’t hold your breath, Joe.

3)      Jesse Owens: I don’t know that I can detail Owens’s track & field fights, triumphs, and tragedies any more clearly than I did in that hyperlinked Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. Check it out and c’mon back!

4)      Mexico City: Like many other commentators have over the last decade, in that hyperlinked post I linked Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s 1968 Black Power protest to Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 anthem protests. But while I stand by that comparison, it’s important that we not minimize how much more danger Smith and Carlos were putting themselves in—Kaepernick has faced countless consequences for his courageous stand, but in 1968 (as throughout the decade) African American leaders were being murdered left and right by white supremacist domestic terrorists. There are few braver protests in our history.

5)      Caster Semenya: Semenya’s story is far more multilayered than I can do justice to in this brief space, but the simple and crucial fact is this: due to aspects of her specific human body, ones that are no different from Michael Phelps’s extra-long wingspan or any number of other quirks possessed by great athletes, Semenya has been targeted time and again by both transphobic hate and official sanctions. That she has consistently fought back and continued to compete and to do so at the highest level makes her a fighter any track & field athlete, and any human for that matter, should be inspired by.

Last context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Lemme know any bday wishes I can pass along to my not-so-young man!

March 8-9, 2025: Significant Sports Studiers

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of hockey histories, leading up to this weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

Just over two years ago (but also like five minutes ago, because time is an accordion here in the 2020s), I dedicated my Super Bowl series weekend post to highlighting a number of excellent SportsStudiers. All those folks are still well worth reading and supporting, so I mainly wanted to reiterate those recommendations at the end of this sports histories series.

But now that I’ve gotten more fully onto the Bluesky (follow me at that profile if you’re over there and I’ll return the favor!), I also wanted to share a couple Starters Packs (which is how Bluesky allows us to create lists of folks for easy follows) that feature many more SportsStudiers:

Left-leaning sports commentators

LGBTQ+ sports media

Baseball podcasts and podcasters

Sports history

Critical sports

Check them out and keep the SportsStudying going!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? SportsStudiers you’d share?

March 7, 2025: Hockey Histories: Team Trans

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of hockey histories, leading up to a weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

On two complicated and equally important ways to contextualize a groundbreaking hockey team.

In early 2019, following a game in New York City between the Boston Pride Hockey and New York City Gay Hockey Association teams, New York team member Aidan Cleary and Boston team president Greg Sargent began conversations that led to the creation of the Boston-based Team Trans, the first all-transgender hockey team in the U.S. After recruiting players from around the country, including both the first openly transgender athlete in any professional U.S. team sport (National Women’s Hockey League player Harrison Browne) and the first in Canadian professional sports (Canadian Women’s Hockey League player Jessica Platt), Team Trans began practicing in Cambridge, MA in November 2019. Not long after they began playing games in both the Boston area and as a barnstorming team; the Covid pandemic delayed those efforts for a time, but in subsequent years the team has both resumed its games and spawned a second chapter, Team Trans Twin Cities based out of Minneapolis.

I want to be clear that nothing I’ll say in these next two paragraphs minimizes the importance of nor the inspiration from Team Trans. But there are both historical and contemporary contexts for the team, and they each offer complicated lenses through which to AmericanStudy them. On the historical side, to anyone with a knowledge of American sports histories (and doubly so to an AmericanStudier who just spent a whole podcast thinking about baseball histories) the idea of a barnstorming team based around a particular identity community has to echo what many of the Negro Leagues teams and players did across the first half of the 20^th century. I made the case in that podcast for the social and cultural as well as sports significance of barnstorming, and Team Trans can likewise both reflect local roots and help connect them to communities across the country and beyond. But at the same time, there’s no doubt that at least a good percentage of those barnstorming Negro Leaguers would have wanted to play in the major leagues if that had been possible (and would have infinitely improved those major leagues in the process); and while professional hockey isn’t overtly segregated in the way that professional baseball was, this current barnstorming team does reflect similar exclusions.

