Memphis Hoops: Race and Basketball in the Bluff City, 1968-1997 (U Tennessee Press, 2021) tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Marin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.

Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.

In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

Keith B. Wood teaches history at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Unequal opportunity sparked Jim Brown's endeavors to encourage Black development while Billie Jean King fought so that women tennis players could earn more money and enjoy greater freedom. gregory.php">Gregory J. Kaliss examines these events and others to guide readers through the unprecedented wave of protest that swept sports in the 1960s and 1970s. The little-known story of the University of Wyoming football players suspended for their activism highlights an analysis of protests by college athletes. The 1971 Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier clash provides a high-profile example of the Black male athlete's effort to redefine Black masculinity. An in-depth look at the American Basketball Association reveals a league that put Black culture front and center with its style of play and shows how the ABA influenced the development of hip-hop. In Beyond the Black Power Salute: Athlete Activism in an Era of Change (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Kaliss describes the breakthroughs achieved by these athletes, while also exploring the barriers that remained--and in some cases remain today.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu.

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Unsung: Not all Heroes Wear Kits (Pitch Publishing, 2022) by Alexis James introduces the sports stars you don't know, telling the stories you can't miss. It shines a rare spotlight behind the scenes of professional sport, with overlooked heroes such as F1 mechanics, athletics starters, football chaplains, rugby medics and cycling moto pilots revealing previously untold tales of intrigue, ambition and dedication.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Kate Sylvester’s Women and Martial Art in Japan (Routledge 2023) examines sport, gender, and society in Japan through the author’s extensive experience and ethnographic research as a kendo practitioner both at elite international levels and in Japan. Sylvester focuses on kendo as a university sport, placing her experiences as a veteran (foreign) competitor working within the hierarchies of that system in the context of the ideologies and lived realities of gender in contemporary Japan. In doing so, Women and Martial Art in Japan unpacks the “sporting masculinity” that permeates women’s experiences of sport within a masculinist culture, and places the practice of sport within the idealized and actual life course of Japanese women. 

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

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Against a backdrop of ongoing resistance to racial desegregation and strident calls for Black Power, the NBA in the 1970s embodied the nation’s imagined descent into disorder. A new generation of Black players entered the league then, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood, and the press and public were quick to blame this cohort for the supposed decline of pro basketball, citing drugs, violence, and greed. Basketball became a symbol for post-civil rights America: the rules had changed, allowing more Black people onto the playing field, and now they were ruining everything.

Enter Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation That Saved the Soul of the NBA (Bold Type Books, 2023)l, a gripping history and corrective in which scholar Theresa Runstedtler expertly rewrites basketball’s “Dark Ages.” Weaving together a deep knowledge of the game with incisive social analysis, Runstedtler argues that this much-maligned period was pivotal to the rise of the modern-day NBA. Black players introduced an improvisational style derived from the playground courts of their neighborhoods. They also challenged the team owners’ autocratic power, garnering higher salaries and increased agency. Their skills, style, and savvy laid the foundation for the global popularity and profitability of the league we know today.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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In Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South, 1947-1979 (U Tennessee Press, 2019), Thomas Aiello considers the cultural function of professional basketball in the Deep South between 1947 and 1979. Making a strong case for the role of race in this process, Aiello ties the South’s initial animus toward basketball to the same complex that motivated the region to sacrifice its own economic interests to the cause of white supremacy. Fans of basketball, as compared to other team sports, were closer to the players, who showed more of their bodies; blackness, then, had more visibility in basketball than it had in other sports. By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, African Americans made up 47.5 percent of professional basketball players, and despite integrating later than baseball and football, it was fast becoming known as a “black” sport. Over time, survival for southern teams grew more tenuous, fan support more fickle, and racial incidents between players and fans more hostile. Racism clashed with civic development in a fast-evolving region.

To identify the sources of this clash, Dixieball (The University of Tennessee Press, 2019) locates the main points of intersection between professional basketball and the Deep South in the two decades prior to the region’s first major franchise. Aiello then takes readers to New Orleans, where the first major Deep South professional basketball team—the New Orleans Buccaneers—was born, and on to Atlanta, Birmingham, St. Louis, and others, leading up to 1979.

Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu

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The sounds of spectators at football (soccer) are often highlighted – by spectators, tourists, commentators, journalists, scholars, media producers, etc. – as crucial for the experience of football. These sounds are often said to contribute significantly to the production (at the stadium) and conveyance (in televised broadcast) of 'atmosphere.'

