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: AMERICAN SPORTS
After Being Excluded From Professional Golf Tours in 1913, Elite Black Players Founded the United Golfers Association
by Lane Demas
March 7, 2019
In 1951, as a renewed civil rights movement dawned in America, African-Americans from around the country gathered in Atlanta for the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). There they heard from important black leaders of the period, including Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Benjamin Mays.
But then some of the delegates did something curious. They boarded busses, headed to the New Lincoln Country Club, Atlanta’s black golf course, and watched the …
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Sportsmen with Roots in the Emerald Isle Reshaped the Image of the Shantytown Ruffian
By James Silas Rogers
May 19, 2017
In his 1888 book The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport, a high-minded treatise on the ennobling effect of sports, the journalist, poet, and Irish exile John Boyle O’Reilly wrote that “there is no branch of athletics in which Irishmen, or the sons of Irishmen, do not hold first place in all the world.” The boast was closer to true than many would realize. By the turn of the 20th century, America’s professional sports were bursting at the seams with …
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How Football Helped the “City of Hate” Recover From JFK's Assassination
By Christian McPhate
January 24, 2017
Watching my Dallas Cowboys fall to the Green Bay Packers last Sunday on the last play of the game in an instant classic of an NFC Divisional Playoff, I couldn’t help but think back to my grandfather.
The first time I recall watching the ‘boys play, in the 1970s, I was knee high to him, paying more attention to the gun case where he kept his Purple Heart and the loot he’d collected from dead Nazis. As the men in …
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Twenty-Five Years Ago, a Little-Known Coach of a Tiny College Team Unveiled a Gridiron Revolution
By S.C. Gwynne
September 20, 2016
Saturday, August 31, 1991. It was Labor Day weekend, the very definition of a sleepy, late-summer day in that simple, pre-digital world. H.W. Bush was president, the Gulf War was five months gone. The biggest news was that Kyrgyzstan had declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Precisely nothing was happening.
Well, not quite nothing.
In the gently swelling cornfields of southeastern Iowa bordering the Norman Rockwell-brushed town of Mount Pleasant, Iowa Wesleyan College, a 500-student school that had been a showcase …
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