Moreover, there’s a very specific form of current sports exclusions that we can’t separate from Team Trans (even though it was formed years before this incredibly frustrating trend truly began): attempts to keep transgender athletes out of organized sports. That exclusionary effort dominated the recent election season to a ridiculous degree, and produced one of the last year’s most nonsensical sports stories: the stream of college volleyball teams refusing to play against San Jose State because of the presence of an allegedly trans athlete, despite that athlete having been on the team for multiple prior years with no issues nor forfeits. My number one goal for any athlete and any sport is that the individuals have the chance to play in whatever ways work for them, and again, I’m not trying to dismiss the importance nor the inspiration of Team Trans. But I do worry a bit that transgender athletes self-segregating in this way will only further the idea that, especially when there isn’t the possibility for entire teams, individual trans athletes shouldn’t be part of overarching, organized teams and sports.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hockey histories you’d highlight?

March 6, 2025: Hockey Histories: Black Players

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of hockey histories, leading up to a weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

On three groundbreaking players who together reflect the sport’s gradual evolution.

1)      Herb Carnegie (1919-2012): As with baseball in the US, for much of the early 20^th century hockey in Canada was racially segregated, with organizations like the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes offering the only consistent opportunities for Black players. That means that, as with the Negro Leagues in baseball, we have far too many instances of clearly exceptional, Hall of Fame worthy players (as the first hyperlink above reflects) who never had the chance to play in the full professional leagues. Herb Carnegie is very high on that list, winning MVP multiple times in lower professional leagues in Canada and even receiving a tryout with the New York Rangers in 1948. But the Rangers refused Carnegie an NHL roster spot and offered him less money to play in their minor league system than he was making in the lower leagues and he turned them down, one more reflection of what was lost in this segregated era of hockey.

2)      Willie O’Ree (1935- ): A decade after Carnegie’s tryout, the “Jackie Robinson of ice hockey” finally broke the NHL’s color barrier. A prodigy from a very young age, playing on teams at the age of 5 and playing in league playoffs before he was 16, O’Ree actually met Robinson while still that talented teenager in New Brunswick (not long after Robinson had broken into the major leagues). Just a few years later, in January 1958, O’Ree was called up to the Boston Bruins from the minor league Quebec Aces; he would play in only two games in that year, but would stay in the league and play more than 40 games during the 1960-61 season. He also faced racist taunts from Chicago Blackhawks players and fans (among many many other during that year), leading to melee after which, he later reflected, he was “lucky to get out of the arena alive.” Like Jackie in more ways than one, was Willie O’Ree.

3)      Grant Fuhr (1962- ): O’Ree didn’t exactly open the floodgates, but gradually more and more Black players did join the NHL over the next few decades. One of the most groundbreaking and talented was Grant Fuhr, the first Black goalie to play in the league and the first to win a Stanley Cup when his Edmonton Oilers did so five times in the 1980s (and eventually the first to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as well). Fuhr being the first in those categories a century after the creation of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes is as frustrating a fact as any produced by segregated histories—but we can remember the frustrations while still celebrating the iconic and inspiring individuals who helped change them, a list that includes all three of these hockey stars.

Last hockey history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hockey histories you’d highlight?

March 5, 2025: Hockey Histories: The Miracle on Ice

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of hockey histories, leading up to a weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

On the symbolic role of sports in society, and the line between history and story.

For a solid five-year period in the early 1980s, the sports world and the Cold War felt inextricably linked. Beginning with the February 1980 Olympic hockey semifinal between the U.S. and Soviet Union teams (on which a lot more momentarily), continuing through the two prominent Olympic boycotts (the US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and the retaliatory Soviet boycott of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles), and culminating, of course, with 1985’s Rocky IV and its climactic, Cold War-ending boxing match between American underdog Rocky Balboa and Soviet machine (literally and figuratively) Ivan Drago, the stories and images of international sports in the period mirrored quite strikingly the political and cultural clashes between the two superpowers.

