An inspirational story that deserves to be told.
A half-century after her triumph, a record-setting Olympic champion receives her due.
Tyus, a founding member of the Women’s Sports Foundation, remains largely unknown even among American sports fans. This is partly because of her race and gender, as she came of age during a period when black females were rarely given due credit or offered much opportunity. But it may also be partly because of her personality. She was an unassuming woman from the rural South who didn’t care much about anything but running, rarely called attention to herself, and found herself overshadowed by larger-than-life figures in turbulent times. Her 1968 triumph in the 100-yard dash made her the first athlete to win gold medals in the same event in successive Olympics and followed her surprising, record-breaking win in 1964. However, that feat remains overshadowed by “Olympic protestors Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who shocked the upper echelons of the Olympic world and thrilled activists everywhere by raising their black-gloved fists on the medal stand to protest human rights violations at home and abroad.” Tyus received little notice when she dedicated her subsequent medal in the relays to them, and she felt slighted by the failure to acknowledge what she had done. Yet the author is by no means a complainer; much of the narrative’s charm derives from the author’s down-to-earth nature. Her memoir, written with co-author Terzakis (English and Creative Writing/Cañada Coll.), is also a testimonial to Ed Temple, track coach of the Tennessee State University Tigerbelles, who also served as Tyus’ Olympic coach. He discovered and trained her when she was a small-town teenager with more ability than technique, and he instilled life lessons that went well beyond track and field. Tyus may never have generated the same attention as the more ebullient Wilma Rudolph, but she has lived a life of accomplishment and meaning.
An inspirational story that deserves to be told.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61775-676-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Edge of Sports/Akashic
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
An engaging and informative cultural history, on and off the gridiron.
A rich history of the rise of the National Football League from its virtual obscurity at its genesis in the 1920s to its position as an economic and cultural powerhouse today.
Former Baltimore Sun sportswriter Eisenberg (The Streak: Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken Jr., and Baseball's Most Historic Record, 2017, etc.) returns with the story of how five owners—George Halas, Bert Bell, George Preston Marshall, Art Rooney, and Tim Mara—refused to give up on the struggling league and lived to see (and cause) its current dominance. Thoroughly researched and gracefully told, the story begins with the background of each of the five, then moves chronologically through the early years of the league—struggles, controversies (among the most significant was the arrival of black players), adjustments (to radio and then TV)—to its full arrival in 1958, when 40 million people watched the Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants in the exciting championship game. As the author repeatedly points out, these five were fierce rivals, but they knew that to make the league survive and flourish, they could not destroy one another. So they compromised and changed rules to make the game more exciting; all would live to see the league’s vigorous health. (The final chapter deals with the deaths of each.) Although Eisenberg is admiring of the founders, he also recognizes—and highlights—their weaknesses. Marshall, for example, was a racist, the last to bring blacks onto his team, the Washington Redskins. Although the author provides some details about some key games (and iconic players like Red Grange, Marion Motley, and Sam Huff), the narrative is not a rehearsal of games but of the history of a game, a business, and five men who took a chance, lost money, and then found great success.
An engaging and informative cultural history, on and off the gridiron.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-04870-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
An intimate memoir of the Negro Leagues by one of its greatest players. Though Riley (The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, not reviewed) gets credit for helping Leonard write his autobiography, this book reads as if it were a verbatim transcription of Leonard's taped reminiscences. That is the book's weakness and its strength. It rambles and lacks consistent narrative structure, but it is also an important memoir of an era in American sports—and in American history—that has only begun to get the attention it deserves. The slick-fielding first baseman was one of the best hitters in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to 1950, and most observers believe that if it weren't for segregation he would have been a superstar in the major leagues. Leonard's memory is encyclopedic: He recalls plays and players from when he was a 13- year-old playing semi-pro ball in 1921 to his last game, at 47, in a Mexican league in 1955. He tells stories of grueling three-games- a-day schedules; of endless travel from one seedy segregated hotel to another; of lousy pay and breached contracts; and of winters spent in menial labor to make ends meet. Lou Gehrig, the white player to whom Leonard is most often compared, had a far more comfortable life, but Leonard expresses no rancor and only mild regret. Nor, at 87, does he romanticize the past. The Negro Leagues were not as good as the major leagues, he writes, and it is virtually impossible to measure black players of the era against their white counterparts. Leonard writes that Gehrig probably was a better player than he was. But he also wishes he'd had the chance to find out. An invaluable historical document and the record of a remarkable life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0119-6
Page Count: 274
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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