The Sounds of Spectators at Football (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær addresses why and how spectator sounds contribute to the experience of watching in these environments and what characterises spectator sounds in terms of their structure, distribution and significance. Based on an examination of empirical materials – including the sounds of football matches from the English Premier League as they emerge both at the stadium and in the televised broadcast – this book systematically dissects the sounds of football watching.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Today we are joined by Frankie de la Cretaz, a sports journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sport and gender, and one of the authors alongside Lyndsey D’Arcangelo of Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League (Bold Type Books, 2021). In our conversation, we discussed the beginnings of women’s gridiron football in the United States’ the reason why so many women wanted to play a “man’s game” in the 1970s and 80s; and the successes, failures and legacies of the NWFL.

In Hail Mary, de la Cretaz and D’Arcangelo recover the lost history of the National Women’s Football League, a professional gridiron competition that ran from 1974 to 1988. To revive this hidden history of women’s football, the authors interviewed dozens of women from and consulted archives around the country. They discovered a competitive, vibrant, and popular sporting entertainment that rose in the Rust Belt, spread to the football meccas of Texas and California, before collapsing due to financial issues in the 1980s.

The book is organized chronologically – except for a first chapter that showcases one of the most dramatic confrontations between two teams – the Toledo Troopers and Oklahoma City Dolls. De la Cretaz and D’Arcangelo’s archival history work, which relies mostly on newspapers, shows the spread and popularity of women’s football. They illustrate how male coaches, journalists, and owners framed the league in gendered ways. Many advocated for the league, particularly promoters like Sid Friedman who hoped to make lots of money, but lots of others genuinely enjoyed the athleticism of the competitors.

More impressively, their oral history interviews also allow the authors to move beyond the social history of the league and to tell the story of individual football players. Through their conversations with former players, they explore why so many women wanted to play the “masculine” game of football, even when they were no longer being paid, what they got out of their competition, the difficulties they faced as players, and what they thought about the failure of the NWFL.

Sexual orientation and race play important roles in the NWFL history. One team basically formed in a lesbian bar and many of the players were lesbians, although the league averred a strict heteronormativity. On the other hand, unlike the better known All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during the Second World War, the NWFL was very visibly racially integrated. Black athletes played crucial roles on teams – the best player in the league was a black woman from Toledo, Linda Jefferson, who racked up more yards and touchdowns per year than better known male running backs. The NWFL also gave opportunities to black head coaches at a time when the NFL unofficially barred them.

In the final chapter, “The Legacy of the NWFL”, the authors discuss the successes, failures and legacies of the league. For a while the NWFL opened the door to professional women’s gridiron football in the United States. Many women interviewed discuss it as one of the formative experiences of their life. Nevertheless, the league collapsed due to financial weakness (although perhaps not unusually when compared to the early men’s gridiron competitions.) Its legacies continue in semi-professional and amateur women’s competitions in the US today.

De la Cretaz and D’Arcangelo’s innovative account recovers a very poorly known history of hundreds of women’s professional athletes in the United States. It should be read by scholars interested in women’s sport, gridiron football in the United States, and LGBTQI+ people in sport. It will also be very useful to classroom teaching.

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From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open.

In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race. 

An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficiency, she pivoted from the elite amateur tennis circuit to State Department-sponsored goodwill tours, attempts to find success as a singer and Hollywood actress, the professional golf circuit, a tour with the Harlem Globetrotters and her own professional tennis tour, coaching, teaching children at tennis clinics, and a stint as New Jersey Athletics Commissioner. As she struggled to support herself in old age, she was left with disappointment, recounting her past achievements decades before female tennis players were able to garner substantial earnings.

A compelling life and times portrait, Serving Herself offers a revealing look at the rise and fall of a fiercely independent trailblazer who satisfied her own needs and simultaneously set a pathbreaking course for Black athletes.

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Kevin Bryant's Spies on the Sidelines: The High-Stakes World of NFL Espionage (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) is first book to fully explore the extraordinary covert actions NFL teams are willing to take in order to win.

Spies disguised as priests. Secret surveillance of targets’ movements. Radio frequency jamming. Tapped telephones. These might sound like acts of espionage right out of the Cold War or a spy movie—but in fact came straight from the National Football League.

In Spies on the Sidelines, Bryant provides the first in-depth investigation of spying in professional football, as well as the countermeasures utilized to defend against these threats. Spanning across all teams and eras, Bryant shines a light on the shady world of NFL reconnaissance—from clandestine photography and hidden draft prospects to listening devices and stolen documents—along with the permissible, if sometimes questionable, spy techniques teams utilize day in and day out to gain an advantage over their opponents.

Written by a former Special Agent with decades of experience collecting and safeguarding information for the Department of Defense, Spies on the Sidelines reveals that, behind the game-day action, professional football can be as cloak-and-dagger as American intelligence agencies. This fascinating and expansive compilation of NFL spy anecdotes exposes the extraordinary measures teams are willing to take in order to win.

Paul Knepper covered the Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All was published in 2020. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.

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