One of those four sports events is not like the others, of course—the fight between Rocky and Drago, compelling as it undoubtedly was, took place only in the realms of film and fiction, unlike the actual historical events surrounding the 80 and 84 Olympics. Yet I don’t believe that the line between those categories of events is nearly as clear as it might seem. While the Olympic boycotts of course had very tangible and often desctructive effects, not only for the athletes and teams but for the respective host cities and countries, they were, first and foremost, about the manipulation of and contests over images and narratives. And while the 1980 hockey semifinal was not scripted by a team of Hollywood screenwriters, however much it might have felt that way (and the subsequent TV and Hollywood films notwithstanding), the narrative of the “Miracle on Ice,” which was developed quite literally in the moment and has become the defining image of that game, represents image-making at its most potent and enduring.

The question, though, is even more complicated than whether the phrase “Miracle on Ice” represents an image rather than the event itself (it certainly does). I would ask, instead, whether we collectively remember the event not only through but also because of the image; because, that is, of how the event was turned into a story that can have cultural and symbolic resonance far beyond even the most striking individual historical moment. Whether the image and story are accurate to the history is a separate (and important) question, and in this case I would say that they largely are (the US team was a huge underdog to the powerful Soviet squad, and the victory thus one of the more unexpected in sports history); but to my mind, the question of accuracy can blur the importance of the process of image-making, can make it seem as if “miracle” refers to the game rather than to the narrative that was and has been developed in response to it. A great deal of the Cold War was defined by such image- and myth-making, never more so than during the Reagan Administration; to recognize the way in which sports can be folded into such narratives is thus a historical analysis, as well as one with contemporary and ongoing implications.

Next hockey history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hockey histories you’d highlight?

March 4, 2025: Hockey Histories: Fighting

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of hockey histories, leading up to a weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

On the way not to argue for a sport’s violent tradition, and a possible way to do so.

First, in the interest of full disclosure: of the four major sports, I know by far the least about hockey. And that’s especially true of hockey history—other than a few big name players and the occasional interesting story (both of those hyperlinked pieces focus on Boston-related topics, which is likely why I know a bit more about them than I do other hockey histories), what I know about the history of hockey can be fit inside a box much smaller than the penalty one. Researching this week’s series has helped with that to be sure, but I know I’ve only scratched the surface still. So as always, and especially when it comes to topics like this one on which I am generally and admittedly ignorant, I’ll very much appreciate any responses and challenges and other ideas in comments (or by email). I don’t think I’m ever gonna get to full octopus-on-the-ice level hockey fandom, but there’s no topic about which I’m not excited to learn more, this one very much included.

So with all of that said, it’s my understanding that one of the most heated debates in the hockey world is over whether fighting is a central and beloved element of the sport that must be preserved or an outdated and dangerous aside that should be discarded to attract more widespread fan support. Obviously I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion (I’m opposed to fighting-based sports, but this is somewhat of a different story of course), but I will say this: from what I can tell, many of the arguments in favor of fighting seem to come from what we could call hockey traditionalists. And having had more than my share of experiences with baseball traditionalists, I’d say that “This is how we have always done things” is an incredibly ineffective way to argue for any aspect of a sport (or most anything else for that matter). For one thing, such an argument would by extension make any change impossible, and anything that is going to endure over time needs to evolve in at least some ways in order to do so. And for another thing, there are many cases where we learn things that require specific changes in the way we do things—and it seems to me that what we now know about head injuries, for example, just might make that the case when it comes to fighting in hockey.

I’m pretty serious about CTE (although I haven’t been able to give up football yet), so if I were to weigh in more fully on the fighting in hockey debate, I’d likely be in the opposition camp. But I try to be open to different perspectives of course, and in a debate like this what I’d be interested to hear is how pro-fighting perspectives might argue for its role in how the sport is played. That is, when it comes to fighting in baseball (something I know a lot more about), fights represent an entirely unsanctioned and illegal element, one that always leads to ejections and suspensions and fines and so on. Whereas fighting in hockey is more or less entirely sanctioned, with the two fighters surrounded by the referees and allowed to complete their fight before the regular gameplay resumes. So perhaps there are reasons beyond tradition alone, ways that fighting contributes to the play of hockey within games, within a season, as a sport. After all, all rules in sports are arbitrary and constructed, and don’t necessarily need changing as a result. This one features violence to be sure, but so for that matter does hockey overall—so I’m open to hearing (including here if you’d like!) for how this element of hockey might also feature other sides to this sport, past and present.

Next hockey history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hockey histories you’d highlight?

March 3, 2025: Hockey Histories: Origin Points

[On March 3^rd, 1875, the first organized ice hockey game was played. So this week for the sport’s 150^th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of hockey histories, leading up to a weekend post on some SportsStudiers we can all learn from!]

On three telling and compelling layers to that first organized game.

1)      James Creighton: Railway engineer and lawyer Creighton is known as the father of organized hockey, as he certainly didn’t invent the sport itself (compared for example to James Naismith and basketball); an informal, outdoor version known as both hockey and “shinny” was already being played on frozen ponds in the 1850s Nova Scotia of Creighton’s youth. But as I discussed with baseball’s 19^th century evolution in my recent podcast (the Third Inning in particular), it took a while for that local, community version of the sport to become organized, and a key step in that process was Creighton gathering groups of players (many from nearby McGill University) and providing sticks for workouts at Montreal’s Victoria Skating Rink in the early 1870s (he knew the rink from his work there as a judge for figure skating competitions). After years of practicing together, those players were finally ready to put on a full, organized game, with Creighton captaining the Montreal Football Club against the Rink’s home team.

2)      The Game: The pre-game announcement in the Montreal Gazette noted a specific change that would significantly reshape the sport’s future: “Some fears have been expressed on the part of intending spectators that accidents were likely to occur with the ball flying about in too lively a manner, to the imminent danger of lookers on, but we understand that the game will be played with a flat circular piece of wood, thus preventing all danger of its leaving the surface of the ice.” That addition of the puck would be more than enough to make this 1875 game a true origin point for the sport (with shinny/pond hockey, which uses a ball, almost a distinct sport in its own right that likewise endures to this day), but the Gazette’s follow-up report on the game makes clear that its play was also quite representative of how the sport would evolve, as exemplified by the phrase “the efforts of the players exciting much merriment as they wheeled and dodged each other.”

3)      The Melee: Of course, hockey players don’t always dodge each other, and their hits aren’t limited to in-play collisions. I’ll write more in tomorrow’s post about the overall history and place of fighting in the sport, but it’s pretty telling that this first organized game likewise concluded with an extended brawl. The fact that this fight wasn’t just between players—instead, players from both teams apparently brawled with Victoria Skating Club members who were angry that the rink had been used for this purpose—only reiterates how much fighting was part of hockey’s collective DNA from the outset. As the Daily British Whig newspaper described this telling postgame scene, “Shins and heads were battered, benches smashed, and the lady spectators fled in confusion.”

Next hockey history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hockey histories you’d highlight?

February 6, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Jaylen Brown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two inspiring layers to the most recent NBA Finals MVP.

I wrote briefly about the inspiring stories behind Boston Celtics superstar Jaylen Brown in this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the Celtics. In lieu of a full first paragraph here I’d ask you to check out that column if you would, and then come on back for more on what makes Brown such an inspiring sports story.

Welcome back! Brown’s social and political advocacy and activism are without doubt the most inspiring layers to his career and life, far beyond the basketball court, and were nicely traced in this excellent William Rhoden essay for Andscape. It’s not just that he’s so committed to those efforts, but also the language and ideas on which they depend—look at the homepage for his 7uice Foundation, for example, which leads with “A History of Systemic Racism”! I’ve written before in this space about the 2015-2017 Boston Globe Spotlight investigation which revealed that the median net worth for Black families in Boston was $8, a statistic that is as complicated as statistics always are but that nonetheless captures quite definitively the legacies of systemic racism in the city for which Brown plays professional basketball. Brown’s foundation represents a direct and vital response to such histories and realities, and that alone makes him one of our most inspiring contemporary athletes.

But as his excellent Hot Ones interview reminded us, there’s even more to Brown than his combination of athletic and activist achievements. A Berkeley grad who was offered a NASA internship, became the youngest person ever to deliver an invited lecture at Harvard when he did so at the age of 21, and in his role as an MIT Media Lab Fellow co-founded the Bridge Program which mentors Boston high schoolers of color who are interested in STEM, Brown was described by certain scouts as “too smart” for the NBA before he was drafted in 2016. Obviously that perspective is caught up in all kinds of limited and prejudicial mindsets that tell us more about those holding them than they ever could about Brown. But there’s no doubt that he’s a unique professional athlete in any sport, and from any time period, one who exemplifies the best kind of Renaissance person that also can and should inspire all of us to be our most multilayered and best selves.

Last inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 5, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Chubbtown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two contrasting and equally important ways to contextualize an inspiring family story.

I don’t imagine I have to convince readers of this blog that sports are more than just a distraction or entertainment, that they connect to all the layers of our society and community and history. One of the most striking instances of such connections for me is the fact that I first learned about the unique and amazing American community of Chubbtown, Georgia, through a pregame story on the running back Nick Chubb, then playing as a stand-out at the University of Georgia. Chubb has since moved into the NFL, as has his relative, the equally talented defensive lineman Bradley Chubb. Both Nick and Bradley are related to the historic Chubb family, one of the oldest-recorded multi-generational African American families in our history (with records dating back to the pre-Revolutionary days) and the founders of Chubbtown, a community of free Black folks established in the mountains of Northwest Georgia in 1864, during the depths of the Civil War (and as an escape from that conflict).

Chubbtown is far from the only community founded by African Americans during and immediately after the Civil War, as anyone who has read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) knows; Hurston sets much of her novel in such a community, one based closely on her own influential childhood experiences in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-Black city in America. And remembering such communities overall allows us—or perhaps forces us is the better phrase—to engage with the 1923 Rosewood massacre, when another all-Black community in Florida was largely destroyed by white supremacist domestic terrorists. The late John Singleton’s 1997 film portrays both that community and that massacre with nuance and power, and I would say we can’t commemorate the Chubbs and Chubbtown without a complementary examination of that story and these frustratingly frequent and foundational American histories of racial terrorism.

At the same time, we talked a great deal throughout my 20^th Century African American Literature course this past Fall semester about not allowing such histories to dominate our collective memories of the truly multilayered and often profoundly inspiring stories of Black history. This year marks the 250^th anniversary of the first recorded stories of the Chubb family, making their saga a particularly striking and symbolic such inspiring story in early 2025 (and one that can, for example, complement, challenge, and transcend collective memories focused only on the 250^th anniversary of white-centered stories and figures from the American Revolution). That story extends far beyond Chubbtown, but it became deeply interconnected with this community, one that produced two iconic 21^st century athletes who can, like so much of the best of sports in our histories, offer a window into better remembering every layer of that setting and story.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 4, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Babe Didrikson Zaharias

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two ways to connect and parallel the pioneering athlete to legendary men, and one key way not to.

1)      Multi-Sport Achievements and Fame: I’ve always thought of Jim Thorpe as the 20^th century’s most talented athlete, what with his stunning and groundbreaking successes in Olympic track and field, football, and baseball, among other sports. But in researching this post, I realized that Didrikson Zaharias has a serious case for the same title: I had long known about her unparalleled successes as a professional golfer, but she also won two track and field gold medals (and one silver medal) at the 1932 Summer Olympics and was an All-American in basketball, again among many other athletic accomplishments. Although sports lend themselves particularly well to lists and rankings and debates about who was the best, the truth is that both Thorpe and Didrikson Zaharias should be remembered as truly exceptional and influential athletes, figures whose early to mid 20^th century, runaway crossover successes in both amateur and professional sports helped pave the way for the sports world to become the national and global phenomenon that it remains to this day.

2)      Larger-than-life Persona: Born Mildred Ella Didrikson, Didrikson Zaharias would later claim that she gained the nickname “Babe” when she hit five home runs in a youth baseball game. That might or might not be true (her Norwegian immigrant mother supposedly called her “Bebe” throughout her life), but even the uncertainty helps illustrate Didrikson Zaharias’ embrace of a larger-than-life persona that echoes that of her potential namesake Babe Ruth. For example, she long claimed to have been born in 1914 (rather than her actual 1911 birth year), perhaps to exaggerate her youthful accomplishments yet further. And she complemented the athletic successes I detailed above with a lifelong series of forays into the worlds of celebrity and popular culture: singing and playing harmonica on several pop songs for Mercury Records; performing on the vaudeville circuit; trying her hand as a pocket billiards player, as in a famous multi-day match against billiards champion Ruth McGinnis; and marrying professional wrestler George Zaharias, the “Crying Greek from Cripple Creek.” Like Babe Ruth, Didrikson Zaharias’ athletic accomplishments would have been more than enough to cement her fame and legacy; but like Ruth, she clearly wanted all that culture and life had to offer.

3)      Shattering Stereotypes: Jim Thorpe and Babe Ruth are two of the greatest American athletes of all time, and linking any other athlete to them is (I hope and would argue) a sign of respect. Yet at the same time, I did so at least somewhat ironically, to help engage with the particular, unquestionably gendered limits which Didrikson Zaharias continually encountered and yet challenged and destroyed. (Certainly a Native American athlete like Thorpe faced his own barriers and challenges, of course.) The most overt such limits, many of which called into question Didrikson Zaharias’ gender itself, are nicely encapsulated by this quote, from sportswriter Joe Williams in the New York World-Telegram: “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.” In the last few years of her life, Didrikson Zaharias developed a close, quite possibly romantic relationship with fellow golfer Betty Dodd, a relationship neither would describe as romantic due to the limits of their early 1950s society. Yet at the same time, in those final years Didrikson Zaharias shattered all limits one final time: diagnosed with colon cancer in 1953, she continued to golf professionally until her 1956 death, winning multiple tournaments including the last two she entered. A towering and inspiring sports legend to the last.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

February 3, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: The Celestials

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

For my money, the most inspiring American sports story and figures are those at the heart of my podcast, The Celestials’ Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America. If you haven’t had the chance to check out that podcast yet I’d really appreciate it, so I’m going to end this post here and ask you to take a listen if you have a chance (and if you’re pressed for time, I’d say the Seventh Inning in particular is among the best work I’ve ever done)!

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?

December 25, 2024: 2024 in Review: The Celtics

[I was initially trying to decide whether to focus my annual Year in Review series on heavy or light topics, but then I realized this was 2024—we had it all, from the serious to the surreal, the absurd to the awesome. So I’ll start with a couple tough subjects and move toward some happier ones. I’d love your end-of-year reflections as well!]

Christmas came in June for the Railton household this year, as my sons and wife and I got to watch together as our favorite shared sports team, the Boston Celtics, clinched their 18^th NBA Championship. I said most of what I’d want to say about that team from an AmericanStudies perspective in that hyperlinked post, but I did want to use this post to do three additional things:

--Sharing this video of my single favorite live sports moment of my lifetime, Payton Pritchard’s first-half-buzzer-beating longer-than-half-court shot in Game 5, as captured from every camera angle possible;

--Highlighting the truly awesome public service and partnership work that Jaylen Brown is doing for the Black community and all communities in Boston, as well as sharing his delightful recent episode of Hot Ones;

--And making the broader case, through those various layers but also through a reminder of my recently completed first podcast which I hope made this case at great length and which I can think of no better Christmas present than y’all checking out and sharing widely, for all the ways that sports can connect to our worst but also and especially our best.  

Next 2024 reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? What stands out from this decades-long year?